The Window Still Breaks

I had not planned to spend Wednesday morning thinking about whether the Vice President of the United States is comfortable with his work contributing to the apocalypse. I had coffee to drink. There were emails. Somewhere, presumably, a normal country was having a normal Wednesday. But here we are.

This week, JD Vance appeared on Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford’s show and wandered into a discussion about the End Times. Vance said he has been fascinated by biblical prophecy since childhood. He talked about the possibility that the Antichrist could already be alive, about sensing spiritual darkness in the world, and about technological developments that strike him as ominous. He also made clear that he does not know whether we are actually living in the End Times and thinks obsessing over the question would probably be unhealthy.

Then he explained what he tries to focus on instead: being a good husband, a good father, a good leader, and doing as much of what he understands to be God’s work as possible. And then came the sentence: “If that leads to the end times, okay.”

To be precise, Vance did not say, “I am trying to bring about the apocalypse.” He did not announce a Department of Armageddon or unveil a seven-point plan for releasing the Beast from the sea. He said that if doing what he believes to be God’s work leads to the End Times, that outcome is acceptable to him. That distinction matters. It also does not make me feel considerably better.

The issue is not whether JD Vance is secretly trying to summon the Four Horsemen. The issue is the moral structure underneath what he said: there exists a divinely ordained plan, you can identify your own actions as participating in that plan, and catastrophic consequences can therefore be accepted as part of something larger than human judgment.

That is not necessarily an intention to cause catastrophe. It is, however, a permission structure for accepting it. And when the person holding that permission structure also holds substantial governmental power, I think we are allowed to become uncomfortable. Or very uncomfortable. Dealer’s choice.

I have spent enough of my life around fundamentalist Christianity to recognize the strange confidence with which people discuss the End Times. The Antichrist will come. Christ will return. There will be judgment. History is going somewhere very specific. The details vary depending on which theological franchise you subscribe to, but the certainty can be astonishing.

We do not know what consciousness is. We do not know why there is something rather than nothing. We do not know whether time is fundamental. We do not know what happened before the earliest measurable moments of the universe. We are anxious apes on a rock circling one star among hundreds of billions, and some of us nevertheless feel pretty comfortable describing the final chapters of cosmic history. You have to admire the confidence. From a safe distance.

Vance’s precise eschatology is not completely clear from this interview, and we should not pretend otherwise. He is Catholic, and Catholic eschatology differs in important ways from the evangelical Rapture-and-Tribulation machinery many Americans picture when they hear “End Times.” I do not particularly care whether his personal apocalypse spreadsheet has seven years, seven seals, or a complicated set of conditional formatting.

The larger beliefs are clear enough. He believes the Christian story of history is true. He believes spiritual evil is real. He talks seriously about the Antichrist. He believes history ultimately culminates in an event ordained by God. And he believes his responsibility is to do what he understands as God’s work regardless of whether the eventual outcome is a flourishing civilization or the culmination of history itself.

Again, the frightening part is not believing in God. The frightening part is believing that you know what God wants you to do while exercising enormous power over people who may not share your God, your theology, or your assumptions about how history ends. There is a canyon between “I believe God has a plan” and “I believe this thing I am doing is part of God’s plan.” Human beings have spent several thousand years demonstrating the importance of that canyon.

This becomes stranger when we look at Vance’s relationship with the Catholic Church he voluntarily joined.

Vance has used Catholic theology to explain his politics, most famously the concept of ordo amoris, the “order of love,” which he invoked to argue that our obligations properly move outward from family to neighbors, community, country, and eventually the rest of the world. Pope Francis publicly rejected that interpretation. He argued that Christian love should not be understood as a concentric expansion of concern in which some people progressively matter less, and instead pointed to the Good Samaritan as the proper model.

Pope Leo XIV has continued criticizing aspects of the administration’s immigration approach, and Vance has publicly described the Vatican’s views on immigration as troubling and said that he ultimately disagrees with them. There is nothing inherently scandalous about a Catholic disagreeing with a pope over public policy. The pope is not God, and Catholics are not required to install every papal opinion like a mandatory firmware update.

But there is an epistemic problem worth noticing. Vance is comfortable invoking Catholic theology when it supports his political conclusions. When the highest authorities within Catholicism tell him that his application of Catholic theology is mistaken, he remains comfortable with his political conclusions. Maybe he has excellent reasons. Maybe he sincerely believes they are wrong.

