I’m not sure if you’ve noticed – I mean, there are just so many damn distractions these days – but our Vice President JD Vance is a crazed religious zealot untethered from reality.
This is not terribly reassuring considering that his boss is even more deranged than he is.
Maybe Vance is just trying to continue peddling his memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” that came out in June. But in a visit with a Christian podcaster named Bryce Crawford on Monday, he theorized that there’s “some really, really weird spiritual dark energy” around the use to Artificial Intelligence.
In that same interview, Vance said he was unsure if we were in “end times” but noted that there were some things “about the world” that would render him “not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us.”
Huh. That seems to be a terrifying admission, and one we can agree on. I wonder if we have the same Antichrist in mind.
He went on to talk with Crawford about his belief in “otherworldly” forces and a “burial ceremony” that was held for a retired AI model. “That makes me very uncomfortable,” he admitted. He also spoke about how some people are using AI for marital advice, which he dubbed “kind of Satanic.”
Apparently, in the Vance world, the Prince of Darkness is there hanging around every corner, leaving me wondering if J.D. has been privately binging “South Park” episodes.
Besides pushing his book, you may recall how this past April, the Veep publicly criticized Pope Leo XIV after the pontiff condemned the U.S. military’s involvement in the war in Iran. He had stated that God is never on the side of those who use the sword or drop bombs. He called the violence in Iran inhuman.
Oh, but Vance believed he was more Catholic than the Pope despite having been raised in a Protestant household and having gone through a period of atheism as an adult. He argued at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia that Leo was wrong and God was on the side of Allied forces during World War II when they stopped the Nazi atrocities.
And then he turned all Cosa Nostra on the pontiff by saying the Pope needed to be very careful when talking about theology to ensure that his words are anchored in truth. He might as well have warned him, “Nice little Vatican ya got there. Be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
So what we have here is a guy who’s delusional enough to believe he out-Catholics the Vicar of Jesus Christ, And again, this is the dude who has been cast as the reasonable alternative to the schmuck who believes himself king.
Now let’s remember that we theoretically live in a country where the separation of church and state remains the law of the land. In that same Monday podcast interview, he explained his approach to governing in explicitly providential terms. He said that Christians are commanded to try to make the world the way God wants it to be and said he’s concentrating on doing “as much of God’s work as possible.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found that when someone invokes God often in their declarations, you can usually count on it being a substitute for the pronoun “me” or “I.” It’s also a simplistic but effective way to exert control over people, particularly those who are already extremely devout.
When the podcast discussion turned to whether Vance’s efforts on behalf of God could actually contribute to the apocalypse, his basic answer was that he is doing on behalf of God leads to end times, that’s OK, because those end times will eventually happen anyway.
How very reassuring.
This man, who is a heartbeat away from the presidency, defends white supremacists and white nationalists over his brown-skinned wife and children, yet claims to be more godly than thou. Like so many pious extremists, he has no character. It’s all just about using religion as a means to control and dominate.
This is all to confirm that the Vice President of the United States is very publicly discussing his exercise of worldly responsibility within an apocalyptic theological framework. If it came down to it, and he had his hand on the nuclear button, he might well push it since it would only serve to confirm his “end times” prediction.
Earlier this summer, Vance made another remarkable argument: Satan wants Christians to believe religion should be kept separate from politics. Actually, I’m with Satan on that one, and so is pretty much everyone in my circle. But this bolsters his declaration of America being “a Christian nation.”
Actually, JD, we’re a multifaith, pluralistic, multireligious society. But you know, semantics can be so inconvenient when you’re pushing a bigoted and insular narrative so hard.
At least equally disturbing and consequential is the fact that by invoking the devil so freely and often, a sitting VP appears willing to employ supernatural causation as a serious interpretive framework for real-world technological and political phenomena.
It should scare the literal and figurative hell out of us that Vance appears to interpret political reality through an apocalyptic religious lens in which Satan, the Antichrist, divine purpose and paranormal forces of “dark energy” are plausible forces operating in contemporary American life.
More troublingly still, he explicitly connects that radical worldview to governing, arguing for a “more fully Christian politics” while describing his political mission as doing “God’s will.” In that context, pretty much anything you come up with can come under the heading of something God would want, up to and including the state-sponsored terror we’re seeing daily now.
My own personal belief is that God – whatever we conceive He or She or It to be – has very little to do with what’s happening to this country right now. More likely, it’s about doing the bidding of the being with the horns, red tail and pitchfork down under.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)