how 'the great disappointment' caused an explosion of unorthodox religion
This little-known event led to the formation of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh-Day Adventists, among others
It’s popular knowledge that something divides Christianity-at-large from groups such as the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Many people, Christian or not, don’t know the particularities of these distinctions, they simply know they’re there. When it comes to another group, the Seventh-Day Adventists, there seems to be no real consensus as to whether they can be “formally” considered part of “orthodox” Christianity, but there is little alarm surrounding conversations about this group. What unites these groups, among others, is that they are distinctly American expressions of religion emerging around the same time, around the same part of the country. And none of them would be possible without a little-known event called “The Great Disappointment”, and the forgotten figure, and movement who caused it. This article will explore the easy-to-dismiss movement of Millerites, where they came from, why they thought the world was ending, and why they still influence religious expressions today.
It can be easy to forget that the “freedom of religion” in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution doesn’t just allow various religious groups to co-exist in America, but also legally allows for people to form new religious groups without (theoretically) any state censorship to impede their growth. Although humans have always had the tendency to frequently form new religious groups, this new state-granted freedom combined with a large population of protestant Christians (who are known for their propensity to split up) created a scenario in which religion would explode in ways utterly unique to American history. The First Great Awakening “occurred” before the constitution was penned (1730s to 40s) and set the tone for American religious expression to come. In short, there is a continuous push for “revival” and “restoration”, to use a new nation as a clean slate, to create a spiritual fervor and excitement in the hopes that “true” religion can be recaptured. The demand for a more “true” expression of the religion justifies split after split, as religious fervor spread through the colonies.
Although this seemingly endless splintering between groups and pushes for revival never stopped, the Second Great Awakening marks another period of a particular influx of these pushes in new religious directions. Although this moment was not limited to one place, it was largely focused in Western New York, so much so that this region became known as the Burned-over district. While this period also marked a significant period for the development of “orthodox” protestant traditions in America such as Congregationalists, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Baptists, both within and outside of the Burned-over district, I’m mainly going to focus on the explosion of utterly unique and typically un-orthodox religious expressions emerging from this particular spot. The area was rapidly developing after the construction of the Eerie Canal. A rapid increase in population among developing towns and cities combined a shortage of trained priests meant that communities of nonconformists could easily spring up. Despite the growing number of distinctions between different groups, one movement would spring up, seemingly out of nowhere, unite Christians of many different stripes, before breaking them apart and creating all-new types of divisions.
The Farmer Who Thought the World Was Ending
Have you ever heard of William Miller, or the Millerite movement? The man who heralded a movement of believers who thought Christ would return somewhere in 1843 or 1844? I would be surprised if you had. In his day, he would have been considered one of the most influential people alive, but today he is merely mentioned in passing as a failed prophet. Discussions of him in the secular realm tend to limit his place to the margins of American history or as a laughing stock, even demonstrating the frivolity of religion itself. But within organizations such as the JW (Jehovah’s Witnesses) and the SDA (Seventh Day Adventists) Miller is still thought of as a type of prophet. Or, more accurately, his prediction for the return of Christ is still seen as correct.
Yet, until the publishing of God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World by Rowe D.L. in 2008, Miller had not received the biographical treatment other major figures of the time had. That also happens to be the source for almost all the information in this article.
So, what’s the big deal? Plenty of people have predicted the end of the world. Yet few movements have had such inter-denominational reach and such a long-lasting impact. And it all started with a farmer who did some simplistic doomsday calculations.
Miller was a farmer, who had very little formal education past age 18. He spent his childhood in upstate New York before moving to Virginia, marrying, and becoming a farmer. Although he was raised Baptist, he rejected his faith when in Virginia. He met a “society of a superior class of men”, became a Freemason and a Deist.
