International Conference of Mahdism Doctrine - Movements of Messianic expectation in Christian history from a sociological perspective”

Movements of Messianic expectation in Christian history from a sociological perspective”

The Scientific Committee of the International Conference of Mahdism Doctrine , 12 Nov 2007 14:21

When social science scholars meet to review movements of messianic expectation within Islamic and Christian history (and also beyond these religious traditions), the connections between faith and practice (belief and behavior) are of particular interest. For sociologists of religion and for cultural anthropologists, the linkage between religious ideas and social patterns is an important topic of inquiry.

Throughout the last century, many scholars of sociology have operated with a secular framework, not necessarily adhering to religious beliefs themselves and not very concerned with the content of those beliefs. But the founders of their discipline, in contrast, did take particular interest in questions of the impact of religious beliefs on everyday behavior in social contexts.

Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and even Karl Marx were all compelled to pay attention to religious communities as part of their wider theoretical formulations about society.
Whether they agreed with the beliefs of the groups they observed or not, the founders of modern sociology showed an awareness that links between religious ideas and social patterns could be strong. Many different sectors of society connect back to certain shared understandings and beliefs, often rooted in religious convictions tied to a world beyond our human empirical grasp. These may include questions of political power in the organization of society, and questions of popular morality that shape its legal framework, and the very practical questions of content in the educational curriculum of public schools for a civil order.
One area of social inquiry which tends to attract both religious and secular scholars alike is the sociology of minority or dissenting movements within a larger religious and cultural heritage. Sociologists are fascinated with the origins of new religious movements, with splits and splinter groups that branch off from established religious traditions. Set in contrast with the larger patterns, these groups serve to highlight and distinguish some key dynamics in the linkages between beliefs and practices. Whereas the majority or dominant consensus, in any given society, tends to take such links very much for granted, dissenting groups by their very existence raise questions about claims that have long escaped scrutiny. Among these minority groups, differences in beliefs often lead to readily observable differences in social or political patterns.

New religious movements sometimes emerge in the context of disputes or conflicts over the past or the present. But one set of special interest for this conference are the groups that emerge with differing views of the future. Movements that form around messianic expectations have long intrigued social scientists. These movements tend to suspend “business as usual,” clarifying stark choices with a heightened sense of “what really matters.” In their most pronounced versions, groups that form with high expectations of divine intervention and deliverance often develop alternative patterns with regard to work, property and family arrangements.

I. Early American history of messianic movements: 1830s
Classic studies in this field include Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District, which examined the origins of numerous new religious movements in the western part of the U.S. state of New York during the first half of the nineteenth century (1800-1850). Two hundred years ago, settlers of European origin were rapidly pushing westward from the older communities of New England. The new nation was largely populated by Protestant Christian groups, and this westward expansion into new territories meant that many persons were no longer connected to any particular local congregation. Revival movements gathered many into new congregations of the standard branches (including Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists). Their traveling preachers worked like missionaries, holding meetings in the open air or under tents. This activity was common all across the frontier regions, further south and further west from New York state.

But Cross found that this small region, just one part of one state (rural, upper New York), quickly became a concentrated center for many kinds of religious activity. The numbers of religious leaders, religious organizations, missionaries, religious publications and many other indicators of religious activity were disproportionately large in relation to other areas of the new country in the first half of the time period he studied. Almost all of this religious activity would have been considered intense but conventional at the time. It was not heterodox; it did not have theological innovation or deviation in practices. It was the standard Christian faith of its time, but clearly displaying elevated stages of intensified enthusiasm and commitment.
About 1825, however, new variations began to arise. This would be just the first of several new groups that consciously went beyond the boundaries of standard Christian faith. A marginal group known as the “Shakers” had significant influence in the region, and was well-known to its friends and its opponents alike. Although founded not long before in England, its real growth and rise to public influence began largely in the state of New York, again in its upper and rural regions. Under “Mother Ann Lee,” this group introduced innovations such as shared property (proto-communism), refusal to use weapons (nonresistance to violence, or pacifism), and full equality for women with men, both in religious and ordinary life activities. The group’s gatherings for worship included an active expectation that the Spirit of God would prompt spontaneous and unpredictable actions among the worshippers, and that mystical powers of healing would be manifest.

