End Times
My friend Tom Sugrue has a good post pointing out how McCain’s “The One” ad seems to dog-whistle a Obama/Anti-Christ comparison to Christian conservatives. As Tom points out:
Premonitions of the End of Time might seem wacky to the Rustbelters, urban planners, Midwestern liberals, blogging history graduate students, and new neo-conservatives who make their way to this website. But to the fifty million people who purchased Hal Lindsay’s best-selling accounts of the last days, they are real. They are part of a disturbing but widespread political and theological vision of current events. McCain’s people know and understand this—and are playing on the hopes and fears of a group of voters whose turnout might well decide the election. It’s a strange, strange world out there, but it’s one that we have to understand.
Two points here. First, I don’t think this analysis of the ad is too far fetched since evangelicals are already making the Obama/End Times/Anti-Christ connection. Hal Lindsay recently claimed that Obama has “prepped” the world for the Anti-Christ.
Second, let me add political scientists to the list of people who need to pay attention to these matters. Theological mindsets are more important than are often realized. For example, Gary Jacobson found that in 2006 14 percent of respondents believed that George W. Bush was chosen by God to lead the U.S. in a war on terrorism and that another 15 percent believe that he might have been chosen by God.
Comments
And the reason Obama cannot be the Anti-Christ, according to Jerry Falwell-style reasoning, is that the Anti-Christ has to be a Jew.
Posted by: ZC | August 6, 2008 12:11 AM
@ZC: No one could substantiate the rumor that Obama was muslim, but the republicans perpetuated the rumor because it was convenient. There are already pictures of Obama wearing a skull cap. When it becomes convenient (scroll up to see how that is quickly becoming so) for them to portray Obama as a Jew, they will have that picture as well as the prayer he put into the wailing wall in which he asked God to make him his instrument on Earth.
And don’t laugh me off. As evidenced by the video above, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that the republicans will try and do this.
Posted by: Walker | August 6, 2008 12:14 AM
There are a lot of stories referring to that “Barrack is the Antichrist” website as evidence of widespread belief amongst the Christian right. But dig deeper into that website. Not only are very few comments ever left. But the arguments and postings are neither high quality nor passionate Christian-based arguments. They just don’t match other types of end-days propaganda (e.g. the Rapture Index)
So yeah, the Christian right may fear Obama for religious reasons. But that particular website is probably a hoax.
Posted by: anonymous | August 6, 2008 12:45 PM
OK. Here is the lowdown:
from THIS SITE
God’s Will
From Letters From God and His Christ
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3/7/08 From God the Father - A Letter Given to Timothy, For All Those Who Have Ears to Hear
Thus says the Lord to the United States:
Obama shall lead you, and by him shall My will and judgment against your nation be fulfilled, for all its forsaking of Me and My Israel. And so I have brought from among your enemy, even one from Ishmael, to rule over you for a time and a season, foreordained, until that foretold is accomplished, and the king of fierce countenance shall rule. Then, by that deception conceived of by your enemy and this transgressor, him being full of lofty and elevated words, lies, and dark speeches sold as hope, will it return against him ten-fold of the same, by him called “perdition”.
Yet remember this: Nothing exists outside of Me, says the Lord…
neither does anything continue outside My will.
For even the evil of this present world is set within the confines of My will. Evil acts and brings forth of its own, yet is unaware that nothing is hidden before Me. Neither has anything come to pass, nor will be, that I have not already beheld.
And this, oh arrogant and deceived generation, is why I said all was written and completed, even before the foundation of the world…
For I am God!… THE GOD!…
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob….
The God of all, even of all that is known and unknown,
the Creator of all things…
The Everlasting, who is from everlasting to everlasting…
I AM.
)_____))_)____)_)___)_
THE END …
Now you know ….
You are welcome!
Posted by: trent | August 7, 2008 04:53 AM