Matthew Avery Sutton

This is all wrong.

Matthew Avery Sutton, and I'm a professor of history at Washington State University.

I teach courses on religion and politics, and my most recent book is called Chosen Land, How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity.

Boy, we could certainly start that story, you know, really in biblical times, which of course has nothing to do with North America.

But in the North American context, I think the way we think of the Antichrist today really begins in the 1880s and the 1890s.

And it has to do with the rise of the modern nation state, with global militarization, and the kind of creation of the modern world order.

So Americans, you know, had been pretty optimistic, forward-thinking.

They believed that they were building the kingdom of God on Earth, that they were kind of creating this utopia.

Then they hit the Civil War.

They were dealing with this problem, which was the growing divide over the issue of slavery.

And once Christians start killing other Christians, it became really, really difficult to justify an optimistic, hopeful politics.

And so these apocalyptic ideas began to seep into everyday theology, began to seep into everyday church life.

And then they hit the Industrial Revolution, and then they saw all these immigrants come over, many of whom were Catholics and Jews.

And so for Protestants who were used to calling the shots, who were controlling much of the destiny of the United States through the 19th century, a small group of them began to rethink their theology and began to think, you know what?

Maybe we're not building the kingdom of God.

Maybe we're in fact preparing for Armageddon.

We're preparing for the Antichrist.

And then they began to scour the news and to study events and to align them with the Bible to try to make sense of what they saw happening all around them.

So as the small group of Protestants begins to reconceptualize what they thought of as the end times, at the core of their story was this concept of the Antichrist, this global leader who was going to take power, who was going to oppress Christians, who was going to transform the world.

And so what they did is they began holding conferences and writing books and debating these kinds of issues and arguing about who might be the Antichrist.