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How the Antichrist infiltrated politics

And why it’s so dangerous.

The Antichrist is back in American political discourse. After President Donald Trump posted an AI photo of himself depicted as Jesus on Truth Social, many of his Christian followers were up in arms. Trump later claimed that he was supposed to be a doctor in the photo, but the damage was already done. Prominent far-right advocates like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes began wondering if Trump was the Antichrist.

This is not the first time the Antichrist has popped up in American politics. Armageddon and the Second Coming have affected US political thought since at least the 1880s. Matthew Sutton is a history professor at the University of Washington and the author of the book Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. Sutton says that Armageddon has been the guiding principle for American evangelicals for hundreds of years.

Sutton spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the history of the Antichrist in America and how that theology has shaped the country.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Where would you start the story of the Antichrist in American politics?

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.

Americans 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.

So these apocalyptic ideas began to seep into everyday church life. And then they hit the Industrial Revolution, and 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, 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........

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