Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession [Paperback]

Robert C. Fuller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 21, 1996

The Antichrist, though mentioned a mere four times in the Bible, and then only obscurely, has exercised a tight hold on popular imagination throughout history. This has been particularly true in the U.S., says author Robert C. Fuller, where Americans have tended to view our nation as uniquely blessed by God--a belief that leaves us especially prone to demonizing our enemies. In Naming the Antichrist, Fuller takes us on a fascinating journey through the dark side of the American religious psyche, from the earliest American colonists right up to contemporary fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson and Hal Lindsey.
Fuller begins by offering a brief history of the idea of the Antichrist and its origins in the apocalyptic thought in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and traces the eventual 71Gws how the colonists saw Antichrist personified in native Americans and French Catholics, in Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the witches of Salem, in the Church of England and the King. He looks at the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, showing how such prominent Americans as Yale president Timothy Dwight and the Reverend Jedidiah Morse (father of Samuel Morse) saw the work of the Antichrist in phenomena ranging from the French Revolution to Masonry. In the twentieth century, he finds a startling array of hate-mongers--from Gerald Winrod (who vilified Roosevelt as a pawn of the Antichrist) to the Ku Klux Klan--who drew on apocalyptic imagery in their attacks on Jews, Catholics, blacks, socialists, and others. Finally, Fuller considers contemporary fundamentalist writers such as Hal Lindsey (author of The Late Great Planet Earth, with some 19 million copies sold), Mary Stewart Relfe (whose candidates for the Antichrist have included such figures as Henry Kissinger, Pope John Paul II, and Anwar Sadat), and a host of others who have found Antichrist in the sinister guise of the European Economic Community, the National Council of Churches, feminism, New Age religions, and even supermarket barcodes and fibre optics (the latter functioning as "the eye of the Antichrist"). Throughout, Fuller reveals in vivid detail how our unique American obsession with the Antichrist reflects the struggle to understand ourselves--and our enemies--within the mythic context of the battle of absolute good versus absolute evil.
From the Scofield Reference Bible (no other book had greater impact on the American Antichrist tradition) to the Scopes Monkey Trial, Fuller provides an informative and often startling look at a thread that weaves persistently throughout American religious and cultural life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While the word "antichrist"?the figure who ushers in the apocalypse of Christian end-time?appears but briefly in the Bible (1 and 2 John), the term has been all too frequently used throughout history by one group as a means of vilifying another group that appears to threaten the accusing group's worldview. Fuller, professor of religious studies at Bradley University, argues that naming the antichrist became a prevalent custom in the U.S. first because of the Puritans' apocalyptic tradition and subsequently because of feelings of vulnerability fanned by Native Americans and later by waves of immigrants who seemed to threaten the establishment of God's kingdom on earth. Fuller robustly explores the writings of those who at various and sundry times have railed against Catholics, Freemasons, and Jews (and even rock music and bar codes, for that matter) and seen them all as signs of the beast from the sea. He offers cogent psychological and sociological explanations for the hold of the idea of the antichrist upon the American imagination. If those explanations do not seem quite conclusive, however, it is because the extraordinarily arcane reasoning in naming the antichrist, so ably discussed here, ultimately itself escapes explanation.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This fascinating and thoroughly documented account of the American obsession with "naming" the Antichrist begins with a concise history of the idea of Antichrist, tracing it from its obscure New Testament roots against the deeper background of apocalyptic thought in Judaism and to its increasingly prominent place in certain strands of Christianity. The author is particularly interested in the American development of the concept and does a thorough job of locating that development both in the history of the U.S. and against the background of earlier Christian apocalyptic. Of particular importance are his insights into the political contexts and uses of the concept, both in the past and in the present. Fuller's documentation of the tendency to "demonize" opponents in the process of naming them "Antichrist" provides a useful theoretical framework in which to understand the passion--and the venom--of "nativist" traditions in the U.S. and of the anti-Communist crusades that dominated much of the twentieth century. The interpretive epilogue is both a fine review of the relevant literature and an excellent example of the application of religious studies to understanding social and political movements. Given the growing political influence of conservative and fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. and the continued influence that naming the Antichrist has on their politics, this is an especially timely work. Steve Schroeder --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (November 21, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195109791
• ISBN-13: 978-0195109795
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #652,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and thought-provoking, May 7, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (Hardcover)

A fascinating and thought-provoking book. A balanced and objective study of one of the most disturbing phenomenons of the 20th century. Prof. Fuller's chronological approach, starting with the early days of Christianity, immediately compels the reader to follow through the centuries and the rise and fall of the apocalyptic world-view and Christian extremism.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly researched, fascinating and scholarly..., February 16, 2006

By 

W. Revis (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (Paperback)

First off the reviewer who said this book reveals how "dangerous Christianity" is completely off the mark and does this book a disservice. This book is not a critique of Christian values, culture or doctrine - it is merely a well researched glimpse at the history of the "Antichrist" (as either an individual or group) throughout history from it's roots in antiquity up to the modern age.

