Voting In The Spirit Of Antichrist

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/lisa_miller/2008/11/is_obama_and_antichrist.html
Is Obama the Antichrist?

On Nov. 5, Todd Strandberg was at his desk, fielding E-mails from around the world. As the editor and founder of RaptureReady.com, his job is to track current events and link them to biblical prophecy in hopes of maintaining his status as “the eBay of prophecy,” the best source online for predictions and calculations concerning the end of the world. Already Barack Obama had drawn the attention of apocalypse watchers after an anonymous e-mail circulated among conservative Christians in October implying that he was the Antichrist. Former “Saturday Night Live” ingénue Victoria Jackson fueled the fire when, according to news reports, she wrote on her Web site that Obama “bears traits that resemble the anti-Christ.” Now Strandberg was receiving up-to-the-minute news from his constituents in Illinois. One of the winning lottery numbers in the president-elect’s home state was 666– which, as everyone knows, is the sign of the Beast (also known as the Antichrist). “It is very eerie, and I take it for a sign as to who he really is,” wrote one of Strandberg’s correspondents.

Ever since Jesus Christ was crucified and, according to the Gospels, rose again in glory, his followers have been anticipating the end of history–the time when their Lord will return to earth and reign for a thousand years. The question has always been when. Most Christians don’t worry about the end too much; it’s an abstract concept, a theological puzzle for late-night pondering. A few, however, have always believed that it is coming–and soon. Millennialist movements, as they’re called, gain prominence especially when the world grows chaotic, during wars and at the turn of every century. According to a 2006 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a third of white evangelicals believe the world will end in their lifetimes. These mostly conservative Christians believe a great battle is imminent. After years of tribulation–natural disasters, other cataclysms (such as the collapse of financial markets)–God’s armies will vanquish armies led by the Antichrist himself. He will be a sweet-talking world leader who gathers governments and economies under his command to further his own evil agenda. In this world view, “the spread of secular progressive ideas is a prelude to the enslavement of mankind,” explains Richard Landes, former director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University.

No wonder, then, that Obama triggers such fear in the hearts of America’s millennialist Christians. Mat Staver, dean of Liberty University’s law school, says he does not believe Obama is the Antichrist, but he can see how others might. Obama’s own use of religious rhetoric belies his liberal positions on abortion and traditional marriage, Staver says, positions that “religious conservatives believe will threaten their freedom.” The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they’re not nuts: “They are expressing a concern and a fear that is widely shared,” Staver says.

Before Christ comes again, those who are saved will ascend to heaven, according to this end-times theology, in a huge, upward whoosh called the Rapture. Strandberg is so certain that the Rapture is coming, he’s bought a number of Internet addresses in addition to RaptureReady: AntiAntichrist, Tribulationus and RaptureMe. In the event that RaptureReady crashes during the apocalypse, anyone who needs an update will, with a simple Google search, be able to get one. Strandberg says Obama probably isn’t the Antichrist, but he’s watching the president-elect carefully. On his Web site, he has something called the Rapture Index, a calculation based on signs and prophecy of the proximity of the end. According to Strandberg, any number over 160 means “fasten your seat belts.” Obama’s win pushed the index to 161.

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Editor’s Note: The colum above, written for Newsweek, has received much criticism from Newsweek readers and in the blogosphere. Newsweek blogger Kurt Soller asked Lisa to respond to the critics. This is her response in full:

On Nov. 5, I was on the phone with a source, a conservative Christian who was disappointed in the result of the election. But something else disappointed him more. Too many of his colleagues on the right, he said, were unable to focus on moving ahead. Too many of them, he told me, saw the result as a catastrophe, a sign of the end; some of them were talking about the president-elect as if he were the anti-Christ. I was intrigued for two reasons. The Barack Obama campaign had faced much criticism for the Messiah-like aura that surrounded it. Now, a certain constituency of far-right Christians were looking at the president-elect as the devil–or at least, as devilish. This seemed to me to be newsworthy. As I looked into it, I saw that the Antichrist idea had been “out there,” in various ways, in local papers and on sites like Politico and USNews.com. Second, I felt that all the stories about the “new evangelicals” during this election season had obscured a very important reality in the Christian landscape: a third of white evangelicals believe that the world will end in their lifetimes, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public life. In other words, Americans with an apocalyptic worldview, who believe that the Bible contains prophesy predicting the end of time, are far from extinct.

Apocalypticism, the idea that God will bring about the end of history soon (in a series of events whose exact order has been debated for centuries) and reward the righteous with heaven, has been around since before the birth of Jesus. Many reputable scholars now believe that Jesus himself was an apocalyptic prophet and preached something like this warning, from the Gospel of Mark: “The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” The controversy over the sanity of this perspective began on the first Easter, when Jesus rose from the dead, according to the gospels, and the world stayed right where it was. The sun rose and set and rose again. The history of Christianity has, in some sense, been a story about reconciling these foreboding teachings of Jesus–and of the apostle Paul–with history as it goes on and on. Today, most mainstream Christians think about Jesus’s apocalpyticism in more metaphorical terms, not as real-time warnings. But through the centuries, there have been many who continued to mine the Bible for exact information about where, when and how the world would end. Millennialists have thrived in America; Todd Strandberg, the lead character in our story, is one of them.

I do not endorse millennialist theology, but I do not dismiss it either. I am a journalist, not a rabbi; I do not aim to condone one truth claim above another, for that way madness lies. (Did God really part the Red Sea? Did Jesus, sentenced to death for political crimes, really rise from the dead after three days in a cave? Did Mohammed really travel to heaven to talk to God? Did an angel named Moroni descend from heaven to show a young American boy named Joseph Smith the location of secret tablets upon which scripture was written?) Christians with an apocalyptic worldview are important to the story of Christianity and in America, their values have to a great degree shaped what we call the culture wars. Many of them believe that what they see as the creep of secular progressivism is a prelude to the end of the world. They are an important part of the American fabric, and in my view, worth 600 words in a national magazine. As I do with most controversial subjects, I let these end-times believers speak for themselves, hoping that readers would draw their own conclusions about the soundness of their beliefs. I never imagined that readers would think that they spoke for NEWSWEEK or for me.
By Lisa Miller.