The Western Antichrist
Don't be so literal, rube.
The beast was permitted to go to war against the saints and conquer them. He was given ruling authority over every tribe, people, language, and nation, 8 and all those who live on the earth will worship the beast, everyone whose name has not been written since the foundation of the world in the book of life belonging to the Lamb who was killed.
-Revelation 13
The Antichrist is a big deal over here in the United States, particularly with the evangelical set. It’s perhaps most prominently on display after a new president is elected here and people with severe mental illness post things on social media about how it’s actually fulfilling the prophecy of the Antichrist. Barack Obama was a big source of Antichrist weirdo shit online, but smug liberals should take a quick perusal of “RESIST!” Facebook groups in the aftermath of Trump’s election before spiking any footballs. Plenty of “Believe Science” liberals posting memes about Trump lying to evangelicals as signs of prophecy fulfillment. All of the Christians here are addled by two things simultaneously: spooky Western theology they’ve never fully shed, and the most literalist culture on Earth.
That means a lot of these poor delusional folks are looking for one Antichrist, as in an individual. As if the Antichrist is just going to be a guy who shows up one day. Okay, Antichrist is here! Time to wrap things up. We take the Christ myth literally — Christ was one guy who gets killed and resurrected, rather than a parabolic representation of the spirit of rebellion as He is in some other traditions — so why wouldn’t we do the same for the Antichrist prophesy? That’s how you end up connecting enough dots to believe it’s possible that a gameshow host who won the presidency might be a manifestation of Lucifer.
I try not to denigrate others belief systems unless they’re Catholic, but this is very clearly absurd. Even if one is to accept the idea that there could be a singular Antichrist, how on Earth could any one individual hold enough sway to fulfill an Antichrist prophecy in today’s world? Even the president of the United States lacks the authority to bring about nuclear armageddon on their own, and that’s before considering the fact that the elites scattered around the rest of the Revived Holy Roman Empire would have a say. If you’re still looking for the Antichrist and keeping your eyes peeled for a powerful person to suddenly grow horns, I think you’re going to die confused and disappointed sometime in the future.
But the Antichrist concept is very real, and the prophesy itself is general enough that it’s not especially difficult to see the end of the Thousand Year Reign as its culmination. To start, forego any idea of literalism and remember that the Antichrist is a concept sprung, like everything else, from linguistics. It just means opposite. Antithetical. You don’t even have to believe in Jesus Christ to believe in the Antichrist, you just have to believe that “Christianity” represents a distinct set of morals, ethics, and values*. Because if you believe that, then it follows that you believe it’s possible that a set of morals, ethics, and values that run antithetical to those Christian ones could take hold. That would be Antichrist.
*[CT Note: It does, kind of, but is also doesn’t so this one is complicated enough to save for another day.]
This isn’t especially fun to consider because it paints the concept of a Revived Holy Roman Empire in a new light; an imperial power that is driven not by commitment to God but commitment to itself. A feedback loop wherein the Antichrist convinces itself of its own piety as it spreads a damaging and poisonous worldview. With the benefit of hindsight, one can see that the Roman Empire was always evil, but I like to give the benefit of the doubt to some of those folks that they thought they were building utopia. Many of them in service of what they thought God was. Now that it’s obvious this is false and our efforts to reshape other civilizations through violence and economic development create pain and suffering, what’s the excuse for continuing the Western drive for imperialism?
Imperialism in service of conquest is Antichrist. Creating a City of God without a unified vision of a loving God that opens its city gates for all is a form of fascism. We conquer other countries for no reason aside from creating favorable economic factors for the world we’ve built. This isn’t especially complicated.
There are various Christian practices I could call out — Pentecostalism is a big one — that fulfill an “Antichrist” type theology, but I believe it’s more instructive to zoom out. Much of the prophesy of an Antichrist revolves around a revived empire that lacks belief; a rudderless entity that is too powerful to be stopped, therefore unavoidably putting humanity into a battle between good and evil. It’s very easy to make a case that a massive economic power using marketplaces as a way to manipulate the future fits the description, so to speak. I could bring in various parables from Revelation as a way of illustrating my point, devolving this blog into doomsaying and schizophrenic ramblings, but I’d rather keep it simple. Remember when Jesus saw all those people conducting business in the temple? He was pretty pissed! I wonder what he would say about the United States letting people in Afghanistan starve to death over a financial dispute.
But you already know what he would say. That’s why living here hurts so badly all the time. As part of nature, human beings abide by the laws of nature, including the one that says opposites exist by necessity. Each peaceful moment I spend is one spent with the knowledge that I have peace because someone in the “Global South” is in hell. We’ve yet to find a way to fix that. There are some very naive people (in tech, in journalism, in academia, in government, and everywhere around us) who have convinced themselves they can solve this problem, and we suffer as they push forward with their fantasy at the expense of us lumpenproletariat.
The Antichrist is real in the same way that hell is unavoidably real: these are constructs and frameworks that we have made real through our beliefs and actions. Hell need not be literal to be real, as anyone who has hit rock bottom can tell you. In the same way, if the Antichrist simply means the antithesis of the Christian Ideal (albeit an ideal that has never been realized and is actively harmful), then the Antichrist is real by virtue of Christianity being real. Unfortunately, there’s no real consensus on what being a “Christian” means, as Catholics and Pentecostals and Anglicans and Baptists and Mormons would all give you a different answer, so it becomes difficult to align on what the Antichrist would actually look like.
That’s a trap. The detail, that is. Most of these movements emerged from various political actors and delusional psychopaths using weaponized credulousness to make mini empires for themselves. The detailed disputes between Latin Church descended rubes are little more than fodder for the minutiae of the day to day. The Antichrist would not stand in opposition to what we think of as Christianity but to Christ Himself, meaning one must only look to Christ’s words for knowledge of how an antithesis would manifest. I know what Jesus Christ said about good and evil. I know what He said about allowing one’s morality to be bought and sold.