Latest / Abide Meditation App / Why Evangelicals Started Looking for 666 in Barcodes

Transcript

Why Evangelicals Started Looking for 666 in Barcodes · Abide Meditation App

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Take a look at the keypad on your smartphone. There's
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: a star key in the bottom left corner and a
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: pound key in the bottom right. Most people go their
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: entire lives barely pressing either one. But in nineteen eighty one,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: a woman in Montgomery, Alabama, published a book explaining what
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: those buttons were really for. Her name was Mary Stuart Ralph.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: She claimed that the engineers who designed the keypad had
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: been instructed to include what she called two mystery buttons
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: when the time came. The star key would connect you
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: to a central banking computer. The pound key would enable
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: you to enter an amount of money. Ralph believed those
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: buttons were waiting for the arrival of a cashless society,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: a centralized electronic system in which every person on earth
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: would be identified by a number. The keypad was just
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: one small piece of a much larger system, she called
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: the six hundred sixty six system. She thought it was
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: coming soon because she claimed to see the number six
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: everywhere on credit cards with the prefix sixty sixty six,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: IRS badge numbers with sixty sixty six. The publication of
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: an algebra textbook titled six hundred and sixty six Jellybeans
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Ralph thought it all pointed to a prophecy in the
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Book of Revelation where a beast forces everyone rich or poor,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: free or enslaved to take a mark on the right
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: hand or the forehead, and no one can buy or
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: sell without it. She was not a fringe outlier. For
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: the past fifty years, American evangelicals have repeatedly interpreted new
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: payment and identification technologies through this passage, credit cards, electronic banking,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: upc barcodes, biometric scanners, implantable chips, and even the COVID
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: nineteen vaccine. The specific technology keeps changing, but the underlying
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: fear doesn't. Cash will one day disappear. Economic life will
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: be controlled by a centralized authority, and access to that
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: system will depend on submitting to the Antichrist placing a
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: mark on or in the human body. So why has
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: this belief survived so many failed prophecies. Let's start with
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: the source text itself. As I said, the mark of
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: the beast appears in Revelation chapter thirteen. This chapter gives
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: us two beasts. The first crawls up out of the
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: sea with seven heads, ten horns, and blasphemous names written
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: across it. A dragon hands it a throne and authority,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: and the whole world falls in line and worships it.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Then a second beast comes up out of the land.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: This one looks less fearsome at first, with two little
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: horns like a lamb, but it talks like a dragon,
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: and it exercises authority on behalf of the first beast.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: It performs miracles, calling fire down from the sky, and
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: it sets up a statue of the first beast that
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: everyone is forced to bow down and worship. And that's
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: where the mark comes in. The second beast makes everyone
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: take the mark of the beast, and the mark itself
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: as a number, six hundred sixty six. The author then
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: tells his readers to calculate it because it's the number
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: of a person. In both Greek and Hebrew letters double
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: as numerals, so any name adds up to a total.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: It works a bit like scoring a word in scrabble.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: Each letter has a number assigned to it and you
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: can add it up to form a score. The practice
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: is called gomatria, and if you spell Nero Caesar in
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: Hebrew letters, you get six hundred and sixty six. The
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: Greek word translated here as brand is karagma, which comes
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: from a verb meaning to scratch or engrave. It's related
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: to the English word character in the old sense of
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: a letter carved into stone. Karagma was a very bureaucratic term.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: It shows up in Roman administrative papyri preserved in the
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Sands of Egypt, where it refers to an official stamp
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: that made a transaction legal. It was also the ordinary
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: word for a brand burned into livestock, or a brand
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: or tattoo marking an enslaved person as someone's property. So
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: in its commercial sense, a karagma is a mark of
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: ownership or authorization, applied by someone with the power to authorize.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: So when a first entry audience read that nobody could
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: buy or sell without a karagma, they were probably picturing
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: commercial paperwork, a stamp on a landed, a seal on
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: a receipt, or maybe an imperial coin, and the mark
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: is set up as a counterfeit. In Revelation Chapter fourteen,
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: one hundred and forty four thousand people are chosen from
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: the twelve tribes of Israel and marked on the forehead
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: with a seal. Sragi's in Greek a word closely tied
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: to divine protection and ownership. The followers of the beast
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: get a karagma instead on their forehead or their right hand.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Scol Has read this as a deliberate parody, a false
