c. 1998 Religion News Service

BROOKLINE, Mass. _ If Richard Landes believed the world will end in the year 2000, he would be doing a lot of work for nothing.

Landes, a medieval historian at Boston University is also the director of the Center for Millennial Studies (CMS), which is keeping a watchful eye on the innumerable manifestations of millennial fervor spiraling the world toward the year 2000, for many, the most important date in the last 1,000 years.

The CMS’ major task is to archive the millennial expectations of a panoply of religious, New Age, and secular groups as well as phenomena such as the so-called”Y2K”bug, which, when computers reset their clocks on Dec. 31, 1999, will read”00″as the year 1900 rather than 2000, affecting a host of computer transactions.

According to center officials, this tracking of pre-millennial manifestations, made possible by the telecommunications advances and global technology unavailable 1,000 years ago, sets this millennium apart from previous periods of fervor. It allows the CMS to keep tabs on a cultural phenomenon that _ as countless magazine covers and Internet sites attest _ spans technological, religious, and business fields.”It’s the first time in history that the documentation has been recorded before the failure”of the millennial or apocalyptic expectation, said Beth Forrest, special projects coordinator for the CMS’ small staff.

In many ways, the work of Landes and Forrest is built on what Landes sees as certain disappointment for those who believe the new millennium will mean the annihilation of the universe.”If you conceive the end is imminent, you’re going to be disappointed,”said Landes, who with perfect confidence has scheduled for 2002 a conference entitled”Disappointed Millennialism and Cultural Mutation.” Despite this expectation, Landes, 49, believes millennial fervor has the potential to contribute great energy to social change.

In this regard, the scholar is careful to distinguish between”millennial”and”apocalyptic.”He says millennialism anticipates a”radical transformation”that does not necessarily involve the imminent destruction of the world through an apocalyptic event.”Millennialism is the radiation that creates social mutations,”he said.

Landes characterizes himself as a”religious”person but not one who believes in a God who intervenes in history. This does not mean, however, he is without millennial expectations himself though, he said,”I think secular people have a really hard time understanding this stuff.””It’s pretty clear that God’s justice is not, shall we say, widely evident in the world today,”Landes said. But an event like the millennium can bring out what he calls human”character.””We become, hopefully, deeply noble at moments like this, and that’s fascinating because we’re looking at people that are truly alive,”he said.

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Landes’ interest in current thought and behavior may seem unusual for a historian who focuses on things past. And that is what Landes was doing when he picked up his friend and colleague Stephen O’Leary’s 1994 book”Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric.” O’Leary, a communications professor at the University of Southern California who co-founded the CMS with Landes, discusses in the book the millennial movement led by William Miller, the first inspiration of what became the Seventh-day Adventists, who predicted the world would end in 1843, a year he later termed”the year of the great disappointment.” As he read O’Leary’s book, Landes said he realized millennialism is a recurring force in human history that is rarely documented and understood before the predicted apocalypse. He approached O’Leary with an idea:”We should start a center for millennial studies and catch this harvest, keep track of it,”he said. The CMS was launched in 1996.

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But when, exactly, is”the event”? The CMS’ official position is the millennium will be ushered in on December 25, 2000, the anniversary of the traditional observance of Jesus’ birth _ even though both biblical and secular scholars now place the birth some four years before the traditional date.

However, most secular celebrations will occur on January 1, 2000. And Landes does not rule out a second wave of Christian millennialism in the year 2033, dated from traditional belief that Jesus was executed at 33.

Many historians, according to Landes, consider the year 1000 to have been without much millennial fervor. But this belief comes, he said, from the dearth of records from the period _ a problem Landes is devoted to not repeating this time around.”As a historian of the year 1000, I’m quite convinced that just about everybody at that point was entirely certain it was the end of the world, or at least thought it was possible,”he said. His goal is to prevent future historians from misunderstanding 2000 by not having a pre-millennium catalogue of millennial sentiment.”We’re here to make sure we catch these ephemera before they look silly and disappear,”he said.

Included among the”ephemera”is the supermarket tabloid”Weekly World News,”which often features tales of apocalyptic prophecy. The CMS is also following a New Age group that believes that on May 5, 2000, a rare planetary alignment will cause a gravitational pull resulting in tidal waves. The group claims these waves will destroy large parts of the world, and their literature includes maps of what the continents will look like after the event. And there is a group organizing a”day of peace”for Jan. 1, 2000, aiming to prevent a single gun from being fired on that day.

Landes and his colleagues _ a dozen scholars who form the CMS advisory board _ also keep track of more generalized religious trends such as the Million Man March and seemingly oddball events such as the recent claim by a Taiwanese sect leader that he would become incarnated in Texas by God’s spirit.

In addition to archiving the activities of these groups, the CMS sponsors regular conferences, a quarterly newsletter, and a Web site (http://www.mille.org) featuring a countdown _ in days, hours, minutes, and seconds _ to the millennium.”It’s like a drug,”Landes said of millennial fever.”It gives you a big boost, but then it’s going to fade, and the hangover is awful.””But we’re addicted to it,”he added.

Landes plans to be in Jerusalem when the millennium arrives, the city he calls”ground zero, the focal point of the millennial imagination of all three of the Western religions of revelation and salvation.” The CMS is currently organizing a Jerusalem”trialogue”among Muslims, Christians and Jews, with an eye toward defusing a potentially violent reaction to millennial disappointment in the region.”If people are disappointed in the year 2000, that’s when anger arises,”said Forrest, the trialogue’s organizer.

Landes marvels at the capacity of the world’s religions _ particularly Christianity _ to survive disappointment after disappointment when it comes to millennialism. “The appeal of apocalyptic millennialism is tremendously powerful, and to tell people not to believe in these kinds of promises is like a disillusioned middle-aged person telling a teen-aged person not to fall in love,”he said,”Every generation is going to have to have their own experience with this.”

DEA END LEBOWITZ