Ironically, the big motivating factor for him rejecting a theistic perspective was a doubt in the book from which he would later draw his doomsday prophesies:
‘While I was a deist, I believed in a God, but I could not, as I thought, believe the Bible was the word of God.’ With its ‘many contradictions and inconsistencies,’ the Bible seemed to be a ‘work of designing men, whose object was to enslave the mind of man; operate on their hopes and fears, with a view to aggrandize themselves […] Would a loving God ‘give us the Scriptures to teach us the way of eternal life, and at the same time clothe them in a mantle of mysticism, so that no man could understand them! Reveal his will, which we cannot understand, and then punish us for disobedience! How can such a being be called either wise or Good?’ (Rowe 41)
If you ask me, this is quite a reasonable argument for a type of scriptural skepticism, especially considering the type of “fiery” Baptist theology he was raised with. But how did he go from this logical rejection to something as drastic as an exact prediction of the apocalypse?
In the early 1810s, Miller experienced many deaths. Within eighteen months, many of his family members, including two siblings and his father, had all died from typhus. While he was in a state of mourning, one of Miller’s Deist, rationalist friends, Henry Spencer, died from camp fever. The members of his deist circle of friends told him that human life is annihilated after death. This disturbed Miller, and he wrote a letter to his wife saying:
No! rather let me cling to that hope which warrants a never-ending existence; a future spring, where troubles shall cease, and tears find no conveyance; where never-ending spring shall flourish and love pure as the driven snow rests in every breast. (Rowe 56)
So, the driving force behind his theism would become the comfort he found in the doctrine of an afterlife. At this realization, he was tarnished with guilt from ridiculing the religion of his family. But his re-conversion was not instant. Nonetheless, Miller began inching back to a Baptist faith, and he was not alone. In the words of D.L. Rowe, “The intellectualism of the 18th-century classicism was slowly giving way to the sentimentality of 19th-century romanticism, the slow difficult evolution producing confusion and profound effects for Protestantism in general and evangelicalism in particular”. The hipness of rationalism among the country’s founders and intelligentsia was becoming increasingly overshadowed by a “post-revolutionary generation which was a synthesis of of republican ideology, commonsense ethical reason and Christian theology” (Noll 251). Congregationalists and Presbyterian numbers were dwindling, while Methodist and Baptist numbers began steadily rising. What these evangelical expressions of Christianity were offering was an opportunity for “Lockean individualism” within the religious sphere, in which you have “commerce of [your] own soul” (214). The emphasis on a born-again salvation experience and a distinctly individual expression devotion to God fit the newly developing culture of America like a glove. Evangelical expressions also place emphasis on a belief in the Bible as a more important authority than all others, including tradition. This particular commitment was an especially shocking pivot from Miller’s former Deist perspective.
Miller big born-again moment after being asked to read a sermon for his local congregation:
“Suddenly the character of a Savior was vividly impressed upon my mind. It seemed that there might be a Being so good and compassionate as to Himself atone for our transgressions, and thereby save us from suffering the penalty of sin. I immediately felt how lovely such a Being must be; and imagined that I could cast myself into the arms of, and trust in the mercy of, such a One.”
His Deist friends were skeptical of his spiritual awakening between 1800 and 1816. They asked him to defend and provide evidence for his beliefs. This started Miller’s deep-dive into the Bible. Without a formal education on the subject, and a determination to prove his perspective correct, he dove into scripture. He began with the assumption that scripture was consistent and that symbolic imagery and prophesies should therefore be interpretable based on corresponding verses. He insisted that no special knowledge or training be required for understanding. And from two years of studying scripture, he “discovered” a method of interpreting prophecies regarding Christ’s second coming: the-day-for-a-year principle.
The prophecy in question comes from Daniel 8:14: "Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed”. Using other verses to interpret the meaning of this one, he drew upon Numbers 14:34: “even forty days, each day for a year” and Ezekiel 4:6: “I have appointed thee each a day for a year”. Combining the meaning of these verses together (and stripping them of their original context) gave him the idea that he might be able to calculate the exact year Jesus would return. What he would have thought of Matthew 25:13 ("Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh”) is not known to me, but clearly it did not deter him.