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: seal mimicking the real one, with the two groups set
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: in parallel, one sealed with divine identity and the other
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: branded with the number of a villainous emperor. Nero scholars
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: like Stephen Friesan argue that this should be read against
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: the cultural background of Western Asia Minor, where Revelation was
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: most likely composed. Roman emperor worship was everywhere there. Major
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: cities like Pergamon, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Aphrodisius all had imperial temples,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: and cities competed with each other for the privilege of
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: hosting the imperial cult, which came with the honorific title
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Neo Koros Temple warden. It was a status symbol worth
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: lobbying the emperor for, and every coin carried the emperor's portrait,
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: often with titles like Son of the Divine. So for
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: a Christian living in Western Asia Minor to buy anything
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: at all, you had to handle a small, blasphemous image.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: So putting it all together, the mark of the beast
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: and revel. Slation thirteen is a stamp of ownership, borrowed
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: from the language of commercial documents and slave brands, and
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: set up as a deliberate counterfeit of the seal that
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: God puts on his own people. So where did the
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: modern belief about microchips and barcodes come from? The foundations
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: for these beliefs date back to the eighteen thirties with
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: the Anglo Irish minister John Nelson Darby. He worked out
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: a system for reading the Bible that divided history into
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: distinct eras dispensations, each one governed by a different arrangement
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: between God and humanity. The important move for our purposes
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: here is what he did with prophecy. Darby and later
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: dispensationalists read the unfulfilled parts of the Bible as a
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: literal schedule of events still to come. First, There'll be
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: a rapture, a seven year tribulation, the rise of the
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Anti Christ, and then Armageddon. The system reached America through
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: the Revival circuit. The minister Dwight L. Moody met Darby
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy two and carried this form of end
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Time's theology into American evangelicalism. Then in nineteen o nine,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: the whole framework was printed inside the hugely popular Schofield
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Reference Bible. The explanatory notes at the bottom of the
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: pages were filled with dispensationalist theology, which means that anyone
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: who was raised with the Schofield Reference Bible encountered dispensationalism
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: as part of the reading experience itself, rather than as
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: one interpretation among several Scofield's actual note on Revelation thirteen
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: doesn't say anything about technology or money or identification systems.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Though the modern technological reading of the mark takes another
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: fifty or sixty years to emerge. It begins in the
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, when evangelical prophecy writers start looking at a
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: rapidly computerized economy and imagining the arrival of a cashless society.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: The most influential of these writers was the evangelical minister
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: Hal Lindsay. His book The Late Great Planet Earth came
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: out in nineteen seventy and sold tens of millions of
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: copies over the next two decades. And what he did
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: in the book is take prophecies from across the Bible
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: and treat them as descriptions of events that haven't happened yet,
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: matching them with whatever was happening in the newspaper. For example,
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Ezekiel thirty eight mentions an invader coming from the north
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: well that must be the Soviet Union. In his version
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: of Revelation thirteen, a false prophet takes control of the
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: world economy. Anyone who won't swear allegiance to the coming
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: world ruler is either killed or put in a position
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: where they can't buy anything, sell anything, or hold a job.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: And everyone who does swear that allegiance gets a tattoo
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: on the forehead or on the right hand. So he
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: doesn't exactly read the mark of the Beast as some
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: sort of financial technology, but there's a short section right
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: after that where he opens the door to that interpretation.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: Lindsay imagines a reader rolling their eyes and saying, oh, come, now,
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: do you believe it will be possible for people to
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: be controlled economically? And his answer is that we're already
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: halfway there, he writes. In our computerized society, where we
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: all are numbered from birth to death, it seems completely
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: plausible that someday in the near future, the numbers racket
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: will consolidate and we will have just one number for
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: all our business money and credit transactions. Leading members of
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: the business community are now planning that all money matters
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: will be handled electronically. The scholar of religion, Glen Shuck
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: makes the point that Lindsay was not the first dispensationalist
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: writer to talk about the mark of the Beast, but
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: he was the first one to make the discussion palpable
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: and trendy for a public audience, and he laid the
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: groundwork about banking technology being a tool for the Antichrist.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: And as the nineteen seventies went on, that speculation began
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: to feel increasingly plausible. Money, commerce, and personal identity were
