I’m not one to throw around terms about the Christian view of the apocalypse willy-nilly, like some latter day Johnny Appleseed strewing the countryside with poison apple trees. But I have read the New Testament, and the Left Behind series that cribs from it shamelessly. So I am familiar when folks make reference to the mark of the beast (Revelations 13:16) or the bottomless pit (Revelations 9:2), “666” (Revelations 13:8), the Whore of Babylon (Revelations 17:5) or meeting Jesus in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:17). I am also familiar with the overuse of these references. When barcode scanners first came out in the min-1970s, people freaked that the UPC codes they read were surely the mark of the beast. I’m too lazy to look, but I suspect every numbering system — Social Security numbers, drivers license numbers, college IDs, numbers on football jerseys — has knotted the stomach of at least some true believers.
The apocalyptic books of the New Testament are close to two thousand years old. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians about meeting Jesus in the clouds in the very early 50s CE*. Revelations was written somewhere in the 80s or early 90s CE. Christianity was in a very different place in those days. From its beginnings as a Jewish sect in the 30s and 40s, it had steadily been breaking from its parent faith. First, there were antagonisms with Jews, who did not see Jesus was the Messiah. Then Rome took notice of the new movement, once it could be distinguished from Judaism, a group that had some imperial protection. Finally, in-fighting within the Jesus movement put the fledgling community at risk from every angle. Add to that the belief that Jesus was very soon coming back to Earth, and you had all the makings for some truly paranoiac literature. The Book of Revelations is widely seen as one writer’s attempts to soothe the community’s fraying nerves by “revealing” the divine behind-the-scenes machinations that would settle matters in the Christians’ favor.
All well and good.
Weirdly, Christianity in the United States, throughout its history being the predominant expression of American religious faith, still connects strongly with the BofR. For one thing, surely, after two thousands years, Christ’s return must be close at hand! Second, is not today’s American Christian living under persecution, just as did those in Revelation times? Today, “persecution” is in the eye of the beholder. Losing the ability to place your manger scene on the town green might seem like a sensible separation of church and state to some. But if you have been involved in staging that scene for decades, you might feel that something has been taken from you. And in the typical misuse of the slippery slope argument, if they can take the manager off the green today, they’ll stop us from putting in our own yard tomorrow, and ban them outright the day after that.
And so (after adding secular support for biblical verboten issues like gay marriage, transgender bathrooms and women in power, you have the makings of a new Christian paranoia that looks again to the Book of Revelation and other Christian apocalyptic writings for succor.
Yet there is one aspect of the Christian paranoia about the end times that has largely escaped their notice. And that is the figure of the Antichrist. You might think that with all the evangelical fervor surrounding the end of time, that the arrival of the Antichrist might merit a few watchmen on the parapet. True, there have been a few lame attempts at IDing the AC. In her heyday, Hillary Clinton — that lifelong Episcopalian churchgoer and fighter for women’s rights —generated tons of books and articles equating her with the Antichrist. “Hillary Clinton, Prophecy and the Destruction of the United States,” “House candidate calls Clinton Antichrist,” and “HE Defeats Hillary, Obama and the Antichrist” are just a few of the titles that come up when googling “Hillary as antichrist.” Barack Obama — mild, well-spoken and Christian—inspired his own run of antichrist-tinged books and sermons. Nowadays, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris get the antichrist treatment. Though few take it too seriously.
But of all the candidates for Antichrist, one is conspicuously missing from the list of current threats seen by the Christian Right: Donald Trump. And why is that? Why is it that rather than setting off salvos of apocalyptic alarm bells, Trump is wildly popular with the Christians who worry most about the Second Coming? They vote for him, they show up at his rallies, and they see him as heaven-sent—even messianic. But they don’t seem to worry that there might be more beneath the spray tan and the breezed-up coiffure. Like a numeric tattoo and horns, maybe.
A little excursion into what the Bible has to say about the Antichrist might be in order.
Paul, writing to the Christians in Thessaly in the early 50s, had this to say about the antichrist, or “the lawless one”:
Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.
…
The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.
— 2 Thessalonians 2:1–4, 9-12
Sorry, that was kind of long. But it brings into focus some of the facets of an antichrist that would have been salient to early Christians — a hatred of truth, the power to deceive, the self-aggrandizement, the eventual comeuppance at the hands of Jesus Christ.
As I said, I’m not big into trying to associate religious symbols from an ancient book with current events. It’s a mug’s game that has been played for centuries. Nero was a candidate for the Antichrist, as was Napoleon, and Hitler and Stalin. All those wicked people have come and gone, yet the universe remains. So I have no commitment to associating a current figure with the Antichrist now. But I am beyond curious that many Christians have failed to do so with Donald Trump. Maybe that’s because most of those who believe the Bible is literal, historically true are on the conservative end of the religious spectrum. They just can’t imagine a good conservative like Trump to be their world’s most dangerous enemy. By contrast, religious liberals tend to approach the Scriptures as an amalgam of history, allegory and grand overarching themes. We don’t bite at the game of matching personalities to the Parousia**. Still, even for lefties, the parallels to Trump are uncanny.
First, can you imagine if Barack Obama’s son-in-law owned a building at 666 (!) Fifth Avenue in New York City? Yet Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s hubby, does. He even has that blank, soulless stare that would have made him fit right in as the son of Satan in movies like The Omen. And his grandiosity and overreach — remember that he was assigned to supposed to solve the Middle East, negotiate the US-Canada-Mexico treaty and distribute COVID vaccines—increases the risk of global damage he could wreak, something any respectable Antichrist’s envoy should specialize in.