The simplest conclusion, in my opinion, would be to assume that 2,300 days after Jesus’ resurrection, he would return. But Miller began his chronology in 457 B.C. Why? Because that was the year that Artaxerxes the First, the fifth king of the Achaemenid Empire, decreed the rebuilding of Jerusalem. In Miller’s chronology, this was the “first” empire and twenty three hundred years would elapse between the rise of the first empire and the fall of the fourth. After setting his starting date, he calculated the end of the world: it would happen in 1843.
Miller performed this calculation in 1818. And even though that left him with only a few decades to warn the world, he kept his prophecy secret. Despite how strange and illogical his doomsday calculations may seem, he appears to have been a very careful person. He didn’t immediately start telling everyone, because he wanted to be absolutely certain. If what he had stumbled upon was true, sharing the news with other may completely disrupt his everyday existence. And, of course, it did.
Miller cautiously told his families of his discovery and quietly wrote out a document with all his evidence. But it was only after 14 years of reluctance to speak out about his “findings”, he finally began publicly preaching on the subject. He published a series of articles in a local Baptist newspaper, from these a movement began to form. He received numerous invitations to provide sermons/lectures which would attempt to fit all of human history into his doomsday timeline. Although Miller himself seemed not entirely certain of his convictions and “private doubts”, the growing movement “pulled him forward” (Rowe 103). His definitive and most widely-distributed work was written after he couldn’t keep up with all the requests. It was called Evidence From Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ, About the Year 1843; Exhibited in a Course of Lectures.
Interestingly Miller did not initially have any license to preach. Which is apparently something you needed. Some Baptist Organizations were warning their followers to not engage with a man who has not been properly “recommended”. But in 1831, Baptists from Hampton, New York awarded him a license which he carried around with him everywhere. Now he was a Reverend, despite the fact that this, in fact, bothered him, and he said in a letter that he was a “sinful mortal” for whom the title Rev. did not apply (Rowe 112). Looking at Miller’s private letters gives us a shift in perspective on the man, as he seemed to be a reluctant leader who had begun something he had no way of stopping, rather than a crazed cult leader (we’ll get to those).
Suffice to say, Miller and his movement exploded in the early 1840s in anticipation of the fateful year of 1843. It became known as Millerism. There was an explosion of papers on the subject all across the country, although the fervor was especially intense in the Northeast. One of the key figures who contributed to the popularity of the movement was Joshua V. Himes, who also helped create the nifty, clear, concise, not-at-all-confusing poster you may observe below ↓
Himes started two seperate Millerite newspapaers, Sings of the Times and Midnight Cry. These titles also double as great band names and, as far as I know, they are up for grabs. Miller avoided setting a certain date, with his signature blend of cautiousness and cosmic certainty. However, dates began to be suggested, and Miller was willing to say that it would likely transpire a year with March 21st 1843 . The date got pushed back, adjusting from the Gregorian to the Karaite calendar, to April 18th. The fate was pushed back a final time to Yom Kippur of the following year: October 22, 1844.
Not So Disappointing After All?
Followers sold their houses, quit their jobs and gathered into masses in eager anticipation of Christ's return. At this point, the movement had ballooned into a nationwide hysteria. Newspapers were widely distributed and movement was no longer restricted to Baptists, but had become a unifying force between denominations like protestants had never seen before. The end seemed so imminent that such labels as “Baptist”, “Presbyterian” or “Evangelical” seemed irrelevant: you either believed Miller or you didn’t. And at this point, it would’ve been difficult to have not heard about his predictions.
The day came and is known today as “The Great Disappointment”. So, you’d expect the movement to have failed, so it fizzled out, never to be heard from again. But that’s not exactly what happened. “Millerism” was over, but other movements had just begun, namely Adventism.
In reaction to the disappointment, followers had various reactions. And Christians who had effectively stripped themselves of their previous denominational identities were ready to find a new home. Those who saw the date as incorrect but held on to the belief that the prophecy (including William Miller himself) was valid held the “Albany Conference” in 1845. The conference evaluated Miller’s predictions, adjusting their predictions. This group went on to form the Adventist Christian Church (not to be confused with the SDA), which is still in existence today, with 61k members.
