Abstract

The article explains the reception of Revelation 13:1—14:1 by the anti-vaccination movement in the United States and how it impacts political discourse in the United States. Given the pericope’s already politically charged context, the movement’s current use of the text increases the text’s political nature and transforms political adversaries into monsters or beasts, thus making an already polarizing issue more extreme. Initially, the anti-vaccination movement invoked the Mark of the Beast by alleging that the coronavirus vaccines carried a microchip. Later, individuals such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene used social media to shift the message to refer instead to vaccine passports as the Mark of the Beast to attack President Joseph Biden.