The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  4. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 46, 39, 40; Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 48–49; Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 21; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), 20–21, 28, 68–69, 30. For general surveys, see Roger O’Toole, Religion: Classic Sociological Approaches (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1984), 10–51; Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies; Andrew M. McKinnon, “Sociological Definitions, Language Games, and the ‘Essence’ of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 14, no. 1 (2002): 61–83.

  5. Phillip E. Johnson, “Concepts and Compromises in First Amendment Religious Doctrine,” California Law Review, 72 (1984): 821, 832; Barbara Forrest, “The Wedge at Work: How Intelligent Design Creationism Is Wedging Its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream,” in Robert T. Pennock, ed., Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 6–8.

  6. S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), esp. 1–25 (editor’s introduction); Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953); Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, in Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 135–74; Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” Daedalus 104, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 1–7, the “standing back and looking beyond” quotation is on 3.

  7. Eisenstadt, ed., Origins and Diversity; Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2005), esp. Björn Wittrock, “The Meaning of the Axial Age,” 51–85; Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 70–90; Peter L. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 65–69; Joseph Kitagawa, “Primitive, Classical, and Modern Religions: A Perspective on Understanding the History of Religions,” in Joseph Kitagawa, ed., The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 53–54.

  8. Eisenstadt, ed., Origins and Diversity; Guenter Lewy, Religion and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 11–32, 59–66, 254–57; C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Richard Shek, “Sectarian Eschatology and Violence,” in Jonathan N. Lipman and Stevan Harrell, eds., Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 88–108; Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 7–66.

  9. Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 77–115; Robert Gnuse, “Ancient Near Eastern Millennialism,” in Catherine Weissinger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 246–49; Philip G. Kreyenbroek, “Millennialism and Eschatology in the Zoroastrian Tradition,” in Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson, eds., Imagining the End: Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 33–55.

  10. Jan Assmann, “Axial ‘Breakthroughs’ and Semantic ‘Relocations’ in Ancient Egypt and Israel,” in Arnason et al., Axial Civilizations and World History, 133–56; Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Cf. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 72; Deut. 30:11–14.

  11. Exod. 34:14.

  12. Job 34:22; Deut. 5:9–10.

  13. Jer. 5:6; Deut. 7:6; Isa. 49:10.

  14. Judg. 11:24; Isa. 45:5, 6. See Cohn, Cosmos, 152. Cf. Mic. 4:5.

  15. Cohn, Cosmos, 143–44.

  16. Deut. 7:1–2; Isa. 34:2–3, 8–14.

  17. Isa. 49:22–23, 26, 41:11, 45:14; Ezek. 38:18–23.

  18. Isa. 65:17, 35:5–10, 11:6.

  19. Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 81–86; Ezek. 34:28; Dan. 7:27.

  20. Cohn, Cosmos, 187–93; Selections from Josephus, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 73; Lewy, Religion and Revolution, 70–91; Cecil Roth, “The Zealots in the War of 66–73,” Journal of Semitic Studies 4, no. 4 (1959): 351.

  21. Selections from Josephus, 93, 103–4; Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 79–80, 83, 91–92; Howard Clark Kee, Christian Origins in Sociological Perspective: Methods and Resources (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), 57–58.

  22. Mark 1:3–6 (cf. Selections from Josephus, 80–81; Origen against Celsus, bk. 7, chap. 9 (in Christian Classics Etherial Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.toc.html).

  23. Mark 13:8, 12, 24–25. Kee, Christian Origins, 54–72; Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 58–100, 129–31; E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1985), 222; Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 95–171.

  24. Mark 13:19; Luke 13:29; Luke 6:20–21; Christopher Rowland, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism (London: SPCK, 1985), 87–88, 109, 146.

  25. Mark 1:15, 13:30; Luke 9:27; Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 51–63, 128; Kee, Christian Origins, 68; Rowland, Christian Origins, 87–88, 109–33.

  26. Mark 13:20; Luke 13:24; Matt. 19:28–30; Rowland, Christian Origins, 137; Cohn, Cosmos, 197.

  27. Mark 3:31–35.

  28. Luke 14:26 (cf. Mark 10:29–31; Luke 9:59–62; Luke 18:29–30); Luke 10:27 (cf. Matt. 22:36–40); Kee, Christian Origins, 77–80.

