Playing Chess With the Beast

Where Trust Belongs

Christians are called to place their trust — their faith — in God and in the finished work of Jesus, and nowhere else. This is not merely a private spiritual preference. It is a claim with public consequences, because trust is exactly the thing that worldly powers most want from us. The book of Revelation gives sustained attention to this problem. It depicts misplaced trust in several forms and warns the church against being drawn into any of them.

How This Essay Reads Revelation

A word about method, since it shapes everything that follows. This essay reads Revelation primarily through an idealist lens: the book portrays recurring, trans-historical patterns of empire and faithful resistance rather than a single coded timetable of end-times events. On the passages in view here, that lens does not so much contradict the other major approaches as relocate their insight. Where a preterist reader sees first-century Rome and a futurist reader sees a coming world order, the idealist sees the same spiritual dynamic surfacing wherever empire demands ultimate allegiance — in the first century, in whatever is still to come, and in the present. The claim is not that this administration is the fulfillment of Revelation. It is that Revelation describes a pattern, and the pattern is legible now.

Read this way, Revelation is a portrait of an ongoing conflict. On one side stands worldly empire: the accumulated structures of power, wealth, violence, and exploitation. On the other stands the way of the Lamb — the kingdom of God, embodied in His true church, present and at work in the world now. The book is a way of seeing the present clearly.

Counterfeit Devotion

In chapters 12 and 13, three figures appear in sequence: the dragon, the beast from the sea, and the beast from the land. Together they function as a counterfeit of divine authority — a parody meant to be mistaken for the real thing, receiving and redirecting the devotion that belongs to God alone. Interpreters have drawn the parallels in various ways, and the exact one-to-one mapping is less important than the overall movement: an evil power, working through an evil agent, sustained by a third figure whose entire job is to manufacture belief.

That third figure is the one to watch. Later in Revelation the second beast is given a name — the false prophet — and the name states its function. Where the Spirit of God empowers witnesses to tell the truth about God, the false prophet produces and circulates a lie about the beast, and it does so persuasively, with signs impressive enough to convince. What it asks for on the beast’s behalf is worship, and worship is a broad category. It includes adoration, but also trust, allegiance, the placing of one’s hope, the extension of unlimited good faith, and finally the surrender of one’s own judgment.

Ancient Cult, Modern Forms

In the first century this dynamic took the concrete shape of the imperial cult — incense offered, temples built, oaths sworn. But trust and devotion take different shapes in different cultures, and the absence of literal altars does not mean the absence of the thing they served. Today the same function is performed by state and party propaganda, by media ecosystems engineered to manufacture loyalty, by the machinery of celebrity, and by religious voices willing to lend divine sanction to political power. The ritual changes; the mechanism is constant. Something in every culture works to persuade people that a particular power deserves their confidence without condition.

Why This Argument Applies Now

A general warning is easy to nod along to and easy to ignore. So it is worth being explicit about why the warning has particular force at this moment, and — just as important — about what would make it not apply. Two conditions stand in the background of everything that follows.

The first is the decline of Christianity in America. The causes and the character of that decline are debated; the reality of it is not. A faith losing its cultural footing is a faith under temptation to secure its position by other means, and one of the oldest of those means is to attach itself to political power.

The second is the exceptional nature of the current administration. This is not the ordinary claim that a president one dislikes is bad. It is a claim about kind rather than degree. By a wide range of measures, this administration is stressing the constitutional and legal system far beyond the normal variation we see between presidents. Two features illustrate the point. First, deception has become a routine instrument of governance on a scale that has prompted dedicated efforts to track it — a different thing from the ordinary and expected dishonesty of politicians. Second, since the autumn of 2025 the administration has carried out scores of lethal military strikes on vessels it labels narco-trafficking boats, killing well over a hundred people without arrest, charge, or trial. The administration defends these strikes as lawful; a substantial majority of international-law scholars and human-rights organizations describe them as extrajudicial killings that violate both domestic and international law. Reasonable people can weigh these facts differently, but very few who are informed about the present would call this administration simply business as usual. Notably, the factual claim here is one that many of the administration’s own supporters would grant: that these are extraordinary times is not really in dispute among those paying attention, even where the significance of them is. The disagreement that matters is not about whether the moment is unusual but about what the church should conclude from it.