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: all becoming more abstract and computerized. At roughly the same time.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy one, President Nixon ended the fixed convertibility
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: of the dollar into gold. Credit cards were spreading rapidly.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Employers increasingly used direct deposit, allowing a paycheck to appear
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: as an electronic change in your bank statement rather than
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: a physical object you receive. Then came the universal product code.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Manufacturers began printing standardized machine readable bar codes on consumer goods,
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: and supermarkets installed scanners capable of reading them. Automatically, goods
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: had numbers, bank accounts had numbers, credit cards had numbers,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: and people were increasingly identified within government and corporate systems
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: by numbers. Evangelical writers gathered all of this under a
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: phrase that sounded both futuristic and ominous, the cashless society.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: Money would no longer need to pass physically from one
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: person to another. It could move electronically through interconnected computer
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: systems attached to an account and an identifying number. Together,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: these changes created a technological world that looked remarkably similar
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: to the one how Lindsay had invited his readers to imagine.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: So imagine you're an evangelical Christian reading Lindsay in the
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: late nineteen seventies. Within about a decade, money had gone
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: from being paper backed by a precious metal to paperbacked
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: by an agreement to a number in a ledger. And
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: you're increasingly not handling the paper anyway, because you're probably
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: carrying a plastic card with a number on it. You
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: might well be thinking about that passage from how Lindsay,
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: that we are all numbered from birth to death, and
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: that someday those numbers will consolidate into one, which brings
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: us back to Mary Stuart Ralph. Her book When Your
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Money Fails, opens with a list that she calls the
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Big three prophetic fulfillments of this age. Number one is
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: the birth of Jesus. Number two is the founding of
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: the state of Israe Trail in nineteen forty eight and
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: the capture of Jerusalem in nineteen sixty seven. Number three
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: she dates to nineteen eighty the worldwide usage of the
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: number six hundred sixty six, the numerical entity characterizing and
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: identifying the last one world government. She calls this the
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: six to sixty six system, and it's the frame for
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: everything else in her book. Her argument isn't that any
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: single item on her list is the mark of the beast.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: It's that six sixty six had surfaced suddenly, simultaneously and
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: deliberately across the political, economic, and religious institutions of the world,
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: and a pattern that broad must have someone behind it.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: And as I mentioned at the start, she claims she
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: sees six hundred sixty six everywhere. New credit cards in
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: the US, central computers for department stores like Sears, and J. C. Penny,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: license plate numbers in Israel. You name it, she has
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: in her book, and she describes the final product pretty plainly.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Buying and selling will be done electronically through video telephone networks.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: There will be no banks to hold up, no cash
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: in purse, no robberies, no cards to lose or steal.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: The number is on each person's head, which can't be borrowed.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Kidnapping will be a thing of the past. The Antichrist
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: and the false prophet will declare no more crime, no
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: more war, peace and safety. As evidence that the network
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: was already being built, she pointed to three pieces of technology.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: The first was the telephone keypad that we started with.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Her claim was that the engineers had been instructed to
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: include two mystery buttons, the asterisk and the pound sign.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: The second was a laser tattoo gun capable of rapidly
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: tattooing every person on Earth. And the third was a
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: soft injectable plastic developed by a labin Orlando. Injected under
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: the skin, it spreads out and hardens into a smooth surface,
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: which she points out, is exactly what you would need
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: if you were planning to write a permanent number on
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: every single person with a laser. She concludes that the
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: banking system was already starting with this plan. She writes,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: banks are now ready to begin imprinting these permanent numbers
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: in the right hand or in the forehead. Note that
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: John says in not on here, or she's likely referring
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: to the King James version, which does say in instead
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: of on, though the original Greek uses the prepositions epi,
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: which more often means on now. None of this happened.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: The star key on your telephone does not in fact
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: connect you to a central banking computer. There was no
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: laser tattoo gun campaign with injectable plastic plates, and J. C.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: Penny did not in fact turn out to be an
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: instrument of the Antichrist. But the next generation of readers
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: who found Ralph persuasive in the nineteen eighties mostly didn't
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: experience the next few decades as a prophecy failure. The
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: dispensationalist framework reads prophecies in light of current events, so
