Müntzer was the most articulate advocate of popular millenarianism since Jesus and the first popular millenarian to turn the fantasy of brutal retribution into an explicit and consistently argued program of class warfare. Like Jesus, however, he was not a successful proselytizer and never got the chance to live in a field free of red poppies and blue cornflowers. The first Christian millenarians to turn the City of Man into the City of God were the Anabaptists of Münster. Anabaptists (“re-baptizers”) were programmatically radical because of their rejection of infant baptism. For the early Christians, baptism was a rite of induction into the sect—an act of purification symbolizing repentance of sins, acceptance of Christ, and entry into the community of believers. If the Protestants wanted to return to the days of the early Christians (and they all claimed they did), and if they believed, with Peter, that they were “a royal priesthood” (and therefore, according to Luther, “all equally priests”)—then they could no longer acquiesce in the baptism of those who were incapable of understanding the Word. This sounded reasonable until one stopped to think of the implications, as most Protestants did. The prohibition of infant baptism meant that one could not be born into a community of faith—that there could be, in effect, no such thing as a church coterminous with society. Four hundred years later, Ernst Troeltsch would base his distinction between a church and a sect on this very point: a church is an institution one is born into. The Anabaptists were determined, above all else, to remain a sect—a group of believers radically opposed to the corrupt world, dedicated to the dispossessed, and composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion and shared a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness, ethical austerity, and social egalitarianism.53
In 1534–35, the Münster Anabaptists expelled all Lutherans and Catholics, burned all books except the Bible, destroyed altars and sculptures, renamed streets and days of the week (and named their city the New Jerusalem), abolished money and feast days, banned monogamy and private property, rationed food and clothing, enforced communal dining, decreed that all doors be kept open, and demolished all church towers (“all that is high shall be made low”). “Amongst us,” they wrote to Anabaptist congregations in other towns, “God has restored community as it was in the beginning and as befits the Saints of God.” Those unfit for saintliness were to be “swept from the face of the earth.” Offenses punishable by death included envy, anger, avarice, lying, blasphemy, impurity, idle conversation, and attempts to flee.54
Monotheism had made the chosen people collectively guilty by attributing the perpetual postponement of salvation to their failure to obey the heavenly autocrat. Christianity had made all human beings guilty by emphasizing thoughts over actions and inner submission over outward obedience. Protestantism had made everyone permanently and inescapably guilty by instituting an austere god who could not be lobbied or bribed. The saints of the New Jerusalem made everyone guilty before the law by decreeing that true Christians should be “perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect.” By the time government troops entered Münster in June 1535, two-hour court sessions followed by executions were being held twice daily.
In post–Civil War England, the saints came close to becoming the government. Inaugurating Barebone’s Parliament (the Parliament of Saints) on July 4, 1653, Oliver Cromwell said: “Why should we be afraid to say or think, That this may be the door to usher in the Things that God had promised; which have been prophesied of; which he has set the hearts of his People to wait for and expect? … We are at the threshold;—and therefore it becomes us to lift up our heads, and encourage ourselves in the Lord. And we have thought, some of us, That it is our duties to endeavor this way; not merely to look at that Prophecy in Daniel, ‘And the Kingdom shall not be delivered to another people,’ and passively wait.”55
Cromwell would eventually decide to wait, but some of the “Fifth Monarchists” (named after Daniel’s last and everlasting kingdom) would not be deterred. As the “roaring” Puritan preacher John Rogers put it, “it is not enough to change some of these Lawes, and so to reforme them”: the point was “to provide for the Fifth by bringing in the Lawes of God.” Such work could not be entrusted to parliamentary majorities, for “how can the kingdom be the Saints’ when the ungodly are electors, and elected to Govern?” The Saints were to bear witness themselves—“preaching, praying, fighting” (praedicando, praecando, praeliando), and, when necessary, bringing “terrour to them that do evil.” Evil was as obdurate on the eve of the Second Coming as it had been during the First. “A Sword is as really the appointment of Christ as any other Ordinance in the Church,… and a man may as well go into the harvest without his Sickle, as to this work without … his Sword.” Having failed in the Parliament of Saints, the Fifth Monarchists staged an armed rebellion, but were defeated by Babylon, perhaps because they did not wait until the year 1666.56
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In Orthodox Christianity, millenarian outbursts tended to be less frequent because churches were either nationalized by local Christian kings or, after the Islamic conquests, maintained as nation-bearing institutions in more or less silent opposition to the mostly hands-off infidel rulers. The greatest “schism” occurred in Russia in the mid-seventeenth century, when the church and the rapidly expanding absolutist state launched a far-reaching overhaul of ritual practice. What began as a top-down reform in the interests of uniformity ended as a reformation in the sense of a broad-based revolt against the established political and ideological order. Both sides appealed to primeval purity but traced different genealogies: the original Greek in the case of the official church and the original Muscovite (and thus the original Greek) in the case of the “Old Believers.” Both were traditionalists and innovators: the Old Believers, like Western Protestants, set out to correct abuses and impurities within the existing church but became radicalized by the momentum of confrontation. The rejection of the high priest