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Millenarian movements used to be regarded as native reactions to enormous social disruptions caused by colonial intrusion, doomed to failure and at best a step on the way to more “modern” forms of collective social resistance. In fact, they have both pre-dated and outlasted colonialism, featuring in ethnic politics across Asia and beyond to this day. Nevertheless, its encounter with modernity has not left millenarianism unchanged, as is shown in this article’s historical case study. A comprehensive timeline and mapping of past and present Hmong-Miao millenarian activity highlights several enduring features including a context of economic and political crisis, their transnational nature, the prevalence of manipulation and/or coercion, and specific cultural symbols within supernatural predictions. Equally important are the historical developments, from pan-ethnic to mono-ethnic and from violent to peaceful (but still threatening to political and religious authorities), reflecting historical trends of ethnicisation and territorialisation. The mechanics of such reproductions and transformations are then unpacked, before the Hmong-Miao experience is compared with millenarian activity from other groups of upland Southeast Asia. Millenarianism continues to play a role in voicing social discontent, challenging power structures and moulding ethnic relations, but needs to be examined and understood within evolving socio-political contexts.\ud \ud

This paper discusses the origins of Mahdiism ( al-Mahdi al-Muntaẓar ) that are constructed using the mahdawiyyah ḥadīth with the status of aḥ a d (single transmitter) and ḍa'īf (weak). Nevertheless, this belief (Mahdiism) has deep roots in the theological reason of Muslims. By the historical approach, the finding shows that Mahdiism has roots in millenarianism (belief of the saviors' presence) that had existed in pre-Islamic traditions, such as Jewish and Christian. The elementary form of Islamic millenarianism is the concept of prophethood, but when the prophethood concept was deemed finished, it continued into the concept of Mahdiism. The first emergence of Mahdiism is in line with the emergence of mahdawiyyah ḥadīth. The emergence context of the mahda­wiyyah ḥadīth revolves around the power transition from the Umayyad dynasty to the Abbasid dynasty, which always involved Shiite followers as the political victims. The contact between Shiites with the Jewish former and Christian former during the conflict at that time influenced the style of Shiite theology, like as millenarianism. The Shi'ites propagate the presence of al-Mahdi, as the savior from descendants of the prophet ( Ahl al-Bait ) described through the mahdawiyyah hadiths. Among the narrators of mahdawiyyah ḥadīth are Jewish former (Ka'ab al-Aḥbar) and Christians former (Wahb b. Munabbih). They were the pioneers who incorporated the millenarianism into the Mahdiism.

Mahdism, or the belief in the resurrection of the eschatological figure of the Mahdi remains important in Islam today. This belief, legitimated by the mahdawiyyah hadith, has allowed many individuals throughout Islamic histories to claim themselves to be the Mahdi, as well as to carry out a radical strand of Islamic movement in order to support their claim. Using a historical method, this paper studies the history and development of mahdism, along with their interpretationof the mahdawiyah hadith; and analyzes the connection of such interpretation with the rise of religious radicalism. The study argues, mahdism is linked to the practices of millenarianism, formerly existed in Jewish and Christian theology. The emergence of mahdism related to the political conflict during the power transition from the Umayyad to the Abbasid dynasty. Yet, the rise of the Mahdi movement found its support from the mahdawiyyah Hadith, which are interpreted in such a way as to legitimize the radical-subversive movement of the mahdi’s leaders, enabling mahdism to develop, ideologically, as a radical movement. This study concludes that mahdism is at once a religious and political movement aiming to bring back the glory of Islam. Religion becomes a legitimate and effective ideological framework of a political mission.

Universities have survived history. They survived numerous revolutions of different natures: scientific, economic, and political. Their millenarian history suggests that their core identity and values stand above time, and the expectation is that they will last many more centuries.

Following the Restoration, various individuals and groups pursued radical millenarian visions of social, intellectual, religious and political reform. This essay focuses on a group coalescing around the mystic John Pordage, reconfigured as the Philadelphian Society under the leadership of the charismatic Jane Leade. It explores the pronounced medical interests of the group, how such ideas may have impacted on their wider vision of social regeneration, the significance of the group’s attachment to ‘psychic experimentation’ and its base in contemporary strains of medical thinking, focusing in particular upon the career of one of their number, William Boreman (d. 1707). Boreman’s religious and scientific ideas (radical whig, tolerationist and medical reformer) mark him out as a ‘progressive’; however, he was also a committed witch hunter who converted his home in Kent into a refuge for the bewitched and as a laboratory for psychic battles with the Devil. Much of the evidence for Boreman’s career is based on extensive, new research in the archives and sheds light on how it was possible for contemporaries to hold what appear seemingly contradictory positions on a range of issues including those relating to spiritual inspiration, communication and sources of knowledge in a period of intellectual upheaval.

Joseph Priestley's millenarian prophecies were not necessarily at odds with his natural philosophy, nor his materialism with his theology, but to the French philosophes and to his friend John Adams they seemed incompatible and they may also seem so to us. That is what this article considers in its three parts: the first, Priestley's reading of revealed religion; the second, the politics entailed by it; and the third, the way a progressive direction is carried in to the future, uniting religion and politics in his late reading of Biblical prophecy.

This introduction delineates the contours of early modern apocalyptic thought and practice among Christians, Muslims, and Jews by discussing specific themes explored in the five articles included in this special issue. It also situates the articles in the expansive scholarship on apocalypticism, highlighting the contribution of this collection of essays to the field. Paying close attention to and problematizing the importance of the terminology that expressed early modern notions of sacred history and political authority—in a context of intense inter-confessional contact and conflict—this introduction calls for a contextual examination of apocalyptic thought and practice.

This paper attempts to identify the sources of Anna L. Barbauld’s pessimistic vision of the future Britain, which distinguishes her from her fellow Dissenters, especially Joseph Priestley. A millennialist outlook on history pervades Priestley’s An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), a defense of the rights of Dissenters, and his 1788 sermon on the slave trade. Here Priestley’s commitment to radical causes is based on the assumption that the course of human history is progressive―that even social evils of slavery and religious discrimination are part of the process by which the human race is progressing towards a free, just society under God’s providence. Barbauld, however, departs from an optimistic view of history held by her co-religionists. Her engagement with issues of Dissent, An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), is full of unwomanly rage at an infringement of Dissenters’ civil rights, which seemed to her a betrayal of the ideals of liberty that the British had upheld. Her Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791) also unleashes fury at the appalling state of moral decay in her country. In the poet’s judgment, Britain is doomed to self-destruction by not abandoning slavery and hence extinguishing the spirit of liberty. Barbauld’s break with the mainstream of Dissenting thought, i.e., her apocalyptic vision of the nation’s decline and fall, becomes more evident in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). As a liberal Dissenter, Barbauld had a firm belief in the idea of individual liberty and so found herself despairing of the political state of Britain, which gradually distanced her from Dissenting millenarianism. This distance made her political writing truly radical.

The study of holy men active in Thailand, Laos and Myanmar between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries has associated them primarily with millenarian movements. In the twenty-first century, the Thailand–Myanmar border has seen the emergence of a holy man to whom the concept of millenarianism is, in the current changing religious environment, not applicable. Khruba Bunchum, a contemporary Thai monk with a significant ethnic minority following in Myanmar, rose to fame in Thailand after being forced to leave Myanmar and spending three years meditating in an isolated cave. He has gained followers among wealthy and middle-class Thais. His case illustrates the effect of mobile media technology in transforming the practice of venerating holy men. It suggests the need for a new approach to studying religious movements, one that draws on religious, political and media sources.

This article investigates the political nature and involvement of millennialism as a religious phenomenon. It, firstly, offers a brief analysis of how millennialism shifted from a significant, but marginal role player in the history of Christianity to become part of the mainstream religious discourse in recent times. It then seeks to explain how this came about by analysing the way this development continues and resonates with the political language and thought of the 19th-century religious discourse in the United States and in early modern England since the 16th century. It finally investigates the dangerous consequences of politicising eschatology by specifically analysing the role of Israel in millennial expectations.

Contrary to modernist assumptions, millenarianism has not died out but continues to influence the politics of many marginalised groups in upland Southeast Asia, including the Hmong. This article summarises and analyses post-World War II Hmong millenarian activity in Vietnam, focusing on three case studies from the 1980s onwards, within the political backdrop of ongoing government suspicions of ethnic separatism and foreign interference. Far from being isolated or peripheral, Hmong millenarian rumours and movements interact with overseas diasporas, human rights agencies and international religious networks to influence state responses, sometimes in unexpected ways.

After the Christianization of the Roman empire, representations of Christ’s return no longer envisioned the end as the fall of an evil empire. Rather, relying especially on Romans 9–11, Christians focused particularly on expectations that the conversion of Jews would inaugurate the end. Jews—and Samaritans—however, envisioned the restoration of their Temple(s) and a political theocracy that would counter the power of the now Christianized Roman empire. This contribution considers four instances in the fifth-century c.e. in which such expectations played a significant role: an account of the conversion of the Jews of Minorca, framed as a prelude to the end; a millenarian episode on Crete whose narrator claims resulted in the mass conversion of Jews; a roughly contemporaneous possible messianic uprising in Jerusalem narrated in the Life of Barsauma, and a Samaritan revolt toward the end of the century. All may be understood as instances of intense contestations between Jews, Christians and Samaritans, in the wake of intensifying orthodox Christian pressures to conform the entire empire to that orthodoxy.

Focusing fundamentally on the Lessons of applied philosophy. Theory of the State of 1813, this paper analyzes the political function of Christianity in the Fichtean understanding of history as the progressive realization of reason. This function is twofold: on the one hand, a political function as a moral education of the citizen and as the civil religion of the State of Right; on the other, a meta-political or utopian (millenarian) function as a requirement of an international federative horizon for the achievement of a single cosmopolitan society on earth.

Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s The Partisan Leader is an explicit political statement, one that posits a future in which the South successfully secedes from the North. In this chapter, Templeton explores this vision in the light both of Tucker’s legal philosophies and of a pastoral millenarianism, analysing the ways in which Tucker’s political vision is shaped by the forms of both pastoral and romance, and in turn how those views inform his understanding of a ‘New Jerusalem’: a perfect pastoral society in a South freed from Northern exploitation.

Fundamentada en la milenaria idea del perfeccionamiento humano, la ideología eugenésica británica emergente a finales del siglo XIX tuvo en el movimiento eugenésico norteamericano el apoyo necesario para materializar una serie de políticas de carácter racial con el objetivo de perfeccionar la especie humana. El movimiento eugenésico estadounidense se constituyó como un paso clave en la extensión de una ideología que triunfó en numerosos Estados latinoamericanos y europeos, y que perdió todo su apoyo científico, político y social debido a su radicalización en Alemania durante el Holocausto nazi. En la actualidad, el debate en torno al pensamiento eugenésico y la posibilidad de su retorno ha crecido de forma exponencial con motivo del desarrollo biotecnológico, y de la posibilidad de una mejora humana biotecnológica que provoque graves daños al ser humano.

This article explores the entangled history of transnational race discourses in the colonialism of early puritan settlers in new england. Retracing the complexity of discursive intersections between proto-racist, anti-judaic and pro-judaic rhetoric within puritan minority narratives, it asks how these discourses changed when theological concepts around self and other, old and new israel, were translated from europe to the north american colonies. The settlers’ millenarian theology forged an eschatological link between the american wilderness and the religious and political heterotopia of a new jerusalem; cotton mather's magnalia christi americana (1702), for example, idealized the figure of the colonial founding father as an american nehemiah or moses. In the settlers’ vision, the puritans stood in competition with old israel, aiming to assume its role and basing their apocalyptic interpretations of the flight from europe on its exodus. At the same time, they transferred images of europe's “internal colonized”—the jews—to the indigenous population. In the frontier zone of colonial contact, the puritans combined older anti-judaic with their own millenarian pro-judaic ideas in new ways, a process that converged in the notion that the “indians” were descendants of the 10 lost tribes of israel and their religion was similar to that of the biblical israelites.

Josef Haslinger's novel Opernball, first published in 1995, represents a fictitious toxic gas attack on the guests attending the Viennese Opera Ball. The novel engages millennial thinking and reaches a climax in the idea of an Armageddon, which corresponds loosely to the Book of Revelations. A terrorist group, guided by a charismatic leader who aligns himself with the traitor Judas Ischariot, claims to derive its legitimacy from the study of historical millenarianism as well as White Supremacist thinking. The aim of the group's action is the realization of an anti-migrant, xenophobic extreme right-wing political regime in Austria.

This paper tries to analyse the millenarian response of the Bantenese to the Western colonization from an anthropological perspective. The his­tory of Banten at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century was marked by various indigenous unrest, rebellion, and resistance against the colonial power. In 1888, several religious leaders of Sufi brotherhoods and community leaders in Cilegon, Banten led a revolt against the Dutch colonial government. This uprising was provoked by the Dutch’s trade regulation, a new economic system, and was fuelled by enduring religious sentiments against the Dutch. While most schol­ars frame the event as a religious or social political movement, this study focuses on to what some of the Bantenese Muslims perceived as “unjust” social situations of the colonized world: poverty, inequality, religious restriction, social and political marginalization.

