The American Antichrist and the Apotheosis of Self-Interest: A Warning from an Elder Democracy

What is evil? The Christian theological tradition has a precise answer, developed across fifteen centuries from Augustine through Aquinas: evil is not a substance or a force but a privation — the specific absence of being from a region that should be fully present to the good. At its root is superbia, the primordial self-elevation that the patristic tradition identified as the structure of Satan's fall and the gateway to every other corruption. Contemporary personality psychology has rediscovered the same structure under a different name: the Dark Triad — narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism — the cluster of traits oriented toward personal gain at others' expense, with minimal conscience or remorse, and a clinically documented tendency to seek positions of religious authority.

The American Antichrist brings these two traditions into direct confrontation with the contemporary political and religious landscape. Across seven parts, it traces a single identifiable pattern from the Pharisees Jesus diagnosed — religious authority weaponized to burden the vulnerable while exempting the powerful — through American slavery's theological justifications, the defense of segregation, the suppression of women's suffrage, and into the specific institutions, alliances, policies, and figures of the present moment. The argument is not partisan. It is structural. The mechanism by which narcissistic egoism captures religious authority and turns it against the values of the tradition it has captured is consistent across every era and every political context in which it appears. It has appeared, with documented regularity, on the American right — and this book explains why that is structurally inevitable rather than coincidental.

Drawing on Augustine, Aquinas, Iain McGilchrist's neuroscience of the divided brain, the clinical psychology of personality disorders, Frederick Douglass, and the New Testament in its original Greek, The American Antichrist is both a theological diagnosis and a democratic warning.

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Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 18. juli 2026