Everyone knows that America is a nation founded on millennial promise. When the Pilgrim Fathers fled to the New World, they were not just fleeing from oppression in the Old; they were aiming to construct a new kind of civilization in which the human condition would be transformed, in which the confusions of life would give way to the moral clarity, social order, material prosperity and religious plenitude that Protestant theologians increasingly expected in the “millennium.” In the chaos of early modernity, and with the unspeakable brutality of the European wars of religion as a backdrop, it seemed an impossible dream. Yet, in many ways, the pilgrims’ elevated vision of American national purpose has been realized.

America’s cultural psyche as well as its social and foreign policies have been profoundly shaped by John Winthrop’s vision of a “city on a hill” and the eschatological vision that compelled it. I’m not just thinking about trends in popular culture, though a glance at the best-seller lists over the past few decades provides powerful evidence that Americans are still in thrall to millennial dreams. (The Left Behind novels (1995–2007), which dramatize events associated with the “rapture”, sold more than 65 million copies to become one of the best-selling fiction series in American literary history.) Rather, I’m principally thinking about trends in politics.

Consider Ronald Reagan. In 1971, as Governor of California, he stated that “the day of Armageddon isn’t far off. . . . Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons.” A decade later, as President, he included as senior members of his Administration some who appeared to share his apocalyptic convictions, including Attorney General Ed Meese, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of the Interior James Watt. Recall, too, that Reagan offered his doom-laden description of the USSR as the “evil empire” in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals.

Successive American Presidents have since echoed the tone, if not the specifics, of his claims. Throughout the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, America’s popular cultural preferences and geopolitical purposes have been announced in language most often associated with the end of days. As Richard Landes puts it in his recent book, Heaven on Earth, America, for all of its modernity, “continues to have one of the world’s more apocalyptic cultures.”

Of course, the increasing volume of this millennial and apocalyptic sentiment can be at least partly explained by the rise of the Evangelicals. Sidelined in mainstream culture after the humiliation of the 1925 Scopes Trial, Evangelicals spent several decades re-crafting their ideas and rebuilding their institutions. Their re-entry to public life in the 1970s was sudden and spectacular, leading Newsweek to designate 1976 as the “Year of the Evangelical.” There were good reasons for the magazine’s so doing: In 1976, 34 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll identified themselves as “born-again” or “Evangelical”, a number that included all of the prominent candidates in that year’s presidential race.

Even as the old-time religion rose to new prominence, it was changing its eschatological style. Hal Lindsey’s sensational block-buster, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), taught that the Bible promised nuclear war with the USSR. It became the New York Times best-selling non-fiction title of the decade. The new Evangelicals were increasingly identified with a system of apocalyptic speculation that, when bolted onto a providentialist reading of American history, required believers to support Israel against the Arab and Islamic worlds while expecting an imminent clash of civilizations, a catastrophic decline of Western society and a horrific global persecution of Christians and Jews.

As this politicized and prophetically charged religion gained influence, the mood music of public discourse began to change with it, and faith commitments became increasingly partisan. Successive presidents, including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, committed themselves to varieties of Evangelical faith, repented of moral failures using Evangelical language and spoke in terms that resonated with millennial hope and apocalyptic fear.

The Evangelical resurgence is ongoing. In 1998, 47 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll identified themselves as “born again” or “Evangelical”—14 points higher than in 1976. In the years since, that percentage has only slightly declined. Leaders within the movement continue to energize their followers, sometimes in overtly political terms, through their use of apocalyptic language. And the audience for this kind of prophetic exhortation continues to be impressive. In 2004, roughly 100 million Americans were listening to the political-prophetic preaching of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Many critics now fear that the Evangelical prophecy lobby has become one of the most powerful grassroots coalitions in the United States, with unquantifiable but outsized influence on government, as well as the ability to field and maintain credible candidates for national office. But what might be most concerning is that this escalation of apocalyptic language in American culture is occurring at exactly the same time as the nation’s armed forces face an enemy with an urgent eschatological goal of its own: the establishment of a worldwide caliphate. What would happen if the millennial hope on which America was founded were to give way to apocalyptic despair?

