church tower, quaint village houses or possibly a long shopping strip, or series of bars, often with a few derelict women hoping to snag some hapless GI to buy them a drink. It all depended on the location of the base how the civilian world surrounding it took form, but it was always “the civilian world” or “the Economy,” populated by “civilians,” and it had none of the regularity and uniformity of the military base. The Economy was a strange and mostly foreign world but I adapted, as “brats” do, and grew up bicultural, able to adeptly move between the Base and the Economy with relative ease.
Central to the military was a sense of family, community, team, in short, the aim to be a single united force. The military was, as Lewis Mumford so aptly pointed out, the “first machine,” a human machine. And central to that unity was the idea of “The Mission,” which entailed an absolute faith in, and total obedience to, superior authority, especially those with superior rank. Although you might never truly understand what the Mission was, it was, nevertheless, everything. It defined your life. The military was, in short, a form of civil religion. Combined with Christian millennialism, it was a powerful, intoxicating, and apocalyptic faith.
Even though the military distinguished itself from the civilian world, it defined itself against The Enemy. The enemy might change (for most of my life it was “Communism” and more recently it has become “Terrorism”) but the roles remained eternal: the military was Good, and what opposed it, the enemy, was Evil.
This was the Manichean basis for another element of this secular apocalyptic faith that had great symbolic significance: the nuclear mushroom cloud symbolized God’s wrath toward all unbelievers, be they Germans, Japanese, or the Godless communists, and HE (for this was also a Patriarchal faith, and God was male, presumably with all associated attributes) had given this weapon to us, the United States. As possessors of the atom bomb the US government, through its military, was proven to be the de facto agent of God’s justice, and [North] Americans, His Chosen People.
The US military accommodated this apocalyptic worldview without explicitly propagating it, quite possibly because of the Constitutional separation of Church and State. Nevertheless, the warrior and the priest have traditionally been seen as a single caste and, as such, often accompanied one another in war making and the construction of empires.
And so the military reinforced a civil-religious worldview based on the skeletal backbone of Judeo-Christian religion, stripped of all identifying symbols and doctrines, and it also heavily relied on the apocalyptic anxiety, terror, and enthusiasm to bind and unite its cadre in a dogmatic faith in the Commanding Officers. Indeed, whatever I later learned in “civilian Christianity” was reinforced by the airtight system of military thinking, and vice versa. The military utopia that we lived out on base was the perfect expression of US civil religion as it had developed from Colonial times right up through the twentieth century.
If we see the apocalyptic-utopian-millenarian idea everywhere we look in the modern and post-modern world, that’s probably because it is everywhere. As the English philosopher, John Gray, puts it, “if a simple definition of western civilization could be formulated it would have to be framed in terms of the central role of millenarian thinking.”2 From this millenarian foundation come ideas of progress, revolutionary ideologies, even the idea of self-improvement so popular in the West: everything is rooted in the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic.
While apocalypse (Greek: apocalypsis, “revelation”) and millennium (Latin: mille + ennium, “thousand years”) and utopia (Greek: u+topos, “no place”) all have different meanings, in a sense they emerge from a common matrix. Apocalyptic and millenarian movements are related and often indistinguishable, although believers in an apocalypse (calamity) don’t always have faith that a “millennium” (or thousand-year kingdom) or utopian state will emerge from disaster. Conversely, utopias, and the rupture with present reality that they imply, aren’t always conceived as necessarily being preceded by apocalyptic disaster. But all three words express the same sharp departure from reality, either by divine intervention or great human will, and the institution of a new social and political order. Through this book I will consider the three phenomena together and often refer to them collectively by the acronym “AUM” (apocalyptic utopian millenarian).
Millenarian thinking goes back to explanations for the failed first century apocalyptic prophet known as Jesus “Christ,”3 although apocalyptic thinking in general goes back much farther, with some tracing it to Zoroaster, or “Zarathustra” who lived in what is today known as Afghanistan, around 1500 B.C.4 Millenarianism, then, emerged out of the apocalyptic faith of Jesus and his disciples as a response to the “cognitive dissonance” of “belief disconfirmation” resulting from Jesus’s execution for the political crime of treason or subversion. Both “cognitive dissonance” and “belief disconfirmation” were ideas that sociologist Leon Festinger arrived at through his study of a flying saucer cult in the mid 1950s. In his study, when the flying saucers failed to arrive (belief disconfirmation) believers had to deal with the “cognitive dissonance” or the gap between their beliefs and the reality.
Similarly, when Jesus failed to overthrow Roman imperial rule and become the new king of Israel, and the disciples had to deal with the belief disconfirmation and cognitive dissonance of his failure and death, they did so by, in a sense, rewriting the story. In the new narrative the gospel writers (and later Christians) had Jesus ascending to heaven and promising to return in the near future to set up a kingdom and rule over the entire earth. In the Revelation or Apocalypse, the final book of the Christian Bible,5 there are references to a “great tribulation” and a “thousand year reign” (millennium) of Jesus that Christians understood in various ways. The early Church believers were convinced, based on Jesus’s own words in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 13 that he would be returning within the lifetime of his disciples. When that didn’t happen Christians began to develop doctrines as a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance of yet another failed expectation.
The “Book of the Revelation of John” (Revelation) was one such response, which portrayed a second coming of Jesus as a cosmic event in which even stars fell from heaven, evil was vanquished, and the “Heavenly” Jerusalem descended to the earth, with streets of gold and walls of jewels. The Revelation was to become the basis of Christian millenarian tradition and the numerous conflicting understandings of the future reign of Jesus on the earth. The emerging church tended to downplay the importance of Revelation and leave the entire second coming of Jesus and the final judgment as vague future events. This became known as the “amillennial” view, and one that St. Augustine and much of the historical Christian Church adopted and taught. But there were other currents within the Church that were excited and inspired by the apocalyptic passages of the Bible, most notably the 13th century theologian Joachim di Fiores, whose apocalyptic and millenarian ideas continue to influence movements to this day.6
The millenarian tradition split between the “pre-millennialists” and the “post-millennialists,” the former believing Jesus return would initiate his millennial reign on earth, and the latter believing his return would come after a peaceful millennium. The two millennialist traditions had very dramatic, and also very different, effects on Western religious and secular culture.
According to pre-millennialists, the return of Jesus would be sudden and chaotic and represent a dramatic rupture with the present order of the world, and then the thousand-year earthly reign of Jesus (the millennium) would begin. It could be argued that this view was more in keeping with the apocalyptic, messianic tradition of “Second Temple Judaism” (the “apocalyptic” era that ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.). This apocalyptic view inspired the revolutionary excitement of the radical medieval sects, and it also left its mark on modern revolutionary currents.
The post-millennial view emerged in the 17th century among the Protestants, particularly the restorationist Calvinists, Unitarians, and Puritans. This view held that humanity would progressively improve as a result of the first arrival of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and then gradually
