Skeptic Project

I recently came across the following article by a Ph.D. student in Religion and Society at Boston University: "Battling The Antichrist By Outlawing Microchips" by Joseph Laycock, Religion Dispatches, March 16, 2010.

Laycock reports that the Virginia House of Delegates recently passed, by an overwhelming 88-9 majority, a bill to outlaw forced implantation of RFID microchips in human beings. Similar bills have recently been passed in Tennessee and Georgia. Laycock comments:

The sponsors of these bills, all of them Republicans and outspoken conservative Christians, claim that preventing the forced implantation of microchips is a civil rights issue: they seek to protect citizens from unwanted bodily intrusions by employers and especially what they depict as a big brother-esque government. Yet the technology to embed radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips into animals and people has existed since the early nineties, and so far no one has attempted a forced implantation of the populace.

There are, of course, purely secular reasons against forced implantation of RFID chips and in favor of policies that particularly protect the truly vulnerable. But the true impetus behind these laws [...] appears to lie squarely in Christian dispensationalism and speculation about “the mark of the beast” described in the Book of Revelation.

Laycock gives a brief history of this notion, including:

The first person to suggest that the mark of the beast could be a microchip may have been Peter Lalonde in his One World Under Anti-Christ (1991). However, the association of microchip technology with the mark of the beast was thoroughly hammered into the American consciousness by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ bestselling Left Behind Series. The eighth installment of the series, The Mark (2000), describes how the Antichrist’s new world order will require everyone to be implanted with a microchip or be guillotined by a “loyalty enforcement facilitator.” The Mark sold over three million copies by 2004.

I wonder whether this may also be the origin of some folks' paranoia about the U.S. government having secret stashes of guillotines.

In any case, note the association of the term "new world order" with a well-known Antichrist narrative.