Millenarianism

North America was especially fertile soil for the growth of millenarian movements and ideas. English Puritans brought millenarianism with them to American shores with the apocalyptic vision of being God's instruments in establishing the New Kingdom. John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, expressed the Puritan aspiration of building a revolutionary city, a New Jerusalem, "coming down out of heaven from God" (Rev. 21:10). Early Puritan divines such as Joseph Cotton and Increase Mather continued the tradition of learned speculation about the date the millennium would begin and how the conversion of the Jews must precede the Second Advent of Christ. A not-inconsiderable part of American optimism and expansionism rested on beliefs about being God's elect and about the qualities of the earthly paradise.

William Miller, born in 1782 in Massachusetts, scrutinized the Scriptures and reconfigured biblical chronology. If the world began in 4004 B.C.E. and lasted 6,000 years, Miller concluded that "sometime" between 1843 and 1844 would be the end of the world. His pamphlet about the Second Coming of Christ and his reign convinced upwards of fifty thousand Americans that time would run out in 1844.

Of course, the world did not end, and the Great Disappointment of 1844 fragmented the Millerite movement. The diversity of responses to the nonappearance of the end included efforts to recalculate and "adjust" the prophetic dates of Jesus's Second Coming. Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses evolved from the discouragement and divisions of Millerism. They, along with the Mormons, another fast-growing American religion, have explicit millenarian expectations, implying the lasting appeal of millenarian hopes.

Although most millenarian terms, images, and ideas originated within ancient Judaism and early Christianity, millenarianism has echoes in other religions and in cults. At its core, millenarianism offers the idea of history as progressing toward a transformed world. This nourishes the ever green yearning for an end of suffering and oppression and hardship. It is not surprising, then, that anxious and "deprived" people continue to look for signs that a new age is dawning. This human aspiration for a transformed world can then be discerned not only behind a variety of utopias and ideas about society, including those of Karl Marx or Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, but also in such contemporary millenarian cults as the People's Temple, the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, and AUM Shinrikyo.