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: it always has new fuels, and the nineteen nineties and
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: two thousands provided plenty of fuel. In nineteen ninety five,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: a pastor named Tim Lahay and a professional writer named
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Jerry Jenkins published a novel called Left Behind. Lahay wasn't
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: a novelist. He was a pastor, prophecy teacher and one
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: of the architects of the religious right. He co founded
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: the Moral Majority with Jerry Folwell in nineteen seventy nine.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Jenkins did the actual writing, but Hay supplied the theological
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: framework and made sure that the plot matched the prophetic
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: future as he understood it. The book was an enormous success.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: It grew into a franchise of sixteen novels, a spinoff
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: series for teenagers, and several films. The Mark itself doesn't
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: arrive until book eight, five years into the series. The
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: book is called The Mark, and it's sold over two
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: million copies in hardcover. In the story, the Antichrist announces
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: a loyalty program. You report to an application site where
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: two things happen. First, you're injected with a biochip under
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: the skin, either in the right hand or in the forehead.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: The chip carries your identification and it's how you pay
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: for things because cash no longer exists. Second, you receive
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: a visible tattoo. You can choose either the anti Christ's
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: name or the number of your world region. The novels
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: call the whole package the Mark of Loyalty. If you refuse,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: there's a guillotine, which the novels refer to as a
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: loyalty enforcement facilitator. So notice that the series follows Rel's
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: model pretty closely. An injectable paired with a tattoo. And
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: even though this was technically Prophecy fiction, it shaped how
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: a lot of American evangelicals interped a sequence of events
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: in the two thousands. In October of two thousand and four,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: the FDA cleared a device called the vera chip for
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: implantation in human beings, an RFID transponder about the size
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: of a grain of rice, holding a sixteen digit number
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: that links to a medical record. That same year, at
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: nightclub in Barcelona started implanting them in VIP customers so
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: they could skip the line and run a bar tab
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: without carrying a wallet, which, just so unclear, is an
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: injectable chip in the hand used to buy something. Prophecy
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: influencers had a lot of material to work with here. Then,
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: in two thousand and five, two Prophecy researchers named Katherine
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Albrecht and Liz McIntyre published a book called Spy Chips.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: It was all about corporate and government tracking through radio tags.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: The following year, they published a second version, specifically for
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Christian audiences, the spy chips threat why Christians should resist
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: RFID and electronic surveillance. Albrecht even wrote a children's book
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: along these same lines. It's titled I Won't Take the Mark,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: a Bible book and contract for children. It markets itself
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: as a beautifully illustrated, in scripturally accurate book tenderly conveying
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: the warnings of Revelation. Each book comes with a frameable
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: eight x ten certificate with a vow to obey God
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: and never take the Mark of the Beast. By the
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: twenty ten z the argument moved into court in twenty twelve.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: A West Virginia coal mine installed a biometric hand scanner
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: to tract shifts. Wave your hand over the reader on
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: the way in, wave it again on the way out.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: A miner at the company named Beverly Butcher refused. He
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: was an evangelical Christian, and he wrote to management explaining
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: that hand scanning technology was connected to the Mark of
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: the Beast. The company tried to talk him out of it. First,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: they pointed out the Revelation specifies the right hand, so
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: Butcher could scan with his left. Then they produced a
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: letter from the scanner's manufacturer, which offered the company's own
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: interpretation of revelation, assuring him that the machine does not
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: assign the mark of the beast. But Butcher was not convinced,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: and he retired Rather than submit to the scan and
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, A federal agency sued on
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: his behalf. A jury sided with him, and in twenty seventeen,
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: the Fourth Circuit awarded him almost six hundred thousand dollars.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: The court's reasoning was that it was not the company's
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: place or the court's place to decide whether Butcher's theology
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: was correct, and they failed to accommodate his religious belief.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Then comes the COVID nineteen pandemic. By the spring of
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty, stories started circulating that any coronavirus vaccine would
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: carry an implanted microchip which was interpreted through the lens
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: of the mark of the beast tradition. In March twenty
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: twenty one, New York State launched its first vaccine passport,
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: an app with a QR code that you'd scan to
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: get into a venue, and on March twenty ninth, twenty
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: twenty one, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green went live on Facebook
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: to denounce it, and then tweeted out her argument in
