Millenialism is, generally speaking, the religious belief that salvation and material benefits will be conferred upon a society in the near future as the result of some apocalyptic event. The term derives from the Latin word for 1,000; in early Christian theology, believers held that Christ would return and establish his kingdom on earth for a period of a thousand years.
Millenialist movements, Christian and non-Christian, have arisen at various points throughout history, usually in times of great crisis or social upheaval. In "nativistic" millenialist movements, a people threatened with cultural disintegration attempts to earn its salvation by rejecting foreign customs and values and returning to the "old ways." One such movement involving the Ghost Dance cults, named after the ceremonial dance which cult members performed in hope of salvation, flourished in the late 19th century among Indians of the western United States.
By the middle of the 19th century, western expansion and settlement by whites was seriously threatening Native American cultures. Mining, agriculture and ranching encroached on and destroyed many Indian land and food sources. Indian resistance led to a series of wars and massacres, culminating in the U.S. Government's policy of resettlement of Indians onto reservations which constituted a fraction of their former territorial base. Under these dire circumstances, a series of millenialist movements began among western tribes.
The first Ghost Dance cult arose in western Nevada around 1870. A Native American prophet named Wodziwob, a member of a Northern Paiute tribe, received the revelation of an imminent apocalypse which would destroy the white man, restore all dead Indians to life, and return to the Indians their lands, food supplies (such as the vanishing buffalo), and old way of life. The apocalypse was to be brought about with the help of a ceremonial dance and songs, and by strict adherence to a moral code which, oddly enough, strongly resembled Christian teaching. In the early 1870s, Wodziwob's Ghost Dance cult spread to several tribes in California and Oregon, but soon died out or was absorbed into other cults.
A second Ghost Dance cult, founded in January 1889, evolved as the result of a similar revelation. This time Wovoka another Northern Paiute Indian, whose father had been a disciple of Wodziwob received a vision during a solar eclipse in which he died, spoke to God, and was assigned the task of teaching the dance and the millennial message. With white civilization having pushed western tribes ever closer to the brink of cultural disintegration during the previous twenty years, the Ghost Dance movement spread rapidly this time, catching on among tribes from the Canadian border to Texas, and from the Missouri River to the Sierra Nevadas an area approximately one-third the size of the continental United States.
Wovoka's Ghost Dance doctrine forbade Indian violence against whites or other Indians; it also involved the wearing of "ghost shirts," which supposedly rendered the wearers invulnerable to the white man's bullets. In 1890, when the Ghost Dance spread to the Sioux Indians, both the ghost shirts and the movement itself were put to the test. Violent resistance to white domination had all but ended among the Sioux by the late 1880s, when government- ordered reductions in the size of their reservations infuriated the Sioux, and made them particularly responsive to the millenialist message of the Ghost Dance. As the Sioux organized themselves in the cult of the dance, an alarmed federal government resorted to armed intervention which ultimately led to the massacre of some 200 Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in December of 1890. The ghost shirts had been worn to no avail, and Wounded Knee marked the end of the second Ghost Dance cult.
The passage implies that the second Ghost Dance cult gained widespread popularity quickly because:
- the U.S. government no longer attempted to suppress Native American religious practices.
- many Native Americans felt particularly threatened by white civilization.
- Wovoka was a more charismatic religious leader than Wodziwob had been.
- it was founded on the basis of a spiritual revelation.
Answer(s): B
Explanation:
This asks for a reason why the second Ghost Dance cult grew popular so quickly. The second Ghost Dance cult is discussed in paragraphs 4 and 5. In fact, the popularity of the second cult is directly referred to in the second half of paragraph 4. At the top of that paragraph, the author had described how the second cult started when Wovoka received his revelation. In the third sentence of the paragraph, we learn that, in the twenty years since the first Ghost Dance cult, white people had pushed Indians "ever closer to the brink of cultural disintegration". And because of this, "the Ghost Dance movement spread rapidly this time", quote unquote.
Therefore, choice (B) is correct: the second Ghost Dance cult quickly became popular because many Indians felt particularly threatened by white civilization. From the third sentence of the fourth paragraph, which states that white civilization was still pushing western Indian tribes to the brink of cultural disintegration, as well as from the end of the last paragraph, where the government's policy of armed intervention is discussed, it can be inferred that the U.S. government continued to suppress Native American cultural practices, and that choice (A) is wrong. Choice (C) is plausible, but unwarranted. The author makes no comparison regarding the amount of personal charisma of each prophet. So there's no way of knowing which cult leader was more charismatic. And choice (D) is wrong because, according to the passage, both Ghost Dance cults were founded on the basis of spiritual revelations. Therefore, the mere fact that the second was founded on the basis of a spiritual revelation does nothing to explain its relative popularity.