derstanding of the Christian origins of progressive ideology reveals the "radical inconsistency" at its core, in Becker's words, the untenable assumption of historical "finality." Almost everyone now agrees that progress—in its utopian form at least—is a "superstition" that is "nearly worn out," as Dean William Ralph Inge put it in 1920; that we can now appreciate its religious roots largely because "the idea has begun to lose its hold on the mind of society," as Christopher Dawson pointed out a few years later; and that the hope of some final state of earthly perfection, in short, is the "deadest of dead ideas," as Lewis Mumford wrote in 1932—"the one notion that has been thoroughly blasted by the facts of twentieth-century experience."

Utopian visions of the future were definitively discredited by their association with the totalitarian movements that came to power in the thirties. Belief in a secular millennium, rooted in the Christian tradition, seemed to have furnished modern barbarism with much of its spiritual energy. "The more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements," wrote Norman Cohn, "the more remarkable the similarities appear." Fascists and communists replaced supernatural explanations of history with secular explanations, but they clung to the apocalyptic fantasy that a final, decisive struggle would establish absolute justice and perfect contentment. "What had once been demanded by 'the will of God' was now demanded by 'the purposes of History.' "

The collapse of utopia made it clear that a belief in progress could be salvaged—and the same calamities that discredited utopian hopes seemed to make it all the more important to salvage some form of hope—only by disavowing its perfectionist overtones. ^* "The world today believes in

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*	In his influential book Ideology and Utopia, published in 1937, Karl Mannheim gave voice to an uneasiness shared by many others. Would the collapse of the utopian

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