The Devil in Disguise?

The leaders of several small warring countries and a giant in the computer industry have all been singled out as suspects, but so have the World Bank, NATO and the credit card system. Now that the time of tribulation is near, at least by some calculations, the finger pointing has skipped from El Nino’s end-of-the-world weather to the Y2K computer virus that threatens havoc at the turn of the century.

With 2000 in easy reach, a cross-section of Christians who interpret the Bible literally, along with a good number of others who may have never read the Bible, share a common vision of the future. They expect the antichrist to appear any day.

From the start of Christianity, candidates for the role of Satan’s protege have never been lacking. Rome’s Emperor Nero, who persecuted Christians in the first century; Pope John XXII, who was denounced as a heretic in the Middle Ages; Russia’s oppressive Peter the Great at the turn of the 18th century; Napoleon; Mussolini; Hitler have all been named at one time or another.

New names surface on the Internet by the day, in e-mail messages and chat room conversations monitored by Steven O’Leary at the Center for Millennial Studies at USC. He has seen suggestions as diverse as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and King Juan Carlos of Spain. Gates was a tongue-in-cheek numerological calculation--”a bit of antichrist humor,” O’Leary says. Juan Carlos was based on the honorary title “king of Jerusalem,” held for centuries by Spain’s ruler. To some who keep a watch for the antichrist, it sounds like a pretender’s claim.

“Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a flash in the pan during the Persian Gulf War in ‘91,” says O’Leary, whose center also tracks news and gathers historical research about the end times.

Several rock stars have claimed the title for themselves: Johnny Rotten in the mid-’70s with his song lyric “I am an antichrist,” and now Marilyn Manson, whose 1996 “Antichrist Superstar” album sold 1.2 million copies.

With millennium fever in the air, vivid imaginations have been let loose.

“Almost no candidate is too implausible,” O’Leary says. “Social institutions, people with power whose intentions we’re not sure of--they’re all being named.”

The nonstop guessing looks to O’Leary like a game of Pin the Tail on the Antichrist. But many clergy people consider it a dangerous sport.

“People have been naming names for years,” says Pentecostal minister T.D. Jakes, whose Dallas-based television ministry reaches 3 million viewers worldwide. “We profess to know more than we know. I have no idea who the antichrist is. Where the Bible is silent, we should be silent.”

His reasons are obvious. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell preached in January that the antichrist must be Jewish because Christ was Jewish and that Satan’s protege is alive today, the televangelist set off an alarm.

Jewish leaders called the speech “radioactive” and said the Bible does not identify the antichrist by any ethnic background. They stopped short of accusing Falwell of anti-Semitism, since he has been a supporter of an independent state of Israel.

More than 40 million Americans believe that the millennium will bring the second coming of Christ, according to a recent Los Angeles Times Poll. Followers of biblical prophecy would add that such a day will launch the battle between ultimate good and evil, the Great Deceiver against the faithful followers of Christ.

From the Bible’s few details, a long, complex story has developed that sets the scene for Satan’s man to emerge. Some consider the story to be fact; others call it a folk tale:

There will be the rapture, a time when the faithful will be raised to heaven. Then, a time of tribulation when catastrophes make the world susceptible to the lure of a false redeemer who will look like a godsend at first. After years of a violent rule, the dreaded battle of Armageddon will begin and the antichrist will be defeated. Christ the victor ushers in 1,000 years of peace.

The villain’s scant few bones lie embedded in three books of the Bible: Revelation, the first letter of John and the book of Daniel.

Revelation’s Chapter 13 warns of a beast who gains control of the world and stamps his mark, 666, on human body parts. The number is a numerological calculation standing for an unnamed oppressor. The chapter does not suggest the beast is the antichrist, but many Christians have interpreted it that way.

In the first letter of John, the term “the antichrist” describes an unnamed opponent to Christianity whose rise to power will be a sign that the end is near.

The Old Testament’s book of Daniel, with its apocalyptic predictions of invasion and the triumph of good, is a key source in Hebrew scripture for an end-of-time scenario. Other predictions of an ultimate battle are found in Isaiah and Ezekiel. Although Jews do not believe Christ was the savior, Jewish tradition does allow for the coming of a false messiah with evil intent.

