A real-life soap opera is playing out before our eyes: a soft-spoken pope, calmly refusing to budge from Catholic principles, confronted by the puerile rhetoric of a tyrannical strongman who surrounds himself with sycophantic clergy. Two weeks ago, I would have thought such a description referred to Pius VII’s showdown with Napoleon in the early 1800s. But in view, of course, is our Pope Leo XIV’s truly remarkable exchanges with the most powerful man in the world, Donald J. Trump.
The details of this back-and-forth have been exhaustively analyzed by secular and religious media outlets all over the world, including social media accounts controlled by the Iranian government. Journalists and broadcasters are prying into old-fashioned topics such as the authority of the pope, the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, and the enduring significance of ecclesial power in a supposedly secularizing world. Though the stimuli behind these discussions are deeply unpleasant, church historians like myself cannot help but feel energized. A rumor earlier in the month even caused a glorious, if brief, spike in interest in the Avignon papacy (c. 1309–77).
My attention, however, has been turned back to the Antichrist, a figure who haunted my upbringing in the evangelical South but about whom, until the other day, I had given hardly a second of thought in decades. For this renewed attention, I must credit not the oracles of Peter Thiel but the blunt observations of a former champion of the MAGA movement. The past few days have been filled with many unpleasant firsts, but the morning after Mr. Trump posted an A.I. image depicting him as Jesus, I experienced a surprising and pleasant first: I found myself in moral and spiritual agreement with the vociferously anti-Catholic former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ms. Greene catapulted to infamy and political success on the back of QAnon and “Jewish space laser” conspiracy theories, and she famously posited that the Catholic Church was controlled by Satan. In the flood of hot takes on the Trump-as-Messiah image, Ms. Greene has provided the pithiest and most theologically astute commentary.
The since-deleted A.I. image was quickly denounced as blasphemous by hordes of commentators from all over the political and religious spectrum, though the owners of Halloween stores are no doubt thankful for the coming flood of Trump-inspired “doctor” costumes. Personally, I felt Mr. Trump’s latest outrage would be more offensive if it weren’t so childish. But Ms. Greene went further: “It’s more than blasphemy,” she wrote on social media. “It’s an Antichrist spirit.” I am generally loath to evoke the apocalyptic in discussions of politics; I have had too many tedious debates with fervid apparitionists who somehow know much more about the end of the world than John of Patmos. But to this spade-calling, I can only say: Amen, sister Greene. Amen.
This leads me back to a figure mentioned earlier: the Antichrist. Anxious American Christians have a long history of worrying that the president or some other major world leader might be formally in league with Satan and, as “the” Antichrist, is preparing the world for the end times. (In commenting on this phenomenon, I am bracketing whether Scripture actually presents “the Antichrist” as a literal figure that is to come—I don’t think it does.) Not long ago, Barack Obama raised apocalyptic alarm in some conservative quarters. My favorite theory, however, was the speculation that “Ronald Wilson Reagan” signified “666.” Surely the Father of Lies would be more subtle, I concluded as a child—surely the clue could not be as obvious as three consecutive six-letter names? Isn’t the Antichrist going to deceive us all? Won’t he be alluring? Doesn’t Satan appear as an “Angel of Light”?
Now I am not so sure. As I approach 40, evil in the world looks a bit more like it did when I was a kid reading The Lord of the Rings. It is unsubtle, black-and-white, a grotesque parody of the good: blowing up little girls, movie trailers for war that treat human lives like a video game, the haughty imprecatory prayers of Pete Hegseth, President Trump presenting himself as Our Lord while rebuking the successor of St. Peter and threatening to wipe out an entire civilization. While we must be wary of the all-too-American urge to resort to apocalypticism and end-times imagery in times of conflict, is it really so far-fetched or unfair to evoke Mr. Trump and Antichrist in the same sentence? Matthew Walther, a traditionally minded Catholic and editor of The Lamp, does not think so. As Mr. Walther put it in a prescient article titled “Is Donald Trump Antichrist?”: “Whether [Mr. Trump] is, at minimum, simply one in a long line of ‘types’ that runs from Cain and Nimrod on is not, I think, an unreasonable thing to ask about someone who now literally identifies himself with Jesus Christ.”
The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, whose genius is only matched by his eccentricity, saw the situation clearly 15 years ago. In a 2011 article in First Things, Dr. Hart wondered aloud whether the Devil might have, over the millennia, devolved from a radiant supernatural prince into a character quite like Donald Trump:
How obvious it seems to me now. Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump….
Dr. Hart recounts a conversation he had with a friend named Ambrose about the disconnect between representations of Satan in fiction as a Promethean figure or a seductive bon vivant (e.g., Milton’s Lucifer) and what we in fact know about the terminus point of pride and selfishness. As Christians, we know that it is saintliness, selflessness and truth that attracts, that “seduces.” Evil is, in fact, terribly boring and terribly unattractive. The classic Augustinian theology that grounds our new pope describes the grace of God as moving us to the good with “victorious delight” (delectatio victrix), while evil can only twist and mock the good. It terminates in nothingness.
A rational creature that gave itself completely to evil would thus have to be, in the words of Dr. Hart’s friend, “monstrously self-absorbed…some tedious little troll, full of spite and resentment.” After all these millennia, Satan is probably not very interesting. If he took human form, the Prince of Darkness would probably manifest as “a monomaniac who talks about nothing but his personal grievances and aims, and in the bluntest, most unrefined language imaginable—the sort of person you try your best to get away from at a party.”
My claim is not that Donald Trump is “the” Antichrist or literally Satan. My claim is that just as people like Robert Prevost—or Dorothy Day or Óscar Romero—can “image” Christ, can show us glimpses of the face of Christ, so also those who descend into selfishness and egomania can “image” Satan. Such people can channel and mediate the spirit of Antichrist in the world rather than the spirit of the Gospel. Most, however, do it a bit more subtly than Donald Trump’s social media posts.
I wish that C. S. Lewis would return from the grave and add new scenes and characters to The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters. It would probably be hilarious. But that great Christian convert would no doubt also draw our attention to the uncomfortable fact that, for most of us, the demonic manifests not at the level of geopolitics but in the banal and tedious elements of our lives: how we think and speak about others, how we treat our spouses, whether we love our enemies and pray for them.
We should recognize and denounce the obvious activity of Antichrist in the world when we see it. Quietism or hiding behind “both sides” rhetoric will not do—we must do everything in our power to oppose it. As Pope Leo has shown before the whole world, the Catholic tradition gives us the symbols and the spiritual tools we need for an hour like this. The same book in the New Testament that first uses the term “Antichrist” exhorts us not to fear because “perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18).
We must nevertheless remain on guard, lest we open ourselves up to triumphalism, self-congratulation or a sense of personal righteousness. While the activity of Antichrist in the world seems particularly blundering and blatant at the moment, most of the time it is not like this. Some harsh lessons from the past warn us not to so supernaturalize and externalize evil that we become fatally blind to its operation in our midst. For example, it is a chilling fact that the height of the “Satanic panic” hoax coincided with horrific rates of the actual abuse of vulnerable people, including in the Catholic Church. While it might be a relief to see evil simply unmask itself, such a scenario can also involve a kind of deception. Our Lord tells us that the kingdom of God is within each of us (Lk 17:21), and that is some comfort. But the powers and principalities that only God can cast out also lurk inside our hearts.
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