Trump — the antichrist?

Recently author Benjamin L. Corey published a piece on his “Formerly Fundie” blog called “Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? Here Are the Biblical Predictions:” — and, in his mind, they lead to President Donald Trump. Indeed, Corey made 20 specific claims mentioned in Daniel, II Thessalonians and Revelation that, at least on the surface, seem compelling.

Now, I’m not going to say that Trump is the antichrist — indeed, in my faith tradition, Reformed, there’s actually no such thing as one (only a spirit of such). That being said, if I were a dispensationalist I’d be quite concerned.

What happened? How could we have become so hoodwinked?

The first problem — and yes, it is a problem — is that, in America, the Christian faith has always had a lot of authority as part of an “establishment.” And as much as present-day evangelicals try to deny it, outside forces for decades have harnessed it and, in the process, subverted it. That’s one of Satan’s favorite tactics, to worm his way in undetected to try to corrupt the church’s witness.

The present hullabaloo began in the 1940s, with industry being battered after the Great Depression (which, arguably, began with disastrous policies that it championed). According to the book “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Created Christian America” by author and historian Kevin Kruse, it reached out to pastors to promote itself as inherently virtuous, most notably in the South, and also to oppose FDR’s New Deal. (We see that today, mostly in Christian radio and on Christian TV.)

Then you have the beginnings of the “religious right” in the late 1970s. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it started not with an opposition to legal abortion but with resentment toward President Jimmy Carter’s rescinding of tax exemptions for then-all-white “Christian” academies formed to circumvent court-ordered desegregation of public schools in the South. One Paul Weyrich, not a Christian to my understanding, connected the dots and brought the religious right into alliance with secular power-brokers. And I hope you’ve noticed that, despite all the money that’s been spent on Washington lobbyists over the past 40 years, there’s been literally no improvement in the spiritual climate.

There’s a reason for that — based on the sheer number of passages in the Bible, God actually has one primary concern other than worshiping Him; it’s that the poor and powerless are uplifted not by individuals but by political decisions and the culture. And that’s the one thing the “religious right” doesn’t want, because anything that would cost it power it fights tooth-and-nail. Not for nothing does it call anything that gives the poor more of a voice “socialism,” which it calls materialistic and atheistic even though, with the civil-rights movement, some of it came straight from the Word. (Indeed, Jesus often reamed out the Pharisees because, I suspect, their maintenance of religious traditions didn’t cause any change in anyone’s state.)

This is where the focus on economic power has corrupted much of the evangelical church and many parachurch ministries. Things like legal abortion and gay rights, which secular conservatives don’t really care about, have become the focus of evangelicals because they raise funds but, as I mentioned, have little impact on the culture, which would include preaching repentance to these same secular conservatives.

Enter Trump, who threw us some bones in promising to nominate justices to the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade, and as a result we prostrated — some of the more cynical of us would also say “prostituted” — ourselves before him. Meanwhile, the nation is hopelessly divided and he’s shown himself to be an incompetent administrator, directly leading to the present COVID-19 crisis.

If Trump is the antichrist and we Christians miss that, it’s because of our failure to take God at His Word, including our allowance of temporal political and financial concerns to seduce us. And who knows where that will lead?