His power lies in his personality rather than his connections with the Illuminati. One sometimes gets the impression from books of this genre is that their preoccupation with Israel and the Jews is an arbitrary fifth wheel. In this book, the Antichrist is moved to make a treaty with Israel because he wants the rights to the agronomical discoveries of an Israeli botanist. The secret formula can make the world s deserts bloom, or something, but this motive does not seem to be very integral to the story. Similarly, though the Temple is being rebuilt in Jerusalem as all this is going on and there is a great proliferation of rabbinical characters, all these things seem to be happening in a universe other than the one that contains the suburbs of Chicago, despite the fact the main characters visit Israel so that everything cane be explained to them.
Apocalyptic novels have more in common with secular dystopias than is generally realized.
So far, at least, the Left Behind series is really about the rise of a totalitarian government and its effects on the lives of ordinary people. It is not a great leap of speculation to suggest that Antichrist novels have flourished in the 20th century because the period s history has made nightmarishly intrusive governments easy to imagine. In the century of Hitler and Stalin and Mao, the anticipation of Big Brother and Antichrist makes a certain sour common sense.