Heckler Calls Obama the Antichrist; Obama Proclaims 'Jesus Is Lord'
Obama is the antichrist.
Well, that is according to one heckler in Los Angeles on Monday night. President Obama was interrupted by a man shouting about Christianity as he was giving a speech for a fundraiser at the House of Blues. The man, later identified as David Serrano, was quickly dragged out of the room by security guards.
According to The Associated Press, the man centered himself in the room and started shouting that Jesus Christ is God and that God is a Christian God. The interruption took place immediately after Obama took the stage and the president was forced to stop talking for a moment.
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After that, the Obama-friendly crowd began to chant, “Four more years! Four more years!” in order to drown out the disruptive audience member.
On his way out the door, the heckler proclaimed that Obama was the antichrist.
The antichrist is a figure in Christian theology that is destined to come in the “last days” of Earth. The figure, according to Scripture, will seek to resemble Christ but will in actuality be the antithesis of good. The Bible says that he or she will provide the people with what they need on Earth but will deny them salvation.
As Serrano was being dragged away, Obama nodded as he watched the scene unfold.
Before he continued with his speech, Obama announced: “First of all, I agree, Jesus Christ is the Lord. I believe in that.”
The crowd immediately cheered with approval. The heckler ended up not being arrested.
The heckler’s claim that Obama is the antichrist is among the many myths that surround President Obama regarding his faith.
A Winthrop University poll of South Carolina voters shows that nearly 30 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in that state believe that Obama is a Muslim.
While Obama’s biological father was a Muslim-turned-atheist, Obama was baptized in the United Church of Christ as an adult.
On Monday, MSNBC host of The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell, invited columnist and historian Matthew Sutton to appear on his show to discuss why Obama can’t seem to shake the antichrist accusation. Sutton’s recent column in The New York Times titled, “Why the Antichrist Matters in Politics,” created a stir in the evangelical community.
In the segment, Sutton explains that Obama fits the mold of the evangelical understanding of the antichrist as a superficial character who promises to grant security and peace to all people but is really working on the side of evil. The last president to fit the mold was Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression.
Attacks on Obama’s character started in 2008 when many Republicans considered him a “light weight” and superficial candidate. While Sutton acknowledged the attacks were against “Obama as celebrity and Obama as superstar,” he also mentioned that the image is one of “a twenty-first century kind of leader which raises certain suspicions” by promising peace and prosperity with lofty and emotional language and then not backing those claims up.
According to Sutton, if the economy continues to falter, Obama may continue to have a hard time convincing some on the far religious right that he is, indeed, a Christian.
Sutton writes, “While few of the faithful truly think that the president is the Antichrist, millions of voters, like their Depression-era predecessors, fear that the time is short. The sentiment that Mr. Obama is preparing the United States, as Roosevelt did, for the Antichrist’s global coalition is likely to grow.”
