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Marking of the ‘signs of the times’ and the appointment of days for fasting and thanksgiving were characteristics of 17th-century Presbyterianism. Seceders and evangelicals in the 18th and 19th centuries shared these concerns, and the reasons they gave for calling these special days revealed how they understood their relationship with the 17th century and how thought about God and his relationship with the created order.

Research relevant to teaching about NRMs and violence suggests that internal and external factors, and their interaction contribute to the occasional involvement of religious movements in violent episodes. Charismatic leadership, “totalistic” organization, and apocalyptic beliefs are among internal factors that have been implicated in violence, while external situational pressures include persecution and confrontational interaction with opponents. Teaching students about the situated connections between religious movements and violence presents special educational opportunities as well as challenges. An effective teaching program may help students understand both that elements of violence connected to NRMs have their parallels in wider social processes, e.g., in families, and that religion has the potential to exacerbate conflict. Due consideration needs to be given to defining violence, to theoretical explanations of violence, to historical and comparative cases, and to a series of basic questions about violence and religion in order to give students a basis for seeking to explain contemporary cases of NRM violence, extending even to the consideration of religious terrorism.

This chapter explores the important role played by the jeremiad in antebellum and Civil War America. It begins with the national day of fasting proclaimed by President James Buchanan in January 1861. Nineteenth‐century Jeremiahs lamented their society's moral state, looked to the example of the nation's founders, and called their fellow Americans to reform. Surrounding these narratives of decline were deeply‐rooted ideas of American chosenness, often fostered by varieties of millennialism that saw the United States as integral to the accomplishment of God's purposes in history. The chapter also explores two rival narratives to the mainstream American jeremiad during these years: an African‐American jeremiad that called down God's justice on white oppressors, and the Southern “Lost Cause” narrative, which viewed the South as a quintessential Christian civilization and lamented its defeat as a sign of God's disapproval of Southern immorality. The chapter concludes with an examination of Abraham Lincoln's unconventional employment of the jeremiad tradition.

Synopsis: The chapter describes the creation of a new social order to replace the one based on slavery and the slave trade, with new structures of local leadership setting a new standard. The chapter begins with Garrick Braide in Nigeria's Delta region and continues with revival ferment in Yoruba country, and in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, thanks to the work of the charismatic Harris. Both Catholic and Protestant missions were thereby renewed. The chapter considers African and Islamic models of religion in contrast to missionary and colonial practice. Primal religious ideas and materials in the appropriation of Christianity are investigated in terms of attitudes to the irrational, modern medicine, divination, divine efficacy, salvation, suffering, and divine goodness. The chapter contrasts the appeal of Christianity with opposition to colonial rule, and thus the African acceptance of salvation‐without‐strings with the rejection of conversion by political subjugation.

The term “eschatechnology” condenses “technology” with the Greek to eschaton, an adjectival noun meaning “the last,” or “ultimate,” meaning here the last stages of a particular race, culture, or social system, where the existing conditions are swept away by miraculous intervention and a new community of freedom, justice, and dignity is established in their place. A common term for this new creation is “millennium,” from a passage in Revelation 20 that describes the binding of Satan and a reign of Christ for one thousand years. This introductory chapter defines millennial thinking as a particular strategy for revitalization movements worldwide, traces the background of the millennial literatures brought by Europeans to the Americas as technologies of conquest and control, and notes the role “hard” technology has played in visions of the end of the world at least since the wheel of Ezekiel. Since the end of the world has always been a fiction, literature plays a key role in its promulgation. Some of the key texts to be analyzed in the study are ranged on a continuum, from those that seek to induce belief, such as Revelation, to those that use millennial themes to encourage skepticism and reflective dissonance, such as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

American culture is suffused with technological millennialism. While the number of core believers in eugenics, cryonics, uploading of consciousness, and space colonies as postmillennial projects may be few, their futurist concepts have broad appeal for literature and film. Millennial ufology, in particular, represents a highly visible reformulation of Christian eschatology. Rather than angels or the messiah emerging from the clouds to battle the Antichrist and redeem the chosen, the messiah is now a benevolent interstellar space traveler, returning to Earth to rescue his space brothers from evil aliens and the ravages inflicted on the planet by technology and pollution. This chapter explores the relation of technology, extra-terrestrialism, and millennium as developed in the writings of the Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal (1925– ), a Catholic priest who became the Sandinista Minister of Culture in the 1980s. Cardenal uses the UFO motif to link first with last things, alpha with omega, Indian with European. The ultimate technology symbolized in UFOs is needed to reverse history and return the earth to a golden age where the land is once again in the keeping of Native Americans. The chapter uncovers surprising links between Cardenal’s poetic visions, the history of UFO sightings, and the reports of UFO experiencers and of the Nation of Islam leaders, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan.

In the context of 19th‐century American millennialism, many early converts to Mormonism heralded the Book of Mormon as a sign of the end times. In an era of many prophets and visionaries, the Book of Mormon was offered as tangible proof that Joseph was an authentic prophet. Joseph Smith's emphatic literalism and appeal to physical and historical evidence made him both more threatening and more attractive than a Jacob Boehme or an Emanuel Swedenborg. The story of angels, seer stones, and gold plates, thus displaced a focus on the Book of Mormon's content, for both critics and believers.

