Barack Obama, long dogged by conspiracy theories branding him the Antichrist, has revealed his desire to meet the new pope, a fellow Chicago native, in a striking contrast to the fringe narratives that have haunted his public life for nearly two decades.
Since his 2008 presidential victory, Obama has been cast by some political opponents, bloggers, and conservative talk-radio hosts as everything from a socialist usurper to the literal Antichrist of Christian eschatology. A 2013 poll revealed that 13% of American voters outright believed the claim, with another 13% unsure; among Mitt Romney supporters, the figure reached 22%.
The supposed evidence for these theories included misreadings of scripture, false assertions that Obama's name appeared in the Quran—which it does not—anger over Obamacare and LGBTQ+ rights, and the persistent falsehood that he was a secret Muslim rather than the Protestant Christian he has always professed to be.
Prominent religious authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, creators of the Left Behind series, publicly dismissed the notion. Obama's team countered with the website FightTheSmears.com to debunk the claims, yet the conspiracies endured, resurfacing as recently as 2023 in AI-generated content.
On a recent episode of Bryan Tyler Cohen's No Lie podcast, the 44th president was asked if anyone remained on his "most wanted" list of people to meet. Having encountered world leaders like Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Vladimir Putin, and received a blessing from the late queen, Obama might have offered diplomatic evasion.
Instead, he responded candidly: "I'll be honest with you, being president or even being an ex-president, I can kind of meet everybody. So I've met a lot of folks." Obama then expressed his hope to meet the new pope, who hails from Chicago—Obama's own city—"sometime in the future."
