Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who's in the top tier of the GOP's 2016 contenders, holds some unusual beliefs. In defending creationism, he has said Satan is behind the Big Bang theory and the promotion of evolution, and he has embraced and endorsed a paranoid McCarthyesque conspiracy theory that claims nefarious Marxists for decades have infiltrated every echelon of American society -- including PTAs -- in order to destroy the United States. But, it seems, Carson's conspiratorial worldview goes beyond all this. In a talk he gave a year ago, Carson, who is a Seventh-day Adventist, indicated that he accepts a dark prophecy rendered a century and a half ago by a founder of his church. She claimed that as part of the End Times (the apocalyptic period when Jesus Christ supposedly will return and battle with the devil), a time will come when Seventh-day Adventists will be imprisoned by the government and even put to death merely for observing the Sabbath on Saturday, not Sunday.

Some background: The Seventh-day Adventist Church traces back to the 1820s, when William Miller, a veteran of the War of 1812, told people that Jesus Christ was heading back to Earth in 1843 or 1844. After "the Advent" didn't occur, Miller's followers didn't give up. They concluded that he had gotten the date wrong, and the church continued. A crucial part of its theology was that the Sabbath starts on Friday night and concludes on Saturday at sundown.