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COPYRIGHT 2000 Professors World Peace Academy
Catherine Wessinger
New York, Seven Bridges Press, 2000
305 pages, index, paper, $22.95
How the Millennium Comes Violently is a book which I greatly welcome because it advances the discussion about New Religious Movements (NRMs) in modern society and why a number of them from Jonestown to Heaven's Gate have led to violence or suicide. Wessinger, Chair of Religious Studies at Loyola University in New Orleans, understands that people join new religious movements for religious reasons, and she engaged in this study to try to understand why some of them lead to violent ends.
She focused her study on seven groups, the Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians, Aum Shinriko, the Montana Freemen, Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, and Chen Tao. All of these groups had "millennial" expectations. By millennial, she is not referring to the belief of all the groups that there would be a cataclysm in the year 2000, but that they had expectations that...
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