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his sense of alarm about the inherent volatility of millennial thinking is a recurring motif in Heaven on Earth. Landes himself is well-placed to guide readers through this perplexing intellectual terrain. As a professor of medieval history at Boston University, he set up and oversaw the development of the Center for Millennial Studies, the premier academic consortium studying the events leading up to Y2K. His latest project is an attempt to move beyond descriptions of the dynamics of millennial groups to theorize the experience of “being in the moment” in which something apocalyptic is about to happen. Heaven on Earth builds on decades of scholarly work on the origins and evolution of a chronologically, geographically and religiously diverse selection of millennial movements.

While the subject itself is not new, Heaven on Earth is certainly doing something new. Landes chooses 11 case studies, deliberately excluding Jewish or Christian examples. This a curious decision, given his entirely justified claim that these religions are “two of the most profoundly millennial religious cultures in world history.” In fact, the book is haunted by the Jewish and Christian millennial thinking it excludes. Landes recognizes that significant actors in the Taiping and Xhosa apocalyptic movements believed themselves to be the little brothers of Jesus, for example, and he makes rather surprising comments about the use of the Bible by Adolf Hitler and proponents of radical jihad. Nevertheless, Landes wants to move beyond a predictable and expected focus on particular religions in order to construct a grand theory of millennial belief and practice. With expansive range and analysis, Heaven on Earth describes and draws lessons from Pharaoh Akhenaten, the French Revolution, Marx and Marxism, the Russian Revolution, Nazism, Papuan cargo cults, UFO cults and global jihad.

Landes insists on the importance of his subject. “The study of millennialism as a historical force is the study of disappointment . . . and a study of how extravagant optimists have come to terms with their failed hopes”, he argues, even as he notes a “key paradox”: “Although millennialism has always proven wrong in its apocalyptic expectations, it has rarely proven inconsequential or unproductive.” This is why, he explains in his laws of apocalyptic dynamics, “wrong does not mean inconsequential”, for “one person’s messiah is another’s Antichrist.”

Landes believes his general theory of millennial behavior to be the most controversial part of his argument. The most significant difficulty is that this general theory is based on a series of grand narratives: Witness his claims that millennialism is “the most protean belief in human history”, that “the West” is “the most millennial culture in world history”, and that “modernity itself is a European millennial dream with a long genealogy.” The deployment of these grand narratives allows Landes to identify the structures of millennial theology and activity in many unexpected places. This is, I think, the subtle danger of his approach: By identifying “millennial” structures of thinking and behavior outside of the two religious cultures from which Western millennial theology emerged—Judaism and Christianity—he may be simplifying and homogenizing in Procrustean ways an extraordinary range of thinking and behavior. When you reduce the complexity of any pattern sufficiently, you can see it everywhere.

The most controversial element of his book, however, may be its chapter on radical Islamism. It is perhaps the most energetic part of this outstanding work, and it is charged by Landes’s concerns about the apocalyptic potential of global jihad. But, again, his tendency toward the grand gesture becomes apparent in his description of radical Islamism as “the first major worldwide apocalyptic movement of the third millennium”, which “constitutes potentially the largest, most powerful” and “most problematic movement in the long and convulsive history of millennialism.” His alarm is rendered all the more urgent by his being, by his own estimation, a voice crying out in the wilderness (like that other preacher of impending apocalypse, John the Baptist). He laments both the failure of secular-minded scholars to notice the motivating power of religious belief and the excessive expert concern not to bruise Muslim “self-esteem.”

