the rumors concerning his Jewish ancestry would be confirmed.” The issue, in any case, was not Mussolini but the organizational structure behind him, for Winrod saw the Antichrist as merely the instrument of an invisible Jewish conspiracy: “A Jewish Antichrist, in the end of this age, pre-supposes an international system of Jewish government. There can be little doubt that such a system, based upon the Jewish Money Power, has already been created—and is ready to step into the open and assume control of world affairs as soon as the time is ripe.” Winrod did not abandon the concept of a personified Antichrist, but he joined it so closely to a conspiracist view of history that the man and the organization became inseparable.8
The anti-Semitic implications of the Antichrist suddenly reemerged more than sixty years later when, in January 1999, the Reverend Jerry Falwell asserted that the Antichrist was probably already alive and was certainly a Jew. He seemed genuinely taken aback when many called the claim anti-Semitic. In a press statement, Falwell asserted, “Since Jesus came to earth . . . as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male.” Saying that he himself is “strongly pro-Jewish and pro-Israel,” he denied any anti-Semitic intent, and agreed in hindsight that it would have been better never to have made the claim.9
As Falwell’s comments suggest, Winrod’s views were hardly typical of evangelicals—he was even tried for sedition during World War II. But his linkage of the person of the Antichrist with a satanic organization later reappeared in other forms. In this manner, the Antichrist suspicions originally attached to the League of Nations came to rest on the United Nations after 1945. The UN was a more tempting target for American millenarians, for although the United States had rejected membership in the League, it was a prime mover in the new organization. In the postwar era, Antichrist fears on the organizational level confronted, as it were, an embarrassment of riches, for in addition to the UN, the creation of the European Common Market (later the European Union) offered yet another potential venue for the Antichrist’s machinations. Because the Antichrist’s domain was widely regarded as successor to the Roman empire, a western-European superstate was a particularly attractive candidate.
In addition to these organizational developments, Antichrist writers were encouraged by technological ones. The Antichrist folklore consistently emphasized his capacity for deception and control; indeed, it became an unquestioned tenet of dispensationalism that the world would initially welcome the Antichrist as a charismatic peacemaker whose diabolical designs would remain hidden until he had achieved total power. Modern technology appeared to equip the Antichrist with hitherto unavailable capacities for misrepresentation and domination. Electronic communications, especially television, could create instant global celebrity, while computers and microelectronics offered the means to monitor and control behavior and commerce.
In fact, for some the Antichrist and the computer came to be virtually interchangeable.10 Paul Boyer notes, “Several [religious] popularizers even suggested that Antichrist would be a computer.” The most common version of this legend is that a giant computer in Brussels, the headquarters of the Common Market / European Union, would keep track of everyone in the world. Because the Book of Revelation says that the mark of the beast would be required for anyone to buy and sell during the Antichrist’s reign, such concentrated power could theoretically control the world. In another, more baroque version of the computer-as-Antichrist, the Brussels machine was said to be at the center of a global network of 365 computers that would keep track of the Antichrist’s minions in their various secret, conspiratorial organizations. So prevalent did these beliefs become after about 1980 that a 1994 tract on computers and the Antichrist explicitly repudiated them: “False reports and silly rumors only damage the credibility of one of the most powerful prophetic passages in Scripture.”11
An important result of these developments was an increasing tendency among fundamentalist millenarians to view the Antichrist as part of a system of control rather than simply an evil and deceitful individual. The figure of the Antichrist became enmeshed in a complex of related ideas: the mark of the beast as a satanic device to control economic activity; the universal bar code and implanted microchips as precursors of the literal mark; credit and debit cards as ways of habituating people to an economy without tangible money; and vast computer systems tracking the details of daily life. Although these were real and in some cases disturbing developments, the manner in which Antichrist writers treated them carried the seeds of a conspiracist view of the world. They saw in them an insidious plan for satanic control. As Grant Jeffrey says:
The prophecies of the Bible tell us a world government will arise in the last days led by the Antichrist, the world’s last dictator. . . . The prophets also foretold that money would cease to exist in the last days. It would be replaced by a cashless society that will use numbers instead of currency to allow you “to buy and sell.” We are now rapidly approaching the moment when these ancient Bible prophecies can be fulfilled through the introduction of the 666–Mark of the Beast financial system of the Antichrist.12
Fundamentalist millenarians saw President Bush’s uttering of the phrase new world order as a sign that the network of Antichrist forces had advanced so far that they could risk speaking about it publicly. To those already habituated to thinking about the Antichrist not simply in individual terms but as a system that drew in the United Nations, computers, and the global economy, the public invocation of the New World Order could only mean that the days of the Tribulation were imminent.
Thus, New World Order came to connote an impending world dictatorship in which the Antichrist would seize control through a combination of co-opted international organizations and marvels of electronic surveillance. But simultaneously, a second conception of the New World Order had arisen, growing in this case from secular roots.
THE ILLUMINATI
The secular version of the New World Order foresaw an equally bleak future, also dominated by expanding tyranny. In this case, however, the source of domination was not the power of Satan but an evil cabal that sought absolute power over the world’s people and resources for its own selfish reasons. Although many secret societies were deemed to be carriers of the conspiracy, the one most often invoked was also the most shadowy and obscure, the Illuminati.
Richard Hofstadter began his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” with an example probably unfamiliar to most of his readers—the belief in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century America that the new nation was about to be taken over by the Bavarian Illuminati. The fear of a plot by this secret Masonic society had been stoked by an earlier literature that sought to portray the French Revolution as the result of an Illuminatist conspiracy. The two key works on this revolutionary conspiracism were John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798) and Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1803). Although the alleged doings of Illuminatist plotters in America seemed credible to some prominent New England clerics and academics, the panic peaked by the turn of the nineteenth century, after which it became increasingly clear that the Illuminati lived mostly in Robison’s fantasy life. Hofstadter himself disposed of the topic by noting that it may have opened the way for the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and 1830s, but he then proceeded to better-known examples of the “paranoid style,” such as anti-Catholic nativism. The Illuminati were relegated to the role of the progenitors of a conspiracist strand in American life that was to take other forms in the future.13
In fact, however, the Illuminati—or at least the image of the Illuminati—had just begun to spread by the 1830s. Both Robison’s and Barruel’s books continued to be reprinted, and both are featured works currently sold by the John Birch Society’s book service. Its catalog touts Barruel’s work as “the most comprehensive expose of a Master Conspiracy to rule the world,” while it offers Robison’s book as a description of “this secret group, whose select members became part of a conspiracy to enslave all people in Europe and America.” By way of updating Robison’s scenario, his current American publisher asserts that the Illuminati “have long since discarded Freemasonry as their vehicle,” preferring
