Does this mean that Trump is an Antichrist? We should be very suspicious about a person, claiming to be a Christian, who obviously flunked Sunday School and claims that he does not need God’s forgiveness. With regard to forgiveness, this is what Trump told a CNN reporter: “I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad.” I passed on drawing a conclusion, but then the lines lit up with a steady stream of people over the next few hours offering their "proofs" that Trump was, in fact, the Evil One come to ravage the Earth. That first caller clearly hit a nerve. Eduardo Freire Canosa once believed that the beast’s seven heads represent the number of Soviet leaders up to Gorbachev, and its ten horns are the seven Warsaw Pact nations plus the three Baltic States. After the break-up the Soviet Union in 1989, Canosa conceded that the prophecy is not fulfilled, along with, if I might add, dozens of others. He causes ALL, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark, or the name of the Beast, or the number of his name. — Revelation 13:16–17 Just as Christians came to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, so they thought that the Antichrist was the Son of Satan. Jesus was born of a virgin. So the Antichrist would be born of a woman who was apparently a virgin, but was really a whore. Where Christ was God in the flesh, the Antichrist was Satan in the flesh.

It was an interesting exercise and conversation, and I was surprised by how many people are actually religiously freaked out about Trump.He tried to end Americans' access to lifesaving medical care by killing Obamacare and privatizing Medicare American evangelist Jerry Falwell, known for his controversial views on apartheid, homosexuality, Judaism, climate change and the Teletubbies, once said: “The Antichrist will be a world leader, he’ll have supernatural powers”. While biblical scholars are split about who the actual "Beast" was that John referenced in his Revelation, many consider it to have been a politically-necessary cloaking of the identity of Roman Emperor Nero. I hear lots of Christians talking about how the only person who would defy God so clearly, is the Antichrist. Conclusions In the apocalyptic fan fiction of the 1970s like "The Late, Great Planet Earth" and the "Left Behind" series two decades later, Christians were unambiguous in their rejection of "the man of perdition" and his evil ways.

Often Moore has to tap-dance around the gap between his church’s beliefs and its behavior. He dismisses as a “manufactured controversy” the criticism of six SBC seminary presidents who in November released a public condemnation of critical race theory. “I don’t find any postmodern theory motivating those who are concerned for racial reconciliation and justice,” says Moore. “I find that what motivates such things is the Bible.” And while Moore has set himself apart from those who support the President, he declines to condemn those who opted to vote for Trump because they believed in the platform, not the man. With Trump’s arrest being construed as an unjust persecution, in the same vein as the crucifixion of Christ, it seems certain there will also be a powerful resurrection of Trump and his movement. And his second campaign for president and, God-forbid, his second term as president, will almost certainly spell the end of American democracy as we know it.That said, Jerry Falwell Jr’s posturing as Trump-booster and voyeur didn’t exactly jibe with Scripture. The ousted head of Liberty University, son of the founder of the Moral Majority, allegedly paid a pool boy to have sex with his wife as he watched. This truth has already been confirmed in prophetic utterances on the internet by godly men and women who understand that Trump has been specifically ordained by heaven itself to be God's instrument in America. Many of us feel, as poet John Donne put it in The Anatomy of the World in 1611, “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone”. I don’t want to wade into eschatological debates. I would prefer to forget they exist. So I will only say that many (but certainly not all!) Evangelicals believe that God will take them into heaven before the Antichrist comes to power and instigates the Tribulation. Christians would vanish, “like a thief in the night,” as the verse goes, leaving their clothes and their apostate relatives behind. God thus spares them the thrilling horrors of the Antichrist, and they get to watch the show from above, as they lounge about in celestial glory. Until Pat Robertson ascends to his McMansion in the sky, there’s not much to worry about. Every American evangelical has heard this story or seen the movies. Most American evangelicals believe this story is biblical and thus is likely to reflect exactly how the Antichrist will rise and the world will end. And yet, remarkably, millions of American evangelicals have placed their entire hope in a man who is far less suave or righteous than the Antichrist in Left Behind, whose life and values literally fly in the face of the most basic teachings of Christ.

Popes, old and new, have been targets for those on the lookout for the Antichrist. Unsplash/Nacho Arteaga, CC BY Donald Trump has said he will physically mark all Muslims. This could be the first step in the Antichrist’s plan to mark everyone. He watched on TV, like a delighted child, as his followers killed a police officer, sent 140 others to the hospital, and tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House Jacob Chansley, also known as the ‘QAnon Shaman’, screams inside the US Senate chamber on January 6. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty ImagesAnd now, with a seemingly insoluble climate crisis, pandemic surges, savage wildfires and hurricanes, and a renewed nuclear arms race, seems no time to stop.