millenarianism A term used to refer to a religious movement which prophesies the coming of the millennium and a cataclysmic end of the world as we know it; or, more formally, which anticipates imminent, total, ultimate, this-worldly, collective salvation. Examples include Christadelphianism, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Fifth Monarchy Men, North American Indian Ghost Dance Movement, and Jehovah's Witnesses. As will be evident from this list of examples, these movements display great variation in the degree of activism expected among followers; the extent to which they are Messianic or charismatic; and the organizational structure of the movement as a whole.

Millennial movements occur inside all religions, including early Christianity and Islam, but also develop outside organized religions. Millenarianism therefore can take many different forms. However, it usually involves explosions of discontent, a rejection of the status quo, and the proposal that the coming millennium will see the installation of a new social order. This new society is usually constructed as egalitarian and just. Millenarianism often develops in a colonial situation and can have grave consequences for the dominant political order. There is little chance of political compromise since the followers of millenarian movements are not afraid of death; for example, they have been known to run against the guns of an army, believing that the millennium is about to end anyway. Millennial doctrines are often anti-reproduction, and ban sexual intercourse and the planting of crops, since there will be no next year. There is always the tension within millenarianism between an other-worldly message with no earthly content and one where the divine returns into the political process to rule justly. Inevitably, the millennium does not come, and the movement collapses. It either fades away or part of the message is recovered and institutionalized–as in the case of Christianity.

The best-known modern examples of millenarianism are the so-called cargo cults in Melanesia. These usually believe that the ancestors or a culture hero are on their way back to this world in a magic ship to create a timeless order which has been interfered with by Europeans. There will be the return of a cargo of precious material goods to their rightful Melanesian owners, bringing about an era of universal happiness and plenty, where the colonized people will be liberated from White domination. Explanations of the emergence of these cults abound. Peter Worsley (The Trumpet Shall Sound, 1957) argues that Melanesian cargo cults are not irrational ‘madness’, but are the result of frustrations caused by colonialism. The movements are fundamentally opposed to imperialism and use a religious idiom to attempt to explain the power of colonizers. This mystical power comes from the ability of Whites to intercept riches (cargo) bound for local peoples. Millenarianism is invoked as a last resort in dealing with this power when political opposition has failed. Alternative interpretations include those of Kenelm O. L. Burridge (Mambu, 1960), who argues that cargo cults express certain moral and emotional imperatives in Melanesian society, and Peter Lawrence (Road Belong Cargo, 1964), who offers a historical and structural account which emphasizes the ‘mismatch’ between Western and Melanesian norms of reciprocity and exchange.

At a more general level, the numerous theories of millennial movements as a whole include interpretations in terms of relative deprivation; those which see such movements as being rooted in the strains associated with rapid social change; and some which emphasize the social isolation, disruption, and normlessness characteristic of situations of anomie. A fairly representative selection of such accounts will be found in the collection edited by Sylvia L. Thrupp (Millennial Dreams in Action, 1962).

MILLENNIALISM

MILLENNIALISM, or millenarianism, focuses on a thousand-year period of unprecedented peace and righteousness that some Christians believe will either precede or follow the return of Christ to earth, marking the end of history. Millennial thinking has traditionally followed one of two patterns. For the premillennialists, God alone would choose the time of the Second Coming; final judgment would come swiftly and without warning; and human beings could do nothing to postpone or hasten it. Postmillennialists, on the other hand, downplayed the apocalyptic nature of the end time, stressed the one-thousand years of bliss promised in Revelations, and theorized that mankind could demonstrate its fitness for Christ's return by remaking the world in His image. The more optimistic outlook of postmillennial thinking made it the preferred theological position for nineteenth-century reformers. More recently, those wishing for radical change have been drawn to premillennialism. Inspired especially by events in the Middle East since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, premillennialism has produced a vast literature speculating about current events and the end of history. Some believers watch current events carefully and set dates for Christ's coming (later to revise their predictions), as in Harold Camping's 1994? (1992) or Edgar Whisenant's Eighty-Eight Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988 (1988).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloch, Ruth H. Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought 1756–1800. Cambridge, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Boyer, Paul S. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.

Weber, Timothy P. Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming:(American Premillennialism, 1875–1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

EdithBlumhofer/a. r.

