Over the weekend, the Department of Defense stepped into one of the more delicate questions in American religiosity: who gets to be called “Christian.” 

More specifically, does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called the Mormon Church), fit the bill?

The brouhaha started with Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to simplify and reform the work of military chaplains — those religious and spiritual advisers who tend to the faithful within the military’s ranks. 

A Pentagon spokesperson on Friday posted a new list of categories of religious affiliation for military service members, which had shrunken from over 200 to 31 labels. In previewing this reform, Hegseth had argued that it was part of the Trump administration’s fight against secular humanism and for the role of religion in public life. By narrowing the number of religions, and excluding some prior identity groups Hegseth’s Pentagon found objectionable, officials argued it would be easier to assign chaplains to units. 

“This brings the codes in line with its original purpose, giving chaplains clear, usable information so they can minister to service members in a way that aligns with that service member’s faith background and religious practice,” Hegseth said in a video statement in March.

Gone were “atheist” and “Wicca” from the new list — and though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was included as a religion, it was not labeled “Christian.”

That set off an explosive reaction from Mormon elected officials, including some normally aligned with the administration. To them, the government seemed to be saying that Mormons are not Christians — a highly offensive statement for LDS Church members, who see Jesus Christ as the center of their faith.

“I can say confidently that the U.S. government has no business recognizing the Christianity of literally every other religious sect that worships Jesus Christ — with one exception,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posted on X, one of many complaints he raised over multiple days.

On Monday, the Pentagon said the move was unintentional — and amended the original document that blew open this controversy. “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks,” an official statement read. Lee said he was “thrilled” with Trump’s response after he discussed the issue with the president in a phone call. 

But the fiery response spoke both to the LDS church’s long battle for acceptance in America’s faith community, and to deeper tensions within the religious right in President Donald Trump’s second term. Even as the administration tries to privilege Christianity in America, its coalition is suspicious about which kind is taking the lead.

A history of exclusion

Mormons have often faced a hostile reception in mainstream religious life since their church’s founding in the 19th century, a wound that the Pentagon decision reopened. 

Despite a tense history between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and both the American state and other religious groups, there’s been a kind of detente in the 21st century. 

Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign was widely seen as a watershed moment for Mormonism’s mainstream acceptance, especially within the Republican Party’s conservative Christian electorate, even as his faith was a sensitive topic at points during the race.

“It’s not like those theological concerns about Mormonism disappeared in 2012, but by the time we got to 2012, the issue wasn’t Romney’s Mormonism anymore,” David Campbell, a professor of American politics and religion at the University of Notre Dame, told me. “And so a lot of members of the LDS church thought, well, this issue’s over now.”

As Campbell noted, however, there were still major doctrinal differences between LDS and major branches of Christianity. For example, LDS theology does not accept the Trinity — the idea that God is both one being and manifested in three essences (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit). Roughly, LDS believers view Jesus Christ as the Son of God and a distinct entity to God the Father, who has a separate physical body.

More simply, the LDS Church rejects the Nicene Creed — the statements of faith that have united most Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant churches for more than a thousand years as well as the Apostles Creed (which most western Christians accept). For these reasons, many Catholics and Protestants would not call Mormons Christians, even if they believe in a God and follow Jesus Christ. 

The Pentagon dust-up brought these divides rushing back to the front of mind. 

“When Mormons have come into the public square and have sought to build bridges politically, that has been acceptable,” Campbell said. “But when that theological question comes up, maybe some have been won over, but not very many. And this is just yet another reminder of that.” 

One example of this submerged tension came up during Romney’s 2012 run, when a prominent Texas evangelical pastor, Robert Jeffress, called Mormonism a “cult” and argued Romney “is not a Christian.” But Jeffress also endorsed Romney in the general election, citing their shared values apart from theology — and he is now a prominent Trump supporter. 

Some LDS voices on the left argued that Mormon Republicans had been too naive in thinking that a White House that elevated figures like Hegseth, an evangelical who has pushed boundaries with his Christian rhetoric in public duties, would protect religious freedom rather than elevate political allies. Some linked the Pentagon list to the administration’s embrace of “Christian nationalist” evangelical leaders who have called for tearing down walls between church and state. 

“For us on the left, it’s like, yeah, of course the Trump administration doesn’t believe in our version of Christianity,” Eric Biggart, chair of the LDS Dems Caucus, told ABC4, a Salt Lake City news station. “That’s been clear to us for 10 years now.”

Republican lawmakers who protested the Pentagon’s decision did not make this argument themselves and appeared to accept the official explanation on Monday. But it’s also noticeable that they did not give Hegseth the benefit of the doubt when the story first emerged — the response to the Pentagon’s list was immediate and public, rather than delivered quietly behind the scenes. Loyal Republican politicians like Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis immediately criticized the decision and spent the weekend debating theology, engaging other Christians, and calling out the Department of Defense.

This episode is probably not going to be a turning point, Campbell told me, but it is another crack in the religious right’s coalition. Many LDS members already view Trump and MAGA with suspicion in comparison to other conservative religious communities, although he’s made inroads with LDS voters since his first election. To some, the episode was a sign that members of the faith should be suspicious about tying their religion to a political coalition. 

