What's the Deal with the Millennium?

And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.

--Revelation 20:7

Cranks of many sorts have set their alarm clocks for the year 2000. As the 20th century ticks to its close, a millennium is ending. Even the word millennium is charged with emotion, suggesting a biblical age of divine rule ushered in with apocalyptic struggle.

But religious nuts are not alone in approaching the end of a 1000-year period with eerie feelings. Deep superstitions are tapped by rites that end one stage of life and launch another. We witness this every year as people make New Year's resolutions, impressed by the passage of time, apprehensive about the use of what is left to them. Even the turn from one day to the next has given the stroke of midnight a certain power over the imagination--it was the vulnerable moment for making magic or loosing demons. No wonder the last midnight of the year draws people's eyes to the ball descending in Times Square. The magic is bound to be more powerful when a year is ending along with a day. And these feelings are heightened further when a decade is ending, or a century. At the stroke of midnight 1999, a day, a decade, a century and a millennium will draw to a simultaneous, dramatic close.

We have only one other example of such a turning point in the modern era--the year 1000. As that magic number approached, people saw portents of the world's end or convulsive renewal. The mystic German emperor, Otto III, went to Italy in 996 to renew the Holy Roman Empire as a millennial kingdom. The Pope of the time, (continued on page 208) Millennium? (continued from page 194) Sylvester II, was considered a sinister magician, the Antichrist in the book of Revelation. The monk Raoul Glaber, looking to the year 1000, warned: "Satan will soon be unleashed because the thousand years have been completed."

When the year 1000 passed without the passing of the world, some relaxed their anxieties. But others warned that the real second millennium should be dated from Christ's death not his birth--so people prayed and shivered all over again as the year 1033 approached. After that second hurdle was passed, a new historical era seemed open to people. Their relief found expression in the building binge in Europe that opened the age of the cathedrals.

Why bring up the medieval superstitions about the year 1000? Surely we have escaped such primordial anxieties. But perhaps we cannot place too much trust in our hard-won rationality. Look at the sprawling New Age sections in any large bookstore--Otto III would be quite at home with the belief in a realm of light just over the horizon. And fear about the future is not something people have escaped. Look at Ross Perot, who has become something of a personal savior to many because he tells them how bad things are and how much worse they promise to become.

Even 19th century rationalism was not enough to protect some people from a feeling of world's-end, fin de siécle funk when the last century wound down. A collapse of Victorian certainties created the decadent 1890s, the so-called Mauve Decade. It also led to a rebirth of the occult in "modern" London, where séances and prophets were all the rage. The poet William Butler Yeats revived medieval theories of a "third age" derived from Joachim de Fiore. In America, the depression of 1893 set the angry, despairing mood for a decade full of prophecies about social collapse.

Millennialism was never more respectable than in the 1890s, emanating from the recently founded (1886) Moody Bible Institute and the popular Bible expositions of Cyrus Scofield. But nuttier fringe groups also pullulated in those times--e.g., the Jezreelites, who built a Sanctuary of Israel in Michigan to serve as the center of the Lord's millennial rule when He came back in 1900.

Signs of similar spiritual upheaval are being seen by prognosticators of our immediate future. In their book Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene predict "a worldwide multidenominational religious revival" by the year 2000. In The American Religion, Harold Bloom finds an air of fundamentalist "showdown" in American religion, which is increasing its other-world orientation: "A religion-mad country entering upon the final decade of the 20th century is doomed to enjoy some very interesting times indeed before that decade, and century, pass into what is to come. The national election to be held in the year 2000 will reverberate with sanctified forebodings, perhaps more than ever before in American history." People are thinking in end-game categories, announcing (and denouncing) the end of empire, the end of American hegemony, even "the end of history" (as Francis Fukuyama puts it). The crack-up of the Soviet Union has not brought the satisfaction one might have expected to its putative beneficiaries. Some see the splintering of the old Communist bloc as a forerunner to the splintering of Europe, of the West, of the free world, as it used to be called. A sour pessimism is settling over our discourse, reflected in polls that show this is the first generation of Americans who do not feel sure that their children will be better off than they are. The spend-as-if-there-is-no-tomorrow attitude of the Eighties made America a debtor nation in the Nineties, unable from lack of resources to respond to many social ills. The ecological predictions of global depletion, of burnout, of nuclear pollution and of mass starvation reflect an inner sense of dwindling energies. The entropy that historian Henry Adams feared in the 1890s is a fear that takes new shape daily in our world.

