Do We Have a Global Death Wish?

[rug]

Review

The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism
Catherine Weissinger, ed.
Oxford University Press, 2011

Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience
Richard Landes Oxford University Press, 2011

July 28, 2012
By Jay Michaelson

Suppose Europe's debt crisis leads to a fracturing of the eurozone and the ripple effect leads to a global depression worse than the one we’re slowly climbing out of. And suppose as a result of the economic chaos, there are riots in Europe and the U.S., with right-wing militias in a near civil war with failing governments, mass disruptions in the food supply, perhaps even global economic collapse and a breakdown of the social order..

Somewhere in that chain of events, most readers stopped supposing. But many others, if the statistics are right, are still with me, and might go further still, envisioning a massive breakdown and/or revolution in the world order, in very short time.

The latter view is a secular form of millennialism, the scholarly term for the belief that a wholesale transformation of the world, for better or for worse, is imminent. And as two massive new tomes, Richard Landes’ Heaven on Earth and the The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism edited by Catherine Weissinger, very helpfully demonstrate, our own beliefs and fears about politics, economics, and the environmental crisis, are not so distant from ancient apocalyptic prophecies about the end of the world, the Second Coming, or the rapture. Sure, our anxieties may be grounded in ‘facts,’ but the ancients thought theirs were too. What’s more important is the pattern of millennial thinking, which has always been with us and, unless the world is about to end, likely always will be.

In Search of Collective Salvation

One detail needs to be cleaned up first. The term “millennialism” does not refer to the year 2000, or the turning of the millennium. Rather, it takes its misleading name from the Christian belief that Christ will return to Earth and rule for one thousand years. The apocalypse, rapture, Second Coming — these are specific events in specific forms of millennial ideology. Millennialism itself is, in Wessinger’s definition, “the audacious hope that in the imminent future there will be a transition — either catastrophic or progressive — to a ‘collective salvation’ which will be accomplished by a divine or superhuman agent and/or by humans working in accordance with a divine or superhuman plan.” Following the pioneering scholar of millennialism Norman Cohn, Weissinger states that the millennialist salvation is collective, earthly (i.e., it will happen in this world), imminent, transformative, and supernaturalist in nature.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/6074/do_we_have_a_global_death_wish/

Jay Michaelson, a Religion Dispatches associate editor and founder of Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture & Spirituality, writes regularly for the Forward and Tikkun. He is completing his Ph.D. in Jewish Thought at Hebrew University and his most recent book is God vs. Gay?: The Religious Case for Equality (Beacon, 2011).

[LARED]

1. If history is the benchmark then

we know civilizations raise and fall, sometimes with catastrophic impact to society and culture. So having a millennialist view (secular or religious) may not be so surprising. I think there is a clear distinction to be drawn between those hoping for an apocalyptic event and those understanding and perhap even preparing for one that may occur.