Here is the point of naming these conditions. Were either absent — were the church not visibly compromised, or were this an administration within the normal range of variation between presidents — the argument of this essay would not hold for this moment. It is the conjunction of the two that invites the analysis, and it is the conjunction that could, in principle, dissolve it. That is what keeps this from being a machine that condemns whatever it is pointed at.

Where the Line Falls

The warning in Revelation is not against trust as such. Some measure of trust in leaders is not only reasonable but unavoidable; a society in which no one could be relied upon for anything would not function. The warning is against a specific mutation of trust, and two markers indicate when that mutation has occurred.

The first is trust that persists through evidence that should have damaged it. When something happens that ought to break confidence, or at least seriously call it into question, and confidence is undisturbed, the relationship has changed character. It is no longer a judgment about a person; it has become a commitment held independently of the person’s conduct.

The second is allegiance declared in advance. When people announce that their support is fixed regardless of what the future holds, they have removed the possibility of assessment. Whatever that is, it is no longer ordinary political trust.

An Example

A version of this is visible in American politics today. When people say that a particular leader “is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers,” the claim is usually this: actions that appear irrational, incompetent, reckless, or plainly wrong only appear that way because a deeper strategy is at work that observers cannot see. The leader is, in all things, working for the country’s good, and can be relied upon to produce a good outcome even when the present is unintelligible.

I do not want to overstate what this phrase, by itself, proves. Often it is hyperbole, or tribal signaling, or ordinary motivated reasoning — the sort of thing people say about a politician they like, without meaning very much by it. It is not, on its own, the mark of the beast. But taken seriously and held consistently, it has a particular and troubling structure: it converts every possible piece of evidence into confirmation. Successes prove the strategy; failures prove the strategy was subtler than we realized. Nothing is allowed to count against it. A posture with no exit is precisely the posture that cannot be tested — and that is what makes it dangerous, whoever it happens to be directed toward.

Testing the Spirits

Scripture does not treat this kind of confidence as a virtue. The instruction is to test everything and hold fast to what is good, and to test the spirits, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. Discernment is presented as ongoing work, not a settled disposition one can adopt once and be done with. Declining to be skeptical in the face of what looks wrong is not loyalty and not charity; it is the setting-down of a real duty. In a democracy the setting-down is more serious, not less, because citizens bear genuine responsibility for what is done in their name. To keep extending confidence past the point where the evidence has withdrawn it is to place in a human power the kind of trust that is meant for God.

Conclusion: Come Out of Her

Revelation was not written to help its readers identify villains at a safe distance. Its warning about the false prophet lands first on the people hearing it — on what we are willing to excuse, what we defend past the point of honesty, and where we have quietly transferred to a human power a confidence that belongs to God alone.

Later in the book, a voice from heaven issues a command that names the task directly: “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins.” Babylon, in this reading, is not a city on a map but the whole worldly system of power and wealth that sets itself up as an object of trust — and the sobering thing about the command is its audience. It is addressed to God’s people, which assumes that God’s people can be inside Babylon without noticing. The letter to a compromised church is not “resist the empire out there.” It is “come out — because you are further in than you think.” Scripture returns to this danger again and again: the people of God are perpetually tempted to become enmeshed in the systems they were called to be distinct from.

That is what this essay is finally about. None of it calls for withdrawal from public life, and none of it calls for cynicism. Christians can and should vote, argue, organize, and serve. What it calls for is that our trust stay conditional, revisable, and honest — the kind of trust that remains capable of being disappointed. A faith that cannot be disappointed by a politician is no longer political loyalty; it has become devotion, and devotion of that kind has an object it was never meant to have.

The standard has to be held evenly, and the temptation belongs to no single party. But holding it evenly is not the same as refusing to name a particular case, and the present moment — a church losing its footing, an administration straining the system past its ordinary limits — is one in which the pattern is unusually visible. Pastoral gentleness is needed for people caught in it; it always is. But gentleness is not the whole of what these times ask for. They also ask for the older and harder thing that Revelation itself models: a prophetic voice willing to say to its own people, plainly, that it is time to come out.