The Bulwark
· collected 2026-10-09 · by Matthew D. Taylor
commentary
During a podcast interview with a young evangelical influencer at the end of August, JD Vance regaled his host with stories of his teenage “end times” preoccupation—but he also made clear that his fascination with apocalyptic prophecy continues today, going so far as to say he would “not [be] shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us.”
asserted
Antichrist → regale → us
These words are a little unnerving coming from someone one heartbeat away from the presidency.
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words → come → presidency
Should American foreign policy be guided by impressions of a “certain darkness” or “dark spiritual energy” such as the vice president claims to have felt around other leaders at world summits?
uncertain
president → guide → summits
Relatedly, this summer, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—Vance’s mentor and sponsor—published an essay he’d coauthored in the right-wing religious journal First Things titled “The Pope and the Antichrist.”
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he → publish → journal
This was Thiel’s follow-up to a series of secretive, “off-the-record” lectures on the Antichrist that he has taken on tour over the past year.
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he → take → year
Thiel’s obsession with the Antichrist merits close examination.
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obsession → merit → examination
He is the first outside investor in Facebook and belonged to the infamous PayPal Mafia, a real Silicon Valley mover and shaker.
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He → belong → Mafia
And Thiel is JD Vance’s moneybags patron, donating $15 million to a super PAC backing Vance’s 2022 Ohio Senate campaign, setting a record at the time.
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Thiel → donate → time
On one level, we shouldn’t be surprised—Antichrist chatter has been a near-constant refrain of Christian discourse since the earliest centuries, particularly in tumultuous times.
But in our own apocalyptic-feeling moment—with its AI-doomsday predictions and the accelerating global depredations of climate change—it behooves us to understand why these two thought leaders of the American right have fixed their minds on the Antichrist specifically.
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leaders → accelerate → Antichrist
Notably, Thiel and Vance both have the Antichrist entirely upside down: speaking from positions of immense power, they are using the idea as a tool to further their own power—precisely what the concept is meant to warn against.
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concept → have → what
The vice president has been weighing in on faith topics a lot to promote his Catholic-come-lately conversion memoir, Communion.
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Catholic → weigh → memoir
It was during a conversation with Bryce Crawford, a popular 22-year-old evangelical podcaster, that Vance offered his ruminations about the Antichrist and the end times.
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Vance → offer → Antichrist
As with many things Vance has done recently—including a brush-back pitch at the pope for criticizing the war in Iran—his comments set many lifelong Catholics’ teeth on edge.
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comments → do → edge
For many non-millenarian strands of Christianity, adherents foster a spiritual hope in Christ’s return to earth, but they generally refrain from speculating about specific timelines or attaching the prospect of the Second Coming to current events.
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they → foster → events
All of history since Pentecost could technically be classified as the “end times” on this view, because the Church has been awaiting Jesus’ return since his ascension into heaven.
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Church → classify → heaven
Across the Christian tradition writ large, this is the mainstream position, one held today by most Catholics and many old-school confessional Protestants.
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this → writ → Catholics
From the sixteenth century to the present, the Reformers’ core doctrine of sola scriptura—which calls for reading the Bible against itself rather than through the stacked lenses of inherited traditions of Christian authority—lent Protestant eschatology a somewhat tumultuous character.
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eschatology → call → authority
That doctrine and its American evangelical corollary, Bible-onlyism, have driven generation after generation back to the Good Book for fresh interpretations of the end of the world.
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doctrine → drive → world
So it is primarily Protestants who’ve developed the many manias of millenarianism, including the more raucous contemporary ones that have become culturally predominant within evangelicalism during this century.
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that → develop → century
What made cradle Catholics wince was that Vance was steering back into all of the assumptions and fixations of his Protestant evangelical youth despite his avowed turn toward a hardline Catholic identity in recent years.
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Vance → make → years
Speculating about which living world leader might be the Antichrist and connecting current events to biblical imagery of the end of the world—that’s a millenarian (specifically, premillennial) hobbyhorse, familiar to many (including me) who grew up in American evangelical churches.
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who → speculate → churches
Some Catholic critics read the whole episode as a sign of Vance being inauthentically Catholic—“three evangelicals in a trench coat” was how one X user sardonically described him.
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user → read → him
But Vance’s religious blundering can be better read as an expression of his ambition to inherit the mantle of Donald Trump, the unlikely carnival-barker king of the American evangelicals.
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blundering → read → evangelicals
Vance knows that evangelicals are the vulnerable right flank he’ll need to shore up for his presidential ambitions to remain viable.
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ambitions → know → ?
BUT VANCE’S SPECULATIVE PODCASTING about the Antichrist looks like meager apprentice work when compared to the bold-letter, years-long obsession of Thiel, who moonlights as a theologian and a philosopher.
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who → look → theologian
These deeper interests are part of what drew Vance to Thiel in the first place.
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what → draw → place
A lecture the PayPal mafioso delivered at Yale Law School in 2011, Vance has written, awakened the future vice president from his atheistic slumber: Thiel was “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian.”
Thiel is fixated on the Antichrist as a concept.
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Thiel → deliver → concept
That’s unremarkable for an evangelical—but Thiel, although raised in an evangelical family, can hardly be said to embrace standard-issue evangelicalism today.
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Thiel → ’ → evangelicalism
He’s a gay man whose marriage enjoys legal protections most evangelicals fought against and continue to oppose, but he nonetheless collaborates with evangelical groups to get his message out.
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he → ’ → message
Thiel has described himself as a “heterodox Christian,” which is another way of saying that he has made a self-aware break with traditional Christian orthodoxy on at least some matters of theological significance.
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he → describe → significance
The heterodoxy is flashing red in Thiel’s understanding of his core subject.
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heterodoxy → flash → subject
Tellingly, his lectures and public writing on the Antichrist have very little to do with Christ himself.
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lectures → have → Christ
Jesus seems mostly absent from Thiel’s eschatology and his theology in general.
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Jesus → seem → general
Surely, if the word means anything, antichristos signals the opposite of christos.
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antichristos → mean → christos
What gives?
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What → give → ?
Before we get into what gives, consider joining our Bulwark+ community—one of the very best on Al Gore’s internet.
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what → get → internet
Right now, you can get 30 percent off an annual membership, which will give you access to everything we produce, including unique political-theological essays like this one.
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we → get → one
In truth, even calling Thiel’s Antichrist interpretation “theological” or “biblical” is a bit of a stretch.
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calling → call → stretch
His account is fundamentally eclectic, stitching together his own Protestant upbringing, his ideology of techno-libertarian power, Carl Schmitt’s Nazi political theory, and ideas he has adapted from the French theorist René Girard, who taught at Stanford while Thiel was a student there.
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Thiel → stitch → Stanford
In his First Things essay, Thiel warns that the real harbinger of the apocalypse is any move toward “totalitarian peace and safety.”
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harbinger → warn → peace
…and 34 more, not listed.
The Aporia