Of course, some people are always saying that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. They express a kind of perverse glee in how bad everything is--like the Evelyn Waugh character who sings "Change and decay in all around I see." There is a natural tendency to think of one's own time as the hinge of history. It is flattering as well as frightening to think that we are in on the critical showdown of all time. Perhaps this explains why some people felt so braced to the task of confronting a monstrous communist threat--and why they seem to feel a kind of post-coital lassitude now that the threat has been removed.

Nothing so disorients and disanimates people as rapid change--especially when it is kept up at a rate that overtakes adjustment to earlier changes. A giddiness follows on such loss of the familiar, a belief that nothing is stable or can hold. Change on that scale is what many people are undergoing now, and in areas where they are least resilient, in the interpersonal relations that are the building blocks of society. What is perceived as the breakdown of the family is the spiritual equivalent of splitting the atom--the formerly indissoluble has become the indefinitely friable. The moral ground is giving way under people's feet. Things on which they thought there was a human consensus--the supremacy of the father in a monogamous family, a social solidarity against abortion and homosexuality and premarital sex--are suddenly up for grabs. Settled institutions such as the Catholic Church find even their own members rebelling against the shared certitudes of the past.

The reaction to such deep challenges is bound to be hysterical and to offer a large audience to doom-mongers. Listen, for instance, to Pat Robertson on the evils of feminism:

"To complete the antifamily, profeminist agenda, the appeal to women was not only to renounce marriage, murder children, overthrow capitalism and seek spiritual insight from witchcraft; sexual relations were to be transferred from heterosexual to homosexual.... It is only now, in this modern and increasingly godless age, that women such as Molly Yard and Jane Fonda dare claim that women have a 'moral right' to murder their young."

It is easy--dangerously easy--to see Pat Robertson as just a comic figure, the cartoon character with a placard saying The end is near. But his Christian Coalition, under its director, Ralph Reed, has become the second-largest independent political force after Ross Perot's--and for some of the same reasons that make Perot so popular. People feel something has gone fundamentally wrong with their lives, and only drastic steps can right them. Public and private crises merge. The end--of something--is near.

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The changes that worried Henry Adams in the 19th century were mainly in the external world--momentous alterations in the physical environment brought about by steam, electricity and gas, producing the transatlantic telegraph, the transoceanic cable, the telephone, cars and motion pictures. Adams said that the cult object of the 12th century was the Virgin, but the cult object of the 20th century had become the dynamo.

We have had even more rapid physical change in this century. We cannot keep any cult object for long. The dynamo gave way to the combustion engine--followed by the vacuum tube, nuclear-fission generator, the transistor, the computer chip, the laser. But even deeper, more unsettling changes have been taking place in people's inner lives, wrenching them out of old patterns, affecting relations between the generations, between parent and child, husband and wife, priest and believer, teacher and student.

Take, as one measure of the rest, the position of women. There has been more change in the ideal, the identity, the role of women in the past three decades than in the two millennia before them. Real female equality, never even approached before, not even aspired to most of the time, is becoming a reality at last. For some, and not only for women, this is an exhilarating prospect--the freeing of the talents of half the human race from past channels of productive but narrow effort.

But nothing could be more unsettling, in the basic sense, than such a shift at the heart of all people's identities. Change the role of women and you change the relation of child to mother, of husband to wife. Authority figures that were only or mainly male--doctors, professors, judges, lawyers, ministers, presidents of colleges as well as of countries--feel crowded out as women enter their ranks. It is no wonder that some see this as a subversion of the very order of nature. It has changed the entire order of society more fundamentally than other important changes--the civil rights movement, for instance. That large and important event left some lives almost untouched, but no one's life is unchanged by the feminist movement. Daughters are brought up in a world as different as could be from that of their mothers. The panicky reaction of men who feel they need some kind of compensatory movement of their own is a sign of desperation as surely as are Robertson's denunciations of feminists as witches and infanticides. What but diabolical forces could sap the strength of all things conservative Christians hold dear?

