Postmillennialism: how to work your way to the end of the world

Those familiar only with present-day forms of American Evangelical Christianity will likely have heard of things like the Rapture, the Tribulation, and the Second Coming.  One term perhaps less well-known is “the millennium” which refers to a thousand years of peace and harmony, whether in a literal or symbolic sense.  Perhaps one of the reasons this term is not familiar to many people is because the other words have become so common-place.  Why is that?  Because the idea of the Rapture, the Tribulation, and other apocalyptic terms denoting a cataclysmic End Times represent one particular form of Christian eschatology known as premillennialism.  It is an idea most people, religious or otherwise, are familiar with even if the word is foreign.  Very briefly, premillennialism is based off of passages in Revelation mentioning a thousand years of peace on earth.  Specifically, the view is that terrible things (the rise of Antichrist, the Tribulation, terrible natural, supernatural, and man-made disasters, Armageddon, etc) will happen before Christ returns and ushers in this new Golden Age.  But it is only with the Second Coming that all of the problems on Earth can be solved.  Premillennialism is probably the most common American view of this era (at least among those who know anything about it), and therefore the violence and destruction occurring as a build up towards the thousand years gets most of the attention among both believers and the culture at large.  The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, with its world-engulfing conflict between good and evil, is a prime example of this, both in the views it expresses and as a reason why American culture popularly believes horrible things inevitably must happen before peace will come (at least when talking about the End of the World).

So, what is the alternative?  It seems only natural to think that the world should end in a bang.  Or else, if there is evil in the world, doesn’t the evil have to be removed somehow before there can be peace?  And wouldn’t the evil go down fighting?  So, again, how can one have an apocalypse without an Armageddon?  As you might have guessed, the answer is postmillennialism.

While postmillennialism is by no means extinct, it has severely declined in popular prominence from its height in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Postmillennialism states that the thousand years of peace will occur first followed by Christ’s return.  I other words, unlike in premillennialism, the evil of the world will cease to exist long before the Second Coming, and this period of peace will be achieved through the works of humanity alone.  Thus instead of as someone rescuing man from his endless sins, Christ returns as the capstone of human self-perfectibility.  It was an idea that had its heyday during the height of Progressive-era campaigns in the 19th and 20th centuries and was closely associated with movements like abolition, universal suffrage, prohibition, public education, urban sanitation, workers’ rights, and other public morality efforts.  The goal at the time was to create a world that would be perfect, morally and technologically, each helping the other.  The driving ideology behind it was that humanity itself was perfectible.  Though we might have erred in the past, now at last we had new technologies, new innovations, new access to scientific truths, and (as was believed) a better understanding of morality than any previous generation.  The ignorance and technologically deficient past had slowly evolved into a happier world, and this progress would never be interrupted (now that we knew what we were aiming at).  This belief in the inevitability of Progress, which was an outgrowth of Enlightenment philosophy, needed only postmillennialism to vindicate it theologically as building towards a new, perfect world that would be worthy of Christ’s return.

