Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements

Eds. Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer, Routledge, New York, 1997.

I recently had an idea for a film (don’t we all). It begins on the roof of a small Baptist church somewhere in the wheat-growing plains of Western New South Wales in Australia. A group of people sit silently in the darkness just before dawn. There are adults and children silently peering out to the east waiting for the world to end. Over the previous three years they have come to believe certain prophecies that the Lord was due at sun rise on this day.

This is as far as I have got with the idea. I cannot find the words to describe what happens as the sun steals over the horizon and it becomes clear that they have got it wrong. But this is happening every week around the world.

The idea for a film occurred to me after I had sat with a group of people in a room over a shopping centre in Sydney. There were about 30 of them and they had “received” the date of October 24th for Christ’s return. At 2.00am. Several of the more faithful had sold their homes, others had resigned and said goodbye to their bewildered families. They sat waiting singing hymns and praying until about 3.00pm. “This is the way the world ends,… not with a bang but a whimper.”

Over the next three years we are going to see more and more books like Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem. People seem to be convinced that the proximity of the year 2000 means an explosion of groups convinced that this is it. But I am not so sure. I think groups who are preoccupied with the end have always been with us. They are like fleas on the bodies of all major belief systems, including these days the New Age and environmental movement. Almost all the prominent religious groups from the Hippie era were convinced that the end of the world was only a matter of years away. There was an almost universal expectation that the demise of the world order as we knew it would happen within that generation. This was true for both religious and non-religious people.

For example The Children of God, now known as The Family, came into being in 1959 in Los Angeles. Their leader was consumed by the belief that the seven years of tribulation before the return of Christ (spoken of in the Bible) was about to occur. In 1972, several hundred of them fled the USA, scattering around the world, because they were convinced that the destruction was about to begin in the US. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been predicting the end of the world for the last 50 years. So have the Bahai’s; they have seen predicted dates go past with no signs of the end. And yet these groups still believe they are in the ‘end times’. But as we approach the year 2000 they are less convinced that this is the time. Their theology lacks the earlier urgency and they talk with less conviction about the prophecies of the past.

The interesting question is “why?” Why do a small number of perfectly decent people become convinced, at various times, that the world is about to end? Various explanations have been given for this. Some say it is in times of major upheaval and trauma that these beliefs arise. This is encouraged by the warning of catastrophes that accompany most of the prophecies of the end times. The Bible warns that the end will be preceded by wars, famines and earthquakes ‘in diverse places’. This theme has been developed into an elaborate and frightening ‘chastisement’ in the thousands of prophecies which many faithful Catholics claim to hear from the Virgin Mary. These contain dire warnings of terrible diseases, wars and natural calamities. Others say that visions of the end occur to people who are oppressed. Because they can see no justice and joy in this life they dream of a life in the future where this is certain.

Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem is written by a group of North American sociologists. So it has the preoccupation of sociology; they are first of all interested in describing who some of the contemporary end time groups are. There are some fascinating studies of the Militia movements in the US, the Christian Reconstructionists, the remarkable explosion of apparitions of Mary, the Waco tragedy, the Aum Shinrikyo group and a number of others. If you want to know what some of the more famous cults and New Religious Movements are thinking about, this is a good introduction. But the larger issues are only lightly warmed over. James Aho suggests that the genesis of these groups comes from within Western culture itself. He argues that our societies no longer have an “unchanging measure of modernity”. We are living in a world with no fundamental reference point except ourselves. He says: “In the modern era, God has been superseded not by class or race, but by self, the rational, wilful ego. It is the sanctity and believability of universal selfhood that today is imperilled. This has occasioned the apocalypse of modernity.”(page 63).

It is a pity Aho does not develop his argument further. For I sniff a certain distaste for pluralism and the diversity of contemporary religion. You see, this book believes we are in the midst of an unusual historical rise of Apocalypticism. Which means they look for reasons in the current history of events to explain it. I believe it has always been present. Which tells me that it emerges from a universal human dissatisfaction with this world.

Some people feel it worse than others. Apocalypticism and Millennialism are about the hunger for justice and the vindication of God’s control of the cause of events. The 20th (indeed any century) is not a pretty sight. To hold to a belief in God after the Holocaust takes a certain intellectual tenacity. Apocalypticism makes it easier. It tells us that the day is about to dawn when God will suddenly show who is really in charge.

DM

Reproduced courtesy of ‘Shoot the messenger’ website http://www.shootthemessenger.com.au. That site is worth a visit