The Antichrist is back in American political discourse. After President Donald Trump posted an AI photo of himself depicted as Jesus on Truth Social, many of his Christian followers were up in arms. Trump later claimed that he was supposed to be a doctor in the photo, but the damage was already done. Prominent far-right advocates like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes began wondering if Trump was the Antichrist.

This is not the first time the Antichrist has popped up in American politics. Armageddon and the Second Coming have affected US political thought since at least the 1880s. Matthew Sutton is a history professor at the University of Washington and the author of the book Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. Sutton says that Armageddon has been the guiding principle for American evangelicals for hundreds of years.

Sutton spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the history of the Antichrist in America and how that theology has shaped the country.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Where would you start the story of the Antichrist in American politics?

I think the way we think of the Antichrist today really begins in the 1880s and the 1890s, and it has to do with the rise of the modern nation state, with global militarization, and the kind of creation of the modern world order.

Americans had been pretty optimistic, forward-thinking. They believed that they were building the kingdom of God on Earth, that they were kind of creating this utopia. Then they hit the Civil War. They were dealing with this problem, which was the growing divide over the issue of slavery. And once Christians start killing other Christians, it became really, really difficult to justify an optimistic, hopeful politics.

So these apocalyptic ideas began to seep into everyday church life. And then they hit the Industrial Revolution, and they saw all these immigrants come over — many of whom were Catholics and Jews. And so for Protestants who were used to calling the shots, a small group of them began to rethink their theology and began to think, You know what? Maybe we’re not building the kingdom of God. Maybe we’re in fact preparing for Armageddon. We’re preparing for the Antichrist. And then they began to scour the news and to study events and to align them with the Bible to try to make sense of what they saw happening all around them.

As the small group of Protestants begins to reconceptualize what they thought of as the end times, at the core of their story was this concept of the Antichrist, this global leader who was going to take power, who was going to oppress Christians, who was going to transform the world. So what they did is they began holding conferences and writing books and debating these kinds of issues and arguing about who might be the Antichrist, where might he appear, and how we [may] know how close we are to the end times. They ended up launching a movement.

Then, by about World War I, they gave the movement a name, and that was fundamentalism. And then they rebrand themselves in World War II, as evangelicals. And so the fundamentalists and evangelicals are the folks who really are mobilizing around this idea that the Antichrist is out there somewhere, and we better be ready for him

When Americans were thinking about the Antichrist, what were the signs that they were looking for?

There were a handful of signs. Some of them are really hard to demonstrate, so they talked about falling away from true Christianity. But, of course, you could make that argument in every generation. The classic is immorality — that the kids today just aren’t following the rules like their parents.

But the much more interesting one was the return of Jews to Palestine and the reconstruction of Israel as a nation-state. The fundamentalists began predicting this in the 1880s, 1890s. So, as the Zionist movement takes off, and then Israel is formed in the late 1940s, it becomes absolutely clear to them that everything they’ve been predicting is correct.

The other thing that they’re expecting is the rise in wars and rumors of wars. That was something that Jesus had told his disciples to expect in the last days. And so World War I becomes a moment basically to crow about how they got it right. And then certainly World War II is another one. Then the creation of the League of Nations and then the United Nations — these kinds of global international organizations that would create the mechanism by which the Antichrist could take power, could seize power — [reinforced the idea].

All of these things become huge blinking red lights telling fundamentalists and evangelicals that they’ve got it right, that their reading of the Bible is lining up with world events.

Who were people saying, “Oh, this person might be the Antichrist,” or “this might be the evidence that we’re approaching Revelation”?

There were two ways they conceptualized it. One was to identify the actual Antichrist, but the problem with doing that was that the Antichrist was going to be a deceiver. That’s what the Bible says. And so they knew it was going to be hard to figure out exactly who it was, but they would still speculate. And often from generation to generation, there are specific figures.

In the 1930s, Mussolini absolutely seemed to fit. He’s trying to resurrect the Roman Empire. That seemed to be one of the key characteristics of the Antichrist. We jump forward to the 1990s, and perhaps it’s Saddam Hussein because he’s trying to rebuild Babel, the ancient biblical city. But there’s also then this idea: What about American leaders? What role are they playing?

Many of them believe that the Antichrist probably would not be an American, because biblical authors had no concept of the United States. Of course, they thought that American leaders might be complicit, that they might help facilitate the rise of the Antichrist. And often it was liberals, it was internationalists [who were suspected]. So Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama — those kinds of folks got a lot of traction among fundamentalists and evangelicals as potential allies of the Antichrist. [The thought was that this was done] usually unwittingly, not intentionally working with the Antichrist, but helping set the stage for Americans to lose their sovereignty to this diabolical, global, new world leader.

It does make me wonder, though, whether this interest in the Antichrist has actually shaped American politics. Did we hit a point in the country’s history where that happened? It was like, oh, FDR is the Antichrist, and thus we must X, Y, and Z?

Working hand in hand with the rise of the religious right was the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan.

And Ronald Reagan was actually a natural partner for many of these folks because he seemed to be obsessed with ideas of the Antichrist and with the end times. While it certainly was not shaping his policy, it was an obsession for him. And it was something that his critics often pointed to to criticize him and to say that he was working too closely with these evangelical freaks and was too obsessed with these kinds of issues.

In my scholarship, I argue that, in fact, it’s extraordinarily important for politics, that certainly in the 1930s, when we have the rise of the modern New Deal liberal state, it’s no coincidence that we [also] have the rise of the fundamentalist anti-liberal, and that is grounded in this kind of apocalyptic theology.

But we see it again more recently with the rise of the religious right. And the reason it’s so important is because it becomes a tool for mobilizing people for action. If you believe the rise of the Antichrist is imminent, what comes right after the Antichrist is the return of Jesus, the Second Coming. And so you’ve got to be ready for that, and you’ve got to be ready for the judgment that’s going to come. You want Jesus to find you being an active and good and faithful servant, somebody who’s using your gifts to do everything you can to prepare the rest of the world for the end times.

That means that folks who are true believers in this apocalyptic Antichrist theology, rather than just wait with indifference because it’s going to happen, instead, they have to get their asses out there and get to work. because they know that Jesus is coming at any moment and he’s going to expect them to be doing everything they can to prepare the way for his Second Coming. And that means fighting the Antichrist.

So what’s happening right now in evangelical communities? How would you situate this in the long history of what Americans have been thinking about the Antichrist?

The Antichrist, for me, is the gift that keeps on giving. He really works for every generation. And so it’s always about Christian folks reading their Bibles and aligning them with world events and trying to make the two compatible.

And so with each generation, it’s going to be a different idea about what the Antichrist is. It’s going to be a different idea about where history is going, where the trajectory of the nation falls on that. But I don’t know that it’s necessarily different. It’s just the latest version of many, many, many versions of this same story, that there’s political mobilization, there’s expectations about change, and then there’s second-guessing. Because things don’t always work out exactly as you expect them to.

And so what does that mean for our politics?

Unfortunately, it’s pretty dangerous, because what it does is it fuels and increases polarization, because rather than having policy debates where you can just agree to disagree or talk about what is going to be the best policy for the greatest number of people. Instead, once you add this kind of spiritualized language, whether or not supporting the United Nations becomes a question of whether or not you’re supporting the Antichrist, then that completely changes the stakes. So it makes it much more difficult to have conversation, to have dialogue, to find a middle ground, and to work with your adversaries. It’s much more fulfilling to fight absolute evil than to just have a discussion about tax policy.