This essay examines the Order of the Solar Temple, focusing on founder Joseph Di Mambro. His idiosyncracies provide keys for understanding the Solar Temple’s dramatic final “transit.” The focus on Di Mambro then feeds into a broader analysis of the three primary suicide cults examined by contemporary scholars: the People’s Temple, the Solar Temple, and Heaven’s Gate. It is argued that millennialism and external provocation are not as central for understanding suicide groups as previous analysts have suggested. Instead, a leader with failing health along with other factors characteristic of intensive religious groups are more important in predicting which groups are predisposed to suicide.

This chapter identifies the “heretic pharaoh” Akhenaten as a millennialistavant la lettre. His version constitutes an unusual form of millennialism, a top-down, success driven apocalyptic scenario rather than the more familiar, bottom-up catastrophe-driven ones. Beginning with the spectacular reign of Akhenaten's father, Amenhotep III, the “sun-king,” the chapter traces the bizarre career of the “monotheist” Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti's move to their millennial capital, Akhetaten, where an exceptionally lively period of Egyptian art unfolded in the brief period before the rapid unraveling of the movement.

This chapter lays out a conceptual framework in which to understand demotic millennialism as a fundamental challenge to (agrarian) “prime-divider” societies (characterized by a profound gap between commoners and elites) and argues that civil polities (characterized by equality before the law and individual freedom) are expressions of a millennial project. Thus, the Enlightenment represents a secular form of demotic millennialism, and the American and French Revolutions were apocalyptic episodes that attempted to transform this world into a just society based on that vision.

Of Pratt’s many roles, he considered his apostleship paramount. He clearly felt an affinity with Paul. His Autobiography was a self-conscious construction; his late sermons provide a different window on the man Parley Pratt. He never fully reconciled his life’s many tensions: liberty and religious persecution, militancy and meekness, millennialism and pragmatism, spiritual richness and relentless poverty, and finally, honor killing and martyrdom. His legacy was unambiguous: Paul-like in his elaboration and systematizing of Mormon doctrine, through Voice of Warning and Key to Science of Theology. Ultimately, he was more motivated by his loyalty and love than his sense of duty.

In Ohio, the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society (bank), part of a nationwide banking failure, fractured the church. Pratt’s wife Thankful Halsey died following the birth of Parley Pratt Jr. Very soon after, he married Mary Ann Frost. Pressured by Joseph Smith on a loan, Pratt broke with the prophet. After reconciliation, he left on New York City mission. There he wrote his masterpiece, A Voice of Warning, influenced by Baconianism, millennialism, and his preference for biblical literalism over spiritualizing. Pratt elaborated a theology of Native Americans, and of restoration and authority more in line with Seekerism than Primitivism. In a pamphlet written in response to Methodist newspaper editor La Roy Sunderland, Pratt began to plumb deeper theology.

While the English prophetic movement coalesced around Henry Drummond and Edward Irving, a similar outburst of millennial speculation occurred among Dublin’s influential, but unsettled, Evangelical community. As the prospect of Catholic Emancipation drew ever nearer, Ireland experienced a sense of political unease even greater than that occurring simultaneously in England. It was hardly surprising that millennialism, with its attempt to equate the Roman Catholic Church with the ‘man of sin’ in prophecy, should gain an especial foothold in Ireland. The expectation of imminent nationalistic Catholic rebellion drove many devout Protestants to an unusually close study of the ‘signs of the times’. In this unsettled atmosphere, a new religious party appeared on the scene, dedicated to restoring Christianity to its ‘apostolic’ purity and doctrinal orthodoxy. More than twenty English and Irish Evangelical clergy seceded into the Brethren during its formative years. The Brethren coalesced into a separate and identifiable religious movement (if not a denomination) functioning in three principal locations: Dublin, Bristol, and Plymouth.

This chapter discusses what is often referred to as “the Second Great Awakening,” in which popular opinion was galvanized around the belief that moral resolve alone is sufficient to bring about salvation and the regeneration of society. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants confidently set about the task of constructing an empire that they believed would in and of itself inaugurate the millennium. This view, known as post-millennialism, touts the power of concerted human effort to perfect the earth in expectation of—and prior to—Christ's final return. Those in the consensus culture knew full well what agencies of the Antichrist still stood in their way: non-Protestants, immigrants, intemperance, the city, and—at least to Northerners—the institution of slavery. Yet new religious voices were championing the pre-millennial form of apocalyptic thought, in which Christ was expected to return to earth in order to defeat the Antichrist personally. The Mormons and Millerites (later to emerge as the Seventh-Day Adventists) appeared on the American religious scene as forerunners of the revival of pre-millennial and apocalyptic understandings of the Antichrist tradition.

This chapter analyzes writing from the 1840s by protofeminist and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller in order to examine her conceptualization of privacy as a site of utopian democratic unity. Fuller portrays her nation as suffering a crisis of material and spiritual dispossession under its capitalist political economy—a crisis she links both causally and metaphorically to women's oppression, slavery, and Indian removal. Focusing on Fuller's calls for redemption through the “shining examples . . . of private lives,” the chapter traces her deployment of women's life narrative as an instrument of millennial transformation in “Autobiographical Romance” (1840), Summer on the Lakes (1844), and Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). It argues that Fuller's vision of the “private relations” to be cultivated through such publications displaces the injustices of property relations rather than reforming them, and subordinates racial justice to an ethic of utopian sameness.

Millennial and apocalyptic traditions in prophecy cross-fertilize the broader reformative tradition. The chapter examines end-time prophecies including forecasts of race greatness and a contrasting nonracial universalism; reconstructs and analyzes John Jasper’s famed “Sun” and less-known “Stone Cut Out of the Mountain” sermons; and discusses parallel uses by major reformative prophets.