Christian millennialism served as a kind of lingo through which Americans debated politics and the country’s place in the world during times of war in the USA. Focusing on the role of ecumenical Protestant millennialism, this chapter details the ways in which ideas about the end of the world, combined with contested notions about the USA’s role in divine plans, fostered Christian nationalism and American exceptionalism from the Revolution to the war on terror in the 21st century.

Chapter 2 focuses on Augustine’s early consideration of the resurrection as the restoration of humanity to the pristine stability of paradise. In starting to describe the resurrection, Augustine begins to articulate the spiritual death and resurrection of the soul and the physical death and resurrection of the body. In this process, he begins to modify his previous notions of the soul’s immortality and the body’s dispensability. Emphasizing more a return to the original creation and less an advance to an eschatological transformation, Augustine reinforces his description of this repristination by articulating not only humanity’s spiritual change at the beginning of time, but also a version of millennialism at the end of time. At the center of these considerations, Augustine begins to explore the fleshly resurrection of Christ, who functions as the sacrament and example of our salvation. Augustine’s later clarifications of his early concept of Edenic repristination evince its limitations.

The previous themes reach into modern debates about freedom and necessity, which are still central in education and psychology today. Contributing to the rise of formal disciplines of developmental and child psychology, educational psychology, clinical psychology and cognitive psychology, as well as psychiatry, empirical approaches based on sense perception began in the mid-eighteenth century; but they are equally the outcome of broader religious and cultural influences. The book therefore concludes with an overview of the direct traces on the modern disciplines of the religious ideas discussed in earlier chapters: in Britain through David Hartley, Joseph Priestley and Francis Galton, and the nature-versus-nurture formula; and in France Hippolyte Taine, Alfred Binet (creator of the ‘mental age’ score, subsequently IQ measurement) and Jean Piaget himself.

Scholars have often cast puritans as doom-mongers fixated on an imminent and retributive apocalypse, but they were interested in the creation of the next world as well as in the destruction of this one. Writing about the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ’s saints prophesied in the book of Revelation, puritan authors evaluated the political and material means through which a new, improved earth could and would take shape. Since the Congregationalist church in New England did not have an official position on the subject, the writers discussed in this chapter (Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, and Samuel Sewall) could use the millennium to explore the latest thinking about a broad range of topics, including the relationship between the soul and the body, the impact of the Fall on the planet’s orbit, and the geopolitics of global peace. Giving this speculative propensity its due corrects the modern tendency to see millennialism as an intellectual dead-end. While the authors in question believed that their predictions would (broadly) come true, their writings performed a function comparable to that fulfilled by the modern genre of science fiction: interrogating the limits of present-day life through visions of possible futures.

The chapter begins by differentiating between two English preconceptions of the American environment, wilderness and waste, and characterizes first-generation colonization as a pastoral retreat supported by English georgic assumptions and practices. The chapter then compares puritan and Algonquian conceptualizations of the natural environment, notably including differing conceptions of property, and discusses the influence of puritan justifications of colonization on John Locke’s theorization of land as alienable property. The chapter goes on to trace environmental changes wrought by colonization, including transformations effected by nonhuman agents as well as human agents, and locates these transformations in the climate context of the Little Ice Age. Domestic animals created environments in which certain English plants flourished while indigenous plants declined. Because English grain crops did not prosper in New England, however, the colonists adopted the indigenous grain, maize, and scaled up the indigenous forest-fallow cultivation system to unsustainable levels. Unsustainability in turn invited frontier expansion. The essay concludes by briefly investigating the tension in puritan thought and practice between worldly engagement and spiritual transcendence on both a national level, where it is evident in millennialism, and an individual level, where it shaped puritan poetics.

Christian writers, keen to interpret the apocalyptic scripture that had since become canonical, recognised the intrinsic importance of Nero’s role as first persecutor to the history of Christianity. According to tradition, Nero created the first martyrs, including the apostles Peter and Paul. Millennialists from the third century established the importance of a relationship between the first and last persecutors, affording Nero an apocalyptic role. To add detail to the paradigm, late-antique writers turned ted to non-biblical traditions – mostly classical historiography, but also the apocryphal Sibylline Oracles and Ascension of Isaiah. Here, they could find characteristics to populate their paradigm, be those the traits of the arch-destroyers of apocrypha, or those of the tyrannical Nero of classical texts.