“I say this with love to my fellow Latter-day Saints: the sooner you give up trying to convince the religious right to validate your faith, the sooner you’ll know peace,” McKay Coppins, an LDS journalist who has written extensively about the church, posted on X. 

“Are we real Christians? Only one opinion matters — and it’s not Pete Hegseth’s.”

Monday morning, the Roman Catholic Church made its biggest foray yet into the discourse on artificial intelligence and the role it should play in human life as the technology develops.

In the first encyclical of his papacy, titled Magnifica humanitas (Latin for “magnificent humanity”), Pope Leo XIV argued that AI is not intrinsically immoral, but that its adoption needed to be slowed in order to build moral guardrails, to establish better social safety nets for those displaced by economic and labor disruptions, and to create democratic processes that will ensure the public remains in control of these developments, rather than a small subset of tech oligarchs. The document also contended that the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence was a misnomer: Intelligence is something only human persons possess, and technology will never be human.

Encyclicals are official teaching documents of the Catholic Church: letters issued by popes to bishops after consultation with theologians, historians, and experts on pressing matters that affect humanity or the church, with the expectation that all people, faithful or secular, can learn from them and help shape their consciences and lives. Magnifica humanitas is Leo’s first encyclical since becoming pope last year, and its release now underscores the focus the new pope is putting on AI and technology. Notably, Leo also used the occasion to make a historic formal apology for the Church’s previous defense and justification of slavery — a reminder that the Catholic Church has not always been on the right side of social ills.

Though popes are traditionally not present during the release of these documents, which first began in the 18th century, Leo XIV was in attendance at its presentation, and delivered his own comments — something Vatican observers indicated reflected his desire to make sure the Church’s stance was properly understood. The Chicago-born pontiff spoke in English and was joined by AI experts and industry leaders, including Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, who consulted on the document. 

So how should the public process and think about this new document? It’s helpful to first understand the context in which the Church is speaking up about this at all.

Why the Catholic Church cares so much about AI’s development

Magnifica humanitas is dropping more than a week after Pope Leo XIV actually signed it on May 15. The timing matters.

That day marked 135 years since the release of Rerum Novarum, the seminal work of Pope Leo XIII, the current pope’s namesake, who was leading the church during the late stages of the Industrial Revolution. As they are today, the faithful, and the clergy, were facing a rapidly changing world. And the Church, the world’s leading moral authority at the time, had yet to establish its place in it. 

That 19th-century document made philosophical arguments about the relationship between labor and capital, warning about the perils of communism. But it also redefined the church’s relationship to the modern world, with the papacy reasserting itself as both a source of power and a moral authority in an era of rapid change. The encyclical set a template for how a 2,000-year-old institution could still remain relevant in a modern age.

In presenting this encyclical, Pope Leo XIV made this parallel clear. He sees the rise of artificial intelligence as the defining global challenge of the day, and of his pontificate: “Like the earlier Leo, I feel entrusted to look upon another huge transformation with eyes of faith, with lucidity of reason, with openness to mystery and with cries of the poor and the earth resounding in my heart,” the pope said while presenting his encyclical.

The newer encyclical builds off his predecessor’s tradition, and the various arguments popes have made about the importance of preserving the dignity of the human person and valuing modern technology only so long as it benefits everyone, not just its creators or the rich.

In 2015, Pope Francis, for example, wrote about “the technocratic paradigm” that has taken root in modern capitalism: the sense that technological progress is unstoppable, that it will demand unlimited concessions from nature and from people, and that the world had no choice but to submit to change.

“Leo is concerned that we don’t just submit to inevitability on questions of AI, but ask critical questions and push back in ways that are necessary before it’s too late to push back, before damage is done that can’t easily be undone,” Dan Rober, an associate professor of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University, told me.

That role of questioning, pausing, and coming to consensus has defined the Catholic Church’s leadership and operation for the last two papacies: the notion of synodality, or teaching and making decisions based on consensus. Before AI and the technologists who have created it become the sole determinants of how politics, the economy, and society operates, the Church is asserting itself as a counterweight — even as it includes some of those leaders in the process.

“Pope Leo is trying to clearly walk in those footsteps, and I think he’s very concerned, as are a lot of people, about the possible implications, particularly for job markets and for people’s lifestyles being sustainable day to day with the rise of AI systems that may render a certain significant amount of jobs able to be automated very rapidly,” Rober said.

This kind of reflection has become standard procedure for the Vatican. Since at least the turn of the century, the Church has found itself increasingly weighing in on the crises of the day, albeit often a bit too late. 

As the Catholic writer Christopher Hale has noted, “Francis took up the climate fight with Laudato Si in 2015, after decades of scientific consensus had been ignored. Benedict XVI took up the global economic order with Caritas in Veritate in 2009, after the financial system had already collapsed. Both documents arrived in the long shadow of the crises they addressed.”