  29. Matt. 19:28. For Jesus addressing his messages only to the Jews, see Matt. 7:6, 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30.

  30. Matt. 18:3 (cf. Mark 10:15; Matt. 10:42).

  31. Matt. 5:21–22, 27–28, 33–37.

  32. Matt. 15:7–11.

  33. Matt. 6:8; Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 40; Matt. 10:28, 5:46, 48.

  34. Mark 14:25.

  35. 1 Cor. 7:29–31; 1 Thess. 4:14–18.

  36. 1 Thess. 5:5–8; Rom. 4:16–17; Rom. 9:1–8. Cf. Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 60–61; Kee, Christian Origins, 92; Cohn, Cosmos, 206–11.

  37. Rev. 7:1–8, 13:15–17, 3:15–16.

  38. Rev. 19:15; Rev. 14:9–11; Rev. 16:1–21; Rev. 20:4–5, 12; Rev. 21:1–4; Rev. 22:10, 20.

  39. 2 Pet. 3:3–4; Rowland, Christian Origins, 276–96; Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 176–77.

  40. 2 Pet. 3:8–9.

  41. Qur’an 47:19, 3:118, 47:18. See also 54:1, 42:17, 22:7, 45:32, 12:107, 43:66.

  42. On Islamic apocalypticism, see David Cook, “Early Islamic and Classical Sunni and Shi’ite Apocalyptic Movements,” in Weissinger, The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, 267–83; Cook, “The Beginnings of Islam as an Apocalypic Movement,” in Stephen D. O’Leary and Glen S. McGhee, eds., War in Heaven / Heaven on Earth: Theories of the Apocalypic (London: Equinox, 2005), 79–93; Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2002), esp. 15–16, 137–88; Said Amir Arjomand, “Messianism, Millennialism and Revolution in Early Islamic History,” in Amanat and Bernhardsson, Imagining the End, 106–25; Aziz
al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 1993), esp. 89–103.

  43. al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 97–98; Ovamir Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 1–9, 37–92, and passim; A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1–14, 74–80, 161–66, and passim; S. N. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19–23, 33–35, 84–89; Henry Munson, Jr., Islam and Revolution in the Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 7–38; S. N. Eisenstadt, Jewish Civilization: The Jewish Historical Experience in a Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 35–42; Juan R. I. Cole, “Millennialism in Modern Iranian History,” in Amanat and Bernhardsson, Imagining the End, 282–311; Stephen Sharot, Messianism, Mysticism, and Magic: A Sociological Analysis of Jewish Religious Movements (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Marc Saperstein, ed., Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), passim.

  44. Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (London: Verso, 2005), 121.

  45. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 19–204; Frederic J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 47–76.

  46. Martin Luther, “On Secular Authority,” in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, ed. and trans. Harro Höpfl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9–11, 23.

  47. Ibid., 28.

  48. John Calvin, “On Civil Government” (bk. 4, chap. 20 in Institutio Christianae reilgionis), in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, 48–49; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), esp. 2–13, 29–55, 121–25, 185–229, and passim; Harro Höpfl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 193–202 (the “diligent watch” quotation is from Geneva’s 1560 edict, see 200).

  49. Calvin, “On Civil Government,” 60; Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 176 (the Cheynell quotation), 223–24; Höpfl, Christian Polity, 188–92; Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 223 (the Guillaume de Trie quotation).

  50. Müntzer quoted in Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 189.

  51. Matt. 13:24–30, 37–43.

  52. Müntzer quoted in Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 239, 242, 237, 238; Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 249–50. The Luther quotation is from Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 198.

  53. 1 Pet. 2:9; Martin Luther, “On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church,” in Henry Wace, ed., First Principles of the Reformation, or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Dr. Martin Luther (London: John Murray, 1883), 235; Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 81; Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 1:331–43.

  54. Anthony Arthur, The Tailor King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster (New York: St, Martin’s 1999), 38–41, 53, 75–78, 93–102, 112, 136–38, 156–78 (the “all that is high” quotation is on 75); Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 262–80 (the “amongst us” and “swept” quotations are on 266).

  55. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle (New York: William H. Colyer, 1846), 203.

