NAMING THE ANTICHRIST: A History of an American Obsession

by Robert C. Fuller ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1995

An intelligent history of how Americans have tended to see the world as the battleground between absolute good and absolute evil. The Antichrist, states Fuller (Religious Studies/Bradley Univ.; Alternate Medicine and American Religious Life, 1989) is held to be the incarnation of ultimate evil, the enemy of Christ who will appear in the final chapter of history to lead the forces of Satan against the forces of God, until he is finally vanquished by Christ at the dawn of the long-awaited millennium. Guiding us briskly through the centuries, Fuller traces this notion from its origins in the Bible through the Protestant Reformation, which saw the pope as Antichrist, and the English Civil War, in which both sides used Antichrist rhetoric. He shows us how talk of the Antichrist soon waned in England but flourished among the New England settlers. John Winthrop saw the Massachusetts colonists as God's ""choice grain,"" threatened by satanic conspiracies, which would in time be embodied by Native Americans, French Catholics, and eventually King George. Fuller leads us through the Great Awakening, with its attack on Freemasonry, and the crusade of various American forms of premillennialism against modern learning, which led to the fundamentalism of the 1920s. Jews, Catholics, and the Soviet Union have been objects of what Fuller calls ""hyperpatriotism,"" a nativist form of fear and hatred connected with the Antichrist theme. At the present time, there are some who see the hand of the Antichrist in the European Community, the United Nations, ecumenism, feminism, rock music, New Age religions, bar codes, and fiber optics (which allegedly send live signals from our living rooms to Antichrist headquarters). Although Fuller is sparing in his use of psychology, he suggests that obsession with the Antichrist is a way of mythologizing life in apocalyptic ways, and that evil adversaries are projections of our own anxieties and insecurities. A fascinating and well-written account.

Pub Date: March 1, 1995

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995

Categories: NONFICTION