Friday’s daily newsletter from the Pentecostal media operation Charisma included a couple of striking headlines: Just below one touting a story about witches rising up to hex Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a link to a story headlined, “Is George Soros the Antichrist?”
Philanthropist George Soros is frequently the target of right-wing and anti-Semitic vilification, so seeing his name attacked in a Religious Right publication is no surprise. But still, the Antichrist?
The article was posted on Thursday by Jessilyn Justice, Charisma’s director of online news. It noted that Rudy Giuliani had a few days earlier retweeted a message calling Soros the Antichrist, and recounted some of the “prophetic” voices who have portrayed allegations against Kavanaugh as spiritual warfare—something we’ve also noted.
It turns out that anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney had also been asking about Soros’s status in the Kingdom of Darkness. On his “Secure Freedom Minute” broadcast on Thursday, Gaffney asked whether Soros is the Antichrist or he is simply the Antichrist’s “right-hand man.” Said Gaffney:
Is George Soros the Antichrist? While former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has put the question in play, theologians may be better equipped to debate it than politicians.
The decades-long record of this billionaire financier and philanthropist, however, is one of such malevolence and destruction that he must at a minimum be considered the Antichrist’s right-hand man.
Gaffney also promoted a two-year old video posted by the American Association of Evangelicals purporting to document “Soros’s formula for killing America.”
Justice’s article did not conclusively answer the question asked in its headline. But it did quote extensively from the biblical book of Revelation’s description of the Antichrist—a beast with seven heads and ten horns, with the body of a leopard, the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion—but also from the book of 1 John, which “described multiple Antichrists who deny Christ as their key characteristic.” The article closed with a scriptural passage declaring: “Whoever denies the Father and the Son is the Antichrist.”