Because Shakerism included substantial theological innovation and heterodoxy, Cross viewed it as “a kind of ultimate among enthusiastic movements” in the first half of the nineteenth century, showing how its “communism, pre-millennialism, spiritualism, and perfectionism could from existing Shaker communities infect larger movements.” While the previous developments had been mostly of a conventional or orthodox character within standard branches of the Christian Protestant faith, marked only by increased fervor or intensity, the Shaker alternative was only the first of many later groups that would form with more and more divergence from the classic, orthodox traditions.

The New Yorkers being studied here became recognized for their intense beliefs, their willingness to consider alternative proposals, and their general cultural optimism, according to Cross. One political issue which had broad social implications was the campaign against Freemasonry, which largely arose from rural suspicion against powerful secret societies of the more urban and privileged classes. In 1826, a disgruntled former Mason named William Morgan who had begun to reveal the secrets of the secret society caused a great stir across a wide region. While he was being held in prison, a band of unknown raiders captured him from the prison and he disappeared, probably being murdered for his disloyalty to the Masons. The Whigs, a new political party at that time, embraced the cause and gained considerable strength through agitation against the Masons. Meetings and publications patterned on prior religious models served to translate the energy of this suspicion into the wider political arena. Cross sees this issue as likely “the most comprehensive single force to strike the ‘infected district’ during an entire generation.” Some religious leaders had also been members of the Masonic order, and some were not. But a far higher percentage (about 25%) of local religious leaders than ordinary religious members (about 5%) belonged to the Masons, at the outset of the controversies. Many religious leaders were disgraced in public and forced to withdraw from the Masonic membership.

At this point the stage was set for more wealthy landowners (now doubly unpopular due to class resentments and also to their Masonic ties) to abandon their former positions of influence and support for religious groups, while control of these church organizations passed to the less wealthy but more fervently religious citizens. As Cross puts it, “people of reasonably substantial property interests—and perhaps by the same token of reasonably good judgment—thus seem to have been driven from sympathy with churchly concerns by the fanaticism of Antimasonry. Their less prosperous fellows moved into command of the meeting and would henceforth freely underwrite religion pleasing to their own tastes and of a sort which might increase membership quickly, to relieve their own increased financial burdens, without the balancing influence of more conservative minds.” Closing the Masonic lodges had made churches more powerful.

The religious organizations followed on this success with further campaigns to distribute large amounts of religious literature, especially Bibles, and to organize religious education (Sunday Schools). A campaign to discourage or ban the consumption of alcohol (the “temperance movement”) also gained much momentum in these same circles. Another cause was the movement to prevent economic and certain social activities on Sunday, as the Christian holy day reserved for worship. In each case, the organizational successes of moral and religious movements continued to grow and flourish, and they flourished much more intensely in this part of New York state than elsewhere. And all of the participants would clearly have seen their activities as significantly related to the hope of Christ’s return, part of the historical drama that would lead to God’s reign or rule on earth.

Ultraism:
For the record, it is worth noting that the now-famous Mormon movement (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) began in this district of up-state New York also. And so did the Millerites, also known as Seventh-Day Adventists. What ties these and numerous smaller groups together, apart from the proximity of their geographical origins, according to Cross, is the pattern of religious enthusiasm he designates as “ultraism,” which swept the region during the 1830s. Many traveling preachers organized speaking campaigns with “protracted meetings” that stirred the local population into a religious frenzy. Drawing the attention of a crowd, and holding the audience over a lengthy period of time, depended on bringing out more and more emotionally charged teachings. Concerns over sin (both personal and social) were emphasized; individuals gave testimonies of great struggles over a heightened sense of fear, doubt and despair.

