Xenophobic race-baiters, unite!

A few months ago, after watching an insipid History Channel documentary on the anti-Christ of Revelations, it occurred to me that the fundamentalist description of the anti-Christ—that he would be charismatic, come from nowhere, inspire a devoted following that captivated the world, etc.—bore some serious resemblances to Barack Obama.

Of course, in no way, shape or form do I think such a portrayal of Obama is accurate. In fact, I think it is, in a word, kinda nuts and is driven not by religious conviction but out of a xenophobic fear of Obama's "Otherness"—i.e., his race, his name, his non-Western roots. In fact, one could see this xenophobic fear of Obama as reflecting a deeper racial prejudice that is no longer socially acceptable to air in public.

Anyway, when I noted the connection, I became curious, and so I Googled the phrase “obama antichrist” to see what the Religious Right was thinking about it. It turns out that the weblog Wonkette apparently did a similar search in October of 2006 and found only 16,000 pages on Google containing the two words. At the time, Dick Cheney was a far more popular target, with 169,000 pages. This was during the heated mid-term elections, which means that the epithet of "antichrist" was probably used by Democrats, not Republicans. The difference, of course, is that the use of the term by fundamentalist Christians is far more explosive.

The day of the Texas and Ohio primaries, things were far different. I Googled “obama antichrist” at about 9:00 in the morning and got 292,000 pages. Then, in preparing to email some friends about my find, I Googled it again at about 10:30 a.m. and got 382,000. Something, it seems, was brewing, and it has continued to brew.

Since then, the number of pages associating Barack Obama and the End of Days have ebbed and flowed with his chances. Today, when I searched the terms, the number surpassed one million for the first time.

Some of these pages are humorous ones, but many more, like this one, aren’t.

While this is far from a scientific survey, in many ways, the growth of the association between Barack Obama and the demonic on Google seems suggestive of a larger trend, particularly among Christian evangelicals, that occasionally bubbles to the surface.

This leads to some serious questions, not about the eschatological significance of Barack Obama—after all, the antichrist has been everyone from the pope to Colonel Sanders (whose chicken has to be demonic)—but about the tactics that the Religious Right could use later on during the general election. If you want to mobilize evangelical voters, and you don’t care how you do it, you can create a grassroots campaign naming him as the antichrist and warning about the demonic regime he will institute once elected. (This is not unusual. John Guest, the leader of a evangelical megachurch in Pittsburgh, where I live, called John Kerry “Satan’s candidate” in 2004.)

Time will tell.