See alsoAdventist Churches ; Disciples of Christ ; Jehovah's Witnesses ; Shakers ; Social Gospel .

millenarianism, a version of the Christian belief that history will end with the establishment of a 1,000‐year reign of the kingdom of God on earth, to be established by means of a cataclysmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. Such beliefs, implying the imminent transformation of the world by direct supernatural intervention, were widespread among the common people of medieval and early modern Europe, particularly at times of social or political crisis. Their most notable appearance in Ireland was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. While some Ulster Presbyterians found in the radicalism of the United Irish movement a political outlook that matched their New Light religious views (see old light and new light), others were theological conservatives, for whom the French Revolution was to be interpreted in millenarian terms, as the defeat of Antichrist in the form of the absolutist and popish Bourbon monarchy. The circulation among both Catholics and Protestants of political prophecies added further to the sense of impending crisis in the years before the insurrection of 1798. During 1822–4 the prophecies of Pastorini, in which the Book of Revelation was interpreted as foretelling the violent destruction in 1825 of the forces of Protestantism, gave the Rockite movement in Munster and Leinster a tone of revolutionary excitement, and a sectarian edge, not seen in other agrarian movements.

millenarianism. Belief in a future millennium (1,000 years) either preceding (premillennialism) or following (postmillennialism) the second coming of Christ, when he will reign on earth in a kingdom of his saints. Unlike postmillennialists, who anticipated a gradual progress towards the millennium through Christian, human agencies, premillennialists (or millenarians) looked for a sudden change through divine, cataclysmic action. Contemporary events were interpreted by reference to biblical prophecies or divine revelations concerning the immediate arrival of Christ on earth. Millenarian hopes and visions surfaced at the time of the Peasants' Revolt (1381) and again among 17th-cent. sects such as the ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy men, and some early quakers. Prophets and prophesyings continued into the 18th cent., and the French Revolution occasioned an outburst of both popular millenarianism (as among the followers of Joanna Southcott) and scholarly exegesis of the millennium by orthodox churchmen. Because of its concern with imminent change, millenarianism appealed to radical reformers and could be secularized into utopianism. It appeared as a strand in some of the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1790s and provided a vocabulary for Robert Owen and some of his followers. Later millenarian sects included seventh day adventists, Plymouth brethren, and Jehovah's witnesses.

John F. C. Harrison

Millenarianism. Belief in a future ‘millennium’, i.e. a 1,000-year period of blessedness. The main source of the concept within Christianity is Rev. 20. Some of its adherents hold that it will follow the Second Coming of Christ; others that it will precede the Advent and prepare the way for it.

In the early Church Millenarianism was found mainly among the Gnostics and Montanists, though it was also accepted by some of the early Fathers. In the Middle Ages the chief exponent of millenarian themes was Joachim of Fiore. At the Reformation many Anabaptists, as well as the Bohemian Brethren, were millenarians, and millenarian beliefs were widely held in 16th-and 17th-cent. English Protestantism. In Germany the millenarian view gained currency in the Pietist movement of the 17th and 18th cents. In the 19th cent. new advocates of apocalyptic and millenarian ideas arose in the USA and in Britain, among them the Irvingites, *Plymouth Brethren, and Adventists, these last reviving the idea of a heavenly millennium after the Second Coming. In the 20th cent. the indigenous Churches of Asia, Africa, and South America produced a variety of millenarian beliefs. In 1944 the Holy Office gave a ruling against millenarianism, and the major Christian bodies have treated the subject with reserve.

Millennialism or Millenarianism. In the narrowest sense, the belief in a future millennium, or thousand-year reign of Christ. The main source of the belief is Revelation 20. Its adherents are pre- or post-millennialists, according to whether they conceive Christ's second coming (parousia) as coming before or after the millennium. Millenarian groups since the Reformation include Anabaptists, Bohemian and Moravian Brethren, early Independents, 17th–18th cent. Pietists, Catholic Apostolic Church, Plymouth Brethren, and Adventists.

In a more general sense, millenarian movements are those which envisage a coming age (usually imminent) in which a faithful group will be particularly rewarded on this earth. Such movements are extremely common. Some are derived from Christianity (e.g. some elements of Tʾai-ping, Adventists), but others have no such connection.

millenarianism Belief in a future millennium (1,000 years) either preceding (premillennialism) or following (postmillen-nialism) the second coming of Christ, when he will reign on earth in a kingdom of his saints. Contemporary events were interpreted by reference to biblical prophecies or divine revelations concerning the immediate arrival of Christ on earth. Millenarian hopes and visions surfaced at the time of the Peasants' Revolt (1381) and again among 17th‐cent. sects such as the ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy men, and some early quakers. Later millenarian sects included seventh‐day adventists, Plymouth brethren, and Jehovah's witnesses.

millenarianism Belief, widespread in Christianity until the 4th century, that Christ's second coming will bring a thousand years of peace on Earth. It has its origins in the Judaic notion of the Messiah and a literal translation of the Book of Revelations (20). Saint Augustine's allegorical interpretation of the kingdom of God supplanted millenarianism. Sects such as the Anabaptists and the Moravian Church revived the belief during the Reformation. Since the 19th century, Mormons and Adventists professed millenarian beliefs. Some sects, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, forecast the imminence of the second coming.

millenarianism the doctrine of or belief in a future (and typically imminent) thousand-year age of blessedness, beginning with or culminating in the Second Coming of Christ. It is central to the teaching of groups such as Plymouth Brethren, Adventists, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

The term may also be used more generally for belief in a future golden age of peace, justice, and prosperity.

MILLENARIANISM.

This entry includes three subentries: