Recently I’ve noticed a meme on Facebook noting that
evangelical Christians had been warning about an “Antichrist” for decades that but
when one actually appeared on the scene they ended up voting for him.
I am of course referring to the narcissistic, arrogant
Donald Trump, whom exit polls reported in 2016 as receiving an astonishing 81
percent of the votes of white evangelicals for President of the United States
despite his lengthy history of corrupt business practices, racism, abuse and
denigration of women — and that’s just for starters. Another meme gave specific
Bible verses as to the Antichrist’s conduct and how they lined up with Trump’s
words and actions. (For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that the Bible teaches
about a personal Antichrist, just a spirit of such.)
The obvious question is: How could so many believers be so
blind?
I have an answer to that, and it isn’t pretty: These folks
never considered that it might be an inside job.
For decades, certainly with the advent of the “religious
right” in the 1970s, the focus of many parachurch ministries fighting the
so-called culture war became rallying the troops to fight outsiders — most notably
but not limited to the “gay lobby,” abortion-rights activists, “globalists” and
diversity advocates — to preserve a form of Christian hegemony. (Which is why
you have the heretical “seven mountains of culture” doctrine, which started
around then.)
And on top of that, many of your conservative church bodies doubled
down on their commitment to “orthodoxy,” the American Protestant Episcopal and
Presbyterian churches splitting and the Southern Baptist Convention purging its
ranks of “moderates” for the sake of what we might consider doctrinal purity.
The trouble with all that remains that the witness of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, the heart of which has always been reconciliation,
ended up being pushed aside — and that’s the one thing that the devil cannot imitate
because the kind of forgiveness required to do that was never on his radar
screen. And when you also consider that many Christians beginning in the 1980s
ingested a steady diet of right-wing talk radio laced with bitterness and
resentment toward certain targets, a couple of hours of Bible study and church
attendance couldn’t compete with the hours of daily spiritual poison to which
they subjected themselves.
All this led to the spirit of Antichrist mentioned in
Revelation but which has slipped the consciousness of much of the church to a
point to where the very words of Jesus, mentioned in especially the Sermon on
the Mount in Matthew chapter 5 through 7, are regarded as “liberal talking
points.” (And although I don’t have any empirical evidence of this, I suspect that
it’s also behind much of the “deconstruction” going on today, with folks who
grew up in conservative churches questioning the veracity of the Scriptures.)
Which is why, if we really want revival in this country, we
Christians need to reject Trump openly — because, as things stand now, he’s in
God’s way. But more importantly, we need to look inward and recognize how we got
off-track because Satan almost never attacks openly, engineering small compromises
so that eventually God’s intent is papered over for the sake of power.
And that is the spirit of Antichrist.
