Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements

Abstract

Abstract Scholars invoke the terms “millenarian,” “millennialist,” and “apocalyptic” to refer to movements and sects that embrace ideologies positing the (typically traumatic) end of one era, promising relief from the sufferings of this world and its present age, and purporting to give rise to salvation in a new “golden age,” “heaven on earth,” or realized utopian social order. The strikingly broad range of movements that adopt such ideologies includes peaceful conversionist movements and militant religious social movements undertaking “holy war,” anticolonial movements, agrarian movements, and modern revolutionary political movements. Moreover, movements vary widely in their scale of organization and significance—from those that attract little notice beyond their participants to movements within early Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, and contemporary Islam that have been civilizational, even world‐historical, in their consequences. Despite the ancient Middle Eastern origins of apocalypticism and millennialism, non‐Western religions and ideologies – for example, Buddhism–have on occasion provided independent inspiration for such movements. Sometimes too, non‐Western movements (for example, the nineteenth‐century Tai Ping Rebellion in China) have synthesized local cultural materials with millenarian Christian ideas. In short, as rich veins of case study and comparative research document, millenarian and apocalyptic movements vary in ideology, organizational form, scale, and trajectory. The broad range of cases poses an important theoretical challenge—whether to focus on shared characteristics, or alternatively, to theorize alternative types of such movements.