John McCain Portraying Barack Obama as the Anti-Christ?

It's become so common for politicians to attack each other's histories and character that such behavior doesn't attract any real attention anymore. John McCain is taking this one giant leap further, though, by running an television advertisement which is quite blatant in connecting Barack Obama with the Anti-Christ. It's both a new low in negative politics and in using religion to pander for votes, which tells us something about the real John McCain.

McCain doesn't quite come out and say that Obama is the Anti-Christ, but the same would be true if the ad said that Obama had the number 666 tattooed on his butt. I don't think anyone would try to split hairs on what the real message of such a claim would be and the meaning of the actual advertisement is no less blatant. It's called "dog whistle" politics because it uses loaded language that "calls" to people who know the codes while remaining under the radar to those who don't (or at least while creating "plausible deniability" so the creators can avoid taking responsibility for their actions).

Historically such unethical tactics have been found primarily in Republican ads promoting and pandering to racism, a pedigree which tells us even more about who John McCain really is.

As the ad begins, the words "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One" flash across the screen. The Antichrist of the Left Behind books is a charismatic young political leader named Nicolae Carpathia who founds the One World religion (slogan: "We Are God") and promises to heal the world after a time of deep division. One of several Obama clips in the ad features the Senator saying, "A nation healed, a world repaired. We are the ones that we've been waiting for."

Source: Time

Democrats are objecting, of course, but some of those objecting — like Mara Vanderslice and Amy Sullivan, the author of this Time article — are among those who have kept arguing that Democratic candidates need to incorporate more and more religion into their political pandering. They may not agree with portraying an opponent as the Anti-Christ, but when you agree that it's appropriate to frame secular, civil policies or elections in religious terms, then you've already opened wide the door to such behavior.

When you agree that it's acceptable for candidates for civil government offices proclaim themselves as doing God's work and/or as called by God — which Bush has done in the past and Obama is doing now — then portraying opponents as anti-God is inevitable. As bad as McCain's behavior is, then, it's simply a further and predictable progression of the sort of religious politics and religious nationalism which Republicans have relied on for decades and which some want Democrats to emulate.

To put it in terms and Vanderslice and Sullivan should be able to understand and appreciate: you can't appropriate the tools of Satan without ending up doing Satan's work; God's work can only be done by using God's tools and not with the tools of His enemy.

[Democratic consultant Eric] Sapp knows that the phrasing and images could just be dismissed as a peculiar coincidence. After all, it was Oprah Winfrey who told an Iowa crowd that Obama was "the one!" But, he insists, "the frequency of these images and references don't make any sense unless you're trying to send the message that Obama could be the Antichrist." Mara Vanderslice, another Democratic consultant, who handled religious outreach for the 2004 Kerry campaign, agrees. "If they wanted to be funny, if they really wanted to play up the idea that Obama thinks he's the Second Coming, there were better ways to do it," she says. "Why use these awkward lines like, 'And the world will receive his blessings'?"

Although the popularity of the noxious Left Behind novels allowed McCain to easily portray Obama as the Anti-Christ, he's helped significantly by the fact that there is a passionate cadre of Christian extremists who already and sincerely believe that Obama is the Anti-Christ.

In the Left Behind books, Carpathia is a junior Senator who speaks several languages, is beloved by people around the world and fawned over by a press corps that cannot see his evil nature, and rises to absurd prominence after delivering just one major speech. Hmmh. But serious Antichrist theorists don't stop there. Everything from Obama's left-handedness to his positive rhetoric to his appearance on the cover of this magazine has been cited as evidence of his true identity. One chain e-mail claims that the Antichrist was prophesied to be "A man in his 40s of MUSLIM descent," which would indeed sound ominous if not for the fact that the Book of Revelation was written at least 400 years before the birth of Islam.

The speculation reached a fever pitch after Obama's European trip and the Berlin speech in which he called for global unity. Conservative Christian author Hal Lindsey declared in an essay on WorldNetDaily, "Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him — a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib ... The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance." The conservative website RedState.com now sells mugs and T shirts that sport a large "O" with horns and the words "The Anti-Christ" underneath.

People like this are beyond help or reason, but they also aren't unusual in the history of Christianity. There is too much similarity between them and Christians of the past who spread or believed other rumors, like that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make unleavened bread. Both are cases of treating others as the epitome of evil not on the basis of facts and evidence, but simply to encourage hatred of them or even to feel superior about oneself.

These are the same sorts of Christians who today spread falsehoods about atheists, Muslims, pagans, humanists, and other non-Christians — and always falsehoods which are clearly designed to encourage distrust of or animosity towards the targeted group. Of course, when a person's entire worldview is faith-based and they are repeatedly indoctrinated into preferring faith over evidence, science, and reason, problems like this can't be surprising. Is believing that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ really any more unreasonable or absurd than believing an Anti-Christ or a Christ can exist at all in the first place?

I'm not talking about the potential political consequences (the former is certainly worse), but just about the reasonableness of the belief itself. The fact that the latter ideas are more popular and even held by many who are generally nice and decent doesn't have any impact on the reasonableness of the ideas in question. (Un)reasonableness is something established independent of an idea's popularity, the sanity of those who hold it, the niceness of those who hold it, etc.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned political impact of McCain's ad won't be limited to just the deluded believers who already believe Obama is the Anti-Christ and/or that the Left Behind novels are non-fiction. These sorts of ideas can slip into the unconscious of voters whose religion has already primed them to believe such nonsense on some level and thus cause them to adopt a more negative, unforgiving perspective on Obama without their ever consciously and seriously believing he is the Anti-Christ. They don't need to believe this; they just need to shift to a more negative attitude.

The same is true of Republican dog whistle ads on racism: they don't just appeal to open racists, but also affect those who are unconsciously prejudiced and who can be brought to adopt a more negative attitude towards a candidate by associating them with negative racial stereotypes. The best way to defeat this is to undermine the non-conscious ideologies of racism and White Supremacism. The best way to defeat McCain's tactic is to end belief in religious nonsense. Neither is likely to happen any time soon.