In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV may be seeking to intervene early in the development or takeover of a new technology this time, and show that the Church wants to both work with Silicon Valley and assert itself as a powerful defender of modern values, as it has done in its defense of the liberal international order and aspects of humanism, like human autonomy and reason.

In the background, there’s also a more sci-fi element: the notion that AI could end up coming between the Church and the people — serving as a filter or layer between regular people and God, and perhaps even usurping the role of the Church itself. The Catholic Church, famously, is concerned with the proper interpretation of scripture, Biblical truths, ethics, and God. Bloody wars waged and hard-fought reformations turned on this central question of who and how one can commune with God. Now, AI enters as another middleman.

“That’s closely related to the question of people using AI as a therapist,” Rober told me. “You could see a way in which AI becomes its own kind of religion, and certainly the way a lot of the Silicon Valley founders talk about it, it does have religious overtones to it. You listen to the Google founders talk about the singularity, and that sounds a lot like religion.”

It’s in this context that this document, and its specific teachings, lands.

What the Church is teaching about AI

Magnifica Humanitas is not the Vatican’s first examination of the role of AI in modern life. 

Just last year, in the twilight of Pope Francis’s pontificate, the Vatican released a teaching note, Antiqua et nova, that laid the groundwork for Leo’s encyclical. That 2025 document established that the Church is not opposed to the development of AI: technological progress and scientific discoveries are part of the natural way that humans are meant to honor God, his creation of humanity in his image, and the natural outpouring of God’s gift of reason and rationality.

But it also established a distinction between human intelligence and machines that analyze data and perform processes. It insisted that artificial intelligence, like all technology, should serve humanity, not the other way around. And it emphasized the risk that new technology poses to the ability to, right to, and dignity of work, especially for the least well off in society.

In the encyclical, Leo uses the biblical parable of the Tower of Babel — a warning about human hubris — to make this case: “We must, then, avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’ namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak,” he writes. “The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.”

This builds off of a long tradition of focusing on not just the dignity of work and workers, but also more recent concerns that modern capitalism facilitates a “throwaway culture” that views people and things as, at best, cogs in the service of a greater machine.

“He wants to talk about the idea that our humanity is meaningful in and of itself and that work is part of that, even if AI systems are able to allow for more leisure and even if something like universal basic income were to be made available, people need to find to have work of some kind to have meaning in their lives,” Rober said.

The encyclical’s teachings can be broken up into three broad categories: regulations on how AI is developed and how individuals adopt it, the responses required to handle the economic effects of AI, and limits on AI’s usage in war. 

The practical recommendations and concerns Leo outlines include:

• The need for a “more active” democratic process for people to decide how AI will develop, “that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.”
• Regulation of how companies collect and use personal data, which “should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few.”
• Better education of adults, teachers, and young people for using AI in their daily lives, specifically to avoid sexual exploitation, blackmail, grooming, and disinformation.
• Environmental regulations, given AI infrastructure’s impact on the natural world.
• A duty for governments to protect access to, and the dignity of, work, to provide job training and professional help to workers affected by AI disruptions, and to redistribute the wealth and value created by AI to those it displaces.
• Flexibility from labor unions and organizations to “be open to new types of employment and the corresponding needs of workers, in order to represent and defend them.”
• New rules of war and accountability for AI usage in combat, given that “just war” theory is being made obsolete by the growing automation of warfare. “When a decision to strike becomes automated or opaque, the risk of abdicating responsibility increases,” the encyclical says. “For this reason, the chain of responsibility must be identifiable and verifiable; those who design, train, authorize and employ technology must be held accountable for their decisions.” 
• A new international compact on how AI should be used to avoid “the technological arms race and ensure robust protection for civilians and the infrastructures necessary for their survival.”

From an eagle-eye view, the document is fairly wonky and detailed: concerned with very practical matters and specific recommendations that could have come from academia, or a secular background — underscoring just how much Leo may hope it can provide guidance for leaders and individuals, as opposed to remaining siloed to the intellectual class. So as this technology continues to develop, the pope and the church want to help shape it. They want the faithful to be reminded that whatever AI offers is not reality, not personhood, and not God. It is a tool that should not dominate or determine the lives of its users. And it should not replace the role of the Church in teaching morality and ethics.

For the greater secular world, the Church wants to remind the public that they should have a say in how AI shapes their world; they should not allow business and tech leaders to define the terms of existence through their machines; and that they have a powerful ally in the Roman Catholic Church in the effort to preserve human dignity in the face of unprecedented technological change.

In case you didn’t notice, the Antichrist is back.

All right, forgive the hyperbole — this biblical agent of Satan hasn’t actually returned to lead a rebellion against God before Christ’s second coming. But in the year of our Lord 2026, a curious surge in chatter about this herald of the apocalypse seems to be underway.

