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Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. By ROBERT FULLER. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. vii + 232 pp. $25.00.
In this new work, Robert Fuller offers what Michel Foucault would call a "history of the present," tracing the history of Antichrist belief from biblical times to our own. He tells that while the only explicit scriptural references to the Antichrist occurred in the Johannine epistles, the persona of the Antichrist speedily came to be used in general apocalyptic contexts. And although Augustine "spiritualized" Antichrist belief, processes set in motion in the Middle Ages continued on into the time of the Reformation and then among the Puritans, who adopted a more literal stance toward the Antichrist.
In colonial New England, Antichrist belief was at first diffuse, and from 1780 to 1880 when Protestants were at work building a Christian commonwealth, Antichrist rhetoric mostly receded. In the period from 1880 to 1925, though, Fuller argues that conservative...