Described in these terms – the belief in the inherent goodness (rather than sinfulness) of humanity, aided towards perfection by education and technology – it seems like many today, even among the non-religious portion of American society, would endorse such a concept.  So why is this view relatively uncommon compared to premillennial ideas?  Well, as stated, postmillennialism was popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  What happened?  To put it succinctly: two world wars, one of which included the attempted eradication of an entire religious minority as well as the creation and use of atomic weapons.  World War One seriously harmed European belief in postmillennialism, but Americans saw little of that war and never on US soil.  The true end of popular support of a postmillennial perspective came with the Holocaust.  The senselessness of such atrocities caused people then (and still today) to question how “good” humans are capable of being if one of the most advanced cultures on the planet could have done so much evil.  And was not Third Reich Germany itself postmillennial after a fashion?  It boasted at the time that it would last a thousand years under the control of a new race of perfect humans.  After which…what?  It would collapse?  Unlikely.  I do not pretend to know much about Third Reich propaganda, but more likely they would have claimed that a new era would emerge with a new Christ-like figure to congratulate them on their success – not quite a Christian postmillennial scenario but one based closely on those ideals.  But it did not last a thousand years, and the legacy it left was not one of peace and harmony.  The Soviet Union, likewise, was built upon a(n atheistic) conception of the inevitable progress of humanity, and yet after the war it and the Western world were enemies.  And the atomic bomb?  Aside from the many thousands of deaths merely two weapons created, the world soon found themselves in a deadly stalemate between two world superpowers, each armed with weapons a hundred times more deadly.  The post-war world was a time of fear and paranoia, of loss and confusion over the things humans were capable of doing to themselves.  Hope in human perfectibility receded, and so did the belief that the End would come peacefully as a reward for a long, happy, prosperous life full of nothing but good deeds.  Instead, the world saw that its End could come in nuclear fire.  Even if that did not happen, there could always arise a despot to subjugate, brainwash, and inflict all sorts of horrors on mankind, all in the name of “human perfection.”  So the world discarded postmillennialism.  And that is why the world “apocalypse” often conjures images of destruction and not progress.

The brief sketch of pre- and postmillennialism here is simply that: a brief sketch.  Many of the ideas are grossly simplified, and to say postmillennialism has been “discarded” is not, of course, strictly true.  Some of the ideas of inevitable progress and human perfectibility live on, changing and evolving with the times.  Transhumanism and the concept of a technological Singularity event both can be seen as part of a postmillennial paradigm, even if the religious aspect is gone.  Also, the historical connections and justifications for postmillennialism have a much richer and varied history than is expressed in this post.  For instance, Mormonism grew out of some of these beliefs, and it is still a strong and active faith.  There are so many more ideas regarding both of these two paradigms that I will not get into now.  For instance, it has been said that postmillennialism is inherently more active of a religious stance since it requires humans to work towards perfection while premillennialists simply wait around.  This, however, is not an inevitable conclusion, and there are premillennialists just as if not more involved with attempting to solve world problems than postmillennialists.  Again, I won’t go into it all here, but I wanted to suggest some of the concepts an examination of these ideas carries with it.

While postmillennialism was not on the lips of everyone in the 19th and early 20th centuries, I suggest the next time you come across Progressive Era images or ideas you consider the religious /apocalyptic ideas that may have under-girded their conception.  Also, try to imagine what a Progressive Era apocalypse might look like.  For those familiar with Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, you already have an idea.

Resolvng the Apocalypse in Civilization: Beyond Earth

From a discussion of creatures found in a 2000-year-old religious document, we turn abruptly to consider a video game released barely a month ago.  Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is a turn-based grand strategy game where the player controls one of several human colonial expeditions on an alien world.  The premise is that in the future humans on Earth are quickly becoming an endangered species due to The Great Mistake.  The explanation is incomplete, but the Great Mistake seems to have been a human-caused ecological catastrophe which has made Earth increasingly inhospitable.  Humanity’s only hope is to send out colony ships, sponsored by different national blocs, with the most cutting-edge technology to create a new home on a distant planet and somehow think of a way to save the humans left on Earth.

How the colonists, and the player, choose to solve humanity’s plight is based on the ideology they adopt, known in the game as affinities.  There are three affinities:  Purity, Harmony, and Supremacy.  Purity means humans stay as they are, trying to terraform the new planet to resemble Old Earth so that humans back home, when they arrive, will find themselves among familiar settings.  Harmony means the colonists have abandoned the idea of rescuing humans back on Old Earth and have instead chosen to integrate themselves biologically and genetically as much as possible into the new ecology of their adopted world.  Supremacy means that humans have decided to embrace the benefits of a purely digital and mechanical existence by uploading themselves into technology, and they plan to return to Old Earth to “liberate” flesh-bound humans from their imprisoning bodies.

