Abstract
This article investigates the political nature and involvement of millennialism as a religious phenomenon. It, firstly, offers a brief analysis of how millennialism shifted from a significant, but marginal role player in the history of Christianity to become part of the mainstream religious discourse in recent times. It then seeks to explain how this came about by analysing the way this development continues and resonates with the political language and thought of the 19th-century religious discourse in the United States and in early modern England since the 16th century. It finally investigates the dangerous consequences of politicising eschatology by specifically analysing the role of Israel in millennial expectations.
Highlights
Millennialism was a major trend in the Jewish and Christian discourse in Western Europe and North America towards the end of the 20th century.2 It had an extraordinary interest in eschatological motifs like the thousand-year reign of peace, introduced by the rapture of the saints, Armageddon as the last war of the Antichrist between good and evil, the last judgement and the final eradication of evil
Millennialism, known as chiliasm, was so named after the reign of thousand years that was characteristic of this trend and that was based primarily on the enigmatic passage in Revelation 20:1–6 about such a reign of a thousand years in end times
Despite its prominence in some times and places and the common interest of the Christian tradition in eschatology, millennialism was in many instances mostly appropriated by groups on the margins of society or by individuals with a particular interpretation strategy of biblical texts or with a preoccupation with the unfolding of future events
Summary
Millennialism was a major trend in the Jewish and Christian discourse in Western Europe and North America towards the end of the 20th century.2 It had an extraordinary interest in eschatological motifs like the thousand-year reign of peace, introduced by the rapture of the saints, Armageddon as the last war of the Antichrist between good and evil, the last judgement and the final eradication of evil. The ‘Left Behind’-literature developed a political agenda with frightening, dangerous consequences, as examples from the sociopolitical context of the United States in modern times will show.
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