ABSTRACT
Postmillennialism was a Christian philosophy of history, rooted in eschatology, which was largely unique to the AngloAmerican Protestant community from the early eighteenth century until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It received its name because it anticipated that the Second Advent of Jesus Christ would occur after earth’s millennial age. (In this, it differed from its oft-times rival, premillennialism, which reversed this sequence of events.) It enjoyed its widest currency in pre-Civil War America, when its popularity benefited from an expansive social optimism in both religious and secular thought, an optimism which its cheery philosophy reinforced. The bloody shock of Civil War undercut its assumptions on the perfectibility of human nature and society, and the social costs of postwar industrialization and urbanization contributed further to its decline. It survived merely as a faint echo for social reform and never recaptured its early popularity.
