How Vance and Thiel Get the Antichrist Backwards
The Bulwark · C · trust 42/100
One is doing a bit of cynical pandering, the other is condemning anyone opposed to the tech future—and neither is willing to look in the mirror.
Matthew D. Taylor October 9 Upgrade to listen 14 minute s 131 12 18 (Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF TALK of the Antichrist of late. 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.” These words are a little unnerving coming from someone one heartbeat away from the 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? Is it?
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 .” 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.
Thiel’s obsession with the Antichrist merits close examination. He is the first outside investor in Facebook and belonged to the infamous PayPal Mafia , a real Silicon Valley mover and shaker. 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. Vance would be nowhere near his present high office without Thiel’s patronage and mentorship.
Why all this Antichrist speculation, and why now? 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.
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 .
VANCE’S ANTICHRIST SPECULATIONS are far less original or interesting than those of his mentor. The vice president has been weighing in on faith topics a lot to promote his Catholic-come-lately conversion memoir, Communion . 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. 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.
Within Western (as in, Protestant and Catholic) Christianity, there are, generally speaking, two major theologies of the end of the world, also known as eschatologies: millenarian and non-millenarian. 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. All of history since Pentecost could technically be classified as the “end times” in this view, because the Church has been awaiting Jesus’ return since his ascension into heaven. Across the Christian tradition writ large, this is the mainstream position, one held today by most Catholics and many old-school confessional Protestants.
But we Protestants are weird. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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 . Vance knows that evangelicals are the vulnerable right flank he’ll need to shore up for his presidential ambitions to remain viable.
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. These deeper interests are part of what drew Vance to Thiel in the first place. A lecture the PayPal mafioso delivered at Yale Law School in 2011, Vance has written , awakened the future vice president…
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