A number of far-right dissidents, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, are asking questions about whether President Donald Trump is more than he seems. “Could this be the Antichrist?” Tucker Carlson asked on his podcast. “Well, who knows?” It didn’t help when Trump posted an AI-slop image of himself as the Messiah, which he later claimed was meant to be a doctor. “Not saying Trump is the Antichrist,” conservative Rod Dreher told the Wall Street Journal. “But he’s radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”

The antichrist talk is also taking off in the politics-adjacent tech world in a different context, where Palantir founder and conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been leading a series of closed-door lectures on the Antichrist (and garnering the disapproving attention of the Vatican). In a wild coincidence, his hypothetical Antichrist appears to be anti-tech people who annoy him.

It’s the most the end times have saturated our political culture since the aughts, when the new millennium brought an explosion of renewed interest, spurred on by the apocalyptic Left Behind novels and related Christian media depicting a “realistic” modern Antichrist. Later on, former President Barack Obama became a fixation of related theories on the religious right depicting him as the Antichrist. 

Scholars and experts on biblical writing and apocalyptic history say there’s a long history of perceived antichrist figures popping up in moments of collective crisis or despair in the western world. And there are certain traits that tend to supercharge these narratives — the presence of war (especially in the Middle East), economic or public health crises, political or societal instability, and the appearance of an unusually charismatic leader. 

Needless to say, we were probably due for a revival. 

Yet just like in past periods of panic and perturbation over the centuries, there’s a lot of uncertainty in these discussions over who or what the Antichrist is, when this figure is to return, or even if this biblical character is supposed to be a real thing. 

So it’s a good time to ask: Where did the idea of the Antichrist come from in the first place? How does it tend to manifest in politics? And what is it about our current moment that’s driving such renewed interest in the concept? 

The biblical roots of the Antichrist

It’s probably helpful to start off with actually defining what the Antichrist is, and what the signs are that believers in his arrival are looking for. 

Definitions vary across various Christian denominations and traditions, but they are rooted in the interpretation of a relatively small number of biblical passages that either use this term explicitly or get linked to the same figure. 

Surprisingly, the term “antichrist” only appears five times in the New Testament. These explicit mentions in the letters of the disciple John refer  to “deceivers” who come to confuse Christians by denying Jesus Christ’s divinity and preaching other heresies. Scripture suggests that there can be (and have been) multiple antichrists, whose aim is to derail the faithful from achieving salvation.

Whether this is a symbolic or literal figure depends on Christian traditions, and how close you link these passages to references to other beasts and deceivers written about in other parts of the New Testament. For example: The apostle Paul writes of a “man of lawlessness” in his second letter to the Thessalonians, who “will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” 

Then you have horror-movie, apocalyptic visions from the Book of Revelations about the chaotic period before the second coming of Christ, which includes reference to a seven-headed “beast coming out of the sea,” who bears a fatal wound, “but the fatal wound had been healed.” This beast is empowered by a dragon, understood to be Satan, and the people of the world stand in awe and worship this beast, asking “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” 

Catholics and mainline Protestants have less literal interpretations of these passages. 

Many mainline Protestant denominations teach that these figures are more symbolic manifestations of unholy traits and un-Christianlike beliefs and behavior, not an actual being who is due to appear at some point in the future.

Catholics are called to view the “antichrist” as a period of intense prosecution, testing of the church, and the rise of false prophets; “a final trial” before Christ returns in which believers face a “supreme religious deception” and are faced with a choice to believe in a “pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah” or stay true to their faith. 

But the Catholic Church also cautions against believing claims that an antichrist figure is imminently coming. And the explicit characters in the Bible have been understood by many scholars to be references to Roman leaders who persecuted Christians during early church history.

More fundamentalist and evangelical believers, however, view all these textual clues as actual signposts and steps in the process toward the apocalypse and Christ’s return. That’s been the main entry point for the Antichrist’s place in American culture.  

The long history of the Antichrist in the Western imagination

Because of the detail and color of these symbols and characters in the Bible, it has been enticing for believers and readers to draw firm connections between the text and the real world. 

“They read the Bible like it’s a secret code book, and that if they can unlock the code, then they can understand what’s going to happen in the end times,” Matthew A. Sutton, a historian of American apocalypticism at Washington State University, told me. “It’s a very modern way to read the Bible compared to what you would’ve seen through much of church history.”

Sutton and other historians differentiate between the modern (and by that they mean in the last century) antichrist discourse and historical beliefs. But there tend to be some preconditions necessary for this chatter to rise that go back even further in time: war in the Middle East, the rise of charismatic or terrifying leaders, and environmental, political, or economic catastrophe.

For example, the turn of the first millennium was one of the earliest surges in interest in the figure of the Antichrist, given explicit references in the Bible to thousand-year periods (as in Christ’s thousand-year kingdom on Earth, from the Book of Revelations) and the violent and unstable nature of life in the early Middle Ages, Brett Whalen, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. In the same century, the First Crusade sparked another of these waves, as crusaders captured Jerusalem from Islamic rule. And the Middle Ages were rife with antichrist talk, primarily by critics of the papacy. 

“You can always call the pope ‘Antichrist,’” Whalen said. “Historically, they’re probably the No. 1 candidate for being Antichrist, or kings or emperors. You had a limited cast.”

