This was the Manichean basis for another element of this secular apocalyptic faith that had great symbolic significance: the nuclear mushroom cloud symbolized God’s wrath toward all unbelievers, be they Germans, Japanese, or the Godless communists, and HE (for this was also a Patriarchal faith, and God was male, presumably with all associated attributes) had given this weapon to us, the United States. As possessors of the atom bomb the US government, through its military, was proven to be the de facto agent of God’s justice, and [North] Americans, His Chosen People.
The US military accommodated this apocalyptic worldview without explicitly propagating it, quite possibly because of the Constitutional separation of Church and State. Nevertheless, the warrior and the priest have traditionally been seen as a single caste and, as such, often accompanied one another in war making and the construction of empires.
And so the military reinforced a civil-religious worldview based on the skeletal backbone of Judeo-Christian religion, stripped of all identifying symbols and doctrines, and it also heavily relied on the apocalyptic anxiety, terror, and enthusiasm to bind and unite its cadre in a dogmatic faith in the Commanding Officers. Indeed, whatever I later learned in “civilian Christianity” was reinforced by the airtight system of military thinking, and vice versa. The military utopia that we lived out on base was the perfect expression of US civil religion as it had developed from Colonial times right up through the twentieth century.
If we see the apocalyptic-utopian-millenarian idea everywhere we look in the modern and post-modern world, that’s probably because it is everywhere. As the English philosopher, John Gray, puts it, “if a simple definition of western civilization could be formulated it would have to be framed in terms of the central role of millenarian thinking.”2 From this millenarian foundation come ideas of progress, revolutionary ideologies, even the idea of self-improvement so popular in the West: everything is rooted in the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic.
While apocalypse (Greek: apocalypsis, “revelation”) and millennium (Latin: mille + ennium, “thousand years”) and utopia (Greek: u+topos, “no place”) all have different meanings, in a sense they emerge from a common matrix. Apocalyptic and millenarian movements are related and often indistinguishable, although believers in an apocalypse (calamity) don’t always have faith that a “millennium” (or thousand-year kingdom) or utopian state will emerge from disaster. Conversely, utopias, and the rupture with present reality that they imply, aren’t always conceived as necessarily being preceded by apocalyptic disaster. But all three words express the same sharp departure from reality, either by divine intervention or great human will, and the institution of a new social and political order. Through this book I will consider the three phenomena together and often refer to them collectively by the acronym “AUM” (apocalyptic utopian millenarian).
Millenarian thinking goes back to explanations for the failed first century apocalyptic prophet known as Jesus “Christ,”3 although apocalyptic thinking in general goes back much farther, with some tracing it to Zoroaster, or “Zarathustra” who lived in what is today known as Afghanistan, around 1500 B.C.4 Millenarianism, then, emerged out of the apocalyptic faith of Jesus and his disciples as a response to the “cognitive dissonance” of “belief disconfirmation” resulting from Jesus’s execution for the political crime of treason or subversion. Both “cognitive dissonance” and “belief disconfirmation” were ideas that sociologist Leon Festinger arrived at through his study of a flying saucer cult in the mid 1950s. In his study, when the flying saucers failed to arrive (belief disconfirmation) believers had to deal with the “cognitive dissonance” or the gap between their beliefs and the reality.
Similarly, when Jesus failed to overthrow Roman imperial rule and become the new king of Israel, and the disciples had to deal with the belief disconfirmation and cognitive dissonance of his failure and death, they did so by, in a sense, rewriting the story. In the new narrative the gospel writers (and later Christians) had Jesus ascending to heaven and promising to return in the near future to set up a kingdom and rule over the entire earth. In the Revelation or Apocalypse, the final book of the Christian Bible,5 there are references to a “great tribulation” and a “thousand year reign” (millennium) of Jesus that Christians understood in various ways. The early Church believers were convinced, based on Jesus’s own words in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 13 that he would be returning within the lifetime of his disciples. When that didn’t happen Christians began to develop doctrines as a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance of yet another failed expectation.
The “Book of the Revelation of John” (Revelation) was one such response, which portrayed a second coming of Jesus as a cosmic event in which even stars fell from heaven, evil was vanquished, and the “Heavenly” Jerusalem descended to the earth, with streets of gold and walls of jewels. The Revelation was to become the basis of Christian millenarian tradition and the numerous conflicting understandings of the future reign of Jesus on the earth. The emerging church tended to downplay the importance of Revelation and leave the entire second coming of Jesus and the final judgment as vague future events. This became known as the “amillennial” view, and one that St. Augustine and much of the historical Christian Church adopted and taught. But there were other currents within the Church that were excited and inspired by the apocalyptic passages of the Bible, most notably the 13th century theologian Joachim di Fiores, whose apocalyptic and millenarian ideas continue to influence movements to this day.6
The millenarian tradition split between the “pre-millennialists” and the “post-millennialists,” the former believing Jesus return would initiate his millennial reign on earth, and the latter believing his return would come after a peaceful millennium. The two millennialist traditions had very dramatic, and also very different, effects on Western religious and secular culture.
According to pre-millennialists, the return of Jesus would be sudden and chaotic and represent a dramatic rupture with the present order of the world, and then the thousand-year earthly reign of Jesus (the millennium) would begin. It could be argued that this view was more in keeping with the apocalyptic, messianic tradition of “Second Temple Judaism” (the “apocalyptic” era that ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.). This apocalyptic view inspired the revolutionary excitement of the radical medieval sects, and it also left its mark on modern revolutionary currents.
The post-millennial view emerged in the 17th century among the Protestants, particularly the restorationist Calvinists, Unitarians, and Puritans. This view held that humanity would progressively improve as a result of the first arrival of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and then gradually the earth would enter into a great millennium of peace, followed by the final judgment. This was the view of many early social reformers, heavily influencing the Abolitionist movement, and even may have contributed to the theory of evolution as conceived by Charles Darwin.7 Post-millennialism certainly was the foundation for the Western belief in “progress” since, according to the early Puritan thinkers, “the earthly paradise is to be merely the last, culminating state in the series of progressive stages which can be discerned in history.”8
This post-millennial view was certainly a major part of the foundational structure or ordering principle of North American religious and secular thought as it emerged, but there were also strong pre-millennial elements. Either way, the American Revolution was an expression of what came to be known as “civil millennialism.”9 Millenarian prophecies, drawn primarily from the books of Daniel and Revelation in the Bible, were “basic to the formation of American revolutionary ideology in the late eighteenth century” and among the primary incitements to the American Revolutionary War.10 And the focus of all human history, according to this perspective, was the beautiful, magical “New World” that, among other things, inspired Thomas More’s Utopia, and awakened other millennial dreams, especially among English Protestants. “God, it began to be thought, is redeeming both individual souls and society in parallel course; and, in the next century, a new nation in a recently discovered part of the world seemed suddenly to be illuminated by a ray of heavenly light, to be at the western