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: compressed form. What she said that what the government was
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: really doing was tying your ability to buy and sell
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: to a vaccine passport, so they might as well call
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: it Biden's Mark of the Beast. Then, in December twenty
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: twenty one, as Swedish company announced an implantable chip that
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: stores your vaccine passport under your skin. This is when
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: evangelical pastor Franklin Graham responded on Facebook. He quoted Revelation
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: thirteen and said he didn't personally think that this particular
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: chip was the mark, but then he added, it does
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: make you think how close we may be. Christians around
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: the world are wondering of COVID nineteen is being used
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: as a way to condition the world population to accept
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: a mark like this, whatever form it may take. For him.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: If a chip under the skin can hold vaccine information,
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: adding personal and financial data would be a short step away. Now.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: To be clear, Graham as pro vaccine and had publicly
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: argued that Jesus would endorse vaccination. So this is a
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: mainstream evangelical leader who accepts the whole interpretive framework. While
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: at the same time rejecting this particular candidate for the
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: role of the mark of the beast. So bringing it
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: all together, viewing financial and identification technologies as the mark
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: of the beast is a durable belief in American evangelicalism
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: dating back to the nineteen seventies, and it has such
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: staying power because it sits at the intersection of three things.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: There's an interpretive engine dispensationalism, there's real anxiety about centralized
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: authorities surveiling our bodies, and there's a delivery system in
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: the evangelical media industry that keeps the story in circulation.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: We've already touched on the interpretive engine, which is dispensationalism.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: This literalist way of reading the Bible supplies believers with
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: a future history, a sequence of events understood to be certain.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: A one world economic system requiring a bodily mark is
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: expected in advance, and that expectation primes evangelical Christians to
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: fit each new payment or identification technology into a script
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: that has already been written, and the interpretive work is
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: just figuring out where the new thing fits. We can
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: treat all of this as one continuous interpretive cycle deriving
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: from a particular way of reading the Bible. The second
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: factor keeping this tradition going is anxiety about the body
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: and centralized authority, what the sociologist Torn Monaham and Tyler
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: Wall call somatic surveillance. That means being monitored through your
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: body rather than through the documents you carry or your
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: data Online. Revelation is very specific about the mark going
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: on the body, and that specificity turns out to determine
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: which technologies get accused. The media scholar Jordan Frith makes
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: this point about RFID. RFID is everywhere. It's in your passport,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: your office badge, the tag on a sweater at target,
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: and while these are sometimes demonized apocalyptic imagination, Frith argues
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: that the subcutaneous implants get most of the focus because
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: of the convergence of data within the human body. He writes, ultimately,
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: the discourses surrounding the mark focus on questions of identification
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: and payment. Data moving into the body. The body and
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: evangelical fears becomes a nexus through which capitalism must pass
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: in terms of exchange of payment information. And while Frith
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: says he doesn't personally believe that RFID is a tool
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: of the Antichrist, he does think the legend raises interesting
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: questions about how specific communities understand the convergence of data
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: and the body. Evangelical apocalypticism is one venue where concerns
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: about surveillance capitalism are being worked out in public. The
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: third thing making this belief so durable is a folklore
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: transmission system. The prophecy publishing industry and now social media
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: have kept this story alive for decades, and that industry
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: has a commercial reason to keep refreshing it. Novelty and
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: urgency are what sell prophecy books, so every new technology
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: and crisis is an occasion to publish essentially the same
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: argument in a new package. Scholars who study these traditions
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: argue that claims about barcodes and injectable microchips behave less
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: like a religious doctrine and more like urban legends. The
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: scholar Alexander Panchenko traced one of these mark of the
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: beast urban legends, the idea that there's a massive beast
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: supercomputer in Brussels, and the standard version of the legend
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: it's a machine so large it fills three floors of
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: a building in Brussels, capable of assigning a number to
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: every human being. On Earth. He tracked the story back
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: to the mid nineteen seventies to a radio station in
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: Oklahoma City. He thinks the story was originally authored by
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: pastors David Weber and Noah Hutchings, who later published a
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: book in the nineteen eighties called Computers in the Beast
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: of Revelation and the Brussels Supercomputer. Idea got popularized in