Gracias a la problemática del milenarismo, la historiografía de Eric Hobsbawm integra toda la riqueza de la subjetividad sociocultural, la profundidad de las creencias, los sentimientos y las emociones en su análisis de los acontecimientos históricos, que no son más, en esta perspectiva, percibidos simplemente como productos del juego «objetivo» de las fuerzas económicas o políticas. Aun distinguiendo cuidadosamente los milenarismos primitivos de los revolucionarios modernos, no deja de mostrar su afinidad electiva. Esto no quiere decir que todos los movimientos revolucionarios sean milenaristas en sentido estricto o, peor todavía, que respondan a un quiliasmo de tipo primitivo. Eso no impide afirmar que la afinidad entre los dos sea un hecho fundamental en la historia de las revueltas campesinas contra la modernización capitalista. Se trata de una de las hipótesis de investigación más interesantes esquematizadas en sus trabajos de esta época. Hobsbawm ilustra sus propósitos con dos estudios de caso apasionantes: el anarquismo rural en Andalucía y las ligas campesinas de Sicilia, ambos surgidos a fines del siglo xix con prolongaciones al siglo xx., Thanks to the problematic of millenarianism, Eric Hobsbawm’s historiography incorporates all the richness of socio-cultural subjectivity - the depth of beliefs, feelings and emotions - into his analysis of historical events, which, from this viewpoint, are no longer perceived simply as products of the «objective» interplay of economic or political forces. Although he makes a careful distinction between primitive millenarianisms and modern revolutionary movements, Hobsbawm nevertheless shows their elective affinity between them. This does not mean that all revolutionary movements are millenarian in the strict sense or - which is even worse - that they are connected to a primitive type of chiliasm. All the same, the affinity between them is a basic fact in the history of peasant revolts against capitalist modernization. This is one of the most interesting research hypotheses outlined by Hobsbawm in his work of that period. He illustrated his idea in two fascinating case studies: rural anarchism in Andalusia and the Sicilian peasant leagues, both arising at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth.

El milenario interés del ser humano por mejorar sus atributos naturales derivó a finales del siglo XIX en la emergencia de la ‘eugenesia’ como ciencia que estudiaba la mejora del linaje humano. En la práctica, el movimiento ideológico y político eugenésico se materializó en la primera mitad del siglo XX, especialmente en Reino Unido, Estados Unidos y Alemania. Estos tres Estados, considerados como la línea principal del movimiento eugenésico, intentaron llevar a cabo la pretendida mejora de la especie humana a través de toda una serie de políticas de carácter homófobo y racista cuya consecuencia directa fue la esterilización involuntaria e incluso el asesinato de miles de personas. Sin embargo, el final de la II Guerra Mundial supuso un punto de inflexión en el movimiento eugenésico, el cual fue modificando progresivamente su carácter racista para desarrollar su idea de perfeccionamiento humano desde el punto de vista del “bienestar de la sociedad” y la mejora de la calidad de vida de los ciudadanos, dando lugar a una hibridación racismo-bienestar en la ideología eugenésica de segunda mitad del siglo XX. Human beings millenarian interest in improving their natural attributes culminated at the end of the 19th century with the emergence of ‘eugenics’ as a science that studied the enhancement of human lineage. In practice, the ideological and political eugenics movement materialized in the first half of the 20th century, especially in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Germany. These three nations, embodying the eugenics movement mainstream, tried to carry out the desired improvement of human species by applying several homophobic and racist policies whose direct consequence was involuntary sterilization and murder of thousands of people. However, the end of the Second World War brought about a turning point for the eugenics movement. It gradually modified its racist nature in order to develop the idea of human enhancement from the point of view of “social welfare” and the improvement of citizens’ quality of life, giving rise to a racism-welfare hybridization within the eugenics ideology of the second half of the 20th century.

Major-General Thomas Harrison. Millenarianism, Fifth Monarchism and the English Revolution, 1616-1660, by David Farr, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing, 2014, xii + 304 pp., £75.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4094-6554-6Having finished his business unexpectedly early, on 13 October 1660, Samuel Pepys: "went out to Charing-cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered - which was done there - he was looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition." That night, Pepys confided to his diary that: "It is said that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that have now judged him. And that his wife doth expect his coming again." 1 His, carefully encrypted, entry was intended as a private means of externalising, and of making sense of, the great public events in which he was now, increasingly, a most willing actor and recorder. Supremely reflexive, Pepys realised that he stood at a political, generational and cultural watershed, as the Republic gave way to a Restored Monarchy, as the imminent God became increasingly transcendent and as the Early Modern psyche became recognisably Modern. If George Thomason chose, after more than twenty years, to stop collecting his pamphlets at the Restoration; then, it is equally significant that Pepys started work on the most famous of his diaries at almost the same time. One language had ceased, and another had begun; at once, coarser, more pragmatic and grasping.On the one side of this divide, Samuel Pepys appears as clubbable, intellectually curious, wryly cynical and wholly materialistic; on the other, Thomas Harrison seems to be a seeker after heavenly signs and portents, an idealist enraptured by the word of God and finding his surest expression in the sounds of battle. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the youthful Pepys was disquieted by - and wholly unable to comprehend - either the Millenarian expectations of the veteran soldier or his willingness to accept a martyrdom, carefully choreographed by his enemies, in order to exact from him the maximum in terms of pain and humiliation.Briefly the second most powerful man in the land, the confidant of Cromwell, the breaker of Parliaments and the driving force behind both the Assembly of the Saints and the regicide, Thomas Harrison commands, and deserves, our attention. Yet, he is also a paradoxical, troublesome and troubling figure in the eyes of posterity, just much as he ever was for his contemporaries. He was no ascetic: his brand of Puritanism was far from dour, hallmarked by a love of display and a certain vanity - which makes him appear all the more human - and which revealed itself in his delight in fine clothes and bright colours. Sir Thomas Herbert saw him "gallantly mounted and armed; a velvet montero was on his head, a new buff coat upon his back and a crimson scarf about his waist richly fringed." 2 Lucy Hutchinson was infuriated by his upstaging of her husband, before the new Spanish ambassador, so "that he alone might appear [great] in the eies of strangers" to parliament; and Charles I found himself, for once, thoroughly out-charmed by one who "looked like a soldier and [whose] aspect was good," during his escort under guard to Windsor and London, in December 1648.3 Having risen from the ranks of the mercantile, "Middling sort"-his father had been a butcher and was elected as Mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme on no less than four occasions - Harrison had few qualms about enriching himself, through his sinecure as Lieutenant of the Ordnance, and in consolidating his social position. He kept a good stable, rented a substantial house on Highgate Hill and owned lands in Bedfordshire and Staffordshire, as well as the manor of Tottenham. Royalist critics sneered at his pursuit of ambition and luxury, while the Parliamentarian memorialist Mrs Hutchinson cattily observed that this "meane man's sonne ... of meane education, and no estate before the warre had gather 'd an estate of two thousand [pounds] a yeare . …