Landes uses this context of scholarly neglect to justify his vigorous and controversial reading of early Islamic history. His account pulls no punches, arguing that Muslims have always regarded violence as a “sacred tool”, and that “military jihad represents to Islam what the Pentecost does to Christians: it gives the key to what a believer must do in the ‘middle time’ between now and an ever-receding doomsday, how to spread the word as far and wide as possible before the Day of the Lord.”

Whatever the limitations of its theory, Landes’s writing is never short on ideas or style. Heaven on Earth is a purposeful and astute reflection upon the “hope addiction” that marks the millennial mind. “Millennialism is above all a moral critique of the world, and its spread to believers invariably includes a moral message that, on the one hand, demands a sacrifice, but on the other, assures believers that they are the truly righteous”, Landes observes. “If the last two centuries have told us anything”, he reminds us, “it is how dangerous those who would perfect the world become when they seize power.”

The paradox is that in Landes’s account the proponents of radical Islamism are driven by an eschatological system every bit as resilient and effective as what some apologists for American military intervention in the Middle East have drawn on. In this reading, common to several critics of U.S. policy over the past decade, the “war on terror” has not been a clash of civilizations so much as a clash of eschatological systems in which Evangelical and Islamic expectations of the last days collide even as they reinforce one another.

A book with this kind of extraordinary scope will always require more nuance than most authors can give it. The books that drive paradigm shifts always do. But there is no doubt that Heaven on Earth is a brave, powerful and urgent reminder that the ideas which most often shape the world are about how it will, or should, end.

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s Jay Rubenstein’s Armies of Heaven reminds us, something very similar to our modern “War on Terror” took place a thousand years ago. It all began with the Christian rediscovery of Jerusalem. The craze for local pilgrimages that swept across western Europe in the 900s grew to a fever pitch with the excitement surrounding the coming end of the first millennium, when many Christians expected events of apocalyptic proportions, if not the end of the world.

They got the former. The accession of Stephen I as the first Christian king of Hungary in the year 1000 opened up a new road to the Holy Land. In that year of apocalyptic possibility the ultimate pilgrimage became possible. As Rubenstein tantelizingly puts it, “The roads to the heavenly and earthly Jerusalems were opening up at once.”

It took almost a century for pilgrimage to became crusade. When it did, it grew to extravagant proportions: “Not just about Jerusalem or salvation, the crusade was about historical mission—about the need to put the world right.” In 1096, a series of armies of Christians gathered up about 200,000 pilgrim-warriors—priests, poor people, prophets and soldiers—and took them from France, Germany and Italy on the long march to Jerusalem. The purpose of the First Crusade, as that brutal pilgrimage has become known, was to recapture Jerusalem from the “Turks” and to worship in its hallowed precincts. But the extraordinary scale of suffering and mass death involved in those dramatic three years throws into sharp relief the relatively restrained modern contest between Islamism and the West. For in Rubenstein’s account, the actors involved in the First Crusade were on a march through Europe into eternity, moving ever further from the mitigation of the present moral order as they crept nearer to the transcendent heavenly city of Jerusalem.

The First Crusade was a quest for the apocalypse, Rubenstein argues in this evocative, compelling and thoroughly researched account. In the 1090s, he notes,

as far as anyone could tell, God (or Satan) has loosed Antichrist on the world. The armies of Gog and Magog had broken through the gates behind which Alexander the Great had imprisoned them. And Christian armies were preparing to make a stand at Jerusalem, to fight around Mount Calvary, where Christ had died, and before the Mount of Olives, where He would soon return.

It took three years for the remnant of the European armies to reach Jerusalem in a journey that was as slow as it was bloody, punctuated by sieges and battles of increasingly violent intesity. The Christian capture of Jerusalem was an achievement of apocalyptic dimensions that was intended to begin a new era in history.

