New World

I'm sitting in American Church History class, and I just made a startling (but probably not new) discovery. The whole idea of the land Columbus discovered being known as the New World was a secular millennial hope. After the Catholics and Protestants got tired of butchering each other, thinkers realized that revelation couldn't be the authority and discovered reason as the universal authority. It would be dumb to trust a new heavens and new earth idea coming from the Bible. With the new found goodness of man and optimism from reason, they didn't need the Bible for a redeemed earth. Let's leave the Old World and set up a New World! Everybody had some form of millennialism, some based on the Bible, others on reason.