But eventually we have to ask a very basic question: What could tell him that he is wrong?

That question interests me far more than whether JD Vance is secretly malicious. Because if agreement from your religion strengthens your certainty, but disagreement from your religion merely proves that religious authorities have misunderstood the situation, then religion is no longer functioning as an external moral constraint. It has become a mirror.

And worse, it has become a mirror that can only return your own righteousness. When the reflection approves, God is speaking. When the reflection disagrees, the mirror needs adjusting. That is a dangerous object to hand anyone, and it is an extraordinarily dangerous object to hand someone with executive power.

There is something I tell my daughter when we talk about choices and consequences. Imagine you get angry and throw a toy. Maybe you consciously decide, “I am going to throw this toy at that window.” Or maybe you are overwhelmed, you react without thinking, the toy leaves your hand, and it hits the window.

Those are morally different situations. Intention matters when we are trying to understand responsibility. But there is another fact that does not change: the window breaks either way.

Reality does not stop before impact and ask whether the decision arose from conscious malice, unconscious anger, childhood conditioning, Satan, the Holy Spirit, economic anxiety, or a misunderstanding of Thomas Aquinas. The glass breaks. That distinction feels increasingly important when we talk about political leaders.

I cannot know whether JD Vance consciously uses religion to sanctify political conclusions he already prefers. I cannot look inside his mind. I do not know whether he experiences himself as strategically religious, sincerely devout, spiritually confused, completely coherent, or some mixture of all four before lunch. And ultimately, there is a point at which it does not matter.

If a worldview makes a leader more willing to accept enormous human suffering because that suffering can be incorporated into a divine narrative, the suffering remains real. If immigrants are harmed, they are harmed. If families are separated, they are separated. If a war expands because someone understands events through a framework of cosmic good and evil, the dead remain dead.

The window still breaks. Intent is relevant to judgment, but it is not a force field around consequences.

This is where my concern becomes less theological and more philosophical. Every worldview needs some way of being corrected. Science has experiment. Democracy has elections, institutions, opposition, law, journalism, and argument. Healthy philosophy should contain doubt. Healthy spirituality should contain humility.

The most dangerous belief systems are the ones that can metabolize every contradiction. Victory proves God favors us. Defeat proves we are being tested. Support from religious authorities confirms the truth. Opposition from religious authorities demonstrates their misunderstanding. Good consequences validate the mission. Bad consequences reveal that sacrifice was necessary. And if the whole damned thing ends in fire? Apparently, okay.

That is an epistemological mousetrap. Once inside, every movement of reality tightens the mechanism. I do not need JD Vance to be an evil mastermind for that to frighten me. Frankly, masterminds are overrated. History contains plenty of disaster produced by ordinary human beings who were exceptionally certain that their story about reality was the correct one.

Sincerity does not protect us from catastrophe. Sometimes sincerity is what makes catastrophe possible.

There is a second part of the lesson I try to teach my daughter. Once the window breaks, we can spend some time figuring out why. Were you angry? Did you mean to hit it? Were you scared? What happened inside you? Those questions matter.

But eventually we arrive at the question that matters most: Now that you can see what happened, what are you going to do differently?

That is the moral test. Not whether you can construct an explanation for the broken window, but whether the broken window can teach you anything. I think the same standard should apply to our leaders.

Can suffering change their minds? Can consequences penetrate the worldview? Can another human being’s pain become evidence? Can an institution tell them no? Can their church tell them they have misunderstood their own theology? Can reality force an update? Or does everything simply become another piece of evidence that they were right all along?

I do not fear JD Vance because I think he is plotting the apocalypse. I fear any leader who possesses a framework capable of looking at catastrophe and saying, perhaps this is simply where righteousness led us, especially when that leader believes righteousness has a supernatural author.

There is something genuinely absurd about humans claiming knowledge of how the universe ends while remaining unable to agree on how to treat the people currently standing beside us. I would laugh harder if these people were not running things. Still, I laugh. What else are you going to do when the Vice President starts discussing the Antichrist before breakfast?

Laugh, pay attention, and keep looking at the glass. Because whatever story we tell ourselves about why the toy left our hand, reality remains stubbornly uninterested in our theology.

The window still breaks.