The Antichrist has long haunted American politics. Now it’s rearing its head again | Matthew Avery Sutton
NEWS | 13 October 2025
Two scenes from the past two weeks capture something unsettling – and familiar –about American public life. In San Francisco, a tech billionaire delivered a sold‑out, off‑the‑record lecture series on the antichrist. In Michigan, a man rammed his pickup truck into a Latter‑day Saints meetinghouse during Sunday worship, opened fire and set the building ablaze, apparently believing that Mormons are the antichrist. The antichrist is clearly back. But perhaps he has never really left. As a historian of American apocalypticism, I’ve traced how this symbol – a protean figure cobbled together from obscure biblical passages – has repeatedly migrated from pulpits to politics and back again. Almost a century ago, fundamentalists mapped European dictators and New Deal bureaucrats on to biblical prophecy. During the cold war, evangelicals scanned Moscow and Jerusalem for signs of the Beast. In the first Gulf war, some Christians argued that Saddam Hussein was the antichrist who was rebuilding the Tower of Babel. Whenever American power felt threatened or social change accelerated, antichrist talk surged. Today’s version arrives with AI, deepfakes and venture funding. And with bullets. Peter Thiel’s “Antichrist” lectures, consisting of four sessions organized by the ACTS 17 Collective, were marketed as explorations of “the theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist”. Tickets sold out. Reports and attenders who shared details with the media and online say Thiel warns that fear of technological progress and especially efforts to regulate AI could become the pretext for a charismatic power to centralize control in the name of “peace and safety”, a scenario he threads to New Testament warnings. One attender reported that Thiel went further, likening anti‑tech sentiment itself to the work of the antichrist. Others have traced the same themes in Thiel’s recent interviews. This summer he suggested that an antichrist of our age would present as a humanitarian regulator – he even floated Greta Thunberg as an analogy – arguing that fixation on “existential risk” can be a gateway to consolidating authority. Thiel claims that warnings about Armageddon may seduce elites into empowering a one‑world administrative order, which is the very thing apocalyptic texts have long seemingly foretold. The lectures have drawn scrutiny not only because of the content but because of the context. Notes from the first session leaked online before they were taken down; the attender who posted them was barred from the remaining talks. Meanwhile, protests outside highlighted the tension between a lecture on end‑times authoritarianism and the speaker’s stake in real‑world surveillance tools. (Thiel’s champions counter that AI anxiety, not AI itself, is the highway to the antichrist – a view that, whatever one thinks of it theologically, conveniently aligns with Silicon Valley’s anti‑regulatory instincts.) I do not doubt Thiel’s interest in Christian ideas. He draws on serious sources. But dressing political theory in apocalyptic robes carries risks. When powerful actors reframe ordinary policy debates such as about guardrails for AI as a battle against the antichrist, they raise anxieties, delegitimize compromise and insinuate that democratic deliberation is spiritually suspect. Whatever Thiel may believe, the “mark of the beast” does not live in the Federal Register. Then, just this past week, 40‑year‑old Thomas Jacob Sanford drove a flag‑festooned pickup through the front of a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints meetinghouse, fired multiple rounds into the congregation, and used gasoline to start a fire. Four worshipers were killed and eight injured; Sanford died in a shootout with officers. As investigators work through motive and means, a troubling detail has emerged. A local city council candidate who had spoken with Sanford a week earlier recalled a tirade against Latter‑day Saints during which Sanford declared that Mormons were “the antichrist”. Labelling neighbors “antichrist” is not simply an insult; in this very Protestant American culture, it marks the enemy of God and humanity, the architect of persecution, the final deceiver. Once your opponents become eschatological villains, the normal habits of politics and pluralism feel like complicity with evil. In extreme cases, violence begins to look sanctifying. Americans have repeatedly reached for the antichrist to make sense of social disruption and geopolitical dread. During the 1930s, some Christians mapped Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler on to prophecy charts and then read Franklin Roosevelt’s growing administrative state through the same lens. In the 1970s and ’80s, the oil crisis, detente, and the Iranian Revolution revived antichrist talk on radio programs and in runaway bestsellers. After 9/11, anxiety about terror networks and nuclear proliferation resurrected the motif yet again. The symbol is elastic. For a century, Christian apocalypticists have alternated between expecting a singular charismatic ruler and warning that a globalized administrative order, often buttressed by new technologies, could institutionalize the Beast’s control. That’s why a four‑part antichrist seminar hosted at a tech hub and a gunman railing against an antichrist church can coexist without contradiction. The word itself is a vocabulary for fear – a way of translating the headlines of the day into a cosmic drama that explains who we are and what we must do. Three currents are converging and as a result we are likely to see more Antichrist talk and action. First, technology really does feel apocalyptic. AI systems collapse time and space, digest private life and promise both miracles and mischief. It’s unsurprising that Silicon Valley’s most famous contrarian wants to set the theology of the antichrist against the politics of AI regulation. Second, institutions are brittle. Trust in media, universities, churches and government is low. In such periods, apocalyptic binaries flourish. They offer certainty, heroes and villains. They also make it easier to justify bending rules in the name of rescue. Third, the American tradition of naming enemies as “antichrist” is a proven mobilizer. It corrals attention, consolidates factions, and gives a transcendent sheen to temporal fights. Rather than fuel this fire, politicians, ministers, and tech leaders should stop baptizing their agendas in apocalyptic waters. It is one thing to warn about genuine dangers and argue for or against regulation. It is quite another to imply that one’s opponents are enlistments in the armies of the Beast. A democracy cannot function if routine governance is reimagined as tribulation. The late modern west has no monopoly on antichrist thinking. What’s notable about this moment is not simply that antichrist talk is back, but that it is coming from all ends of our social spectrum: from a sealed room on the Embarcadero and from a burning church in Michigan. The stakes are not theoretical. In San Francisco, the antichrist was a thought experiment about governance and technology. In Grand Blanc, antichrist became the curse that prefaced a massacre. Apocalyptic language has always helped some Americans to feel they know where history is headed. They use the Bible’s most cryptic passages to explain the past, understand the present and predict a future in which they prevail. In the end they vanquish all of their enemies and receive their just reward. But it can also push a nation toward the very nightmares it imagines. If we want to keep politics human and humane, we should retire the antichrist from our debates and leave the Beast in Revelation – where he belongs.
Author: Matthew Avery Sutton.
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