Antichrist is behind in American political discourse. After President Donald Trump posted a photo of his AI posing as Jesus on Truth Social, many of his Christian followers fought back. Trump later claimed that he should have been the doctor in the photo, but the damage had already been done. Popular right wing advocates like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlsonand Nick Fuentes it started wondering if Trump was the Antichrist.
This is not the first time that the Antichrist has appeared in American politics. Armageddon and the Second Coming have influenced American political thought since at least the 1880s. Matthew Sutton is a professor of history at the University of Washington and the author of the book The Chosen Country: How Christianity Made America and Americans Reformed Christianity. Sutton says that Armageddon has been a guiding principle for American evangelicals for hundreds of years.
Sutton spoke to Today, It’s Explained co-host Noel King on the history of the Antichrist in America and how that theology has shaped the country.
The following is part of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so take a listen Today, It’s Explained wherever you get your podcasts, incl Apple Podcasts, Pandoraand Spotify.
Where would you begin the story of the Antichrist in American politics?
I think the way we think of the Antichrist today really starts in the 1880s and 1890s, and it has to do with the rise of the modern nation, and global militarism, and kind of the creation of the modern world order.
Americans were optimistic, forward thinking. They believed that they were building the kingdom of God on earth, that they were a form of creating this utopia. Then they fought a civil war. They were dealing with this problem, which was a growing division over the issue of slavery. And once Christians started killing other Christians, it became really difficult to justify the politics of hope and optimism.
So these apocalyptic ideas began to enter the daily life of the church. And then they hit the Industrial Revolution, and they saw all these immigrants coming – many of whom were Catholics and Jews. And so for the Protestants who were used to shooting, a small group of them began to rethink their theology and began to think, What do you know? Maybe we are not building the kingdom of God. Maybe we really are preparing for Armageddon. We are preparing for the Antichrist. And then they started searching the news and reading the events and reconciling them with the Bible to try to find the meaning of what they saw happening all around.
As a small group of Protestants began to rethink what they thought were the end times, at the heart of their story was this concept of the Antichrist, this global leader who was going to take over, who was going to oppress Christians, who was going to change the world. So what they did is that they started holding conferences and writing books and discussing these kinds of issues and arguing about who the Antichrist might be, where he might appear, and how we (can) know how close we are to the end times. They ended up starting a movement.
Then, around the First World War, they gave the movement a name, and that was the foundation. And then they announce themselves again in the Second World War, as evangelists. And so fundamentalists and evangelicals are the people who rally around this idea that the Antichrist is out there somewhere, and we better be ready for him.
When Americans were thinking about the Antichrist, what signs were they looking for?
There were few signs. Some of them are very difficult to demonstrate, so they talked about falling away from true Christianity. But, of course, you can make that argument in every generation. Common is promiscuity – that children today are not as law-abiding as their parents.
But the most exciting thing was the return of the Jews to Palestine and the rebuilding of Israel as a nation state. They believe they started predicting this in the 1880s, 1890s. So, when the Zionist movement begins, and then Israel is created in the late 1940s, it becomes clear to them that everything they have been predicting is correct.
Another thing they expect is an increase in war and rumors of war. That was what Jesus had told his disciples to expect in the last days. And so World War I becomes a time to cry about how they got it right. And then of course World War II is another. Then the creation of the United Nations and then the United Nations – these types of international international organizations that would create a system in which the Antichrist could take power, could seize power – (reinforced the idea).
All these things become big red flashing lights telling fundamentalists and evangelicals that they’ve got it right, that their reading of the Bible is in sync with world events.
Who were the people saying, “Oh, this man could be the Antichrist,” or “this may be proof that we are approaching the Revelation”?
There were two ways they thought of. One was to identify the real Antichrist, but the problem with doing that was that the Antichrist would be a deceiver. That’s what the Bible says. And so they knew it would be hard to figure out who exactly it was, but they would still think. And often from generation to generation, there are special figures.
In the 1930s, Mussolini seemed to be quite fit. He is trying to revive the Roman Empire. That seemed to be one of the main characteristics of the Antichrist. We jump ahead to the 1990s, and it’s probably Saddam Hussein because he’s trying to rebuild Babylon, the ancient city of the Bible. But there is also this thought: What about American leaders? What role do they play?
Many of them believe that the Antichrist would probably not be an American, because the writers of the Bible did not have the concept of America. Of course, they thought that the American leaders could be shareso they can help facilitate the rise of the Antichrist. And they were often liberal, they were international (suspected). So Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama – those types of people gained a lot of traction among fundamentalists and evangelicals as potential allies of the Antichrist. (The idea was that this was done) usually unwittingly, not intentionally to work with the Antichrist, but to help set the stage for Americans to lose their power to this satanic, global, new world leader.
It makes me wonder, however, if this Antichrist motive has really shaped American politics. Did we hit a point in the country’s history where that happened? It was like, oh, FDR is the Antichrist, and so must X, Y, and Z?
Working side by side with the rise of the religious right was the greatness of Ronald Reagan.
And Ronald Reagan was a natural ally for many of these people because he seemed to have the ideas of the Antichrist and the end times. Although it certainly wasn’t shaping his policy, it was a passion for him. And it is something that his critics often pointed to and said that he was working very closely with these evangelical people and he was very concerned about these kinds of issues.
In my scholarship, I say that, in fact, it is very important for politics, that certainly in the 1930s, when we are emerging with the modern liberal state of the New Deal, it is not a coincidence that we (also) have the emergence of radicalism against liberalism, and which is based on this kind of apocalyptic theology.
But we’re seeing it again more recently with the rise of the religious right. And the reason it is so important is because it becomes a tool to motivate people to take action. If you believe the rise of the Antichrist is near, what comes immediately after the Antichrist is the return of Jesus, the Second Coming. And therefore you have to be ready for that, and you have to be ready for the judgment that will come. You want Jesus to find you as a diligent and good and faithful servant, someone who uses your gifts to do all you can to prepare the rest of the world for the end times.
That means that people who are true believers in this theology of the Antichrist, instead of just waiting idly by because it’s going to happen, should instead get their asses out there and work. because they know that Jesus is coming at any moment and will expect them to do everything they can to prepare the way for His Second Coming. And that means fighting the Antichrist.
So what is happening right now in evangelical communities? How would you place this in the long history of what Americans have been thinking about the Antichrist?
The Antichrist, to me, is the gift that keeps on giving. He really works for every generation. And so it is up to Christian people to read their Bibles and reconcile them with world events and try to reconcile the two.
And so for every generation, it will be a different idea about what the Antichrist is. It will be a different idea about where history is going, where the direction of the nation falls. But I don’t know that it has to be different. It’s the latest of many, many, many versions of this same story, that there’s political mobilization, there’s expectation about change, and then there’s second guessing. Because things don’t always work out the way you expect them to.
And what does that mean for our politics?
Unfortunately, it’s very dangerous, because what it does is incite and increase discrimination, because instead of having policy discussions where you can just agree to disagree or talk about the best policy for the majority of people. Instead, once you add this kind of spiritual language, whether or not you support the United Nations becomes a question of whether or not you support the Antichrist, then that completely changes the stakes. So it makes it more difficult to have a conversation, to have a conversation, to find a middle ground, and to work with your opponents. It is more satisfying to fight absolute evil than to have a discussion about tax policy.
