Phew. Only one in four Americans suspect Barack Obama might be the antichrist, according to a poll this week. Given the US’s love of conspiracy theory, from the grassy knoll to The Da Vinci Code, you’d think the figure would be much higher – because among conspiracy figures, the antichrist is the biggest beast of them all. He sailed to the US in the same ship as the Pilgrim Fathers, and yes, he probably wore one of those black brimmed hats with a buckle on the front, because the way you recognise the antichrist is to spot him pretending to be even more pious than everyone else. So he’s been part of the American way of life ever since they set foot on Plymouth Sound.

Those first colonial settlers, Puritans, came from England, and the antichrist was all the rage in the days of Good Queen Bess and James I. I imagine that the Pilgrim Fathers talked about little else on their long Atlantic voyage. In fact the antichrist has always been around in Christianity. Several books in the New Testament talk about this “deceiver”, and a letter-writer called John (not the gospel one) gives him the name “Antichrist”. But that’s not all he’s called. The book of Revelation, that wonderfully mad vision of the cosmic punch-up at the end of time, adds spice to the mix by assigning a number to what it merely calls “the Beast”. It says helpfully in chapter 3 verse 18 that “the number represents a man’s name, and the numerical value of its letters is 666″. But it doesn’t actually name the name (it was probably a Roman emperor), which is why you can enjoy yourself working out how 666 can be Barack Obama.

The antichrist isn’t exactly Satan, because he’s a shape-shifter, and the shape-shifting is the reason he has been so useful for conspiracy theorists down the ages. The person who threatens you most: that’s the antichrist. The enemy constantly changes. Medieval kings and emperors were fond of saying the pope was the antichrist. Then, during the 16th-century Protestant reformation, Martin Luther was borrowing the name for use in his quarrel with Pope Leo X, though Protestants might equally identify the antichrist with the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople. English Protestants were far away from Constantinople, so they preferred the pope. …

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2013/apr/05/who-is-the-antichrist-obama-satan