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Mary Ralph's book, but it kept moving. Decades later. Versions
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: of that same rumors surfaced in post Soviet Russia, where
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: Russian Orthodox believers were protesting new tax identification numbers, barcodes,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: and electronic cards. The supercomputer, of course, never existed, but
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: the story recirculated for fifty years, amplified by the Christian
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: media industry, and crossed into another country into an entirely
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: different Christian tradition. So, putting the three mechanisms together, we
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: have an interpretive framework. Dispensationalism, somatic surveillance, anxiety in a
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: folklore transmission vehicle. Combined, they've continually animated the belief that
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: the mark of the Beast will be found in the
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: world of banking or identification technology. The interpretive framework guarantees
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: that a marking technology is coming someday, so believers are
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: always watching for candidates. The anxiety about our bodies and
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: centralized systems surveiling us determines which candidates get noticed, which
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: is why technologies involving the body, like implants, hand scanners,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: and vaccines generate more concerns than shipping labels. Mary Stuart
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Relp was fixated on bar codes, but I suspect modern
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: prophecy influencers regarded as ordinary technology now. But the interpretive
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: framework didn't disappear when the barcode failed to become the
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: mark of the beast, it simply moved on to the
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: next candidate. The irony is that these legends grow out
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: of genuine fears. Governments and corporations really do collect enormous
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: amounts of information about US. Financial systems really can exclude people.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Biometric technologies really can turn parts of the human body
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: into credentials. The historian of religion, David Frankfurter has written
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: about how societies turn to fuse anxieties like these into
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: stories about organized evil. In his book Evil Incarnate, he
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: examines recurring rumors about witches, satanic cults, ritual murder, and
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: demonic conspiracies, and he argues that these stories take scattered
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: fears and anxieties and arrange them into a coherent system,
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: and experts emerge who claim to know how to identify
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: the signs in the technological mark of the Beast tradition. Prophecy,
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: writers and influencers play that expert role. They take technologies
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: developed by different peoples in different industries for different reasons,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: and assemble them into a single satanic narrative. And that's
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: why whenever a new technology promises to make buying, selling,
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: and identifying people more efficient, somebody begins looking for the
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: number six. One of the best out there to cover
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: the creepier corners of folklore is the creator A Bit Frank.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: She has a series called A Bit Obscure where she
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: travels to strange, half forgotten places and digs into what
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: actually happened there. My favorite episode covers an ancient indigenous
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: ceremonial site sitting in the middle of Marietta, Ohio. Much
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: of the site was destroyed as the town was built,
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: except for the burial mound, partly because when settlers showed
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: up in the seventeen eighties, they started burying their own
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: dead around it. Ancient sacred ground was preserved because a
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: totally different group decided it was sacred too. The episodes
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: are beautifully shot, and she narrates them like ghost stories,
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: even when the history is fully documented. This is the
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: sort of high effort, human made content you can find
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: on Nebula. Nebula's a streaming platform built and owned by
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: independent creators like me, and it's home to a growing
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: library of original shows where the creators get to make
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: the most ambitious version of their idea. We've got heavy
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: hitting documentaries like seventeen Pages, which covers one of the
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: biggest science scandals of the twentieth century, feature length video
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: essays like Sarah Z's Three Dead Girls I Love, which
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: is about power, memory and the women history has turned
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: into cautionary tales. And we've even got travel competition shows
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: like Jetlag. The Game. The newest season has two teams
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: racing across the US trying to claim territory by connecting states.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: Whoever ends with the biggest run of connected states wins.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: So if you want to watch a bit obscure along
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: with all of the amazing content we're making over at Nebula,
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: the best way to sign up is through my link
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Nebula dot tv slash Religion for breakfast right now. That
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: gets you fifty percent off an annual plan that's thirty
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: dollars for the whole year or two and a half
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: dollars a month. But if you'd rather pay once and
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: be done with it, there's also a lifetime plan. It's
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: normally five hundred dollars, but my link gets you two
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: hundred dollars off, so it's a one time payment of
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: three hundred dollars and you never pay for Nebula again.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: Either way, you're directly supporting me and a bunch of
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: other independent creators. Again, that's Nebula dot tv slash Relligion
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: for breakfast or scan the QR code here on screen.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Thanks everyone,