Ben Carson has surged into the lead in the Republican presidential race, but now The Daily Beast is asking whether it’s awkward for Carson to run for president when his faith believes the U.S. government will team up with the Antichrist in the end times.
Even as a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Carson getting support from 29 percent of GOP voters, The Daily Beast is calling into question the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine about a predicted partnership between the U.S. government and “Babylon” from the book of Revelation before the Second Coming.
“According to mainstream Seventh-day Adventist doctrine, the Second Coming of Christ will occur after the U.S. government teams up with the Catholic Church—which Adventists believe is the ‘Babylon’ of the book of Revelation, with the pope being the Antichrist—to compel Adventists and others to worship on Sunday, rather than Saturday,” wrote Jay Michaelson in his article in The Daily Beast.
“That may seem like a small hook on which to hang the fate of the world, but for Adventists, it is a core belief, taught at ‘prophecy seminars’ and elaborated in excruciating geopolitical detail by key Adventist leaders.”
Michaelson went on to ask what impact this Adventist belief will have on Carson’s evangelical base. So far, no one knows whether Carson shares the belief.
The only time a journalist asked Carson about the end times didn’t result in an answer to this particular question.
“I’m a Christian,” Carson told the reporter. “I belong to the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. I believe in godly principles of loving your fellow man, caring about your neighbor, developing your God-given talents to the utmost so you become valuable to the people around you.”
Pressed further about his eschatological beliefs, Carson said, “You could guess that we are getting closer to that.”
“You do have people who have a belief system that sees this apocalyptic phenomenon occurring, and that they’re a part of it, and who would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if they gain them,” Carson said. “I think we have a chance to certainly do everything that we can to ameliorate the situation, to prevent—I would always be shooting for peace. You know, I wouldn’t just take a fatalistic view of things.”
Nonetheless, Michaelson pointed out that Carson’s Adventism has much in common with conservative evangelical beliefs.
“And evangelicals love Carson’s outrageous comparisons between Obamacare and slavery, the Obama administration and Nazi Germany—perhaps because they so enrage journalists,” Michaelson wrote.
After all, 77 percent of evangelicals believe the world is now living in the biblical end times, polls show.
“That’s compared with 40 percent of Americans, and 51 percent of Protestants overall—still high numbers, when you think about it, but imagine a huge crowd at a mega-church or Christian Right political event,” Michaelson wrote. “Three quarters of those people believe the end of the world is nigh.”
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