Ivan Drury recently posted a public letter on his blog (ivandrury.wordpress.com) explaining why he resigned from Vancouver’s Fire This Time social justice movement (FTT), a movement he helped create. Drury describes FTT as an umbrella for a number of groups such Mobilization Against War and Occupation (MAWO), Youth Third World Alliance (Y3WA), and the Alison Bodine Defence Committee, among others.

He writes that the core membership of FTT operates like a cult, though he hesitates to use this term for fear of minimizing the personal agency of the people involved and dismissing the good work they’ve done to raise awareness of imperialism and global injustice. Even so, he says that FTT has some cult-like characteristics and that some members have engaged in very ethically questionable and, in some cases, possibly criminal behaviour in pursuit of their revolutionary goals.

I should confess that I’ve attended MAWO meetings and protests and that the people I met there seemed to be sincere social justice activists, though a touch credulous when it came to the regimes governing Cuba and Venezuela. It’s difficult to reconcile my impressions with Drury’s claims, but I can’t ignore the fact that, far from profiting from this letter, Drury is laying himself open to potentially serious legal repercussions, an act that requires a degree of bravery that lends him some credibility. And it’s not just Drury who’s making these claims. His blog also contains letters by Mike Krebs, a man who was allegedly assaulted for resigning from FTT, Nasim Sedeghat, a FTT founding member who claims to have witnessed the attack, Ian Breeching, a former member of Y3WA who describes extremely abusive organizational practices, and Kimball Cariou, a Communist Party of Canada newspaper editor who writes about being bullied and threatened by members of FTT. If Drury is simply engaging in slanderous political in-fighting, then he’s doing a masterful job of it.

Setting aside the question of whether or not Drury’s letter is accurate¬—a question that’s certainly not for me to decide—I’d like to explore the vulnerability of political movements to the kind of dynamics Drury believes are besetting FTT. If Drury is correct, then FTT is operating like an authoritarian religious movement.

But this shouldn’t be seen as a significant deviation from the political norm. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, (Doubleday Canada, 2007) John Gray writes that “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith—moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion. The world in which we find ourselves at the start of the new millennium is littered with the debris of utopian projects, which though they were framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion were in fact vehicles for religious myths.”

Gray argues that modern political ideologies are descended from Christian millennialism. Christian millennialism teaches that good and evil are locked in battle, but that this war is not eternal. It will end with the triumph of good over evil, a victory that will occur at the end of history. At last the world as we know it will end and a new one will be born, a metaphysical revolution that will usher in a transformation of the human condition. Whereas now humanity is mired in ignorance, sin, and tyranny, after the tribulations of universal transformation the human race will be elevated to new spiritual heights of wisdom, virtue, and justice. Christian millennialists understand history not as a series of causes and effects, but rather as a drama of human salvation.

By offering life-affirming meaning with which to confront suffering, death and injustice, this myth lends comfort and courage to hearts wearied by the world’s numberless cruelties. Because it does this so well, Western political culture held onto the essential features of the myth even as its Christian trappings were abandoned: whereas Christian millennialists believe that God will create heaven on Earth, the political philosophers of the Enlightenment and their descendents believe that humanity will procure its own salvation either through social evolution, by which ignorance and injustice will be progressively overcome, or revolution, by which the forces keeping the bulk of humanity in servitude will be aggressively overturned.

Gray writes that “Modern revolutionaries such as the French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks detested traditional religion, but their conviction that the crimes and follies of the past could be left behind in an all-encompassing transformation of human life was a secular reincarnation of early Christian beliefs. These modern revolutionaries were radical exponents of Enlightenment thinking, which aimed to replace religion with a scientific view of the world. Yet the radical Enlightenment belief that there can be a sudden break in history, after which the flaws of human society will be for ever abolished, is a by-product of Christianity. . . . The very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion. Modern revolutionary movements are a continuation of religion by other means.”

He points to the example of Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1923), in which Trotsky writes that socialist-controlled science will allow humankind to realize hitherto undreamt-of potentials: “Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” Christian millennialists and Trotsky agree that history is a process by which humanity becomes superhuman, a belief with clearly mythological foundations.

Millennialism isn’t restricted to the political Left. Neo-conservatives who believe that American-style capitalism is the virtuous completion of human history and that American military force must eradicate the obstacles en route to the Americanization of the world are every bit as indebted to millennialism as Marxists and Jacobins, or, for that matter, as the Extropians, Ken Wilber’s disciples, or anyone else who believes that history has a plot.

If modern politics are religious, then it stands to reason that they’re vulnerable to the same kind of temptations as other religions. The most powerful religious temptation is the temptation to read myths literally rather than metaphorically and allegorically, to mistake, in Karen Armstrong’s words, Mythos for Logos. This can easily lead to cult formation. Robert Jay Lifton writes about this in his analysis of the Japanese Aum cult, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (Metropolitan Books, 1999): “In reading mythological stories, we seek to reconnect their concrete details to the symbolized, metaphorical world in which we exist psychologically. A megalomaniac guru . . . does the reverse: he embraces the very concreteness of mythic narratives so as to circumvent the metaphor and symbolization so crucial to the functioning of the human imagination.”

As with other religious cults, political cults are expressions of mythological naivety. This produces some very sloppy thinking in which mythological categories like salvation and damnation are given simplistic 1:1 correlates in the political world. For instance, rather than viewing dialectical materialism for what it is—a 19th Century theory of history with all the limitations of any other product of human thought—Marxists who have descended into cultish behavior will view it as an ironclad truth with, despite all evidence to the contrary, an unparalleled ability to foretell the destiny of our species and to distinguish the righteous from the damned in the eschatological epic of class struggle.

When this happens, political millennialists can override all the normal ethical restraints on human behavior in the pursuit of their vision of global salvation, usually defined as “justice.” Albert Camus warns that this can create an “imperialism of justice” that “has no other means but injustice.” By attributing unlimited literal authority to the myth, political millennialists can rationalize any action, however base, as necessary for the revolutionary cause, and dismiss any criticism as symptomatic of the very wickedness they’re trying to destroy.

Regardless of the truth of Drury’s allegations, the danger of political millennialism is a real one. To safeguard ourselves against it, political activists need to be aware of the mythological subtext to our work. To do so, we must become mythologically literate, which is to say that we need to become more aware of the role of metaphor and allegory in human thought, as well as the ways that our fears of mortality and our need for meaning influence our collective behavior. For many people this will mean having to go beyond a cherished but all-too-facile dichotomy that separates religion from atheism.

Whatever beliefs we explicitly hold, we are, each of us, essentially religious creatures, and so we’re all prey to the various perils of religious practice. Our vulnerability increases alongside our awareness of the world’s evils, an awareness that arouses our deepest fears and sorrows. To deal with these fears, we inevitably turn to mythology, to symbolic narratives that make sense of evil and suggest ways of overcoming it. It’s here that the temptation towards literalism is most compelling, and it’s here that good people can be damned by fables of redemption and corrupted by stories of a purified world.