In a way, it did begin a new era in history. The crusade was used to fashion a shared loyalty to “the West”, reinvigorating Christendom, by allowing parochial political loyalties to be superseded by a common continental faith. This shared religiosity was given military purpose in a “holy war”, a concept, Rubenstein argues, that developed during the expedition. This doctrine of “holy war” suspended normal rules of warfare. Military actors took upon themselves responsibility for imposing the final moral order of the heavens, enabling the warrior-pilgrims to “fight in battles longer and bloodier than any they had ever imagined.” The crescendo of violence increased as the warrior-pilgrims marched across Europe and into the end times, destroying Christian cities and fellow Catholics in preparation for their final battle with the Islamic Antichrist. They were creating the apocalypse, ensuring that the enemies of God died in a chaos of horror. Their moral duty required the suspension of compassion, proportionality and restraint.

If Landes’s Heaven on Earth is an account of millennial ideas, then Armies of Heaven is an account of millennial experiences (which is why reading them together is such a splendid notion). It describes the expedition by re-imagining the conceptual world that drove it, remembering the motivating power of dreams and trials by fire. Armies were driven by visionaries, whose own charisma could not control outbreaks of rival charismatic leaders, and who sacrificed sound logistics in favor of heightening the passions of apocalyptic war. Their imaginative world was potent, meditating upon the providential significance of blood-red moons and clouds, monstrous babies, celestial horsemen, the miraculous branding of bodies with crosses, letters falling from heaven and even a goat filled with the Holy Ghost. This apocalyptic imagination fuelled extensive anti-Jewish violence and forced conversions in Europe, but it only reached its bloody nadir in the lands of the Turks.

Rubenstein’s account maps the emergence of the strongly supernatural millennial worldview as the Christian armies crossed cultures. Entering Turkish lands, the Frankish soldiers began to understand the conflict as an uncomplicated war of religion. Conflicts were understood through the lens of a basic moral dichotomy. At the siege of Nicea, Christian soldiers collected the heads of their vanquished enemies and hung them from their saddles. God’s work became more visible as they moved onward. Crusaders saw angels guide their armies and fight their enemies. As logistics became ever more difficult, the supernatural came nearer. As they made their way slowly to the Holy Land, the crusaders “fought battles of an ever-increasing apocalyptic scale.” Still they suffered mass starvation, outbreaks of plague, charismatic preaching and supernatural experiences as the armies marched determinedly toward the end of the world.

Activities heightened at the siege of Antioch (1097–98), when the rules of war were entirely abandoned. In pursuit of total war, Christian soldiers executed Turkish prisoners, then catapulted their heads back into the city to achieve maximum psychological impact. They executed other prisoners in sight of terror-stricken Muslims on the city walls, hanging their corpses on spits as if for a feast. And it was not all about psychological warfare: There were fears of mass starvation as the Christian armies, now deep in enemy territory, struggled to find supplies. The believers were encouraged by a miracle: the ghosts of fallen crusaders returned to assist their brothers in the church militant. When the city fell, its inhabitants became victims in an ecstatic slaughter, as warrior-pilgrims established their identity as agents of the apocalypse by mimicking the violence described in Revelations. The pilgrims were the riders of the pale horse, sent out to achieve victory in a clash of civilizations, ensure the final Christian triumph over Islam and with it the end of days itself.

With the fall of Antioch, Jerusalem was but ten days’ march away. But in the three-year campaign, the army of 200,000 that had left Europe had been reduced to about 5,000. Jerusalem itself had also just fallen to a powerful new occupier: the Egyptians, with whom the Frankish army was supposed to be in alliance. They, too, would need to be defeated. There was only one thing for it: The Christian army had to be purged to be ready for an encounter of this magnitude. It had to become a City of God on earth. The army’s preachers abandoned whatever theological nuance they had preserved and represented the final stage of the crusade as a total war of “unadulterated millennialism.”

Ecstatic activity increased—dreams, visions, miraculous weapons and encounters with the sainted dead. Soldiers walked around the Mount of Olives, surveying the holy city and its idolatrous captors with the certainty that history’s final battle was at hand. It was, Rubenstein notes, an early incidence of “Jerusalem syndrome”—the experience some pilgrims in Jerusalem suffer when they find themselves unable to distinguish between their world and that of the Bible—and a necessary preparation for the “single apocalyptic moment where Christians met pagans and saints fought demons.”

