That's the RedState response to Amy Sullivan's Time piece. Andrew, no doubt, is not at all amused. He wrote, in response to this post (and this shirt):
Ross thinks it's "(ahem) a joke," which it is. A harmless joke, given the legions of evangelical Christians waiting for the Rapture and convinced that only the Republican party represents the will of God? I guess it's just as well that Ross thinks the religious right is entirely a function of the liberal media's imagination.Um ... I don't recall ever making the ludicrous claim that the religious right is "entirely a function of the liberal media's imagination," though I suppose I do think that some of the particular dangers supposedly posed by religious-conservative activism - an American theocracy, for instance, or a foreign policy based on premillenial dispensationalism - are manifestations of liberal and secularist paranoia. Of course Andrew is right that there are millions of Americans (I've known more than a few myself) who hew to an end-times narrative that approximates the events depicted in the Left Behind saga, or similarly-fanciful attempts to read the Book of Revelation literally on to contemporary affairs. And no doubt a small and paranoid minority of these believers will be susceptible to the suggestion that Barack Obama might be the prophesied Man of Sin, in the same way that a deluded minority of Christians was taken with the notion that Mikhail Gorbachev (with that Satanic birthmark!) was the Antichrist. But I think that once you drill down through the large group of believers who tell pollsters they believe in an imminent Second Coming (a group, as Anthony Gottlieb points out, that apparently includes a fifth of non-Christians!) to the much smaller group for whom the belief is a very important part of everyday life (and voting-booth conduct), to the even smaller group prone to fantasies about the Carpathian potential of Democratic nominees for President, you've reached a demographic too tiny to have any significant impact on American politics at all, let alone be the secret target of subliminally-messaged campaign ads.
There's a lot of subterranean craziness in American life - always has been, always will be - and Obama's candidacy is bringing quite a bit of it bubbling to the surface: The "he's a Muslim" chain emails are the break-out conspiracy theory of this election cycle, but I'm sure that lots and lots of paranoiacs will see an Obama President as confirmation of their darkest fears. (All of the books I just linked to, alas, are currently outselling Grand New Party on Amazon.) But I'm also pretty confident that the "Antichrist" meme will remain sufficiently marginal, even within the world of marginal memes, that I won't regret treating RedState's horned "O" as the satire on Obamaphile hagiography it's intended to be, rather than as marching orders for the humorless legions of Christianists currently massing in the hinterland.