It's true that throughout history individuals and institutions have used the image and language surrounding the Antichrist to demonize (pun intended) individuals or groups of people. Today we in the 21st century can look back on this persecution through the lens of temporal ethnocentrism and deem such behavior immoral. But that's not the goal of this book.

Naming the Antichrist is a sober, unbiased examination of the history of the "Antichrist" in doctrine and popular culture. It is a well researched, if somewhat dry read that is fascinating to history buffs and potentially valuable to students and other researchers.

Further, anyone who is interested by the concept of the Antichrist would do well to read this book - particularly in light of our modern era's fascination with dispensationalism and it's impact on world politics. Fans of Left Behind or Hal Lindsey can brush up on the historical underpinnings of some of the concepts they weave in to their fiction.

I give it four stars instead of five because it is a dry read at times. Fuller set out to write a scholarly work and succeeded.

5.0 out of 5 stars Us and Them, July 1, 2006

By 

Labarum (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (Paperback)

Anyone familiar with Evangelical Christianity of the last forty years could probably reel off at least a half-dozen proposed candidates for the Antichrist. In Naming the Antichrist, Robert Fuller demonstrates how often crises within the nation and the American Church have precipitated the naming of religious and/or secular forces within the country as minions of the Antichrist. In so doing, he connects the theme of a satanic influence seeking to undermine the nation's status as a bastion of true Christianity forming out of the experiences of the Puritan influence in the British colonies in America and passed down as a unique element of our American heritage.

Fuller begins his exposition with an overview of the history of the concept of an antichrist. His view of the Biblical texts largely assumes secular biases and is the most unsatisfying aspect of the book. However, it has little bearing on what follows and can largely be ignored. The book begins to hit home with the assumption of many Protestant Reformers that the papacy was the Antichrist predicted in Scripture. This assumption - born in the struggles of the Reformation and its aftermath - was gradually discarded by many European Protestants over time but became etched in the collective consciousness of those who left for America.

The Elizabethen Settlement, with a compromise between Protestant and Catholic sensibilities, was totally unsatisfactory for the Puritans who wanted a church completely devoid of any remains of Roman ritualism. Cromwell's bloody revolution and the tyranny that followed soured the English on Puritan ideals and after the Restoration many of their negan a trek that would bring them to America. With them they brought their intense hatred of Catholics as the legendary "other" as they sought to build their "city on a hill." With no Catholics around to dread, the Antichrist rhetoric was put on a back burner but there was an inherent assumption that they were building the great Christian society free of popish influence. On the occasions that their hegemony was threatened, the natural inclination was to attribute a sinister motive with Rome as the likely power behind the nefarious plot.

The ineveitable assertion of British control over the colonies with its Church and "popish" Common Prayer was, of course, an obvious source of displeasure. But even events within their own communities were seen as threats. The perception of threats from without and within engendered a sense of trepidation that could and did veer out of control when a loss of their beloved "perfect Christian society" seemed imminent. The events surrounding the Salem Witch Trials demonstrates how events that could not be explained by their categories of thought could be combined with this fear to produce tragic results.

Out of this foundation came a tradition of "naming the Antichrist" as a method of closing debate, separaing "us" and "them", villifying the enemy, and protecting the societal hegemony. Whether the enemy be Catholic France (in the French and Indian War) or later the British (in America's war for independence), the struggle was painted in apocalyptic terms with the enemy an agent of the devil himself. Of course, many prominent Americans who supported these causes were Englightenment thinkers who were aghast at their allies rhetoric but were grateful for the wide support it generated. Thus the sometimes strage allies we see today with intellectual neoconservatives and Evangelical Christians is itself a tradition with a heritage.

This pattern would continue throughout the 19th century. Americans attempted to construct their "perfect society" that would transform the world with evangelization, orphanages, soup kitchens, temperance movements, and other social endeavors and a postmillennial eschatology dominated. During stable periods, the antichrist rhetoric would recede but resurfaced when a threat was percieved. These could be in the form of Enlightenment philosophy, Freemasonry, or Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Europe. During the Civil War, anti-slavery forces in the North and pro-slavery forces in the South demonized each other as Satan's minions.

The loss of Protestant hegemony in the 20th century brought an end to the dream of the "perfect Christian society" and there was a retreat into a pessimistic view and a developing dispensationalist eschatology. Yet the overall pattern for "naming the Antichrist" has become such a staple of American life that it survived in new forms. Theological modernists who disagree with all that came before now seek to build their perfect society and demonize opposition in a more secularized form. Our political discourse is centered on the inference of nefarious motives by the opposition. And, of course, Evangelicals have continued the unbroken American tradition of pointing to an enemy as the son of perdition.

Throughout his analysis, Fuller resists the temptation to sit in judgment but takes the role of historical analysis seriously. He provides a framework for understanding how American Protestantism achieved its distinctive elements and how this affected the country's history. For those seeking to understand the American tendency to see itself as a land of destiny and to see all of its conflicts - both foreign and domestic - in apocalyptic terms, Naming the Antichrist is essential reading.