Novel: A Creed for the Third Millennium

Overview
Colleen McCullough’s A Creed for the Third Millennium is a near-future dystopian novel about a government-engineered savior and the moral cost of manufacturing hope. Set in a United States ground down by relentless cold, economic contraction, and psychic exhaustion, it follows a brilliant, ruthless psychologist who recruits a charismatic small-town doctor to front a national campaign of renewal. As his message spreads and the man begins to embody the role others have written for him, the novel asks whether a creed can redeem a people if it destroys the person who carries it.

Setting and Premise
In the early decades of the third millennium, a protracted climatic shift leaves North America in a state of perpetual grayness. Crops fail, cities shrink, and whole populations drift southward in search of bearable weather and work. Beyond material hardship, a deeper malaise, the erosion of will and meaning, pervades communities. A covert wing of the federal government, tasked with psychological stabilization, decides that material programs are not enough. What the country lacks, they argue, is an animating purpose and a voice to articulate it.

The Making of a Messiah
Dr. Judith Carriol, a driven and hyper-competent behavioral scientist, is given the mandate to find that voice. She scours the country not for a theologian or politician, but for someone whose character and charisma can bear the weight of a national mood. She finds Dr. Joshua Christian, a compassionate physician whose daily work, treating the neglected and listening without condescension, has made him a quiet center of gravity in his struggling community. Carriol recognizes in him both authenticity and a symbolic name, and persuades him to take his message to the nation.

With government resources shaping itineraries, staging events, and amplifying coverage, Joshua tours the country preaching a simple, secular creed: mutual responsibility, endurance, service, and the rediscovery of meaning through communal care. He speaks in plain language and refuses cynicism, and people who had felt abandoned begin to respond. The media declares a movement. The bureaucracy congratulates itself on a masterstroke of soft power. Joshua, initially skeptical of choreographed spectacle, grows into the role, convinced that the work is saving lives.

Unraveling and Sacrifice
The pressure of ubiquity, however, begins to strip him of privacy and health. Carriol’s calculation is unsentimental: a figurehead must be tireless, and the narrative cannot be allowed to falter. Joshua’s schedule becomes punishing, his words increasingly freighted with expectation, his image commodified in ways he cannot control. As adulation swells, so do detractors, and the strain sharpens his sense of destiny; he starts to believe that the office he occupies is not merely strategic but ordained.

The novel steers toward a tragic consummation that echoes a passion play. In the depths of winter, driven by his insistence on sharing the people’s suffering and by Carriol’s refusal to slow the campaign, Joshua collapses under the burden of travel, exposure, and ceaseless demand. His death, part accident of human limits, part consequence of design, instantly transfigures him into a martyr whose creed carries more authority in absence than it did in life. The government hails the unifying effect. Carriol, who has achieved her goal, is left to reckon with the cost of turning a man into an instrument.

Themes
McCullough uses the apparatus of futuristic politics and media to stage questions about leadership, manipulation, and the hunger for meaning in hard times. The book explores how genuine compassion can be harnessed, and distorted, by systems that privilege outcomes over individuals. It interrogates the ethics of a salvation engineered from above, the corrosive effect of celebrity on sincerity, and the uneasy border between faith and propaganda. The result is both a cautionary tale about manufacturing a messiah and a somber acknowledgment that creeds often gain power through sacrifice, leaving ambiguous whether the cure redeemed the sickness or merely masked it.