COMMENTARY: Heaven’s Gate represents a new form of millennial vision

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Michael Barkun is professor of political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. His most recent book is”Religion and the Racist Right”(University of North Carolina Press).) UNDATED _ The Heaven’s Gate suicides in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., grip our attention because of the drama of mass […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Michael Barkun is professor of political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. His most recent book is”Religion and the Racist Right”(University of North Carolina Press).)

UNDATED _ The Heaven’s Gate suicides in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., grip our attention because of the drama of mass death, just as did those of the People’s Temple at Jonestown and the Order of the Solar Temple in Canada and Switzerland.


But dramatic and wrenching as the mass deaths are, what may be most significant about Heaven’s Gate is its beliefs, not its exit. For its strange millennial vision is in fact typical of a broad new category of contemporary apocalyptic belief systems.

Where once there were two major types of millennial visions, there is now a third.

The first type, of course, was religious, derived from Scripture.

From the Middle Ages onward, Christians drew from the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation scenarios for the end of history. These end-time beliefs varied in their details, differing about when, for example, the Second Coming would occur, what the warning signs of the”last days”would be, how much tumult and violence would attend the collapse of the old order.

They were also sometimes constructed in opposition to the official teachings of Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, seeing the world as far more provisional and transitory than ecclesiastical authorities would acknowledge.

Despite such doctrinal arguments, however, religious millenarians developed their ideas within existing religious traditions and based them on the same sacred texts as those who regarded them as heretical.

By the late 18th century, a second type of millenarian vision began to arise. This one was secular, not religious, and separate from religion, if not directly hostile to it. The French revolutionaries, with their confidence in the power of reason, constructed one such millenarian vision. In the 19th century, an even more powerful secular apocalypse _ Marxism _ appeared. There were others as well, some based on race, some on national destiny, some on the power of science.

While all of these secular visions dispensed with God as the power that would bring present existence to a close, they had substitutes that were deemed equally powerful _ the dialectic of history, for example, or the redemptive promise of science. Indeed, in everything but name, these secular apocalypses were religions, claiming for themselves the same ultimate truth ascribed to religion and demanding of adherents the same total commitment.


Both the religious and secular millenarian visions still exist, of course. The religious visions continue to spread, as in some fundamentalist Protestant expectations of Armageddon. Secular millennialism has temporarily faltered, with the post-Cold War weakening of Marxism.

But a third version of the apocalyptic vision is emerging, the type embodied in Heaven’s Gate _ a group that grew out of neither a coherent religious tradition nor single ideological current. This third style is an eclectic one that borrows freely not only from religious traditions and political ideologies but from belief systems that normally lie out of public view: occultism, cultural and political radicalism, and unorthodox science.

There could scarcely be a better example of the new eclectic style than the belief system of the Heaven’s Gate group.

It is a collage of ideas appropriated from diverse sources, from Christianity to the New Age. To those now learning about it for the first time, it appears bizarre not only because its individual beliefs are sometimes strange but because the belief system itself cannot be easily classified.

Many of its concepts are drawn from the domain of stigmatized knowledge, the ideas rejected by such authoritative institutions as universities and mainstream media.

The most obvious use of stigmatized knowledge is the heavy reliance upon UFOs and extraterrestrials. There are others as well: reincarnation, the rejection of gender (not just sexuality), the special meaning assigned to the Hale-Bopp comet. There is even a suggestion the group had begun to accept anti-government conspiracy theories.


These beliefs coexisted with more familiar concepts, such as a redemptive role for Jesus and references to the New Testament Book of Revelation. All are stitched together in a pastiche that owes something to many traditions but is part of none.

While such a hybrid belief system has its special characteristics _ the result of the ingredients chosen and the manner in which they are combined _ it is not unique. In the last decade in particular, such eclectic belief systems have proliferated.

At a time when there is unparalleled access to many kinds of beliefs, both religious and non-religious, it is tempting for some to create distinctive mixtures that are not anchored in any single religious, historical, or intellectual tradition.

It is also important to recognize that the growth of such eclectic millenarianism almost never carries the dire consequences that occurred in California.

Still, apocalyptic visions of the world’s end that take highly idiosyncratic forms are becoming increasingly common.

In a post-Cold War world that often seems chaotic, those in search of understanding will increasingly construct or seek out beliefs of this kind, beliefs promising total knowledge and fulfillment but with no organic connection to historic millenarian traditions.


DEA END BARKUN

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