Various secular rulers have been labeled as such too: Frederick II, a Holy Roman emperor around the turn of the 12th century, was called Antichrist by the pope with whom he regularly feuded. The Muslim sultan Saladin, who retook Jerusalem around this time, was similarly described as such.

“Martin Luther was called Antichrist when the Protestant Reformation happened,” Whalen said. “So wars, political changes, religious revolutions, and the rise and fall of empires — these sorts of political and religious events can create a moment.”

What makes modern iterations of the Antichrist different

So how did these historical waves of antichrist panic lead us to Donald Trump and Peter Thiel? 

Blame America, in this case. In the modern era, antichrists became democratized, as US-based evangelical movements picked up steam, literal readings of the Bible spread, and end-times theories were solidified. 

“Obsessing over everyday news and trying to align that with biblical prophecy — that is a modern American phenomenon,” Sutton told me. “And by modern, that begins in the 1880s, 1890s, and that really is what gives birth to fundamentalism, [another] uniquely American phenomenon. And then fundamentalism morphs into today’s evangelicalism.” 

Certainly, the news seemed to confirm their suspicions: Even for secular Americans, it’s easy to feel like a particular moment is a time of struggle, or that we’re headed toward some violent catharsis, or are being engulfed by a personality cult.

And the 20th century, marked by two World Wars, the rise and fall of new totalitarian governments, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, was especially fertile ground for this kind of thinking. Figures like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin were all labeled Antichrists; President Franklin D. Roosevelt also faced accusations. 

In the postwar period, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was another crucial development in today’s antichrist theology. Many of the apocalyptic biblical stories center on the Holy Land, the return of Jewish people to it, and a period of tribulation for them; there, this antichrist figure will allow the Jewish people to rebuild a temple, then betray them, demand worship, and assemble global armies under his command for a final battle in the valley of Armageddon (which historically is located in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel).

Now, these narratives have become central to dispensationalist evangelical theology: Israel’s unity and existence must be preserved in order for these phases to take shape, and for the eventual rapture to occur. Consequently, “anything that involves Israel or the Middle East is going to trigger speculation” of end-times prophesies, Sutton said, especially when there’s instability or war in the region.

These literal biblical interpretations also suggest a period of global domination by the Antichrist — governments submit to this figure and turn over their armies to him. 

“Part of what has driven concerns about the Antichrist is the idea that they’re going to sacrifice American sovereignty through a global organization,” Sutton said. “And so this is why religious conservatives are so suspicious of groups like NATO and especially the United Nations, because they believe ultimately we’re moving towards one world government, and it’s the Antichrist. He’s going to prevail over that one world.”

Combined with the expectation that the antichrist figure will be a charismatic leader, you get the more recent panics: Saddam Hussein faced antichrist allegations during the Gulf War. Hillary Clinton was called the Antichrist. But nobody drew more scrutiny in recent times than Barack Obama, whose meteoric political rise on a message of greater international cooperation and outreach to the Muslim world made him a magnet for antichrist talk. 

This speculation broke into the mainstream in 2008, when some Democrats accused former Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign of deliberately referencing it with a web video mocking Obama’s celebrity by depicting him as a Moses-like religious figure. 

The McCain campaign denied it was a dogwhistle, but the discussion around the topic grew so heated that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, co-authors of the Left Behind novels about the Antichrist, stepped in to publicly reassure their Christian readers that Obama was not the figure they had in mind. 

Which brings us to 2026. The latest panics fit neatly into these traditions: Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures seem to boil down to a fear over technological stagnation and growing opposition to artificial intelligence. He warns that efforts to regulate AI, in the name of fighting some future existential risk, could bring about the conditions for a central power to seize global authoritarian control — the Antichrist. 

Sutton, who has written about these lectures before, argues that it’s not the most novel approach, but it is dangerous: “Dressing political theory in apocalyptic robes carries risks. When powerful actors reframe ordinary policy debates such as about guardrails for AI as a battle against the antichrist, they raise anxieties, delegitimize compromise and insinuate that democratic deliberation is spiritually suspect.”

The recent Trump panic, however, is a bit of an inversion: Trump is typically championed by the same right-wing religious figures who are most attuned to literal interpretations of the Antichrist and the end times. It’s surprising that figures like Carlson and Fuentes would break the seal on this front. But, historically speaking, Trump also fits the mold of prior antichrist hunts: He is surely a charismatic leader; he’s launched civilizational wars in the Middle East; he’s survived assassination attempts, mimicking the fatal, but healed, wound of the beast of Revelations; and he’s blasphemed and used the trappings of religion to advance his personal brand.

But to focus on any one person or movement as antichrist is to miss the broader point, Robert Fuller, a religious studies professor at Bradley University, told me. The concept, applied politically, risks taking an already polarized time and raising the stakes of elections and policy debates even further. 

“This image sustains a crisis mentality,” Fuller said. “It summons out hatred and resentment that can fuel long-term grudges. It makes compromise unthinkable since no one compromises with the devil. It justifies hatred and violence, recasting these traits as virtues.”