The importance of the concept of Europe as a source of meaning and object of contested discursive battles during the fundamental transition towards modernity of the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) can hardly be overstated. The Weimar Classics (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland) made important contributions both to Enlightenment debates about Europe before the French Revolution and to the discursive battles about the continent taking place in the aftermath of the French Revolution in a context of heightened epistemic uncertainty and ideological confrontation. The paper aims to investigate Goethe's representation of Europe as an almost millenarian civilisation endangered at the end of the eighteenth century by a double process of economic and political modernisation. Particular attention is paid to how Goethe rooted his perception of Europe as a civilisation in geographic and climatic assumptions and how he compared the continent to other civilisational entities such as America, China, India or Persia. Finally, the ...

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War . By Eran Shalev . New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press , 2013. x + 239 pp. $40.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesScholars have long recognized that an important strain of American nationalism constructs the United States as a "redeemer nation" based on equating it typologically with ancient Israel and exercising a millenarian appropriation of the Mosaic national covenant. In American Zion , Eran Shalev advances an "expanded sense" of the Old Testament's role in forming a "national and political culture" (2). Between approximately 1770-1830, he contends, lay and clerical writers elaborated an earlier European discourse about the "Hebrew republic" into a distinctive political hermeneutic that wove "America into the Bible and the Bible into America" (143). In demonstrating how generations of early American republicans fashioned scripture into a political text, Shalev has produced a marvelously trenchant study of their religious nationalism.One of American Zion 's greatest virtues is its chronological care in linking ideological developments to politico-cultural change. As resistance to Britain heated up, American Whigs calibrated their civic humanist rhetoric to include biblical Israel along with Greece and Rome in exemplifying the promises and perils of republican government. This process continued during the 1780s as supporters of the Constitution cited the Israelite polity, refigured as having comprised twelve (or sometimes thirteen) "states," for modeling a federal republic that was both structurally balanced and, unlike other cases from antiquity, ordained by God, thereby sanctioning the newly proposed arrangement as simultaneously well-wrought and divinely favored. By 1800, parsing Old Testament politics had become so normative that "pseudobiblicism," a genre of political commentary cast in the cadences of the King James Bible, flourished among pundits who hoped that its "ontologically privileged language" (85) would give their own observations special credence. Constant references to the United States as a second Israel culminated in the notion, particularly vivid after the War of 1812, that the United States had become the new Israel, a viewpoint that granted special cogency to arguments identifying Indians as the Ten Lost Tribes and endorsed the claims of religious groups, most notably the Mormons, to possess an Israelite pedigree. After 1830, however, social transformations associated with the Market Revolution and the Second Great Awakening underwrote the ascendance of an alternative political theology grounded in the New Testament. The dynamics of this hermeneutic played out most prominently during the debate over slavery, in which each side justified its stand by soliciting Gospel examples--what did Jesus do? To slaveowners, Christ condoned slavery as legal and just, while abolitionists held that his ministry to the downtrodden and sacrifice for "bleeding humanity" demonstrated precisely the opposite. Historicizing biblical slavery unintentionally undermined the logic equating the Hebrew and American republics by morally distancing them; if biblical slavery was far less heinous than the South's chattel system, then the United States could no longer claim to be Israel redux.The full impact of Shalev's argument builds as the book progresses, albeit not without some analytical hiccups. He rightly underlines the importance of "biblical republicanism" while also acknowledging that this discovery does not noticeably change our knowledge of republican ideology. …

Profeti e profetismi: Escatologia, millenarismo e utopia. Edited by Andre Vauchez. [Conifere, Vol. 7.] (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane. 2014. Pp. 484. euro49,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-10-56008-2.)Although perhaps not as fashionable as they were around the turn of the last millennium, the intertwined subjects of prophecy, eschatology, and apocalypticism remain a vital part of scholarship on the Western tradition, ranging from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the modern (or even postmodern) era. The "pursuit of the millennium," to speak, harkening back to Norman Cohn's groundtions breaking work on the problem of millenarianism and its revolutionar)' potentialities, continues among historians, sociologists, political scientists and others. Far from being marginal, prophetic voices, apocalyptic predictions, and eschatological speculations provide a fascinating opportunity to interrogate all sorts of texts, events, and figures that relate to a wide range of political, intellectual, and social issues, some conservative and others subversive, framed in religious but also secularized forms of theorizing about the future.This volume of essays edited by Andre Vauchez (an Italian translation of the original publication, Prophetes et prophetisme [Paris, 2012]) makes for a welcome addition to the ongoing dialogue about what Vauchez calls the "three principal forms of prophecy" (eschatology, millenarianism, and utopianism), viewed here as "cultural constructs, with a strong symbolic character, that need to be taken seriously since they illustrate the role played by the imagination in human society" (p. 17). The collection includes contributions by Jean-Robert Armogathe, Sylvie Barnat, Jean-Pierre Bastian, Philippe Boutry, Pierre Gibert, Balerio Petrarca, and Isabelle Richet. These studies designedly stretch across the entirety of Western apocalyptic discourse from the Bible to the late-twentieth century. They also widen the geographic scope of their inquiry into various iterations of prophecy and millenarianism, including chapters on Africa, Latin America, and North America (meaning, in effect, the United States).Scholars conversant in the premodern apocalyptic tradition will encounter many familiar texts and names in this collection, starting with the Christian roots of prophecy and messianic thought in the Hebrew tradition to the highly influential patristic thinker Augustine of Hippo (whose stultifying effect on millennial speculation was considerable, albeit not absolute), followed by medieval monastic authors including Hildegard of Bingen and Joachim of Fiore, and Reformation-era firebrands like Thomas Muntzer (along with, inevitably, Michel de Notre Dame, better known as Nostradamus). …

This essay discusses Jesuit Priest Antonio Vieira's (1608–1697) Messianic writings, specifically the texts in which he comments on the impending arrival of the Kingdom of Christ, described as a most happy state suffused with divine grace. This Kingdom would be perfect and complete, and it would take place on earth, not in the purely spiritual sphere of heaven. I argue that the earthly dimension of Vieira's conception of the Kingdom of Christ opens his Messianism to a political dimension. It will lead him to consider the coexistence of nations during this Millenarian Kingdom in terms of “perpetual peace,” a notion later secularized by the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