In the ensuing struggle, Christians reported being driven forward by a mysterious warrior who sat on a white horse on the Mount of Olives. Finally storming the city, they drove the Muslims into the holy precincts and butchered them there. One Christian observer described “rivers of Saracen blood” that flowed “fast and deep and carried severed limbs and heads down the streets, torsos and extremities mixed and intermingled so that no one could have put them back together again, if anyone had been inclined to try.” The allusion is to Revelation 14:20¹, but, as Rubenstein reminds us, the fact that the writer used a biblical allusion “does not mean that he did not at the same time remember seeing exactly what he described.” Even for the agents of this violence, its brutality must have been unimaginable.

History’s last battle was then over. The weary, heart-worn, thirsty pilgrims stepped through the bloody streets toward the tomb of Jesus Christ and knelt to pray. They had arrived at the end of the world. But what do you do after the end of the world?

The final struggle for Jerusalem reflected the enduring violence of the apocalyptic imagination. Three days after the Christian conquest, with the passions of battle cooled, Frankish soldiers began systematically

beheading or striking down with stones girls, women, noble ladies, even pregnant women, and very young girls. . . . Some were wound about the Christians’ feet, begging them with piteous weeping and wailing for their lives and safety. . . . The streets of the whole city of Jerusalem are reported to have been so strewn and covered with the dead bodies of men and women and the mangled limbs of infants, not only in the streets, houses, and palaces, but even in places of desert solitude numbers of slain were to be found. 

There were too many bodies to bury. Survivors piled corpses against the gates of Jerusalem, where the bodies remained for months, until they decomposed.

Of course, as Rubenstein notes, “it is difficult to ignore the resonances between the 11^th-century story I have told and our own time.” We have witnessed

a Western army attacking a little-understood Eastern culture, earnestly believing itself to be a liberator of the cities it conquered . . . both anxious and hopeful that its exertions would remake the world and create a peace so profound that history itself might draw to a close (with Christianity or liberal democracies covering the globe), only to discover that the sudden liberation of Jerusalem had led not to a new world but to an endless and endlessly dangerous occupation of enemy territory. 

With Baghdad substituted for Jerusalem, the analogy is perhaps not far-fetched.

We may step neatly aside as Rubenstein compares the millennial vision of politicized Evangelicalism with the secular promise of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of History.” Despite the parallels, there is “no clear lesson” in the story Rubenstein tells, except that “ideas are often no less inspiring or powerful for being wrong.”

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hat, precisely, is why millennial theories should concern us. Whatever the temptation to mockery, the eschatological commitments of contemporary faith communities need to be taken extremely seriously. American Evangelical readers are already attuned to the collision of Christian and Islamic eschatological traditions. Joel Richardson’s The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth about the Real Nature of the Beast (2009), for example, draws on the commonalities in the apocalyptic traditions of these religions to argue the paradox that the qualities of the Qur’anic Jesus match those of the Biblical Antichrist. Richardson’s work emerges from within conservative Evangelical culture, but it ought to warn cultural observers of the terrible danger that these eschatological systems could be helped along toward the ultimate zero-sum conclusion. As Landes puts it, and as Rubenstein so eloquently illustrates, one person’s messiah is indeed another person’s Antichrist.

These two outstanding books are necessary maps to this inherently chaotic intellectual domain. And they will continue to be necessary to our understanding of what could be an increasingly unhinged future. Whatever becomes of the apocalyptic potential of the “War on Terror”, or of Islamist millennialism itself, America was founded on millennial promise. Though it is about as far from the standard American consciousness as possible, that is partly why its actions in the world continue to provoke apocalyptic fear.

¹“And the winepress was trodden outside the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.”