Millenarianism, Ahmadinejad, and the Greatest Super Bowl Ever Played
You may call it the Second Coming, the apocalypse, the eschaton, the parousia, the return of the Mahdi, or the Hale Bopp comet; we call it the Greatest Super Bowl Ever Played.
Every religion, even of the secular sort, seems to have a theory of the end of the world, and there are sects within each religion who are convinced that the last days are upon us.
Of course we are all going to die, so we all have a personal end of the world to contend with. But it seems that many people are invested in the idea that their personal big event will coincide with the cosmic Big Event of the end of everyone else’s world too. Perhaps they think or wish for their life to have greater meaning if they are there on game day for the Greatest Super Bowl Ever Played.
We think it is very interesting that many people looking forward to the Greatest Super Bowl are not looking forward to attending it only as fans. From Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to David Koresh, from Jim Jones to Marshall Applewhite, from St. Paul to Tim Lahaye, they see themselves as players, coaches, producers, directors, play-by-play announcers, cameramen, or sportswriters of the event — perhaps most importantly, they always see themselves on the winning team.
So far the thing that all millenarian or apocalyptic movements have in common is that they have all been wrong. In Christianity alone, they have been wrong for at least 1956 years and maybe more. We refer to the transition from I Thessalonians to II Thessalonians in 50-51 AD; that community went from the giddy daily expectation of the Second Coming of Christ to being told by St. Paul to quit slacking and get a job a year later. Now that’s millenarian disappointment!
We observe that millenarian communities often engage in all kinds of destructive behavior. Aum Shinrikyo planted sarin gas in Japanese subways. The Shakers contrived a doctrine sure to render them extinct. The Heaven’s Gate cult poured themselves a deadly cocktail to toast the heavens. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has personally experienced religious visions, awaits and seeks to hasten the return of the Mahdi through sponsoring suicide bombings, promoting terrorism worldwide, and doing whatever it is he plans to do with Iran’s nuclear weapons.
To summarize where we are, many people throughout history have believed they lived in the end times, that the Greatest Super Bowl Ever Played was going to occur on their watch, and that they had a role to play in this Super Bowl, from fan to player to coach, etc., in helping their team to victory. Oddly, these true believers have often been willing to engage in destructive and self-destructive behavior to bring about their victory. Since the world persistently refuses to end, these people invariably wind up disappointed, which changes, but does not necessarily diminish, their beliefs.
We think extreme millenarianism is often caused by a personal or societal crisis, a conflict between the way we want the world to be and the way that it is. Young people who become extreme millenarians may be having problems adjusting to the challenges of adult life. Older people, such as the Heavens Gate cult, may have different problems; perhaps they have become deeply disillusioned by the way life has turned out for them. We are not surpised to find extreme millenarianism in fundamentalist Islam and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; we have written on many occasions of the incompatability of sharia rule and modern life (here or here or here, for example). The psychoanalyst Shrinkwrapped gives radical Islam about fifteen years in which to accomplish its mission or fail. Perhaps he is right.
Our purpose in writing this piece is to say that, despite the fact that the millenarians have been invariably wrong, they are deadly serious and often seriously deadly in their missions, given the deep-seated and personally compelling roots of their beliefs. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be such a man. We are not worried about him celebrating in a victory party after the Greatest Super Bowl Ever Played: his team is sure to lose. It is, rather, the nasty halftime show that he has planned that gives us pause. A millenarian in crisis is not to be underestimated.