This chapter materializes around the concept-metaphor of the “spirit” to parse the troubled and recent past of slavery in the Caribbean, leading to the Morant Bay Rebellion and its aftermath, including the labor struggles and nationalist agitation of the 1930s–1940s. The early 1860s witnessed a resurgence of ancestral, millenarian, and revival religions, including Native Baptist denominations, the Afro-Creole religion Myal, and African spirit religions based on ancestor worship more generally. These spirit-based religions directly influenced the Morant Bay Rebellion leaders, who were both Baptist preachers, as well as later representations of the event. I first track the uncanny manifestation of the Haitian Revolution in texts on rebellion in the Caribbean. The variously terrifying and welcome specter of Haiti, a reminder of both black enslavement and black resistance, haunts the mid-nineteenth-century dispute between Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, and its repetition in the late nineteenth-century debate between James Anthony Froude and John Jacob Thomas. It also haunts the proliferation of C.L.R. James’s textual representations, or more accurately revisitations, of the Haitian Revolution in his plays Toussaint Louverture (1934) and The Black Jacobins (1967). I argue that within all these texts both slavery and black insurrection constitute imperial capitalism’s very modernity, even as they are seen as “premodern” and atavistic. I then examine the Afro-Creole religion Myal’s deconstruction of the primacy of being and its attention to the figure of the ghost, or more accurately to the act of inspiriting, as an ethical responsibility to the “other” through a critique of colonial biopolitics, as seen in Roger Mais’s play “George William Gordon, a Historical Play in 14 Scenes” (1947) and Claude McKay’s poem “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives” (1912). I end the chapter with a focus on the representation, in both the aesthetic and political sense, of a mid-century creole anti-colonial nationalism that constituted a “spirit of the age,” and that drew its impetus from trade unionism. In a reading of V.S. Reid’s novel New Day (1949) and two poems from Una Marson’s collection The Moth and the Stars (1937), I argue that while Reid constructs the longed-for nation-state as constituted by family land and thus as part of this masculinized creole nationalist project, Marson more ambivalently reads it as potentially disruptive of family land, and thereby seems at moments to bring that nationalist project into question.

There is a swell developed argument from Alexis de Tocqueville to Jose Casanova that Christianity is not only deeply embedded in the founding myths of American society as the First New Nation and the Israel of the New World, but also an important component of contemporary American politics from the Moral Majority to the Tea Party. This chapter looks at the millenarian dimensions of that aspect of American political culture. Starting with the dispensational theology of the nineteenth century to the “unusual relationship” between evangelical Protestantism and modern Judaism, this chapter explores how American foreign policy toward the Middle East has been influenced by dispensational theology, the idea that the end of times will be foretold by the gathering in of the Jews and by a nationalist reading of American exceptionalism. The foreign policy of George W. Bush was in particular constructed around this version of the theology of catastrophe. The more intense the Middle East crisis, the more evangelicals believe that their catastrophic view of history is coming to fruition. Those who reject this millenarian view of the end of history will be left behind. In short, American foreign interest toward Israel and the Arabs is shaped by the intersection of a nationalist sense of America as a society with a unique commission in the world, a religious theory of apocalypse, and the conjunction of a Middle East crisis.

In historical terms, the Pentecostal movement, for almost a century, was known for its political quietism. Identifi ed by ecstatic and esoteric experiences, Pentecostalism was in essence world-rejecting by nature. The movement’s millenarian disposition meant that it had no or few political inclinations. The return of Christ seemed imminent, ushering in the Kingdom of God that would replace all human authorities. With new waves of Pentecostalism spreading across the world, the movement appeared to become increasingly politicised in certain global context. This paper take a comparative analysis of the political undertakings of Pentecostalism in two western contexts, namely, the USA and the UK that provide examples of a seemingly highly religious society and a ‘mid-range’ secular society of Europe respectively. The paper overviews the activities of Pentecostals in both nations and identifi es the key factors behind the politicalization of the movement and explores the principal variables by which to understand diff erent levels of success achieved by the movement. This emphasis is supplemented by recognition of the contrasting political cultures in which the activities of the Pentecostals have operated.

Orianne Smith. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786-1826. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 293. $95. Situated between studies of millenarianism's class consciousness and the feminist reappraisal of women's writing in the Romantic period, Orianne Smith's Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786-1826 argues that not only was visionary, apocalyptic writing undertaken by women as well as men, but this writing is a complex form of social protest. Part secular, part sacred, sometimes catastrophic in orientation, sometimes progressive, such writing was a means by which women attempted to achieve world-historical relevance at a time when patriarchal institutions afforded them few if any "legitimate" opportunities for expression. Perhaps ironically, it is the flexibility rather than univocity of what Ian Balfour has called the "prophetic mode" that proves, in Smith's analysis, especially important to its generic coherence. Thanks to their hermeneutic resourcefulness--or, according to critics, a "typological excess" productive of "deranged and manic exegesis" (14)--prophets, speaking in the same style as each other, might read the same historical event in radically different ways. Take the French Revolution. "For Dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, Helen Maria Williams, and [Anna] Barbauld, and Dissenting sympathizers like Wollstonecraft, progressive millennialism [spurred by the Revolution] brought with it a renewed faith in the eventual abolition of slavery, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the eradication of gender inequality" (17). At the same time, "Anglicans such as Joseph Galloway and Hannah More believed that the events across the channel signaled something like the beginning of Armageddon" (19). What Smith's work reveals, then, is that thanks to the prophetic mode women were capable of participating in debates about nationalism, religion, and world history in ways that cannot be homogenized. Smith argues, instead, that what these writers share is a turn to "an illocutionary speech act," a kind of saying that accomplishes--or tries to accomplish--what it announces through its mode of performance (23). Thus, promising and cursing do not merely describe situations but manifest a political and social intent in the very fact of their utterance. Over the course of six compact chapters and a brief Epilogue, Smith explores the specific practices of "five very different Romantic women writers engaged in political prophecy" (33), situating their performative prophetic writing within larger cultural and artistic trends in the later eighteenth century including acts of improvisation, the discourse of sympathy, the Gothic genre, and moral philosophy. In her first chapter, "Verbal magic: an etymology of female enthusiasm," Smith looks back to the sectarian female prophets of the English Civil War to contextualize prophetic writing and practice by women in Romanticism. In spite of enthusiasm's bad reputation--cemented during the Restoration--and its generally diminished cultural currency in the more sober eighteenth century, Smith argues that Romantic women prophets draw on these precursors and participate in a tradition of such writing. The "use of the word 'tradition' here and elsewhere is deliberate" (6), Smith insists early on, situating the phenomenon of female prophecy within the controversy between "tradition" and "right" as two different grounds of authority. Female prophecy, for Smith, draws its power from both sides. Because women from Hester Lynch Piozzi to Helen Maria Williams to Mary Shelley situated themselves with the prophetic tradition, Smith argues, their claims to political legitimacy carried more weight with Burkeans and other conservative thinkers. At the same time, Smith stresses that the performative nature of prophetic writing bases its authority in its autonomy: like a rights claim, female prophecy is expressed by fiat and makes a transcendental gesture beyond any limiting (and often discouraging, patriarchal) tradition. …