Muslims took up the Christian theme after their religion’s founder, Muhammad, died in 632, and resistance to Islam led to violence and persecution. Many Muslims still believe that Christ, whom they consider a prophet but not the son of God, will come again and lead an end-time battle against Dajjal, Islam’s name for the antichrist.

Laverne Flynt, 60, an administrative assistant at UCLA Medical Center and a born-again Christian, has been piecing together her image of the antichrist for 20 years. The Bible, a recent spate of half-forgotten disaster movies (“the one about the tidal wave is just like what will happen,” she says) and frequent trips to Logos, a Christian bookstore in Westwood, have helped.

“He looks like a savior, and for three years there will be peace,” Flynt says of the devil’s disciple.

After that?

“I feel like anything is possible.”

At the mention of the unknown future, conversation takes a sudden swerve. Flynt describes a plan to stockpile food and medicine.

“Not that I think Y2K is it,” she says. “The antichrist is a person. But the discomfort will show us what it’ll be like when he takes over. On a scale of 1 to 10, Y2K is a 1 compared to what [the antichrist] will be like.”

Pop culture is pumping up the anxiety pitch. Wayward asteroids, invaders from outer space, comets, the tidal waves Flynt describes so vividly and scaly monsters, have all tried to wreck the planet lately.

O’Leary says that people watch this stuff and get ideas.

“I know who the antichrist is, I saw him at the movies. That’s the thinking,” he says. The “Omen” films from the mid-1970s, which depict the coming of the antichrist in the form of a young boy, still serve as the basic source.

Books about the end of the world with the antichrist in a leading role are bestsellers on the religious as well as mainstream lists. None more so than “Left Behind” (Tyndale House, 1995), a series of four books of apocalyptic fiction that have sold more than 3 million copies. Authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins set the stories in the present and project modern social, economic and political fears into the near future. When the international economic depression hits, the antichrist will step in, set up a one-world currency and dominate the world.

Bernard McGinn, an editor of the three-volume encyclopedia on the apocalypse due this summer from Continuum Press, has noticed that three kinds of people are keeping the antichrist watch.

“Some believe in a literal fashion,” McGinn says. “Some say it’s a superstition. And there are those who see the antichrist as related to something within ourselves.”

Fans of Manson (whose real name is Brian Warner) would say that the rock star comes under McGinn’s third category, when he warns that he could be the devil’s disciple. (“The time has come it is quite clear, our antichrist is almost here,” the title song of his “Antichrist Superstar” hammers.)

“Manson’s pointing out the negativity in the world, he’s saying there’s a lot that’s bad,” says Brad Wilgus, 28, a bass guitarist who listens to Manson’s harrowing music when he’s feeling frustrated. “There’s a certain amount of release in recognizing the darker side in the world and in yourself. It’s a way of exorcising your own demons.”

Fascist uniforms, Nazi banners on stage and warnings to the crowd not to be oppressed by the “fascism” of religion have parents far from convinced that the rocker is a wise old man.

“Manson may just be the flavor of the month, but with violence in schools, teenage shootings and all the rest, it frightens me,” says Rick Farquar, 52, a parent and the leader of a recovery program at the nondenominational Christian Church at Rocky Peak in Chatsworth. Still, he doesn’t believe that a rock star masked in ghoulish makeup is Satan’s protege. “The most charming, most charismatic public figure is the one to fear, not the one with horns and a tail,” he says.

Rather than a single demonic person, it is a pervasive condition of evil among us that will flourish in the last days, according to the Jewish vision. This view raises perhaps the most important question about the potential of a future dominated by the prince of darkness.

How do we take the subject seriously, if not literally?

“I feel we’re living in days of unparalleled global challenge,” says Lanier Burns, chairman of the theology department at Dallas Theological Seminary. “Conglomerates that monopolize, corporations that downsize, sports teams we can’t follow anymore because they move away or dissolve, fear of tyranny. These things make us angry. The idea of God as the warrior and conqueror is pretty popular right now.”

He sees other complications.

“We’re superstitious,” he says, “and we don’t have many thinking voices speaking out. We’re living in a seedbed of insecurity. That can lead to a heightened insecurity that is dangerous.

“We’ll be fine if the public doesn’t have a mania. But we can orchestrate our own destruction if we’re not careful.”

Mary Rourke can be reached by e-mail at mary.rourke@latimes.com.