Did Santorum just call Obama the Antichrist? Updated

The short answer is "yes."

For over thirty years, the religious right has been teaching its followers that they are under siege by modern society, by liberals, by secularists, and by the Democratic Party. Anything they find even moderately unpleasant, their leaders tell them is an attack aimed directly at destroying, not just them, but Christianity and Christians. This paranoid world view fits very well into the Protestant end-times narrative. If they already believe that they are under constant attack by vaguely defined, almost irresistible forces it's not much of a jump to believe that those forces are diabolical in nature. And many do make that jump.

Rick Santorum gladly encourages those feelings of paranoia in his audience and is trying to direct them into a force that he can ride into the White House. When Obama says every kid should go to college, Santorum says that's because the Left uses college to indoctrinate our kids. The secular Left, he warns, wants to crush religious dissent, just like in the old Soviet Union. The day day after Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, Santorum railed that "he has done more to assault religion in this country than any president." Santorum has never been one to shy away from over the top rhetoric including, of course, the Hitler card.

Today he managed to go beyond Hitler and the Soviet Union. Today, he suggested to his followers that Obama is the Antichrist or, at the very least, paving the way for the Antichrist.

They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that. But if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.

So, you might ask, where's the Antichrist in all that talk of the French Revolution? Guillotines have a special place in most versions of the end-time narrative being passed around. The non-raptured Christians who stay behind and battle the Antichrist during the Tribulation are supposed to be martyred on the guillotine if they are captured. End-time writers base this detail on Revelation 20:4.

"Judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands."

This is not an obscure detail; this is something that any apocalyptic Christian will instantly recognise. Google "antichrist" and "guillotine" and you will get over two million results. This is something that even secular survivalists have added to their repertoire of things to be paranoid about. Browse through those Google results and you'll find them all tied up with FEMA concentration camps, the New World Order, vapor trails, Bilderberg, and the Illuminati. It shows up in the Ron Paul forums.

The Obama-Antichrist link isn't new. The urban legend debunking site Snopes has had a page on this since 2009. Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, who was arrested last fall for shooting at the White House was quoted by acquaintances as believing Obama was the Antichrist. Till now, that kind of talk has been limited to televangelists and the fringe. Santorum is taking a big leap by bringing it into the mainstream.

The Antichrist angle is new low, even for Santorum. He needs to be called to account for it.

Update: It looks like the guillotine dog-whistle is going to be a regular part of Santorum's stump speech. He repeated it in Oklahoma today.

It was a secular revolution on which we relied on the goodness of eacother. This is the left’s view of where America should go. And of course where did France go? To the guillotine. To tyranny. If there are no rights that government needs to respect, then what we see with ObamaCare is just the beginning of what government will do to you.

What a disgusting human being.