Increasingly, attention is being given to the religious underpinnings of Francis Bacon’s project to reform natural philosophy. Within this discussion, however, his vital invocations of Jewish religion and culture have been ignored or represented as largely static and unproblematic, rather than understood in terms of contemporary cultural and theological struggles. In his utopia New Atlantis , Bacon draws on the dynamics of Christian-Jewish relations for several interrelated polemical purposes. One purpose is to imagine, not a complete sundering of science from religion as some past scholars have concluded but nevertheless a specific kind of division between these two spheres at the level of social organization. Another is to affirm such a qualified division of religion and science at the level of the relationship between God and nature; this division is specifically affirmed against the background of the contemporary upsurge of radical forms of millenarianism and messianism, alluded to in New Atlantis , which put the relationship between God, nature, and earthly political order under new scrutiny. These theologically and politically heretical developments are at the heart of Bacon’s most significant polemical purpose here: to defend his project against a set of vulnerabilities historically associated with natural philosophy’s reception by Christianity, vulnerabilities heightened by Bacon’s apocalyptic framework and its susceptibility to being paralleled with these disruptive eschatologies.

After a brief presentation of the work of the German-born American political philosopher Eric Voegelin, Prof. Barry Cooper focuses on what Voegelin calls the Ecumenic Age, the period from the rise of the Persian around the eighth century BC to the fall of the Roman Empire around the eighth century AD. From this period, we can learn that any intramundane apocalyptic efforts to unify politically the ecumene (or inhabited world) and thus to bring an end to history are doomed to fail. Yet this dream remains the driving force behind many contemporary radical ideologies.

First published in 1991, this book collects a broad array of path-finding scholarship by specialists in Coleridge and Romantic literature on the subject of his prose. They range from broad appraisals of Coleridge's own critical practises; demonstrations of the fecundity of his autobiography, the Biographia Literaria, for contemporaries; the effect of Milton and the radical polemicists of the English Civil War on Coleridge's early political and religious dissent; and the influence of the Hebrew prophetic tradition in his move away from the conjectural millenarianism of his youth towards the interpretation of Prophecy and a symbolic narrative.

Within the rhetorical tradition of American civil religion, the United States is often depicted as divinely obligated to spread and defend democratic government throughout the world. That trope partly stems from the political thought of John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the United States Democratic Review and the christener of Manifest Destiny. This essay analyzes his political writing, which characterizes America as a sinless agent of God’s will, possessing a messianic destiny to initiate a global democratic transfiguration and redeem the world from tyranny. O’Sullivan’s millenarian thought identifies democracy with American power, framing politics as a conflict between democratic good and despotic evil. His vision of America as specially obligated and authorized to intervene in the affairs of other nations remains influential on American political speech and self-understanding today. Understanding O’Sullivan’s political theology helps explain elements of American political speech and behavior in the twenty-...

Shi‘ite Messianism has been accommodated constitutionally and has been portrayed as an indispensable aspect of political culture under the Islamic Republic. If the state is using the concept as a form of legitimacy, the concept is standardized in accordance with the prevailing perspectives of the political system. Thus, if there are other emerging grassroots messianic narratives incompatible with the political ideology, they could undermine the legitimacy of the state. This article examines the emerging paradoxes in a climate in which the state uses messianism as a legitimacy tool but, at the same time, is unable to monopolize the concept primarily for its own use. This article will assess a situation in which the state and the grassroots are struggling in order to maintain dominance over ideas that advocate millenarianism. There will be a critical discussion on how the politics of the Shi‘ite Messianism have proved to be contradictory, and the dilemmas over the politicization of Mahdism will be identified.

James D. Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 306 pp. How are we to do cultural anthropology when distinct communities with long-established customs and moralities are giving way to free market individualism and ever-changing commercialized lifestyles? James D. Faubion addresses this critical question with a framework for studying ethics or "subjectivation," that is, how individuals fashion themselves through work on the self. His approach, however, is decidedly not psychological. To the contrary, he begins by rejecting psychological reductionism in favor of a Foucauldian perspective on how reflexive social actors "govern" their selves (3). He is concerned not with psychic interiority but rather with "subject positions," that is, with subjects "passing through positions in environments," whether as part-selves, individuals, dyads, human or non-human collectivities, corporations, or even cyborgs (119). Faubion draws particularly on Foucault's history of sexuality where ethics and morality are separate aspects of morals. In contrast to morality or moral code, ethics is said to concern the subject's care of the self (not the usual way of defining ethics in Anglo-American circles). For Foucault, it includes "substance" (e.g., carnal appetite), mode of subjection or how the subject relates to morality, self-forming activity, and aim or purpose. Faubion elaborates on these four components throughout his monograph, although he refers to morality as the "themitical" and subsumes it within a broader ethical domain. He also draws on Niklas Luhmann and Max Weber. In agreement with Foucault, Luhmann contends that individual psychology is irrelevant to social-systemic communication. In a manner reminiscent of Foucault's treatment of capillary power and discursive practices, he views social systems as loose connections of semi-autonomous subsystems each with its own "autopoiesis" of codes and understandings. And like Foucault, he privileges ethics over morality; indeed, for Luhmann, shared moral orders in modern societies are dysfunctional. Drawing on Weber, Faubion finds ethics originating with charismatic leaders in social crises. In such "primal scenes" of social life, the themitical and rationalization are in abeyance as sovereign charismatic leaders fashion and purvey new ethical values. After introducing this approach, Faubion reviews Foucault's survey of ethics and subjectivation in ancient Athens. He then presents several case studies: 1) Fernando Jose Mascarenhas, a Portuguese aristocrat; 2) Amo Paul Bishop Roden, a leader in the Branch Davidian group in Waco, Texas; and, briefly, 3) Constantine Cavafy, a expatriate Greek poet of the 19th and early 20th century. The discussion of Fernando relies on a monograph by George E. Marcus as well as Faubion's own interviews with Fernando, while the chapter on Ms. Roden builds on Faubion's earlier The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millenarianism Today (2001). Faubion portrays Fernando as a composite figure and Ms. Roden and himself as forming a "dyad-subject." Fernando was twice in psychoanalysis. He found men more attractive sexually, but ultimately regarded women as more interesting. He was twice married. He was a communist. Faubion nicely describes how Fernando conscientiously tried to fulfill his aristocratic obligations to society, but he ignores how psychoanalysis influenced Fernando and is more interested in his one serious homosexual affair than his two marriages. Fernando's communism also receives scant attention, unfortunately since it was no doubt part of his ethical perspective. Faubion pities Fernando's lack of enthusiasm for homosexuality, and admits that he did not connect well with him (209). Ms. Roden was a divorced, single parent; leader among the Branch Davidians; and proponent of polygyny. Fernando was not only an aristocrat, but also unusual in his sexuality and politics. Ms. Roden was, if anything, even more eccentric. …

