One way commentators have dealt with the discrepancies between chapters 17 and 18 has often
been to divide them into “Religious Babylon” (17) and “Political Babylon” (18). There is no clear
justification from the chapters themselves for doing this since they pretty much run together as one narrative; however the apparent differences in their focus do make it a reasonable possibility. If this is the case then chapter 17 may well be largely fulfilled historically by Roman Catholicism, while
chapter 18 remains yet to be fulfilled in terms of a pre-eminent center of the final world empire. The connection that would tie the two together would be their “Babylonian spirit”. In other words
similarities in their religious and philosophical systems, in particular perhaps in the way they merge the worlds of religion and monetary with political power.