Apocalyptic and millenarian movements JOHN R. HALL Scholars invoke the terms “millenarian,” “millennialist,” and “apocalyptic” to refer to movements and sects that embrace ideologies positing the (typically traumatic) end of one era, promising relief from the sufferings of this world and its present age, and purporting to give rise to salvation in a new “golden age,” “heaven on earth,” or realized utopian social order. The strikingly broad range of movements that adopt such ideologies includes peaceful conversionist movements and mili- tant religious social movements undertaking “holy war,” anticolonial movements, agrarian movements, and modern revolutionary poli- tical movements. Moreover, movements vary widely in their scale of organization and significance – from those that attract little notice beyond their participants to movements within early Christianity, the Protestant Refor- mation, and contemporary Islam that have been civilizational, even world-historical, in their consequences. Despite the ancient Middle Eastern origins of apocalypticism and millennialism, non-Western religions and ideologies – for example, Buddhism – have on occasion provided independent inspiration for such movements. Sometimes too, non-Western movements (for example, the nineteenth-century Tai Ping Rebellion in China) have synthesized local cultural materials with millenarian Christian ideas. In short, as rich veins of case study and comparative research document, millenarian and apocalyptic movements vary in ideology, organizational form, scale, and trajectory. The broad range of cases poses an important theoretical challenge – whether to focus on shared characteristics, or alternatively, to theorize alternative types of such movements. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam.  2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm341 The theoretical puzzle of millennialism and apocalypticism is signaled by the terms them- selves. “Millennialism” in the narrowest sense refers to the thousand-year reign of Christ described in the Bible’s New Testament “Apoc- alypse of Saint John.” And the Greek word apokalyptein means “disclosure.” For Christian millennialists, disclosure signifies “revelation” about the end of history when God’s final judg- ment of – and victory over – the Antichrist and Satan is to take place. Millennialism, then, has to do with fixed temporal events, and since at least 1200 ce, when the Cistercian monk Joachim di Fiore unveiled his calcula- tions about the three stages of world history, quintessential millenarian movements some- times have focused on predicting the exact date of the anticipated second coming of Christ, the end of the world, or other decisive develop- ments. However, even movements that evoke strong millenarian themes often display little interest in calendrical calculations, nor are they oriented toward the end of the world as such. Thus, millennialism has come to have a much broader – and looser – definition, centered on the anticipated arrival of an earthly utopia. Overall, the apocalyptic offers a clearer basis for the conceptualization of the diversity of movements and sects centered on the end of one era and the beginning of another, because it is not inflected with meaning about a thousand-year period of time. The apoca- lyptic encompasses a broad array of ideologies and movements not necessarily focused on the actual physical destruction of the planet or its conditions of life (even if those are increasingly salient issues). Rather than the “end of the world,” the apocalyptic typically concerns “‘the end of the world as we know it,’ an extreme cultural and social disjuncture in which dramatic events reshape the relations of many people at once to history” (Hall 2009: 3). Social researchers may affirm that the apoc- alypse is socially constructed in this way or