In early postcolonial Burma, millenarian prophecies about the imminent arrival of Setkya Min, the world emperor, circulated. This exalted personage was expected to protect Buddhism, and usher in a golden age for Buddhism and Burma. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the anthropologists Michael Mendelson and Melford E. Spiro encountered a perplexing phenomenon — a few so-called royal esoteric congregations whose leaders behaved as kings and were treated as such by their followers. These leaders were held to fulfill the prophecies and thus to be impersonations of the powerful figure Setkya Min, a weikza, a future Buddha, and a righteous king. Mendelson and Spiro understood these congregations as being continuous with the anti-colonial and even the pre-colonial millenarian rebellions. Until now, this interpretation has remained uncontested, probably due to lack of empirical evidence, since most scholars have assumed that these kinds of congregations ceased to exist long time ago. However, there still exists one such congregation in Burma, and was founded in the early 1950s. This article demonstrates how this congregation has waged a "battle" with supernatural means against what it perceived as the evil, anti-Buddhist forces to save Buddhism from extinction, and that it is just as anti-colonial and anti-Western as the anti-colonial rebellions. Moreover, the article argues that this congregation is similar to those studied by Mendelson and Spiro, and that these kinds of congregations should be understood as new Buddhist movements emerging in response to crises of authority and identity, to projects of modernization and nation-building, and to political turmoil in the postcolonial period. These congregations represented a quest for identity (individual, communal, and national), and are comparable to the other new religious movements that emerged in Southeast Asia in the postwar period.

SummaryThis article analyses the religious aspects of Spanish republicanism of the 1830s and 1840s. From the case of Catalonia, the most industrialized region of Spain, it is concluded that radical liberalism elaborated a synthesis of freedom and religion that was presented as an alternative to traditional religiosity. Re-elaborating old myths popular during the War of Independence of 1808–1814, in addition some liberals and republicans presented their political project in millenarianist terms. This millenarianism was due to the radicalism with which they interpreted the confrontation with political opponents, one of whom was the established Church. It follows that the religiosity and millenarianism exhibited by these republicans also involved a strong anti-clericalism. At the same time, in the political and cultural context of Spain, these proposals were not seen by their followers as a negation of divinity but as its truest expression.

The dramatic changes occurring in China in recent years have made many intellectuals ask about history, its values, and its purpose. When Chinese Christians reflect about history they find themselves in a contradictory situation. They enjoy the fruits of tremendous social changes, yet they also experience ongoing hostility of the state. Equally, they recognise that social change is not only a blessing, but may also contribute to growing disintegration in society. This paper introduces three interpretations of Chinese history offered by independent Christian groups or individuals. They are attempts to make sense of history and the radical changes and emerging contradictions of the past years. The historical constructs try to shed light on the question where Christians stand in this process of change. The examples presented are (a) the Back to Jerusalem Movement (BJM), a strongly revivalist missionary movement, (b) Yuan Zhi Ming who became famous through a DVD, called China's Confession, and (c) Ren Bumei, a Christian intellectual. They all in different forms offer a political theology that shows a political assertiveness and outspokenness that is atypical of the independent Christian tradition in China. The article concludes that the three presented historical interpretations stand in continuity with a long countercultural history in China. They reflect an experience of powerlessness and a promise of empowerment that are both responses to the experience of life in a totalitarian state.

Accusations of fanaticism have a long history, and Alberto Toscano's new book Fanaticism aims at considering some instances of this effective and therefore popular dismissal of religious and political positions. Built around the central claim that the idea of fanaticism almost always covers up an implicit opposition to the “politics of excess,” Toscano goes through a number of indicative cases and shows the ideological tricks at work at the heart of most rejections of fanaticism. The book will be of interest to those engaged with the recent resurgence of research related to religious fanaticism and political totalitarianism.

After the 1680s, Big Vehicle Religion gradually developed on the Yunnan-Burma frontier. It was banned by the Qing government and became a sect of Chinese secret societies. The founders of this religion combined various Buddhist and Taoist elements together and claimed this to be the route to their salvation. They also trained many students to be monks. After the Sino-Burma wars these monks established a Five Buddha Districts system among the Lahu and some Wa villages in western Mekong River, until the system was destroyed by the Qing government in the 1880s. The monks became leaders of the Luohei/Lahu through millenarianism and many Han immigrants also became involved in the movements to become the Lahu or the Wa. The monks performed critical roles as social activists in Lahu cultural reconstruction. As a shaping power, their human agency was deeply integrated into secret societies and they formulated regional political centers as well as a network mechanism for the floating indigenous populations. Secret societies clearly shaped a historical framework for local politics and economic flux in the Yunnan-Burma frontier and became a cross-border mechanism for contemporary life after the border between Yunnan, Burma and Thailand was decided. However, it used to be a networking dynamic linked with silver and copper minefields, Sino-Burma wars, and anti-Qing millenarianism. Local people could also use this frontier space for their negotiations with different states before the coming of European colonialism. Après les années 1680, le bouddhisme du grand véhicule se développa sur la frontière birmano-yunnanaise. Le gouvernement des Qing l’interdit mais il devint une secte diffusée par des sociétés secrètes. Les fondateurs de cette religion combinèrent des éléments bouddhistes et taoïstes et prétendirent que c’était la voie du salut. Ils formèrent également des élèves pour en faire des moines. Après les guerres sino-birmanes, ces moines établirent un système de cinq districts du Bouddha parmi les Lahu et certains villages Wa de l’ouest du Mékong, jusqu’à ce que ce système soit détruit par le gouvernement des Qing dans les années 1880. Ces moines devinrent des leaders des Luohei/lahu dans des mouvements millénaristes et de nombreux immigrants Han participèrent à ces mouvements pour devenir des Lahu ou des Wa. Ces moines tinrent des rôles critiques comme activistes sociaux dans la reconstruction culturelle lahu. En tant que pouvoir actif, leur action humaine fut profondément liée à des sociétés secrètes et ils instituèrent des centres politiques régionaux ainsi qu’un mécanisme de réseau pour des populations indigènes fluctuantes. À l’évidence, des sociétés secrètes donnèrent forme à un cadre historique pour la politique locale et les flux économiques à la frontière birmano-yunnanaise et devinrent un mécanisme transfrontalier pour la vie quotidienne après l’établissement de frontières entre le Yunnan, la Birmanie et la Thaïlande. Il s’agissait de fait d’un réseau dynamique lié aux mines d’argent et de cuivre, aux guerres sino-birmanes, ainsi qu’à un millénarisme anti-Qing. Les populations locales pouvaient également utiliser cet espace frontalier pour négocier avec les divers États avant l’établissement du colonialisme européen.

