Modern Millennial(ism)?

Millennialism is one of those things that seems to sweep through people and cultures every so often, a rising surge of fear, hope of the future, and an overwhelming need for something to change, to go back to the way it was before, or to re-make the world into something better. It is usually associated with Christianity, but there have been millennial movements among Native Americans (the Ghost Dance), and the Ibo in southern Africa. I’m starting to get the sense that we are witnessing another wave of millennialism, this time based on environmentalism, specifically in the Extinction Rebellion movement and other allied groups.

Millennialism, leaning on Richard Landes’ definition and discussion, is an emotional, socially perfectionalist movement with an apocalyptic anticipation that that rise out of and then fall back into “ordinary time.” Communism, Nazism, the Ghost Dance, the Millerite movement in the 1830s-40s in the US, the Münster Anabaptists, all fit this description and pattern. Society has become fatally corrupt, and there are signs that the end is coming, be it the Christian idea of the End Times, or Marx’s rising up of the proletariat against the owners of capital. The goal of the believers is to purify themselves and society so that when the End comes, they are ready for the new world that will arise. Often, they believe that their actions can bring about the coming of the End, or at least their inaction will lead to them failing to reach the better world (or for it to arrive at all – Ghost Dance.)

Millennial movements often arise in times of enormous stress and social change, but not always. Marxism tied into the Second Industrial Revolution and the on-going social and economic disruptions of the First Industrial Revolution. The Stone-Campbell/Millerite movement tapped both the end of the Second Great Awakening and the populist political and generational change associated with Andrew Jackson’s presidency and the politics around it. The Münster Anabaptists came four years after Martin Luther’s final departure from the Roman Catholic Church and coincided with the start of the German Peasants’ Revolt, as Anabaptists were being persecuted and the Wars of Religion had started turning hot. The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians came from the end of the bison and the next-to-last round of northern Indian Wars.

So what about a modern Millennial movement? We are in a time of enormous technological and social upheaval that we are barely starting to see the full effects of (hormonal birth control, the computer revolutions). The social frameworks that have supported Western Society for almost two thousand years, the Christian Church and associated institutions, have faded away and seem to be being actively shoved to the wayside, if not collapsing completely. Two generations now have been told that there is nothing but the material world, that they have an ineradicable burden of guilt for all the ills of the past, that the Western economic and social system will destroy the planet and all life within 100, or 50, or 25, or 12, or 1 year, and that the End is Nigh. Unless—

Unless society is purified of its sins and shortcomings, unless the old world passes away and a new, perfect, and moral society takes over, one that will usher in a new age of living in harmony with the physical and biological environment, a world where Westerners will at last, perhaps, begin to atone for their sins by supporting and learning from the Global South/ Indigenous Peoples/the previously colonized/ the sexual and racial Other. And there is only a short window of opportunity to bring about this purification and change, before the Apocalypse.

Sound familiar?

I think it was Extinction Rebellion’s Renaissance carnival figures, the ones in crimson with white faces, that kicked the idea for me. They reminded me of dancers, which got me thinking about the Ghost Dance. So I started listening not just to the words, but the tone of Extinction Rebellion and the other leading edge activists, including the teenagers. And I kept thinking that I’d read and heard this before, except in the 1500s, and 1800s.

I had, but in a different framework. I’m so used to tuning out the wilder shores of the environmental movement that I hadn’t been paying attention to the tone and emotional perfectionism of this group. It wasn’t just “reduce, reuse, recycle,” or “save the whales and baby seals, sponsor the protection of an acre of tropical rain forest.” Oh, no, this is Millennialism with all the fervor and emotional power of the Ghost Dance and other movements. As the “end” draws closer, we are seeing greater and greater efforts at social purification (disabling and destroying electric scooters in France because they are not Green enough) and stricter and stricter demands (end all use of fossil fuel by 2050. Eliminate the internal combustion engine by 2030.)

The difference is that this movement has the ear of the government, at least in some places. Already opposition is rising from the more traditional (and in my opinion realistic) groups like European farmers and others who are opposing the wildest parts of Extinction Rebellion’s ideas, as turned into legislation.

It is a religious movement. We who need to deal with it forget that at our peril, because we can’t use just logic and data to show the error of the movement. It is a response to uncertainty, to predictions of doom, to deep changes in society that people have no good framework for dealing with. They’ve grabbed onto the environment because of “science” and because of a heavy injection of Marxism (itself a Millennial movement and Christian heresy), while being on the emotional support and certainty that goes with their prophecies and predictions. Those of us outside of the movement need to take that seriously, and to really think about what we are going to do when it follows the pattern and collapses back into “ordinary time.”

I don’t have a solution. Someone who has dealt with end-time movements would better placed to provide ideas on what to do with and for people in these times, especially after the movement fails and the End of the World does not come.

For further reading, although it is a very thorough and rather fat book: Landes, Richard. Heaven and Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).    [Yes, the subtitle is a play on William James’ book on Christian experience.]