is a question one of my Facebook friends ask recently.
I replied, “Because the antichrist understands how to manipulate them. His whole deal is to make Christians think he’s going to fulfill all their righteous desires and destroy their enemies, when he’s really just using them for his own ends.”
All these other people, however, said, “Christians don’t and won’t support the antichrist!” Someone wanted to quibble with me over the definition of a Christian, saying that while pretend Christians might support the antichrist, real Christians never would. Whatever. I believe in self-definition, and if people call themselves Christians, I’ll call them Christians too.
One person I don’t consider Christian is myself. But I read a lot of scripture before my great apostasy, and I remember that antichrist’s mission isn’t to attract followers among God’s enemies—it’s to lead away the faithful.
The people most likely to see through an antichrist are the people who’ve already seen through the doctrines and teachings and attitudes that make people believe there’s such a thing as the antichrist in the first place.
The “faithful” are vulnerable to being led away by deceivers and adversaries because they purposely seek charismatic leaders who make them feel all tingly and spiritual and emotional—and plenty of those are fraudsters looking for victims.
Also, even if you’re secular, it’s problematic to believe that a “virtuous” charismatic leader will punish the “evil” charismatic leader(s), because what most charismatic *leaders* want is followers—even though their greatest loyalty will never be to those followers, but to anyone they consider a peer. Donald Trump is not going to expose all the rich, famous men who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein, because so many of them are also his friends, as he told Marjorie Taylor Greene. Trump wants to be like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, his peers, and those are the people whose favor he really wants. John Dehlin isn’t trying to be Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, no matter how much his followers might want him to try; he wants to be Martin Luther, because the leadership of the COJCOLDS is who he considers his peers, and they are the people whose favor he really wants.
The United States had a serviceable, codified way for boring office people to uncover crime and prosecute criminals. Its boring, bureaucratic nature was why it worked as well as it did. Damage done to that system, if not its utter destruction, is one of the many tragedies of the Trump era. The system was set up to be indifferent to charisma, but MAGA is based entirely on charisma—though it sort of chokes me to admit that, because I find Donald Trump about as charismatic as dogshit.
I think I must just be missing a lot of the cones and rods that would let me see charisma. Most of the time when people talk about someone being charismatic, I’m like, “That person? Charisma? Really?” For me to recognize charisma, it has to be so extreme that someone is a worldwide superstar, like David Bowie or Prince or Madonna or Beyonce. It’s an affliction I wish more people shared.
If you want to glom onto someone charismatic, find a charismatic artist who just wants to make cool stuff. Reject anyone “charismatic” who tells you they can fix everything and hold the evildoers accountable, just by force of personality. They may not be the antichrist, but they’re his cousins.
(Also, there is no antichrist, but if there, it would be Trump.)