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Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization. By FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 286. $26.95.
The discovery of nearly a thousand buried or burned members of the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God underscores the perpetual relevance of millennialism as a focus of scholarly and public inquiry. For Baumgartner, "the best way to protect society from the destructive acts of zealots like Jim Jones or David Koresh... is through a serious inquiry into the history of millennialism" (p. 8). In Longing for the End, millennialism is shorthand for a wide variety of apocalyptic texts, eschatological beliefs, and utopian, doomsday, or end-time scenarios and groups.
To an audience seeking an introductory survey of the persistence of millennialism in Western history, Frederic Baumgartner (Louis XII: France in the Sixteenth Century; and Henry II: King of France) offers a compact enumeration of the religious and secular groups whose eschatology can or has lead to violent acts or suicide. This volume grew out of an undergraduate seminar on millennial cults at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and from Baumgartner's scholarly interest in religion and politics in sixteenth-century France, "an era as loaded with apocalyptic anxiety as the current one" (p. vii).
Longing for the End is restricted to Christian groups and those heavily influenced by Christianity. Baumgartner's blueprint for millennial groups is a messianic cult within Judaism: Jesus and his disciples and apostles. His explanatory model for the recurrence of millennial groups interprets stress or deprivation (of nearly any sort: economic, political, religious, and even personal) as the catalyst between a susceptible person or group and the millennial traditions captured in biblical texts. Personal or group aspirations or frustrations can spiral upward in this context and ultimately lead to violence. This model is not particularly probative...