led to the rejection of the whole priestly hierarchy, and the rejection of the whole priestly hierarchy posed the problem of how to consecrate a new clergy or what to do without any clergy at all. The Russian schismatics covered the entire Protestant spectrum, from the episcopalian “priestly” Old Believers, who built a new Orthodox Church without the patriarch, to the endlessly subdividing sects that abandoned all priestly mediation and kept debating the fate of the sacraments, especially marriage. The peculiarity of the Russian Reformation was the absence of alternative potentates to appeal to or foreign brethren to join; the remaining options included flight “to the desert,” armed resistance, and mass suicide. The schismatics who believed that the last days had arrived saw all government officials as servants of the Antichrist and battled them accordingly. Salvation by way of martyrdom in the fire of Armageddon came in two varieties: at the hand of the Beast or through self-immolation. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more than eight thousand people burned themselves to death.57
The surviving Old Believers (about 10 percent of the empire’s population at the turn of the twentieth century) continued to wait for the apocalypse in remote settlements around the edges of the empire or reached an accommodation with the state and applied themselves to money-making. Russia’s most successful capitalists who were not Germans or Jews were Old Believers.58
The “spirit of capitalism” tends to thrive in communities of the chosen that separate themselves from the unclean world. There are two types of such communities: the Mercurians, or middleman minorities such as the Jews and Overseas Chinese, who cultivate inner cohesion and outward strangeness in the exercise of their mediating function; and the sectarians, who do it in the interest of exclusive salvation. The first are based on tribal unity, enhanced by the need for protection from polluting surroundings; the second, on the rejection of kin in favor of a community of faith. In the first, internal trust is based on blood ties renewed through ritual and endogamy; in the second, on constant self-discipline, mutual surveillance, and a suspicion of procreation as the nemesis of sectarian purity. B
oth value ceaseless toil: the first, because Mercurian occupations depend not on natural cycles but on the perpetual pursuit of gain through symbolic manipulation in a hostile human environment; the second, because sectarian commitments require constant struggle against worldly temptations. Mercurian tribes are protocapitalists by definition; “saints” have to beat plows into shares and earn salvation through accumulation. The point of connection is the prohibition of idleness and devotion to work as duty and virtue. Everything a sectarian (and his domesticated cousin, a monk) does—eating, drinking, mating, talking, reading, writing, listening, gardening, farming—is godly work for a heavenly wage. When the intensity of the expectation wanes, and the sectarian warily reenters the world, work as prayer may displace prayer as work, but aversion to leisure and the habit of vigilance and self-discipline remain constant—and turn lucrative. Meanwhile, ongoing procreation and the kinship bond it engenders continue to undermine the sectarian principle of a voluntary circle of the righteous, transforming metaphorical brothers into blood relatives, love of neighbors into nepotism, and saints into money changers. The chosen people of the second type join the chosen people of the first type. The Old Believers who continue to live “in the desert” and separate themselves from the world are among the first peasants to turn into farmers; the Old Believers who move to Moscow and engage in industry and philanthropy are among the first merchants to turn into capitalists. Those who abandon tribal and confessional exclusivity but retain a commitment to ceaseless work and vigilant self-discipline become “modern.”
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Having been defeated, tamed, or marginalized in Europe, Christian millenarianism moved to America, where it became a permanent feature of national life—as the raison d’être of the Puritan colonies, the wellspring of state messianism, a ready response to political and economic distress, and one of the ways to structure a national existence unprotected by a common folk or ecclesiastical tradition. In the absence of an ancien regime, an established church, or a claim to tribal cohesion, much of American communal life was built around Christian “denominations”; most outbursts of social and political creativity were accompanied by Christian revivals; and most Christian revivals (“awakenings”) had to do with the expectation of the last days.59
The “First Great Awakening” of the 1740s saw the launching of “postmillenialism,” or millenarianism without Armageddon (first proposed in England more than half a century earlier). Babylon was so far away, the army of Antichrist so small, and the “showers of grace” so plentiful that the new kingdom “must needs be approaching” (as Jonathan Edwards put it). There was no need for Jesus to bring perfection amidst trumpet calls and rivers of blood: it would be “gradually brought to pass” as the result of a natural spread of the Holy Spirit. The Methodist-influenced Second Great Awakening, from 1800 into the 1840s, effectively destroyed the Calvinist doctrine of predestination by making saving grace available to anyone determined to obtain it. As the prophet of new revivalism, Charles Finney, put it, “sin and holiness are voluntary acts of mind.” And since sin equaled selfishness, and selfishness could be overcome by an act of conversion, it would be “a sad, dreadful mistake” to expect God to deliver redemption “chiefly without human agency.”60
One consequence of salvation optimism was political millennialism and the reform activism associated with it. “I believe,” said Andrew Jackson in 1828, “that man can be elevated; man can become more and more endowed with divinity; and as he does he becomes more God-like in his character and capable of governing himself. Let us go on elevating our people, perfecting our institutions, until democracy shall reach such a point of perfection that we can acclaim with truth that the voice of the people is the voice of God.”61