In that vein, it’s inevitable that antichrist narratives persist; such a flexible idea can adapt regardless of century. It’s likely we’ll see many recurring returns of the Antichrist, at least until the world does actually end.

Now that Ken Paxton, the conservative attorney general of Texas, has defeated incumbent John Cornyn for the Republican Senate nomination, we may see something unusual in modern American elections: a theological throwdown.

In a closely watched and competitive race, Paxton will be facing off against James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and the Democratic nominee. The race is now set to be a battle between two very different worldviews about the role of Christianity.

That Democrats are even able to hold up their end of such a debate is unusual in a political moment when “Christian” has come to be synonymous with “right-wing.” Talarico has been trying to change that narrative — now he gets to face off against a flawed Republican with a more typical evangelical message.

Talarico earned significant media attention in his primary for the progressive tilt of his Christian faith — one of forgiveness, love, and righteous anger against the wealthy and powerful. Yet he’s also been ridiculed by the religious right as a false prophet: a Christian in name only who launders left-wing social views through faith, supports abortion, and once argued that God is nonbinary. 

Meanwhile, Paxton’s nomination sets up an interesting foil: He’s a formerly impeached and indicted politician in the middle of a divorce his wife sought “on biblical grounds.” And he has championed a right-wing brand of Christian politics, embracing the “Christian nationalist” movement’s efforts to break down the walls between church and state, while fending off bipartisan attacks on his personal morals. 

This larger cultural struggle over who gets to claim Christian identity and what Christianity should stand for in 21st-century America will be front and center in the race. It will test the limits of persuasion for a liberal Christian trying to win over disaffected Republicans with different political and theological views, and the limits of partisan loyalty for a conservative Christian trying to keep them in his camp despite bipartisan concerns about his ethics. 

Christian authoritarianism versus a Christianity of radical love

A Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico comes from a more politically liberal tradition than Paxton’s Southern Baptist background. His particular branch of mainline Protestantism, the Presbyterian Church (USA), has been derided by critics on the right as “woke” and theologically heretical for its embrace of same-sex marriage, ordination of women, and welcoming stance for transgender congregants. 

Talarico has centered the concept of “radical love” in his political identity and campaign platform: He wants to heal political divisions, welcome Americans who aren’t typically Democrats to his campaign, and move beyond anger toward any one person (like President Donald Trump or Paxton) toward a forward-looking agenda that goes after oligarchs, the political establishment, and the “corrupt” elite.

“In my faith, love is the strongest force in the universe,” he said at a campaign rally in February. And to justify his righteous anger, he argues that “you can’t stand for faith and then warp and weaponize religion to hurt our neighbors.”

Talarico has explicitly contrasted his faith with “Christian nationalism,” arguing that right-wing religious leaders are aligning with Trump in order to institute “theocracy.”

Paxton is solidly in the Christian nationalist camp. Generally, Christian nationalists oppose the separation of church and state; seek to make Christianity the official religion of the state; call for Biblical morality to determine the law; and argue that the United States has God’s unique blessing among other nations. 

Paxton has made a name for himself as a proponent of an aggressive form of religious liberty, arguing not just that the state should pull back and cede space to the faithful, but that the state should actively promote a specific version of Christian ethics and morality. He supported efforts to bring Christian prayer and Scripture into public schools, to set aside time for Bible readings and prayers, and to display the Ten Commandments on public property.

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton said in a September statement calling on students to recite the Lord’s Prayer in class. “Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

Talarico has defended secular government, while also trying to turn the theological conversation to economic concerns. “These politicians want a Christian nation, unless it means providing healthcare to the sick or funding food assistance for the hungry or raising the minimum wage for the poor,” he said on The Ezra Klein Show. “And so, it seems like they want to base our laws on the Bible until they read the words of Jesus.”

While marrying progressive politics and Christian themes might win over the Democratic base, Republicans are already challenging him aggressively on social issues — especially abortion and LGBT rights — where they believe their platform is more in touch with their state’s longtime rightward bent. 

But Talarico also could try to peel off voters with another argument steeped in religious principles: that Paxton is not living out the Christian values he claims to support. 

Paxton creates a test of what Christians should tolerate

The Paxton-Talarico race is partly a referendum on what Christians will tolerate as Christian-like behavior.

Talarico has a squeaky clean image: a former teacher, pastor-in-training, and activist concerned with social justice. Paxton looks more like Trump: accused of adultery by his wife (hence the “biblical grounds” for their divorce), charged with securities fraud (he later settled the case without admitting guilt), and impeached by the Republican-dominated Texas state house over bribery and corruption allegations (then acquitted in his trial).

Sen. Cornyn elevated all these accusations against him. “Ken Paxton has the ethics of a strip club owner,” one of his ads read. “Texas moms: Would you want your daughters to marry a man like Ken Paxton?” And Cornyn proudly highlighted that Paxton’s own pastor had joined his re-election campaign as an adviser before the run-off.

Talarico seems likely to redouble these efforts: He’s called Paxton “morally unfit” for office. “He’ll lie to you with a straight face. He’s failed the character test. He’s the most corrupt Attorney General of our lifetime, and he puts the interests of himself over the laws of Texas,” Talarico said Tuesday night, citing some of the statements made by Republican critics of Paxton.