Cross traces the next part of the drama as religious excitement during the previous years began to turn toward political campaigns in the 1830s. Certain parts of the religious establishment resisted the changes, but large numbers of ordinary church members began to resonate with the concerns against the institution of slavery. Though there were not many slaves being held for commercial exploitation in the northern states, and the problem was therefore not to be solved locally, the cause gained adherents rapidly in New York’s religious strongholds. Cross records evidence that this antislavery movement gathered more support among rural residents than among city-dwellers; he also shows that it gained ground more rapidly among some Protestant groups than among other similar Protestants (Presbyterians more than Methodists, for example).

There is a strong parallel in the growth of two distinct political campaigns in this region and in the same period: abolition of slavery and abolition of alcoholic beverages ran together as the largest and most obvious political agitations, which also translated into support for newly emerging political parties. Votes for these causes mapped across the region in the very same areas that had also produced religious revivalism, Anti-masonry, Adventism, perfectionism and spiritualism, in addition to other “minor ultraisms,” as Cross describes them.
Each of these causes or movements shows the tendency to identify a clear threat or evil, denounce it as sin, and then engage in strenuous efforts to organize themselves and like-minded adherents into committed companies of persons who will act together in the marketplace, together in their places of worship, and together in their political participation to accomplish the changes which they favor. Whether in the name of religious revival, or of moral reform of society, the idea of combining forces to stamp out something evil from society was a powerful unifying force. To oppose the works of Satan and to hasten the coming of God’s reign, major efforts were invested and great campaigns organized, at considerable expense. People sacrificed their time, their talent and their financial resources to advance their chosen cause.

The whole pattern of ultraism, writes Cross, reached its peak by the year 1836, and then abruptly diminished for the following six years, due largely to an economic depression. An epidemic of the cholera disease swept through the upper New York region at this time also. Many of their new organizations failed and went bankrupt or were sold.
By the 1840s, however, the stage was set for a new, very powerful revival of religious fervor and expectations. The rise of William Miller’s new Adventist preaching, which originated slightly to the East, in old New England, took the Burned-Over District by storm. Even though economic depression continued, Miller’s prediction of an actual date to expect the return of Jesus Christ (somewhere between March 1843 and March 1844) began to stir large numbers of the population into renewed religious excitement. But the announced date for the end of all things came and went, and was postponed or re-scheduled several more times (most conspicuously, October 22, 1844), before the excitement faded in deep disappointment. People who had left everything to wait for the coming of the Lord had to return to other ordinary pursuits; some joined other nearby movements but kept a lower profile. This very public humiliation for the persons who predicted and then retreated from their fervent hopes to see the return of the Lord became a source of humor and mockery by many others around them. The failure of predictions required a target of blame; this process eventually focused on the inadequate devotion of the followers themselves.

One might expect that this public humiliation and failure would result in permanent discrediting of prophecy-based movements in the wider American society. And in some aspects, this indeed is the primary conclusion for the stories that swirled around upstate New York in the first half of the 19th century. Religious fervor and radical hopes for social transformation shifted away from the sphere of religion, moving instead into political campaigns over various issues that appeared to have less and less connection to the religiously-based movements that preceded them. American political society became more and more preoccupied with the campaign to abolish slavery, which brought out deep conflicts between northern and southern states. This led quite rapidly to the Civil War (1861-65), which in turn was reflected in the north/south division of all of the leading religious bodies (Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, etc.). It is evident, therefore, that the later conflicts which wracked the still-young American society in the 19th century became largely political and economic, though with religious overtones and serious consequences among religious bodies. The Civil War disputes were not primarily religious, however, and did not originate within religious controversies as such. Even if combatants in the civil strife were deeply religious and expressed their views accordingly, it was not primarily religious concerns that tore them apart. What was most perplexing for sincere Christians at the time, in fact, was the recognition that God and the Christian faith were understood on both sides in largely the same ways. I have provided these descriptions from the religious movements in U.S. history from the 1830s as a background for some further comments on current developments and movements that have an impact on a much wider scale.

II.Current Definitions for understanding prophecy-based movements
Interest in prophecy/predictions and speculation about the End-times has not in fact disappeared from general American culture, even though some examples from history have been discredited or disappointed. Shifting our focus to the present situation among the U.S. population, we find that even those who do not count themselves active Christians or church participants are often paying attention to popular teachers or preachers who base their explanations of current events on a framework that draws from the Bible’s teachings.
It may be helpful at this juncture in the presentation to review just how the key terms are best understood in popular American usage today. Some of these concepts are no doubt familiar to many of the participants in our Consultation gathering in Tehran, since they appear in news headlines and stories with considerable frequency. But the nuances and distinctions among terms may be lost in popular coverage, so we will try to unpack some of the terms with care.
What do such terms as utopian, adventist, millennialist and apocalyptic really mean, with regard to the history of Christian movements (and as used within current American cultural discourse)? It is important for understanding some of today’s significant social and political developments in the U.S. scene and even around the world to trace as accurately as possible the deep ways in which popular culture has been shaped by key concepts in the more narrowly religious history reviewed in the first part of this paper. To draw the connections between the formative chapter of religious enthusiasm in the first half of the 19th century through to today’s religious movements that have substantial influence on public life in the United States, we should attempt some clarifying distinctions here, among the rich variety of messianic groups.

Utopian:
ever since the classic book by Sir Thomas More (Utopia, 1516), this term is used to characterize an ideal, perfect society. More placed it on an imaginary island, and today it is often used pejoratively, in a sense of impractical or unreal experimentation. Although it may be easily dismissed today, after many such experiments have been attempted and failed, the impulse of cultural confidence and optimism about perfecting human society keeps re-appearing in numerous guises. Few such efforts turn out to be explicitly based on a religious vision today, but the social and cultural history that Americans too easily forget has included such examples of utopian community as John Humphrey Noyes, who in 1840 began a communal group in Vermont that soon moved to Oneida, upstate New York. Sharing their property and their other resources, this group became entangled in controversy over its unorthodox sexual arrangements, a problem that would recur in scores or even hundreds of similar groups during the following decades. Noyes claimed to model his communism on the practices of the earliest Christian churches in Jerusalem. His group was a religion of perfectionism, believing that humans could achieve endless spiritual growth and real holiness or purity. It is worth noting that as an economic enterprise, the Oneida community survived right into the present, although its religiously based organization disbanded in 1881.

Overall, utopian views and experiments have remained very much a minority phenomenon, among the larger patterns of messianic expectation we are studying here, but these views are a recurring theme or impulse within many community idealists. Even if most persons would not share the cultural optimism that utopians believed, many Americans today are prone to the idea that complex problems are liable to a “quick fix.”

Apocalyptic:
the broadest term to cover the concepts and movements that are organized around anticipation of Christ’s return signifies an intense interest in the things that are expected to happen at the end of human history. Apocalyptic teaching is meant to reveal what those future events might look like, and how to recognize the signs of their approach. Will the judgment of God be revealed against all kinds of wickedness and sinfulness in our broken world? Can we read the occurrences of natural catastrophes as part of that picture? Will violence and human depravity reach new levels, as things get worse and worse before God intervenes on a massive scale to start putting things back in right relationships? Will the sufferings of God’s righteous followers in this age be compensated by rewards and relief from suffering in the age to come?
These are the hopes and the soul-felt longings that have produced such curiosity and eager expectation in every chapter of human recorded history as we attempt to relate to God. The literature of these longings is rich, and the visions have sometimes been very detailed. Without attempting to document or evaluate these visions, a sociological account will nevertheless take note that the ideas have certainly displayed significant power to gather up persons who are suffering, who are weary of the tribulations of this world, and who have valid theological reasons to expect something better ahead, in the providence of God.

But authentic apocalyptic literature usually is formulated in hard times, when its intended audience is often under repression and when saying clearly what the oppressed are hoping for could get the author and the audience in trouble from the oppressors. Those were the conditions which the people of ancient Israel were living in during exile, when the first examples of apocalyptic literature in the Bible were written. And the conditions were similar when the early Christians were under oppression in the Roman Empire and the apostle John was in prison, receiving the revelation which became the final book in the New Testament, “The Apocalypse” revealed to John.

One prominent aspect of apocalyptic literature, then, is that its truths are often revealed in a way that is clear only to those who really understand the message. For an outsider, the truths would be more obscure, deliberately disguised so that the writer and the audience would not get into trouble with the oppressing authorities. Poetic expressions and metaphors both reveal and conceal the intended message. Encoded messages are common, requiring the reader to decipher the meaning. Beyond the immediate context of the original message, many references that would be clear or obvious to the first recipients become obscure to later readers. When John’s Revelation at the end of the Christian New Testament refers to the “Beast” that exercises authority and makes war on the saints (Revelation 13), the first audience would most likely have connected this to the Roman Empire, a government that was persecuting the early Christians in the first century of the church. But the metaphor allows many other suggestions throughout history also, whenever earthly powers are persecuting the righteous ones who put their faith in God.

Apocalyptic visions of the world are often expressed in sharply dualistic terms, as forces of evil opposing forces of good. Neutrality or non-alignment is not valued, in these visions. Compromise is not a virtue, in this approach to life’s difficulties. Reaching agreements with political forces at a different point along the spectrum is not a prized skill. Believers who are strongly shaped in this vision are most concerned to be faithful, whatever the price may be. These powerful beliefs can inspire great devotion and loyalty, among believers who are prepared to undergo great suffering and persecution. This devotion is the basis for many strong movements throughout Christian history.

Eschatology:
The Christian teachings that build around the hopes for the Messiah’s return belong to the category of Christian eschatology, the doctrine of last things. The eschaton, a Greek term, is the end of human history, in this account. It relates to questions of what happens to humans after death, how God’s judgment will appear, and what will be the destiny of persons or forces that are arrayed either for or against God’s will in human affairs. The hope for God’s righteous judgment has often provided powerful motivation for believers who pour their best efforts into putting things right in the world of human social concerns.

The movement to end human slavery was a lengthy struggle, owing its eventual victory in large measure to the hopes and expectations of many Christian believers who found in their faith a powerful resource for opposing the evil of that large human institution. Many other campaigns for social and economic and political improvement in the centuries since the abolition of slavery have continued to draw inspiration and strategies from that example, especially the campaigns for civil rights in the United States, and other human rights campaigns around the world. For many social reformers, their efforts belong to the hope of putting things right in ways that fit more closely with God’s justice and God’s intended designs for human societies. And thus, even in an indirect way, these efforts at their best reflect some of that eschatological hope.

Adventist and Millennialist:
Two further terms must be noted, before this paper concludes with a glimpse of current groups that advocate some similar beliefs. Adventist and millennialist beliefs are inherently related, with the latter term designating different branches within the larger stream of adventist thinking. Despite the fact that one rather large minority group near the edges of the Protestant churches is today known as “Adventist” (Seventh-Day Adventist Churches, to be precise), the Christian belief that Jesus Christ will return to this earth in power and glory is a staple of classic Christian teaching in almost all branches of the Christian churches. It is not only a group named “Adventist” that shares this belief. But what makes “Adventists” unique, then? Is it anything more than an arbitrary selective emphasis on their part, just as Baptists emphasize baptism but most Christians are also baptized?

From an outsider’s perspective, or in strictly sociological observations, one might easily be honestly confused by this range of curious diversity in emphases. For the purposes of this paper, let it be enough to take at face value the stated belief that certain Christians have a pronounced view and devotion to the hope of Christ’s return. One would look for evidence that their lives and relationships are organized around this belief in some coherent patterns. Presumably it would affect the way they plan for the future, making such plans contingent on whether indeed the Lord’s return is expected to be quite soon.

What becomes even more interesting, from a sociological perspective as I am proposing in this review, is when differences emerge among those who hold the general expectation of Christ’s return in common, but begin to go in different directions in their interpretations of what will happen just before or even just after that anticipated event. Millennialist views pick up at this point, and they come in three main versions. The term itself names the expectation (gleaned from Revelation chapter 20, in the Christian Bible), that Christ will return to earth, defeat Satan and establish a kingdom to rule on the earth that will last 1000 years (a “millennium,” from the Latin root for 1000, “mille”). Simply put, the pre-millennialists expect events to unfold in this sequence: Christ returns, and then comes 1000 years of peace and righteous rule. The a-millennialists consider that the millennium began long ago with Christ’s resurrection and continues until the end of time. The post-millennialists expect the whole world to come to faith in Christ and be transformed into a golden age of peace, and after this millennium then Christ will return.