Another was a series of attempts to hasten the return of Jesus by imitating the life of his sect. The key to saintliness was selflessness, and the key to selflessness was isolation from the world, regimentation of behavior, mutual surveillance, and strict control over reproduction. In the end, everything came down to control of reproduction, because nothing threatened selflessness as much as romantic love, exclusive sexual unions, parental and filial attachments, and inherited (private) property. The Harmonists and the Shakers enforced celibacy; the Oneida “Bible Communists” instituted “complex marriage,” whereby all males were married to all females, all births were planned, and all children were raised communally.62
The largest, most original, and, in some sense, most successful American attempt to realize a Christ-inspired kingdom of God on earth was launched in the 1820s by Joseph Smith, a farmer’s son from upstate New York. His original message was a conventional Christian apocalyptic revelation of an angel “glorious beyond description” informing him “of great judgments which were coming upon the earth, with great desolations by famine, sword, and pestilence; and that these grievous judgments would come on the earth in this generation.”63
Smith went much further than other Christian prophets, however. He did to Christianity what Jesus had done to Judaism, but much more thoroughly and self-consciously. Indeed, he did to Judaism and Christianity what Muhammad had done to both of them, but even more thoroughly and self-consciously. Muhammad had accepted the Hebrew God and the sacrality of both testaments (including the prophecy of Jesus’s imminent return and the ensuing slaughter) and added to them his own actions, instructions, and revelations. Smith accepted the Hebrew God and the sacrality of both testaments; added to them his own actions, instructions, and revelations; and discovered a new old testament containing a complete sacred history of his promised land. His scripture (the Book of Mormon, published in 1830) includes the original exodus, two new ones, and the promise of a third one, which he and his successors went on to fulfill. It also includes Jesus’s preliminary Second Coming to America (“the prints of the nails in his hands and his feet”) in preparation for his final Second Coming to America, and a limited continental holocaust as a prefigurement of the final universal one, which Smith was going to witness and perhaps help bring about.64
Americans had ears, and they heard. Within a few years, a small millenarian sect had become a complex society involving thousands of men, women, and children. For the first time since Münster, a Christian doomsday prophet faced the task of preserving apostolic communalism beyond a small band of brothers. In the absence of any guidance from Jesus, the only appropriate model was Moses. Moving around the Midwest, Smith founded two temples, attempted property redistribution, introduced “plural marriage” and the baptism of the dead, and created a complex hierarchy of lay priests. His successor, Brigham Young, led the “latter-day saints” across the desert to the New Jerusalem, where they established a state “under the immediate, constant, and direct superintendency of the Almighty.” Within several decades, the expectation of an imminent collective redemption had been replaced by a belief in eventual individual perfection, and Utah territory had become a state under the indirect but steady superindentency of Washington, DC.65
Another farmer, William Miller in Massachusetts, was a much more conventional prophet of the last days and a consistent critic of “that doctrine which gives all power to man.” He was also a rationalist who relied on demonstrable mathematical proof rather than divine revelation. According to his calculations, the world was going to end sometime in 1843. When it did not, he admitted his mistake, revised his timeline, and rescheduled doomsday for October 22, 1844. Thousands of sermons, lectures, and newspaper articles were dedicated to the event; thousands of Second Adventists (or “Millerites”) sold their property, forgave their debts, abandoned their fields, and, on the appointed day, came out to be saved. What happened next is known as “the Great Disappointment.” According to Hiram Edson,
We confidently expected to see Jesus Christ and all the holy angels with him; and that his voice would call up Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the ancient worthies, and near and dear friends which had been torn from us by death, and that our trials and suffferings with our earthly pilgrimage
would close, and we should be caught up to meet our coming Lord to be forever with him to inhabit the bright golden mansions in the golden home city, prepared for the redeemed. Our expectations were raised high, and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the clock tolled 12 at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept, and wept, until the day dawn.66
“The Great Disappointment” produced a variety of responses. Some returned to a life of permanent expectation, others accepted “the agency of man” and joined the Mormons or the Shakers. Yet others followed the example of the early Christians by claiming that the prophecy had, in fact, come true, but not quite as expected. The Seventh-Day Adventists, founded by the disappointed Hiram Edson, believed that Miller’s calculations were accurate but that Jesus had not been able to return because of the practice of Sunday worship; instead, he had entered a special place in the heavenly sanctuary in order to go over the books and decide who deserved to be saved. The Jehovah’s Witnesses moved the date to 1874 and then to 1914, arguing that Jesus did return as prophesied but remained invisible while he—along with some members of his “anointed class”—cleansed the temple in preparation for the coming bloodbath. The early Pentecostals returned to the idea of the imminent Second Coming but connected the event to the direct personal experience of God’s presence. In April 1906, hundreds of people danced, screamed, moaned, prophesied, rolled on the floor, and sang in unknown languages on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Among them were several Molokans, who had arrived from Russia a few months earlier. According to a report in the Los Angeles Herald, “there were all ages, sexes, colors, nationalities and previous conditions of servitude.”67
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