The Antichrist is back

The Antichrist is back
By Damian Thompson
Artwork: John Broadley

The monster known as the Antichrist has been stalking Christians for nearly 2,000 years. Mostly it has fed the nightmares of frightened peasants or credulous fundamentalists. But now it has emerged from the most secular place on Earth, Silicon Valley, and its prophet is a billionaire venture capitalist married to a man.

The origins of the Antichrist legend lie in the Book of Revelation, in which the nations submit to a Beast whose name is concealed by the number 666. He forces everyone to receive a mysterious ‘mark on their right hands or foreheads’ without which they cannot buy or sell anything. This triggers the return of Jesus at the Battle of Armageddon. Early Christians seized on the ambiguous term ‘antichrist’, a word found in the Epistles of John, used in the plural to refer to heretics in general, and combined it with the Beast. Enter the demonic supervillain known as the Antichrist – a Satanic demagogue so seductive that he conquers the world and, in more recent interpretations, uses his implanted mark to usher in one-world government.

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How bizarre, then, that today’s most influential proponent of the Antichrist thesis should be Peter Thiel, who at first glance is a poster boy for the sinister global elite. He ticks nearly every box. He’s a handsome, silver-tongued homosexual who qualified as a lawyer at Stanford University, became unimaginably rich as a trader and investor, belongs to the Bilderberg Group, fantasises about sea and space colonies, and flirts with a transhumanist ideology that seeks to abolish physical death. And how did Thiel become a billionaire? By co-founding PayPal. Remember what Revelation says about the Beast seizing control of buying and selling?

Yet, in reality, what Thiel actually represents is the surreal reconfiguration of politics in the 21st century. As he reclines in his Gulfstream jet en route from Los Angeles to his mansion in Hawaii, he dreams of the downfall of a globe-trotting liberal elite who he believes are using their billions to manufacture a new world order. He calls them ‘the Antichrist’. Like many American fundamentalists, he worries that dark forces are using supranational institutions such as the United Nations to control the world. He has become a citizen of New Zealand and has bought land there as insurance against nuclear Armageddon.
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