JD Vance has said he is “doing as much of God’s work as possible” and that he is OK “if that leads to the end times”, which he says “are coming”

The US vice-president made the comments during a Monday podcast interview with Bryce Crawford, a 22-year-old evangelical host with over a million YouTube followers and videos featuring sensationalist headlines including “Preaching the gospel in Chicago’s deadliest neighborhood” and “Debating a ‘gay’ pastor”

Speaking about the Christian prophetic notion that the world as humanity knows it will end one day, Vance said: “Do I think we are in the end times? I don’t know

“While I’m fascinated by it, I think that focusing on it too much can be very bad,” he said, adding that if his work “leads to the end times, OK, and if that leads to … us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone, that’s great, too”

Vance, who published a spiritual memoir earlier this summer about his conversion to Catholicism, said: “I think you got to just kinda try and have an attitude of: the end times may be coming, in fact they are coming, it’s just a question of whether they’re coming thousands of years down the road, or a few months down the road”

He said: “I think there are things about the world that make me feel, like, not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us”