Matthew Avery Sutton

So there were two ways they conceptualized it.

One was to identify the actual Antichrist.

But the problem with doing that was that the Antichrist was going to be a deceiver.

Like, that's what the Bible says.

And so they knew it was going to be hard to figure out exactly who it was.

But they would still speculate.

And often from generation to generation, there are specific figures.

So in the 1930s, Mussolini absolutely seemed to fit the bill.

He was trying to resurrect the Roman Empire.

That seemed to be one of the key characteristics of the Antichrist.

We jump forward to the 1990s and perhaps it's Saddam Hussein because he's trying to rebuild Babel, the ancient biblical city.

But there's also then this idea, what about American leaders?

What role are they playing?

And so many of them believe that while the Antichrist probably would not be an American because biblical authors had no concept of the United States, of course,

They thought that American leaders might be complicit, that they might help facilitate the rise of the Antichrist.

And often it was liberals.

It was internationalists.

So Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama.

Those kinds of folks got a lot of traction among fundamentalists and evangelicals as potential allies of the Antichrist, and usually unwittingly, not intentionally working with the Antichrist, but as helping set the stage for Americans to lose their sovereignty to this diabolical global new world leader.

Working hand-in-hand with the rise of the religious right was the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan.