Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis Read Online Free PDF Page B

for a time firmly established in western governments, that believes political action can bring about an alteration in the human condition.
    As we understand it today, utopianism began to develop along with the retreat of Christian belief. Yet the utopian faith in a condition of future harmony is a Christian inheritance, and so is the modern idea of progress. Though it may seem at odds with the belief that the world is irredeemably evil and about to come to an end, an idea of progress has been latent in Christianity from early times, and it may be in the last book of the Christian Bible – St John’s Revelation – that it is first advanced. As the American historian Ernest Lee Tuveson noted:
    In the Revelation we see a great drama which joins angels, demons, monstrous villains, and the people of God in one great action. It involves the human race, which is inescapably divided into redeemed and condemned … what redeems this frightful prediction is the confidence that good is, act by act, destroying evil. Mankind has suffered and still suffers many woes, but they are being eliminated … Thus, strange as the idea may seem at first glance, the movement of the Revelation is in its way
progressive
–perhaps the first expression of the idea of history as progress. 17
    A hint of the idea of progress may be found in the Book of Revelation, and the early Christians believed they embodied something better than anything that existed in the ancient pagan and Jewish worlds. A belief in moral progress has always been part of Christianity, but it remained dormant until the Reformation. Puritans served as a vehicle for the idea – often called post-millennialism – that human effort could hasten the arrival of a perfect new world. In contrast with pre-millennialists who believe Jesus will
initiate
the Millennium, the Puritans believed that Jesus would come and rule over the world
after
the arrival of the Millennium – a Millennium generated as much by human effort as by divine will. Each is a version of millenarian belief.
    The idea that the world must soon end and the idea that it is moving to a better condition look antithetical – after all, why strive to improve it when it is going to be destroyed in the near future? Yet both express a view of history that hardly exists outside cultures shaped by western monotheism. In the Book of Revelation history could be seen as a progressive movement
because
it was believed to have an end-point when evil would be overcome, and the same is true in theories such as Marxism. On the other hand theories of progress that claim to reject any belief in a final state of perfection turn out, on closer inspection, to retain the idea that history is a struggle between good and evil forces. Both these views take for granted that human salvation is worked out in history – a Christian myth without which the political religions of modern times could not have come into being.
    Millenarian belief was at the heart of the Reformation, when it began to assume shapes that are closer to those found in modern revolutionary movements. Despite the opposition of John Calvin and Martin Luther, who led the rebellion against the authority of the Catholic Church, belief in an impending End-Time was rife among the more radical dissenting sects. Hundreds of thousands of agricultural and urban workers pillaged monasteries and demanded large-scale changes in society. They were supported in their struggle by prophetic divines such as Thomas Müntzer, a Protestant pastor who believed all their demands would be met in the imminent new world. In fact the Peasants’ Revolt, which he led, was crushed, with Müntzer and around a hundred thousand others being killed in the process.
    It was in seventeenth-century England that the millenarian currentsof late medieval times started their mutation into modern revolutionary movements. All the main protagonists of the English Revolution were steeped in biblical prophecy, with figures as