Credit scores and the Mark of the Beast

I’m still a bit puzzled to learn that many of the same people who formerly denounced supermarket scanners, ATMs, and GPS because of the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast now seem to be rallying around the idea of a national ID card that they say would need to be shown to police upon request.

Hal Lindsey warned us about national ID cards. He was certain that by 1980, such cards would be administered — or perhaps implanted on the hand or the forehead — and that no one would be able to buy or sell anything without one. For generations, any hint of anything even remotely like a national ID card was loudly denounced by Rapture Christians crying Mark of the Beast. And now some of those same folks are demanding that the government start printing them.

To be clear, I don’t want a national ID card. I do wish that, for example, my auto registration and proof of insurance could be coded into my Pennsylvania driver’s license so that I wouldn’t need to carry up-to-date paper hard copies of those in my glove compartment. But even relatively benign technology like that has been politically fraught thanks to paranoid End-Times enthusiasts still freaked out over the guillotine scene in A Distant Thunder.

So again, I’m puzzled. And maybe a bit disappointed. Anti-Antichrist paranoia did have the salutary side-effect of turning anti-Antichristians into unwitting defenders of our civil liberties.

I may be biased here, but I think part of this development may be due to our friends Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The phenomenal popularity of the Left Behind series has changed the way “Bible-prophecy” obsessed Christians think about the Antichrist. Go back to Hal Lindsey, or the films of Donald W. Thompson, or to the earlier Tribulation novels that LaHaye & Jenkins borrowed from/ripped off and you’ll find cunning, devious Antichrists who plot and scheme creatively. Those guys were sneaky and clever, demanding constant vigilance against their soon-to-be-revealed wiles.

But then along comes Left Behind, with the least imaginative Antichrist imaginable. Nicolae Carpathia inspires the world by reciting the list of countries alphabetically. This stirs up such national pride in his audience that all of those countries promptly disband, voluntarily ceding him global sovereignty. And then, once he is named global potentate and leader of the one-world government, he turns around and declares war against himself, bombing all the cities he now leads because … um, well, just because bwahaha — Antichrist!

So instead of semi-lucid conspiracy theories about the Mark of the Beast, now we get third-rate nonsense like last year’s freak-out over Jade Helm. People were worried that the United States was plotting to invade Texas. This confusion of boundaries and nationalities and arbitrary war against oneself read like something taken directly from Nicolae Carpathia’s playbook.

People steeped in Left Behind’s version of this folklore no longer expect an Antichrist with a devious plan that makes any sense. And since they’ve stopped expecting the Antichrist to think creatively and coherently, they’ve become less able to think creatively and even semi-coherently about the Antichrist.

And that’s a shame, because I have a terrific candidate for what could have been the next target of their Mark-of-the-Beast vigilance: Credit scores.

It fits. Here, again, is the Mark-of-the-Beast crowd’s favorite passage from Revelation 13:

Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. … It causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is 666.

So we’re looking for a three-digit number without which no one will be permitted to buy or sell. Credit scores, people, think about it.

They’re calculated in secret by a triumvirate of unelected overlords who constitute a kind of shadow-government not restricted by national boundaries. They’re assigned to each of us, for they are the number of a person. And if that number is too low, things begin to get prohibitively expensive, making buying and selling ever-more difficult. How low is too low? We can’t know for sure — Mystery Babylon guards such mysteries — but I’ve been assured that it’s best to keep one’s credit score above 700. Dip too far below that — to, say, 666, or 616 (according to other ancient manuscripts) — and you’re going to be paying a poverty-tax on many transactions.

We could go on — consider how the reign of the credit rating agencies was prophesied in the book of Daniel: “And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh.”

Three ribs, people. Transunion, Equifax, Experian. Three. What more do you need?

But apparently we can no longer count on the people we used to be able to count on to get riled up by this sort of thing. Despite this clear fulfillment of biblical prophecy, we can’t rely on Bible-prophecy fans to rise up against credit scoring the same way they once reliably opposed computerized records, RFID chips for pets, and pay-at-the-pump credit-card scanners.