In this regard, the race is an extension of a long-running argument within the religious right about Trump, whose endorsement of Paxton sealed his primary victory. The president has long been embraced by social conservatives who have argued that, despite his own moral flaws, he can still deliver anti-abortion policies, appoint judges who share their views of religious freedom, and give an evangelical protestant form of Christianity a privileged space in public life.

Even among Paxton’s religious critics on the right, these issues have led to splits. National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar argued Paxton was “odious,” but Talarico was “morally worse” because he espoused ideas that Blehar believed were wrong and immoral under the guise of faith. In doing so, Blehar rebutted the New York Times’ evangelical columnist David French, who praised Talarico as “one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian,” even as he condemned his positions on issues like abortion.

Paxton has relied on testimonials from his family to rebut personal attacks, and he’s likely to try to refocus the race on the greater work he can accomplish for Christian conservatives. In declaring victory Tuesday night, he framed the coming election as the “beginning of the fight to preserve every value we hold dear.”

The two versions of Christianity represented by Talarico and Paxton may be like two ships passing in the night if you’re looking to compare and debate theologies. But the race is one of the most high-profile recent examples of Democrats trying to reclaim the politics of faith — and Republicans rarely have had such a flawed interlocutor to rebut them.

Millions of ballots are still being counted in California, where the primary results for the state’s two marquee races for governor and mayor of Los Angeles remain uncalled as of Wednesday afternoon. 

That’s on top of a handful of congressional and local races — a slow process that is typical for the Golden State because of how counties count votes and the generous deadline for receiving ballots (they must be postmarked by Election Day, but can arrive at vote-counting centers days later). 

The race brought significant attention to California’s “jungle primary” system, where the top two candidates advance regardless of party. Democrats worried earlier in the governor’s race that their own field was so large and closely divided that two Republican candidates might make the cutoff.

As things stand, at least one Democrat will advance in both races: Former Biden Health and Human Services Secretary and former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra looks likely to move onto the gubernatorial election in November, while incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will advance to a run-off — the first sitting LA mayor since 2005 to not win reelection outright.

Who they will face is the big open question: Republican former Fox News host Steve Hilton is leading the gubernatorial race at the moment, and may prevent an all-Democratic contest later this year. Bass, meanwhile, faces challenges from a lefty city council member, Nithya Raman, and the Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, whose insurgent campaign has remade the city contest. 

The slow procedure for counting votes isn’t the only reason this is taking so long, though. Voters were reluctant to rally around a single candidate in either the governor or mayoral contest — contributing to slow ballot returns — with many expressing unease with their choices and with the Democratic-dominated government. There’s a sense of deep voter frustration: at Trump, at the status quo, at homelessness, and incumbents. Yet despite it all, the state might just get more of the same. 

To better understand where Californians are coming from, I turned to Dan Walters, a columnist at CalMatters and veteran chronicler of the state’s politics. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This has felt like the longest and messiest gubernatorial election in recent California memory. How did we end up here, and is it really that historic?

It was so different because there was never a pre-campaign frontrunner. There’s a stage before the official campaign launches where potential candidates are kind of testing the waters. That never happened here. Everybody was asking around, Who’s going to run? 

We got this deal where Kamala Harris stood around for what, a month, two months, making up her mind. And then there were others who thought about it, Rob Bonta, the state attorney general, Alex Padilla, one of our US senators — they eventually both said, “No, we don’t want to run.” Eleni Kounalakis, the lieutenant governor, also announced she was going to run, and then she dropped out. 

All this stuff was going on, and we didn’t really even know who was running until basically the campaign got started earlier this year.

Has this ever happened before in California? This void of leadership?

I’ve covered governor’s elections here for 50 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody else has ever seen anything like that too, for the governorship of the nation’s largest state. There seemed to be more people reluctant to run. Maybe they wanted to run, for whatever reason, but maybe they just figured governing California is so difficult. I mean, why would Alex Padilla give up a lifetime seat in the US Senate?

But the main overriding thing [is] there was never a natural frontrunner. Eight years ago, we knew Gavin Newsom was going to be running for governor. It was clear from the very beginning. We didn’t have that this year. And that kind of set everything off. And so finally we have a field of 61 people running, 10 whom you’d call serious candidates — that unfolded. Then, former congressman Eric Swalwell became the leading Democratic candidate at one point in early April. And then, within a few days, he was out of it after he was accused of sexual harassment and resigned from Congress.

That ends up helping Xavier Becerra, who was down at about 4 percent in the polls at that point in early April. And he became, essentially, the candidate of what you might call a Democratic establishment. Voters either went to him or held back and he leaped up, and it wound up being just him and Tom Steyer, who was spending $200 million mostly attacking Becerra at the end.

It also seemed to me like it was voters almost running to the safest choice — like 2020 when everyone seemed to coalesce around Biden.

