Throne and Altar: Delusional Messianic Expectations

Poorly formed expectations are premeditated resentments.

This piece of wisdom occurred to me recently while reflecting on the beginning of the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Our Lord performs the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish as a sign to the people that they might believe in him. The people, however, had very clear expectations for Jesus: they were going to make him a king so as to have a constant supply of miraculous bread and fish. 

This causes Jesus to withdraw: “Since Jesus knew that they were going to come and carry him off to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain alone” (Jn 6:15). The crowd will pursue him, but they will eventually leave with resentment because he is offering the Bread of Life and not free food.

What the crowd wanted, the Christ was unwilling to give. Instead, they would have gladly fought a political revolution for any false messiah who would have promised them more free lunches. 

This of course sounds like the Antichrist, who is described by the Catechism of the Catholic Church as the culmination of a “religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth” (675).

In recent decades, the Church has warned against the eagerness with which countries have sought such false messiahs. For example, we have Pope Pius XI’s warning against Communism from 1937, Divini Redemptoris:

The Communism of today, more emphatically than similar movements in the past, conceals in itself a false messianic idea. A pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor impregnates all its doctrine and activity with a deceptive mysticism, which communicates a zealous and contagious enthusiasm to the multitudes entrapped by delusive promises. This is especially true in an age like ours, when unusual misery has resulted from the unequal distribution of the goods of this world. This pseudo-ideal is even boastfully advanced as if it were responsible for a certain economic progress. As a matter of fact, when such progress is at all real, its true causes are quite different, as for instance the intensification of industrialism in countries which were formerly almost without it, the exploitation of immense natural resources, and the use of the most brutal methods to insure the achievement of gigantic projects with a minimum of expense (8).

I’d like to suggest that false messianic expectations have been at the core of the radical deleterious changes that the United States has experienced in recent years:

• In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama won presidential elections using messianic-sounding promises of “hope” and “change.”
• In 2016, Donald Trump won the election with the equally messianic-sounding promise to “make America great again.”
• In 2020, the people clamored irrationally for their leaders to save them from cold and flu season. Leaders, convinced of their messianic abilities, made it illegal for most people to work or even leave their homes, followed by forced muzzling and the required injection of untested potions.

As the economy was now intentionally crashed, the people clamored for something even better than the multiplication of loaves and fish; they wanted the printing of massive amounts of free money by the government. Nearly every politician agreed to pretend to be a messiah, and one brave man felt the wrath of Trump for not wanting to go along:

• This was not enough, however, as cold and flu season still existed and the free money proved not to be enough. Voters decided to try for a new messiah, who promised to end respiratory infections and print even more money! Joe Biden was elected despite his obvious cognitive decline.
• Finally, as both the public debt and inflation explode, the cry arises for both lower interest rates and the end of inflation, an utter logical impossibility. Neither Haris nor Trump speak about the national debt, leaving only Kennedy as the voice for fiscal responsibility. What candidate will the people attempt to install as messiah next? Whose promise of free lunches will garner the most electoral votes?

This leads us to the very uncomfortable conclusion that the principle underlying reason for where we are in 2024 is that a substantial portion of the population has desires and expectations that are, to be blunt, stupid and evil. The expectation to be saved is a religious expectation, not a civic one. To have these poorly formed expectations means that only liars who know they cannot deliver will be electable and resentment will only grow among the populace.

Unless we as a people restrain our expectations of political authorities, we are doomed to be ruled only by exceptional liars who promise more hope, faster change, and utter greatness.

In short, the ideal desired candidate will look more and more like the Antichrist.