A Culture of Conspiracy. Michael Barkun
until his return. For the unsaved, however, the seven years of the Tribulation would be a time of increasing violence, persecution, and terror, much of it at the Antichrist’s hands.
According to Darby’s system, the Antichrist would become the leader of a global dictatorship after three and a half years, at the midpoint of the Tribulation, and seek to secure the world for Satan until the battle of Armageddon signaled Christ’s return. The leading dispensationalist theologian, John Walvoord, says of this period, “This man’s absolute control of the world politically, economically, and religiously will give him power such as no man has ever had in human history. His brilliance as a leader will be superhuman, for he will be dominated and directed by Satan himself.” This scenario might well be dismissed as merely idle speculation, were it not for the conviction of many contemporary millennialists that the Tribulation will begin soon. In keeping with Darby’s belief that the prophetic clock would begin to run only after scriptural prophecies concerning the Jews were fulfilled, Christian millennialists see in the creation and expansion of the State of Israel indisputable evidence that their end-time expectations are about to be fulfilled.4
While some millenarians concentrated on the Antichrist’s personal characteristics, the better to identify him, others began to speculate about his apparatus of control—for if, indeed, the second half of the Tribulation was to be dominated by a world dictatorship, then surely that would require a formidable governmental and administrative structure. Because his rule was to constitute a resuscitated Roman empire, there had to be an organizational as well as a personal component. This train of thought was evident as early as the 1920s, when some American millennialists regarded the new League of Nations as the institution awaiting the Antichrist’s controlling hand.5
The interwar period provided fertile ground for Antichrist speculation, not only because of the League but also because of the emergence of European dictators. Hitler and, especially, Mussolini lent themselves to the scenarios of millenarians. For once, Mussolini seemed to trump his German ally because—at least insofar as the Antichrist was concerned—his identification appeared to be firmer. He reached an agreement with the pope, he ruled from Rome, and he made no secret of his desire to revive the Roman empire. Among the most enthusiastic exponents of this theory was American Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite Gerald Winrod (1900–1957).6
Winrod was of two minds concerning the Antichrist. On the one hand, like many of his contemporaries, he saw Mussolini as a natural candidate. On the other, his intense anti-Semitism dictated that the Antichrist be a Jew. The two positions could be harmonized by making the Jews the Antichrist’s allies, or by manufacturing a Jewish ancestry for Mussolini. Unlike the typical dispensationalist, Winrod felt compelled to draw Jews into the Antichrist system. He did so most extensively in a 1936 pamphlet, Antichrist and the Tribe of Dan.7
In this pamphlet, Winrod brushed aside the issue of Mussolini’s family background. Indeed, it was not necessary to establish his Jewish roots in order to identify him as the Antichrist—quite the contrary. For Winrod, “If it developed that Mussolini is the Antichrist, the rumors concerning his Jewish ancestry would be confirmed.” The issue, in any case, was not Mussolini but the organizational structure behind him, for Winrod saw the Antichrist as merely the instrument of an invisible Jewish conspiracy: “A Jewish Antichrist, in the end of this age, pre-supposes an international system of Jewish government. There can be little doubt that such a system, based upon the Jewish Money Power, has already been created—and is ready to step into the open and assume control of world affairs as soon as the time is ripe.” Winrod did not abandon the concept of a personified Antichrist, but he joined it so closely to a conspiracist view of history that the man and the organization became inseparable.8
The anti-Semitic implications of the Antichrist suddenly reemerged more than sixty years later when, in January 1999, the Reverend Jerry Falwell asserted that the Antichrist was probably already alive and was certainly a Jew. He seemed genuinely taken aback when many called the claim anti-Semitic. In a press statement, Falwell asserted, “Since Jesus came to earth . . . as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male.” Saying that he himself is “strongly pro-Jewish and pro-Israel,” he denied any anti-Semitic intent, and agreed in hindsight that it would have been better never to have made the claim.9
As Falwell’s comments suggest, Winrod’s views were hardly typical of evangelicals—he was even tried for sedition during World War II. But his linkage of the person of the Antichrist with a satanic organization later reappeared in other forms. In this manner, the Antichrist suspicions originally attached to the League of Nations came to rest on the United Nations after 1945. The UN was a more tempting target for American millenarians, for although the United States had rejected membership in the League, it was a prime mover in the new organization. In the postwar era, Antichrist fears on the organizational level confronted, as it were, an embarrassment of riches, for in addition to the UN, the creation of the European Common Market (later the European Union) offered yet another potential venue for the Antichrist’s machinations. Because the Antichrist’s domain was widely regarded as successor to the Roman empire, a western-European superstate was a particularly attractive candidate.
In addition to these organizational developments, Antichrist writers were encouraged by technological ones. The Antichrist folklore consistently emphasized his capacity for deception and control; indeed, it became an unquestioned tenet of dispensationalism that the world would initially welcome the Antichrist as a charismatic peacemaker whose diabolical designs would remain hidden until he had achieved total power. Modern technology appeared to equip the Antichrist with hitherto unavailable capacities for misrepresentation and domination. Electronic communications, especially television, could create instant global celebrity, while computers and microelectronics offered the means to monitor and control behavior and commerce.
In fact, for some the Antichrist and the computer came to be virtually interchangeable.10 Paul Boyer notes, “Several [religious] popularizers even suggested that Antichrist would be a computer.” The most common version of this legend is that a giant computer in Brussels, the headquarters of the Common Market / European Union, would keep track of everyone in the world. Because the Book of Revelation says that the mark of the beast would be required for anyone to buy and sell during the Antichrist’s reign, such concentrated power could theoretically control the world. In another, more baroque version of the computer-as-Antichrist, the Brussels machine was said to be at the center of a global network of 365 computers that would keep track of the Antichrist’s minions in their various secret, conspiratorial organizations. So prevalent did these beliefs become after about 1980 that a 1994 tract on computers and the Antichrist explicitly repudiated them: “False reports and silly rumors only damage the credibility of one of the most powerful prophetic passages in Scripture.”11
An important result of these developments was an increasing tendency among fundamentalist millenarians to view the Antichrist as part of a system of control rather than simply an evil and deceitful individual. The figure of the Antichrist became enmeshed in a complex of related ideas: the mark of the beast as a satanic device to control economic activity; the universal bar code and implanted microchips as precursors of the literal mark; credit and debit cards as ways of habituating people to an economy without tangible money; and vast computer systems tracking the details of daily life. Although these were real and in some cases disturbing developments, the manner in which Antichrist writers treated them carried the seeds of a conspiracist view of the world. They saw in them an insidious plan for satanic control. As Grant Jeffrey says:
The prophecies of the Bible tell us a world government will arise in the last days led by the Antichrist, the world’s last dictator. . . . The prophets also foretold that money would cease to exist in the last days. It would be replaced by a cashless society that will use numbers instead of currency to allow you “to buy and sell.” We are now rapidly approaching the moment when these ancient Bible prophecies can be fulfilled through the introduction of the 666–Mark of the Beast financial system of the Antichrist.12
Fundamentalist millenarians saw President Bush’s uttering of the phrase new world order as a sign that the network of Antichrist forces had advanced so far that