Some people called Becerra California’s Biden — a safe bet, in other words. People wanted something known, something safe. Look, there’s a lot of angst out there about inflation and cost of living, gas prices, housing prices, that sort of thing. And I think people are kind of leery of somebody who comes along like Steyer and says, “I’ll fix it!”

And this wasn’t like in past moments of Democratic scrapping, where you’re looking for a sign from above, and intervention from a figure like Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi?

Right, there was nothing like that. It just didn’t happen. So it was just a bizarre, very strange campaign.

Is it something about the job of governor that makes it so undesirable? Is it the state of the state? Are there structural issues that make it difficult to run or govern?

We have a lot of what I would call existential issues — things that will really affect how California goes in the future. You’ve got water supply issues, you’ve got homelessness, you’ve got a chronic budget deficit, you’ve got low education performance. There’s just no end of these things that need resolution but haven’t been resolved. And they’re going to be all lying there on the desk where the next governor takes over next January. Right off the bat, they got a lot to deal with. And you see Gavin Newsom for all of his supposed energy and engagement, and everything has not really dealt very well with these existential issues.

Is it fair to blame candidates and campaigns when these structural issues exist?

There’s definitely something to the structure — it is unwieldy when you’re dealing with complex issues because it takes a high degree of agreement, of consensus, because the American system of government is a series of hurdles.

Committees, chambers of the legislature, the floor, the governor — every one of those hurdles, you have to get through all of them. And if you miss just one, you failed. And so it’s fundamentally a negative process. It’s set up to make it difficult to make policy. Consensus with all the stakeholders — business, labor, trial lawyers, environmentalists, consumer protection advocates — it’s extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to actually effectively govern California. You have to come in with very limited promises, deliver on those promises, but to do that, you have to ignore all the larger, more complicated existential issues.

How much of this can we blame on the top-two primary system (the two candidates with the most votes advance to a general, regardless of party affiliation)?

The top-two system was forced on both of the parties by a budget deal involving Arnold Schwarzenegger back in 2009. He forced the legislature basically to put it on the ballot in 2010, and it passed. The Democratic leadership never wanted it. The Republican leadership never wanted it. And after the scare that the Democrats had this year about the possibility of a freeze-out by having two Republicans finish one, two, I think there’s a lot of sentiment among the Democrats to do away with it.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has seemed to deflect some of the blame from voters and opponents on the fact that she has pretty limited powers: She likes to remind people that she can’t have the police arrest ICE agents, has no control over schools or public health because that falls to the county, and she couldn’t control the weather when wildfires destroyed whole neighborhoods last year; Xavier Becerra did the same thing too on the trail, when he talked about issues caused by Trump.

That’s a whole other bag of something. Karen Bass is definitely in trouble. If you’re an incumbent mayor and you can’t get 50 percent in the primary, that means that most of the voters are against you, and so she has to really worry about what might happen in November.

She would probably win against Nithya Raman — Los Angeles is liberal but not leftist — but Pratt, that’s a wild card, man. He represents the angst of Los Angeles. There’s a lot of anger in Los Angeles over the fires and over the aftermath of the fires and the response and the reconstruction. Karen Bass really didn’t do herself any good on how she handled that whole thing, and it’s coming back to haunt her, and she may pay the price on it.

Pratt’s had very clever AI-generated ads and certainly a lot of enthusiasm. I think Bass defeats Raman, but I think with Pratt, she’s got a potential problem here because he’s struck something in the voters in Los Angeles, their unhappiness with the status quo on homelessness, crime, and the fires.

What else can we say about the results of other races in the state so far? What can we make of Tom Steyer’s spending?

We obviously still have votes to be counted, but I can say it looks like Democratic voters kind of rejected the more progressive wing of their party. Steyer had camped out as Bernie Sanders’s best friend in California. He was going full populist on single-payer healthcare, taxing billionaires, breaking up monopolies, everything, the entire agenda of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He adopted that as his platform, and it didn’t get him that far — plus he spent $200 million.

I wouldn’t say this is exactly a backlash against the progressive movement, but it may reflect this post-2024 feeling within the party that they had gotten themselves identified as being too “woke.” In fact, Gavin Newsom said that not too long ago, he said that he thought the Democratic Party had gotten too far left, and needed to become more “normal.”

There’s definitely a misconception that California is a woke leftist paradise. You’re saying that’s wrong?

The results that we saw from yesterday kind of hint at that. The more progressive candidate running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat over in San Francisco didn’t do well, Steyer didn’t do well, it appears. I’m not certain yet that the left-wing candidate for mayor down in Los Angeles didn’t do well. 

Not a backlash, but a sense that “no, we really don’t want to go that way.” Becerra is a very ordinary, “don’t rock the boat” Democratic politician. He’s by no means a left-winger. And in fact, if you look at the voting results…the Latino population of California, which is the largest ethnic group, isn’t very left-wing. If you look in the legislature and you start looking at the range of Democrats in the legislature, those on the moderate side tend to be Latino and Black, whereas progressives all seem to be white liberals. So California is not as progressive as it’s often portrayed in the national media. 

And there are a lot of Republicans in California — a quarter of the registered voters.