Discontent breeds conspiracy theories. Someone must be causing all this pain. Some blame the media for the breakdown of societal restraints--or the movies or Playboy. The broader the conspiracy, the more plausible it seems--people want a comprehensive explanation for their scattered troubles. Pat Robertson, like most apocalyptic evangelicals, now blends the personal and the political. According to him, the overall power structure for assailing God's laws is the New World Order--a term he thinks was held secret by the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations until former National Security Council chairman Brent Scowcroft let it slip out during a 1990 television interview. Then George Bush, puppet of the CFR, owned up to the secret plan.

Christian patriots in America have long seen the apocalypse as arriving when the Antichrist re-creates the single world that God thwarted when He knocked down the Tower of Babel, giving different nations their different languages. According to Robertson, Bush was forging a single world order when he used the UN--the forerunner of one-worldism--against Saddam Hussein. But then, significantly, Bush did not finish off Saddam, since Saddam will be part of the New World Order--he is even Robertson's temporary favorite for the role of Antichrist (Gorbachev was an earlier candidate). The new Babel will arise on the site of the old Babylon.

Christian prophecy is always a flourishing business, based as it is on the promise of a millennium of earthly rule by Christ when he returns at the end of the world (see Revelation 20:3--7). Since most orthodox Christians believe that Christ will return at the world's end, that troublesome 1000-year reign is part of fundamentalist lore, even though Saint Augustine convinced most nonfundamentalist Christians that it is a symbolic, not a literal, statement. The American historian Paul Boyer has shown the resiliency of the belief that the millennium will be ushered in by a bloody struggle with the Antichrist and with the mystically evil Beast whose number is 666 (Revelation 13:18). Hunter Thompson says he can take a drug trip in any motel simply by opening the Gideon Bible to the book of Revelation.

The power of numbers is part of the allure of prophecy. We all, to some extent, feel the suggestive force of number reifying things that have no real separate existence. Decades, for instance, are differentiated only by arbitrary counting devices. Centuries, also. But people who talk about the Sixties as if they were a historically distinct epoch are partway toward the number magic of the book of Revelation, which finds power in certain numbers (three and seven, for instance). President Reagan was superstitious enough to change his street address when it happened to be 666. Imagine the apprehension people will feel in 1999 when they realize that the number, inverted, is 6661. This was not a fear that arose in 999, since Arabic numbers were not in general use then--though the wizard Pope Sylvester knew them. But 1666 scared people silly. That was the year of the great fire in London, and Quaker founder George Fox was thundering that the end was clearly at hand.

Any natural disaster in the present decade will be interpreted mystically, as the London fire was in 1666. The proof of that is the reaction to the great Midwestern floods of 1993. Antiabortion activist Randall Terry says that the Mississippi overran its banks because God was angry at the "murder" of fetuses. A woman in Illinois wrote to a St. Louis paper that God was trying to prevent further gambling on Mississippi steamboats. Another correspondent felt that the recognition of homosexuals in the military had caused the flood. Jerry Falwell blamed it on "our treatment of the unborn and the trashings of the Judeo-Christian ethic."

Any new eruption will bring similar reactions as the magic year draws nearer. And Christian fundamentalists are not alone in foreseeing the apocalypse. Muslim and other fundamentalists see holy wars in the offing--which induces something bordering on hysteria in people who observe these frenzies of destruction. Many Americans have been frustrated by the inability of the world to respond to the self-rending action of Balkan governments--or to the splintering of the old Soviet bloc, the collapse of Europe, the instability of African nations, the "Balkanization" of our own society. Those who claim that the West is committing suicide in an orgy of indiscriminate multiculturalism may soon think there is not enough of their her itage left to defend. A sense of helplessness is easily interpreted, among believers, as a sign of God's impatience with so rampant a disorder. Better the deluge--or the fires of a second punishment to the sinful world--than such evil everywhere you look.

These moods pass, as we saw in the aftermath of the year 1000. But we probably cannot breathe safely till the fateful 2000 is behind us. For the rest of the Nineties we should brace ourselves, expecting something new in the way of ingenious nuttiness. The alarm clocks are set and ticking.

"The monk Raoul Glaber, looking to the year 1000, warned: 'Satan will soon be unleashed.'"