If there is one thing I have learned over the past fifteen years of studying new religious movements, it is the folly of attempting to predict their futures. I leave that risky exercise to their doomsday (or utopian) prophets. As I look toward the approaching dawn of the new millennium, however, having been trained in the multidisciplinary pedagogy of religious studies, I feel quite confident in saying that we, the denizens of the late twentieth century, are sitting on a rich, fermenting compost heap of religious traditions that will continue to sprout new, exotic seeds.
As the twenty-first century unfolds, we may expect to see the battle for social legitimacy waged ever more fiercely between the fundamentalists of the three great Abrahamic traditions. Middle Eastern enclaves will be established in the American Midwest, as well as nostalgic recreations of our pioneer communities. Behind these fortresses, bastions against the powerful tides of pluralism, secularism, and the relative realities of tolerance, we will find surprisingly synthetic cultures, mixing high tech and virtual reality with a primitive back-to-the-land survivalist ethic. Theocratic city-states will emerge to encapsulate their unique path to salvation, like Reverend Moon's current project under construction in Venezuela. The prospect for danger here is that these global millenarians, drawing on their different apocalyptic texts to point, with an odd, self-satisfied sort of gleeful pessimism, towards the "signs of the times", may unwittingly collude in concocting a composite, many-faceted nuclear theology (!).
The nuclear family will continue to fragment, transmute, and reconstitute itself under the unprecedented conditions of "gender-bending", birth technology, and perhaps even cloning. We may witness the renewal of religion's traditional function of preserving the sanctity of the family. STDs and mistakes in genetic engineering will be cited to reinforce the mainstream churches' view of sexuality and family as ordained by God.
What new forms will religion take? It will be moulded by the same social issues that concern us today. As baby boomers reach sixty and seventy, they will likely resort to new healing mystiques and alternative medical centres, as the more stress is placed on the public health system. Environmentalist groups, while pursuing pragmatic courses of action, will develop full-blown eco-theologies. Transcendental religions will have to bend their theologies to include sacred notions of nature. Radical environmentalists and "biocentrists" like the Earth First!ers and Reverend Chris Korda of the Church of Euthanasia will continue to resort to terrorist acts and shock tactics.
I feel there is reason for optimism as we peer into the next century. Ecumenism and religious pluralism will flourish, while the majority of our citizens will lead decent, compassionate lives without ever feeling the faintest urge to go to church, enter trance states, or speculate on the afterlife. Some of the more virulent forms of religious life will hopefully be swept away by immigration, multi-ethnicity, and education. Racialist religions will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their separatist ideals. Reverend Butler of the Aryan Nations is in his eighties and in weak health; Farrakhan's charisma is the glue that holds together the Nation of Islam-perhaps the most schismatic church since the Seventh-Day Adventists. If his one-meal-a-day diet that guarantees a thousand-year lifespan to Black Nationalist postmillennialists proves ineffectual, his 250,000 followers may be reabsorbed into mainstream Islam.
Finally, it is not unlikely that we will witness a resurgence of millenarian movements at the onset-and aftermath-of the year 2000. Prophecy will fail so many times, we may see psychologists setting up shop, trained to treat patients suffering from cognitive dissonance and post-millennial depression! Apocalyptic ferment will be a major focus for the news media, and will encompass technological and economic chiliasm, as well as our more familiar forms. As Norman Cohn observed in The Pursuit of the Millennium: "It is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still."
Susan Palmer is the co-editor of Millennium, Messiahs, & Mayhem (Routledge). She teaches at Dawson College and Concordia University.