Not a peep from the pious on that one.
Second, what recent president has been more lawless than Donald Trump? He counseled his supporters to refuse to testify to Congress. He ignored conflicts of interest, charging the government for using his personal properties and hotels. He broke nepotism rules by using his daughter and son-in-law as confidants. He pressured a vulnerable foreign country to produce dirt on a potential political rival. He at the very least encouraged his supporters to storm the US Capitol on January 6th and threaten his vice president with death for not going along with his plans to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Even as a former president, he continues to claim legal powers he does not possess, hoping to wear his opponents into submission or tangle them up in years-long legal fights.
As a man of lawlessness, Trump has few equals outside of organized crime and dictatorships. But the power he wields — first as present and now as de facto head of a mob that counts 30% or more of the electorate as members — is enormous and potentially world-shaking. That Trump relishes flouting the law is one thing; that his bullying, violent and retributive approach to politics has captured the hearts of one of our political parties is quite another. A well-timed stroke could fell one of these; but what will turn the mob back to the path of light?
Paul’s reference to a rebellion should have struck a note of recognition in those who watched the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Thousands of Trump’s minions stormed the building sacred to democracy, thinking they were doing the country a favor. They beat cops while flying Thin Blue Line flags. They used chemical sprays on those protecting lawmakers inside. Trump all but danced for joy as he watched the unfolding drama. Only after people died, many were injured, and it became apparent that the certification of the 2020 election would move forward in spite of the riot did he call on his supporters to stand down.
Still no word from our Bible-believing friends about the rebellion that Paul described.
How about one who will “exalt himself over everything?” Five words will suffice to describe Trump’s narcissistic belief in his own power: “I alone can fix it.” Though there are so many more. Like “I will be the greatest president God ever created.” Like “I am the chosen one.” Anyone who thinks Trump would shrink from being deified by his followers hasn’t been paying attention.
As as for lies and powerful delusions? They are the hallmark of Donald Trump. The Washington Post caught him in 30,573 lies in his four years in office — close to 21 per day. His refusal to believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election is called The Big Lie. It and its related conspiracy theories are repeated endlessly by Trump and his media supporters. This creates and contributes to the delusion that a large segment of Americans is in thrall to. As though bewitched, they believe what they want to believe and dismiss all facts to the contrary. They cannot be persuaded, and descend by quick steps into the most absurd conspiracy thinking. Democrats run a pedophile ring that harvests young people for their youth-bestowing adenochrome? (17% of Americans believe that.) World leaders are reptilians? (12 million US believers.) COVID boosters prove the vaccine doesn’t work? (71% of unvaccinated adults agree.)
We are in age of delusion, propelled by people’s innate resistance to change, their distrust of science, experts, and urbanites, as well as by powerful pushes from media and political leaders who mine their audience’s distrust for power, privilege and money.
I could go on. Every day, it seems that the chasm widens between those who believe in humanity’s ability to control our world (via science, climate control, vaccines, universal health care and the like) and those who seemingly have thrown their futures to charlatans and con men. A simple, common-sense remedy like wearing a mask to ward off illness is rejected by those who hold tightly to a hyper-individualistic interpretation of the principle of liberty. School board members are yelled at and threatened. All over delusions.
Yet our religious brothers and sisters are often the ones holding these views. As Paul warned, they refuse to love the truth. Or rather, the “truth” they love is not the truth at all.
Luckily for all of us, I don’t expect these parallels to foretell an imminent return of Jesus to judge the people of the Earth. The Book of Revelation for me is, if not a dead letter, then a book whose values is in seeing what persecution and internal division can do to a community. But isn’t it baffling that those who do believe in biblical signs and portents aren’t seeing them when they are right before their eyes? It may well say something about the way we humans reason. If we hold tightly to a belief in, say, the sinfulness of liberals and the righteousness of the church, it may be extremely difficult to accept that one’s own views and institutions might be mistaken. The path out of delusion, especially when that delusion is confirmed by those one respects, is long and arduous. German citizens living right in the towns where Jews were murdered by the tens of thousands were able to persuade themselves that what was happening right under their noses was not actually going on. Only when the evidence — piles of naked, starved corpses — was presented to them did the veil drop and was their vision restored. Given the immensity of a truly eye-opening experience — one that quickly persuades many that they are living a lie — I pray it isn’t necessary. For that revelation would have to be so dire and so grave that it would make personalities crumble and markets crash. At the same time I realize that, to paraphrase Lincoln, the country cannot remain half deluded and half clear-eyed. It will have to become all of one or all of the other. And let’s pray the nation swings toward sanity — a wholly deluded populace is capable of truly malicious behavior against those who don’t go along with the lie.
Finally, it might be worth quoting Jesus on his own worries about what happens when apocalypse is in the air:
At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ or, ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you ahead of time. (Matthew 24: 23-25)
“Even the elect” will be deceived. That’s a parallel I didn’t mention. If I were a biblical literalist, I might be worried. As it is, I am worried because of how hard it is for human beings to self-correct when they have gone far down he wrong path.
2021 and 2022 may go down in history books as a pivot point in history. These may be the years when self-government snatched itself from the brink, or where the march toward dictatorship reached a tipping point. Whether we pivot toward a new Enlightenment or a second Dark Ages remains to be seen.
* I use CE (Common Era) rather than AD (Anno Domini, the Year of Our Lord) as a more religiously inclusive way of denoting the calendar year. Similarly, I use BCE (Before the Common Era) instead of BC (Before Christ).
** Fancy theological term for the Second Coming of Christ.