How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven's Gate

Catherine Wessinger is a scholar of new religious movements, and this Seven Bridges Press book is her standard comparative scholarly study of millennial movements that ended in violence, from Jonestown to the Branch Davidians at Waco to Heaven's Gate. Its strength is a genuinely useful analytic distinction the book develops, separating fragile, assaulted and revolutionary types of millennial violence based on what actually triggered each episode, rather than treating all such groups as uniformly dangerous or uniformly persecuted. Its limit is that it covers a specific set of well documented twentieth century cases, so a claim about a millennial movement outside this comparative set, or about a more recent case, needs a source addressing that group specifically alongside Wessinger's comparative framework.