Who is the Antichrist? In his new book Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, Matthew D. Taylor, a mainline Protestant and religious studies scholar specializing in Christian extremism, provides a long list of figures whom Christians have at one point or another accused of being this biblical figure: the Prophet Muhammad, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, Adolf Hitler, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and “too many popes to list,” among others.
To that list of possibilities, one might now add Donald Trump, if one listens to former supporters like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rod Dreher and Nick Fuentes—and also add the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, according to the tech billionaire (and noted commenter on the notion of Antichrist) Peter Thiel.
It is tempting to conclude that the word Antichrist has been debased beyond meaning, reduced to nothing but a rhetorical smear. But in Defying Tyrants, Taylor argues that modern-day Christians concerned about the rise of Christian supremacist movements may benefit from recovering the early church’s understanding of the concept.
Taylor’s previous book, The Violent Take It By Force, was an academic account of the New Apostolic Reformation, a far-right evangelical movement that seeks Christian dominion over all aspects of American society. By contrast, he introduces Defying Tyrants as an attempt to speak not as an academic but as a “Christian among Christians,” entering “an internal debate” on the question of “what are we to do, as Christians, about the spread of power-hungry theologies and the abusive leaders within our communities who are doing so much damage in our world?”
To answer that question, he first traces the roots of modern-day Christian supremacist movements to the Roman Empire. Early Christians challenged Roman values with their belief in a God who entered history as a colonized Jewish peasant, and who revealed his divinity through service, love and self-sacrifice rather than military power and domination.
But when Emperor Constantine converted to the faith, churchly and worldly interests became conflated, inaugurating a long history of Christians committing atrocities, from the Crusades to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to modern Christian nationalist violence, as they sought wealth and power rather than renounce it.
Taylor sees this history as in keeping with Jesus’ parable of the tares, which compares the kingdom of God to a field in which well-planted wheat must grow alongside poisonous, invasive “tares,” or weeds, until the end of time. He suggests that the wheat may be analogized to the anti-imperialistic, power-renouncing core of the Gospel, and the tares to theologies and practices that misuse the Gospel to justify Christian violence.
If some admixture of wheat and tares is inevitable, Taylor nonetheless argues that Christians “do need to identify invasive, toxic pseudo-gospels that have crept into the Christian crop” in order to “warn against the poisonous weeds that have become entwined with many Christian communities and traditions.”
Taylor points out that in the New Testament, the word Antichrist more often appears in the plural form, antichrists, to refer to members of the church who introduce such weeds, rather than to a single supernatural end-times figure. In his first two epistles, St. John uses the term to refer to community members who have broken away, leaving doubt and trauma in their wake. Though he concedes that biblical scholars remain divided as to the exact nature and beliefs of these dissidents, he suggests that a close reading of the epistles reveals three characteristics by which John identifies them as “antichrists”: They deny the Incarnation, they claim access to privileged, esoteric knowledge, and they actively harm and abuse their fellows.
On the first characteristic, Taylor states that denying the Incarnation was not a matter of abstract theological nitpicking but an attempt to ingratiate the church to empire—to make the Gospel more palatable, and the church safer from persecution, by making God “more akin to the Roman gods: either a distant benevolent force…or another trickster god playacting at being human.”
Far from simply doubting the Incarnation, these members also actively positioned themselves as keepers of special, salvific knowledge. Taylor speculates that in this sense, John’s antichrists represented a proto-gnostic strand of Christianity, a highly dualistic and elitist school of thought which sprang up in the early centuries of the church and which taught that a select few extraordinary individuals could achieve spiritual liberation through personal enlightenment. This unworldly, sectarian mentality would have been easily reconcilable with the elitist mystery religions that flourished during the Pax Romana, thus diluting the Gospel’s challenge to the empire.
Moreover, such claims to special knowledge would have replicated the hierarchical logic of the empire within the church: “If you wanted the real dope, the secret evangelion, the inside track, you had to go through them.” Hence, John’s assurances to his community that “you have been anointed by the Holy One, and all of you have knowledge.”
In the New Testament, John condemns antichrists for actively hating and harming their fellows: They are “like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother.” Although John does not specify the nature of their harm, Taylor concludes that John’s emphasis on the fruits of their actions shows that his meaning of the word antichrists refers more to right practice than right belief, a sentiment echoed centuries later by St. Augustine: “We find these also to be antichrists: whosoever in his deeds denies Christ, is an antichrist… A more lying antichrist is he who with his mouth professes that Jesus is the Christ, and with his deeds denies Him.”
Some readers may reasonably doubt the utility of seeking to reclaim the word in today’s politically and theologically polarized climates. But at a time when some American politicians purvey erroneous understandings of Catholic teaching, and church leadership finds itself vulnerable to misinformation-fueled conflict and digital tribalism, I found Taylor’s close reading of John’s letters powerful and persuasive. In his encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV calls on Catholics to be mindful of their words, but this mindfulness includes denouncing injustice. At the very least, Defying Tyrants raises fruitful questions regarding how Christians should speak about injustice in their midst with love and courage.
However, for a book that insists that Christians “should have few qualms about calling many significant Christians antichrists,” Taylor offers general declamations—“the perpetrators, the theologians, the commanders, the abusive priests and conniving televangelists, the pampered princes and heartless oligarchs”—while curiously declining to name names. He condemns “populist politicians anointed to lead and promising to protect Christians’ interests and cultural dominance,” but he never names Donald Trump or any of the Christian nationalist churches and advocacy groups that have supported him.
In a book about modern-day Christian antichrists, it seems strange not to discuss Peter Thiel, who has spoken often about the Antichrist and who also famously funded JD Vance’s political career. Perhaps Taylor wanted to challenge Christian readers to determine for themselves which contemporary figures fit John’s description of “antichrists,” but more specificity might have been helpful to readers seeking to understand Christian nationalism and how to resist it.
Nonetheless, for readers concerned with the distortion of church teachings for political ends, or seeking to reckon with its complicated history, Defying Tyrants offers thoughtful provocations worth wrestling with.
This article appears in November 2026.
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