Among these branches within a general millennialist framework, it is the premillennialists who are regarded as most apocalyptic in generating lurid, intense scenarios of predictions for the end times. These usually include the expectation of persecutions for Christians, natural catastrophes, violence, destruction and especially war. Simple warnings and minor references in widely scattered parts of the Bible (in both the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Gospel) are woven together into a complex scheme of interpretation that produces predictions of signs that must happen before the final climax and the end of history at the return of Christ.

Dispensationalism:
The single most widespread and influential of these interpretive systems is known as “dispensationalism.” It originated in Britain (1830s) with John Nelson Darby, an Anglican priest who quickly moved into dissident reforming circles, but its influence only grew when transplanted into the fertile imaginative soil of the Americas in the 1870s, soon after the period of religious fervor and the Civil War as described earlier in this paper. Dispensationalism’s primary concept is that human history unfolds in different chapters, or dispensations, which God provides with somewhat different rules or arrangements.

The details need not concern us here, but the intrigue of the entire system depends largely on its ability to describe, interpret and explain current or future events of human history. This naturally means a fascination with biblical prophecies and predictions that appear to be convincingly drawn from biblical teachings. This movement found adherents among most of the conservative Protestant evangelical groups in the intervening century, rising to prominence in the early 20th-century disputes between modernists and fundamentalists that shook almost every branch of the Protestant movement in America.

III. Impact of Current Messianic Movements in the U.S.
Why do these ideas and disputes from previous centuries matter to anyone today, in a sociological inquiry? What difference might minor theological debates among conservative Christians make in any other part of the world? The answer may be surprising, both to someone who essentially grew up surrounded by such phenomena and to another who has only observed it from a great distance.

Even though all the beliefs depicted to this point in the paper may seem equally strange and obscure to an outside observer, this last group of dispensationalist millennialists among Christians turns out to be the least unusual in their behaviors of any of the groups mentioned along the way leading up (or down?) to their appearance on the stage of religious history. As Timothy Weber, whose doctorate was awarded by the University of Chicago, points out in a critical study of this movement, dispensationalists did not engage in bizarre practices such as religious communism, distinctive food diets, unconventional sexual practices or family arrangements, nor any deliberate departures from classic Christian teaching. Their activities were neither spectacular nor especially scandalous in terms of public morality. Taking the Bible quite literally, and studying it carefully, their beliefs may have been regarded by other Christians as fantastic or sensationalist, but hardly dangerous.

As Weber puts it, the dispensationalists “were history’s great spectators and explainers: They had the ‘sure word of Bible prophecy’ to help them interpret world events and show how such events were leading to Christ’s return. As futurist premillennialists, they believed that they would be raptured [miraculously removed from the scene] before most end-times events actually took place, but they expected to be here long enough to see history moving decisively in a predetermined direction.” Weber continues by describing dispensationalists as spectators who sit watching a game of football, commenting on the players on the field below them and explaining to everyone around them just how the game is going to end.

I would also depict this movement like a group arranging the pieces of a complicated puzzle made up of very tiny components. Each part must be placed in just the right position for the entire picture to eventually make sense. Weber shows that the movement achieved considerable success with interpreting world events through the First World War, at the beginning of the 20th century. Rather than organizing to reform society, however, the dispensationalists poured most of their energy into simply trying to convince and convert people to accept the Gospel and become active Christians. This was their answer to the apparent decline in social conditions; they understood that their time was short, before the anticipated end.

The movement did not have much social or political impact before the Second World War, nor did it address any particular causes or controversies in the wider society. Its chief ambition was to recruit and convince more persons to become Christians who shared their basic beliefs and who would watch the game of history together, as in Weber’s analogy. They did not intend to become players on the field; they mostly wanted to observe the game. In times of great uncertainty and social or political insecurity, their simple message offered substantial comfort and clarity.

The dispensationalists were building a popular movement and gaining adherents amid rapid social change. Their leaders became powerful communicators, using the means and methods of mass communication more and more effectively. They taught a vision of God as powerful and ready to intervene in human history. Even when human history seemed to be getting worse and worse, the bad news only made their Good News shine more brightly. The expectation that Christ is returning soon did not lead to spectacular or bizarre behaviors as in some previous movements, but rather they used this hope to cultivate basically sober and careful lives, devoted to the things that believers would want to be doing in the moment when Christ would appear. They did not feel a need to control or even influence the course of human history; God would take care of all of that.

This focus on the personal or even private dimensions of faith corresponded well with the emotional requirements of a society tending toward individualism, although undergoing massive social changes. There was too much complexity in the wider world for ordinary believers to feel responsible for it all. Large-scale forces seemed to be out of control, and beyond the impact of religious communities. The events leading up to the Second World War did not quite make the same kind of sense according to the prophetic schemes they were working with.

It turned out that one of the biggest pieces in the puzzle was still missing. For more than one hundred years, this movement had been interpreting biblical prophecies to indicate a renewed role for the nation of Israel before the final rounds of human history could take place. For certain anticipated events, certain key players on the field (to use Weber’s analogy again) had to be Jews in order for the proper relationship to the Messiah to be accomplished. According to this interpretation, which was central for the entire drama, the nation of Israel would once again reject the Messiah and judgment would be rendered, and then some remaining Jews would embrace Jesus as Messiah after all. These steps in the sequence could not be fulfilled by secular Jewish actors or persons who remained far away from Jerusalem. The same literal approach to other passages of the Bible required literal fulfillments of these references, as interpreted by the dispensationalists.

The centrality of Israel for the last chapters of human history, in the drama as seen by the dispensationalists, required a significant change in their relation to the game after 1948, when that event appeared to be confirmed with the establishment of Israel as a nation on territories still disputed today. I will not try to evaluate or debate that event within the framework of this paper, but the role of Israel must be noted as very important (not precisely for Jews or for Arabs or other neighbors in the Middle East) but as a piece of the prophetic puzzles so intensely studied by the dispensationalists. This event in fact is the precipitating cause for a shift in the role that dispensationalists assign to themselves: they are seriously tempted to move out of the stands as observers and onto the field of the game themselves as players. After World War II, they begin to see themselves as at least partly responsible to help history come out right. They began to consider that the fulfillment of prophecies might require active participation on their part. No longer content to merely observe and explain historical events, they began trying to influence those major forces by advocacy, lobbying, praying and paying support for the causes that they deemed to be directly in line with prophesied events.

Not all Christians in the United States are Protestants; not all Protestants are evangelicals; and not all evangelicals are dispensationalists. This paper is not meant to exaggerate their impact on the American social and political scene today. But about one third of evangelical Christians in the U.S. are dispensationalists (which is about 15 million out of 40-50 million evangelicals). Polls also report that only about one third of all Americans (36%) believe that the Bible is to be taken literally as God’s Word, but almost two thirds (59%) think that predictions from its book of Revelation will come true. If an observer tries to understand the Religious Right on the American political scene, or the popularity of the religious best-seller fiction series of “Left Behind” books, or the stream of tourists and dollars from the U.S. supporting conservative causes in Israel in recent decades, the chances are pretty strong that dispensationalist teaching and organizations are behind these diverse phenomena. Most political observers would also credit this set of voters with determining the outcome of at least the last two presidential elections in the U.S.

Strange as it may seem to distant or secular observers, there is more adequate explanation for this set of social and political behaviors in the real world to be found by referencing the religious beliefs of dispensationalist Christian theology than in the complex machinations of global capitalism or the conspiracy theories about secret societies, I believe. Very serious critique can be and is being directed at this movement from within alternate frameworks of Christian theology, but this paper has concentrated on tracing the patterns that connect belief and behavior in a fairly wide range of movements within recent Christian history. Because these movements almost all have in common the fervent expectation of Christ’s return.