From the premise alone, it is not difficult to imagine the creators of this game conceiving of it as an apocalyptic scenario.  The world is dying and humans, whether through pride, greed, or ignorance, are at fault for it.  It is not even clear if the Great Mistake refers to a single event or if it is an umbrella term for all the sins humanity has inflected upon the Earth which has led to the doomsday scenario in which they find themselves.  The only source of salvation is for humanity to turn to space, to find a New Earth beneath a New Heaven where the mistakes of the past, their sins, will no longer return to punish them.  If humanity survives this apocalypse and in what form depends entirely on the colonists and thus on the player.

The beauty of Civilization: Beyond Earth as an artistic representation of apocalyptic themes is how the developers fully embraced the multiplicity of views one might have undertaking such a venture.  In other words, they were not content to simply present the player with an apocalyptic scenario back home on Old Earth.  Many things throughout the game reinforce the idea that the colonists are wrestling with heady issues of religion, bioethics, the importance of the past (positive and negative), cultural adaptation, economic utility weighed against the worth of the individual, and other such topics.  These ideas are not linearly presented.  They occur as players progress and make branching choices in the development of their colonies.  The player is never told that there is a “right” choice, only that such a choice will advance them further along the path of a particular affinity.  For instance, the player can choose what to do about the local indigenous (non-sapient) alien population.  Choosing to exterminate them, befriend them, or domesticate them for labor purposes increases one’s Purity, Harmony, or Supremacy points, respectively.

As one progresses further down an affinity path, quotes from the colonists appear that express the emerging ideology the player is promoting through their choices.  These quotes are short but they provide an incredible degree of richness and immersion for those interested in such things.  The quotes touch on topics of religion, philosophy, regret, loneliness, responsibility, hope, banal daily interactions, colonial storytelling – all from the point of view of the chosen affinity.  For instance, the transhuman Supremacy affinity begins to take on a religious zeal to liberate humanity from flawed human bodies and upload into advanced machines.  One quote far down the Supremacy path is an adaptation of Matthew 26:41, “The spirit has always been willing.  The flesh has always been weak.”  This saying, in context, is a justification for privileging digitized humanity over organic people.  Alternatively, the Purity affinity has this to say, “Actual human beings everywhere now are more important than potential ‘improved’ humans that may or may not exist in the future.”  This quote comes from a holy figure in the game’s lore expressing the desire to remain human without tampering with the definition of “humanity” with either gene splicing (Harmony) or transhumanism (Supremacy).

The importance of these choices and the way Civilization: Beyond Earth implements them is that the player is left with the understanding that he or she is resolving an apocalypse that has permeated every aspect of life for the colonists.  The ideology chosen makes the entire culture adjust its attitudes, mobilizing the whole of society behind one idea, until it comes to a single conclusion on how to bring about humanity’s salvation.  For Purity, it is finding a way to make this New Earth what the old one should have been and bringing those suffering back home into this new paradise, rapturing them away from a fallen world.  For Harmony, it is abandoning humans on Old Earth to their fate because of their ecological sins – sins which will not be repeated on this new planet that has remained an Eden.  For Supremacy, it means returning home as crusaders with a new proselytizing religion of circuits and computer processors to uplift those who embrace it or crush those who refuse.  In short, the Great Mistake was not the apocalypse.  Rather, each of these affinity-specific outcomes is one kind of apocalypse for mankind, and the player gets to decide which one will happen.  The task of the game isn’t simply to save humanity.  It is to decide what Heaven will be like.

One final note.  Take a quick look at the game’s opening cinematic embedded below.  In it you will see a young woman, one of the few “chosen” worthy to leave behind an impoverished, lifeless world to be reborn in the heavens.  To me, the symbolism is not only possibly but explicitly apocalyptic in the full meaning of the word.  But, of course, I am rather biased.

If you have perspectives on what you have read, whether or not you have played Civilization: Beyond Earth, feel free to share your thoughts.