  56. Ibid.; Rogers quoted in B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 67, 162, 138, 132, 140–41; Dan. 2 and 7.

  57. On self-immolations, see M. V. Pul’kin, “Samosozhzhenniia staroobriadtsev v kontse XII–XVIII vv.,” Novyi istoricheskii vestnik 1 (2006): 1–14; and Georg B. Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 207–9. On Old Believer apocalypticism, see Michael Cherniavsky, “The Old Believers and the New Religion,” Slavic Review 25, no. 1 (March 1966): 1–39; for general overviews, see S. A. Zenkovskii, Russkoe staroobriadchestvo (Minsk: Belorusskii ekzarkhat, 2007); and Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970).

  58. L. Vorontsova and S. Filatov, “Staroobriadchestvo: V poiskakh poteriannogo grada Kitezha,” in Religiia i obshchestvo: Ocherki religioznoi zhizni sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow: Letnii sad, 2002), 247. On Old Believers and the “Protestant work ethic,” see Crummey, Old Believers and the World of Antichrist, 135–58.

  59. See, esp., Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Searbury Press, 1975); William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  60. James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 13–32, 269, and passim; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 52–90 and passim. The Jonathan Edwards quotations are from Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). See also Baumgartner, Longing for the End, 127–30; and Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 92–99 and passim; McLoughlin, Revivals, 98–140 (the Finney quotation is on 125); Ruth Alden Doan, The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 75 (the last quotation is from Henry Cowles).

  61. Quoted in McLoughlin, Revivals, 139.

  62. William E. Wilson, The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964); Lawrence Foster, Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 75–120; John W. Friesen and Virginia Lyons Friesen, The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 104–16; Robert P. Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732–2000 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 17–46, 67–86; Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1993); Bryan Wilson, Religious Sects: A Sociological Study (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 132–35; Warren Lewis, “What to Do after the Messiah Has Come Again and Gone: Shaker ‘Premillennial’ Eschatology and Its Spiritual Aftereffects,” in M. Darrol Bryant and Donald W. Dayton, eds., The Coming Kingdom: Essays in American Millennialism and Eschatology (Barrytown, NY: New Era Books, 1983), 71–109.

  63. “The Testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” in The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ (N.p.); 1 Nephi 13:37.

  64. 3 Nephi 11:15.

  65. Edson quoted in Gordon D. Pollock, In Search of Security: The Mormons and the Kingdom of God on Earth, 1830–1844 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989); Mark P. Leone, Roots of Modern Mormonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Tuveson, Redeemer Natio
n, 179–84 (the “government” quotation, from Parley Pratt’s The Angel of the Prairies, is on 183).

  66. Edson quoted in Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 215. See also Doan, Miller Heresy (“that doctrine” quotation is on 74); and David L. Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, 1800–1850 (Chico, CA: Scholars’ Press, 1985), esp. 119–39. The “agency of man” was a common formula promulgated by Joseph Smith and rejected by Miller. See, e.g., Doan, Miller Heresy, 74.

  67. Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 1–186 (the Los Angeles Herald quotation is on 1); Douglas J. Nelson, “For Such a Time as This: The Story of Bishop William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival” (PhD diss., University of Birmingham [UK], 1981), 191–245; Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street: The Roots of Modern-Day Pentecost (Gainesville, FL: Bridge-Logos, 1980), 49–74; Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), esp. 45–66 and 111–22; Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Wilson, Religious Sects, 98–117; Baumgartner, Longing for the End, 175–78.

  68. Acts 2:1–21.

  69. Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966), 30–38, 157–66, 209–15.

  70. Nathan Wachtel, “Rebeliones y milenarismo,” in Juan M. Ossio Acuña, ed., Ideologia mesiánica del mundo andino (Lima: Ignacio Prado Pastor, 1973), 118–23; Enrique Florescano, Memoria mexicana: Ensayo sobre la reconstrucción del pasado; Época prehispanica–1821 (Mexico City: Editorial J. Mortiz, 1987), 222; James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965); Micheline E. Pesantubbee, “From Vision to Violence: The Wounded Knee Massacre,” in Catherine Wessinger, ed., Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 62–81; Bryan R. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-World Peoples (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 221–36, 283–308; Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (1902), trans. Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944); Robert M. Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeast Brazil, 1893–1897 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).