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. (Kirkus
Reviews)
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.
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