Matthew Avery Sutton

Ronald Reagan was actually a natural partner for many of these folks because he seemed to be obsessed with ideas of the Antichrist and with the end times.

And so while it certainly was not shaping his policy, it was an obsession for him and it was something that his critics often pointed to to criticize him and to say that, you know, he was working too closely with these evangelical freaks and was too obsessed with these kinds of issues.

In my scholarship, I argue that, in fact, that it's extraordinarily important for politics that, certainly in the 1930s, that when we have the rise of the modern New Deal liberal state, it's no coincidence that we have the rise of fundamentalist anti-liberalism, and that is grounded in this kind of apocalyptic theology.

But we see it again more recently with the rise of the religious right.

And the reason it's so important is because it becomes a tool for mobilizing people for action, that if you believe the rise of the Antichrist is imminent, what comes right after the Antichrist is the return of Jesus, the second coming.

And so you've got to be ready for that, and you've got to be ready for the judgment that's going to come.

And so you want Jesus to find you being an active and good and faithful servant,

Somebody who's using your gifts to do everything you can to prepare the rest of the world for the end times.

And so that means that folks who are true believers in this apocalyptic Antichrist theology, rather than just kind of wait with indifference because it's going to happen, instead they have to get their asses out there and get to work because they know that Jesus is coming at any moment and he's going to expect them to be doing everything they can to prepare the way for his second coming.

And that means fighting the Antichrist.

Yeah, so the Antichrist for me is the gift that keeps on giving, that he really works for every generation.

And so it's always about Christian folks reading their Bibles and aligning them with world events and trying to make the two compatible.

And so with each generation, it's going to be a different idea about what the Antichrist is.

It's going to be a different idea about where history is going, where the trajectory of the nation falls on that.

But I don't know that it's necessarily different.

It's just the latest version of many, many, many, many versions of the same story, that there's political mobilization, there's expectations about change, and then there's second guessing because things don't always work out exactly as you expect them to.

Unfortunately, it's pretty dangerous because what it does is it fuels and increases polarization.

Because rather than having policy debates where you can just agree to disagree or talk about what is going to be the best policy for the greatest number of people, instead, once you add this kind of spiritualized language, whether or not supporting the United Nations becomes a question of whether or not you're supporting the Antichrist, then that completely changes the stakes.

And so it makes it much more difficult for

to have conversation, to have dialogue, to find a middle ground and to work with your adversaries.