This paper is about a Korean Millenarian group called Sion-san cheguk (the Empire of Mt. Sion). Contrary to anthropological studies of “millenarian” movements in non-European societies, the study here shows that this Korean millenarian group is neither post-millennial in outlook, nor was it anti-European although it was anti-colonial. More importantly, this paper indicates that it is fundamentally wrong to assume that “millenarian” movements are principally movements of political protest, and not inspired fundamentally by religious beliefs.

I must admit to some trepidation when the Journal of American History editor Ed Linenthal first mentioned this project. In the last several years, I have served as a reader for a number of journals focused on terrorism to which historians submitted pieces—with John Brown a recurring theme—that showed little or no understanding of the processes of terrorism. Each manuscript was returned with heavy red marks, suggestions, and a basic bibliography of sources through which the historian might at least briefly acquaint himself or herself with what terrorism scholars have been writing for more than four decades. True, the attacks of September 11, 2001, inflated this corpus beyond all reasonable bounds, but a good rule of thumb is that a respected scholar of terrorism studies before 9/11 is a respected scholar after 9/11. Thus it was with considerable pleasure that I read Beverly Gage’s nuanced and multidisciplinary essay.1 John Brown does make an appearance, but he does so in a multifaceted way. There is an engagement, rare for a historian, that tries to make the discipline more than a passing spectator of events. Historians are, as Gage notes, observers, not doers. My own professors in the history of culture at the University of Chicago insisted the same. When I had the temerity to suggest that my dissertation on millenarian revolution might have in it the seeds of a possible predictive instrument, I was silenced by our department chair with the classic rejoinder: “I wouldn’t know, I AM A HISTORIAN.” In my heart of hearts, so am I, though I have strayed rather far from the reservation over the years. In short, Gage’s essay is as fine a piece of analytical work on terrorism as I have read in recent years stemming from any discipline. I do take issue with some relatively minor points and will focus on these later in the essay. In her deeply considered meditation on terrorism, Gage does a magnificent job of distinguishing terrorism from other forms of political or religious violence. Would that terrorism scholars were always so careful. In so doing, she runs into the same methodological brick wall with which we all come in contact when we write of terrorism: there is no single accepted definition of “terrorism.” Gage wisely goes to the sacred Ur text of political terrorism, Alex Peter Schmid, Albert J. Longman, and Michael Stohl’s Political

This article focuses on the ‘theo-political’ core of US Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism. The political militancy characterizing two Millenarian/Messianic movements such as Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism constitutes a still under-researched and under-theorized aspect that, at present, is paramount to address for its immediate and long terms implications in the highly sensitive and volatile Israeli-Palestinian issue, in the US and Israeli domestic domain, and in the wider international community. Although processes of the ‘sacralisation of politics’ and ‘politicisation of religions’ have already manifested themselves in countless forms over past centuries, Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism are unprecedented phenomena given their unique hybridized nature, political prominence and outreach, mobilizing appeal amongst believers, organizational-communicational skills and degree of institutionalization.

Southey's abolitionist poems of the 1790s and his long poem of 1805, Madoc, typically demonstrate his ideological ambivalence. In his nine anti-slavery poems, Southey shows his egalitarianism and his sympathy with black slaves. The basic tone of these poems is a protest against the British victimisation of black people for profit. However, Southey's liberal vision is ambivalent: while the slaves are to have their human rights respected, it is intended, from the Eurocentric perspective, that they will be Christianised by white culture. In "On the Settlement of Sierra Leone" (1798), for instance, Southey, while celebrating the Sierra Leone plan to create a free state for former slaves, indicates that the liberated slaves are happy in the civilised British community. Southey's interest in republicanism was at a peak in the early 1790s. His commitment to human equality and liberty originated in 1788, when he published the periodical paper The Flagellant with his friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford. In this paper, Southey criticised the English education system for repressing the freedom of students through its authoritarian approach, such as flogging. He argues that "corporal punishment" is "an invention of the Devil" (Carnall 16). The tone of this paper reveals his revolutionary sensibility that was to develop in the 1790's strengthened through his reading of Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine's Rights of Man (1791) and Godwin's Political Justice (1793), and through his friendships with a radical circle including Coleridge. His dissenting sensibility also contributed to his political radicalism. Most of the reform movements in England in the 1790s were related to such dissenters as the Unitarians. Discriminated against in 18th-century English society, they welcomed the French Revolution which they believed would help precipitate reform in Britain. Some even viewed it as the herald of a millenarian world, where everyone would enjoy civil and religious liberty, irrespective of their religious sect. For instance, Joseph Priestley, the Unitarian scientist, in his letter to Edmund Burke, revealed that he expected to see "the extinction of all national prejudice, and enmity, and the establishment of universal peace and good will among all nations" (Priestley 143). An admirer of Priestley, Southey derived his dissent from his upbringing in Bristol where had attended a school run by William Foot, a dissenting minister. In the 1790s, he started to mix with dissenters such as George Burnet and other Unitarians educated by Anna Barbauld. Although it is unclear which denomination Southey felt he belonged to, it is certain that he questioned the doctrine and rituals of Anglicanism. His dissenting sensibility along with his radical politics made him interested in dissenters' campaigns for human rights. Southey's egalitarian stance was thus reinforced by his political and religious anti-establishment attitudes. The abolitionists became active in England in 1787, after the London Committee was founded by the Granville Sharp, together with the Quakers. Southey's abolitionist poems reflected his antagonism to the established political order, which he and most dissenters saw as a system for oppressing the liberty of thought and body. In his nine anti-slavery poems, Southey expressed his humanitarian indignation against the slave trade, as in "To the Genius of Africa" (1797) which was composed as anti-slavery propaganda in conjunction with the anti-slavery lecture given by Coleridge in Bristol. Southey vividly illustrates their hard labour and "there imprison'd die Where the black herd promiscuous lie, By the scourges blacken'd o'er And stiff and hard with human gore, By every groan of deep distress. (Shorter Poems 54-56; lines 38-42) The critical tone reflects Coleridge's "Lecture on the Slave Trade," where Coleridge denounces as blasphemy the selling of human beings as if they were commodities. …