Another group transformed the understanding of what the date indicated. The “advent” had not yet come, but judgement had, in the form of the “investigative judgement”. A farmer and believer in Millerism, Hiram Edson, claimed that the day of October 22nd, 1844 actually indicated the moment when Jesus entered the heavenly sanctuary to begin his judgement on all humankind. The idea occurred to Edson the morning after The Great Disappointment, where he claimed to have received a vision which explained what had happened:
Heaven seemed opened to my view, and I saw distinctly and clearly that instead of our High Priest coming out of the Most Holy of the heavenly sanctuary to come to this earth on the tenth day of the seventh month, at the end of the 2300 days, He for the first time entered on that day the second apartment of that sanctuary; and that He had a work to perform in the Most Holy Place before coming to the earth.
Fifty people believed him, leading to one of the founding beliefs of the Seventh Day Adventists. Of the Ellen G. White, a founder of the SDA, had attended Miller’s lectures and experienced visions shortly after the Great Disappointment. By 1858, she began expounding her views in a book called The Great Controversy, which would eventually become SDA doctrine. This is still considered one of the “pillars” of SDA faith. SDA is one of the most rapidly expanding faiths in the world, with 22 million members.
One of the other figures who saw the prophecy as valid, yet miscalculated, came to prominence decades later. He was Charles Taze Russel. Miller’s teachings were incorporated into one of Russel’s earliest texts, in 1877: Three Worlds, and the Harvest of This World which utilized the day-for-a-year method and claimed that Christ’s return began in 1874. This would develop eventually into the teaching of Christ’s “invisible return” which JWs believe has already occurred. Not long after this book was written, Russel founded the Bible Students Movement, a movement which was originally a deceptively non-denominational movement, but which rapidly developed into what is known today as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which number 8.5 million actively participating adherents (this requires the evangelizing work the JWs are famous for), but there is also a larger estimate based on those who who attend the largest JW gathering every year: the 19.7 million that attend the annual “Memorial of Christ's death”.
There are other surprising connections too. Many of the “disappointing” became Quakers. Even the idiosyncratic faith of Baháʼí think of Miller as a legitimate prophet and make mention of him in their literature. While it would be a mistake to consider Joseph Smith as directly tied to Millerism, as he directly denounced Miller’s predictions and supplemented them with his own for the year 1890, it is also important to acknowledge that Smith directly acknowledged and competed with the Millerites, and the Mormons likely gained plenty of “Disappointed” followers after 1844. It’s also interesting to acknowledge that that fateful year was the same year Smith was killed after fleeing Western New York to Missouri. The Mormons moved then went to Utah (this event is now known as “Pioneer Day”, which happened yesterday, July 24th). So the explosion in adherents in Mormonism is not due to but somewhat in parallel with these other movements.
The Unorthodox Awakening
But what do all these waves of unorthodox (to varying degrees) forms of quasi-Christianity have in common? Well, let’s put a few things into context. Much of it can be seen as a reaction against the deist rationalism and optimism of the new-founded American liberalism, Free-Masonry, and Credal religion. The second great awakening shifted the function of church services in a unique direction. You went to church not to learn or take part in ritual, but to be filled with ecstatic emotions. Within more orthodox movements this became the services function, combine this with insistence on individual interpretation of the (protestant) Bible, a distrust of church, a sometimes flirtatious, sometimes adversarial relationship with spiritualism (which was developing at the same time), and a dismissal of the Creeds, and you get the religious-cultural milieu Miller was bathing in. Despite the fact that Miller remained rather orthodox in his beliefs aside from his precise eschatological predictions (and, admittedly, that’s a big one) the other movements which orbited around him started flirting with various forms of non-Trinitarianism. Once you dismantle the Trinitarian beliefs, it seems as if, to quote Yeats, “the center cannot hold” and “things fall apart”. These groups start to engage with unorthodox beliefs which result from unique readings of scripture, including things like conditional immortality and shut-door theology.
Keep in mind that these were fire-and-brimstone sermons of a new sort. We were no longer in the world of pietistic pilgrims who read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” while they eat oats for dinner, this is a world of many competing religious voices who are trying to sway you with how radically “true” they are. And two tools to help speed along the process of people seeing things as “true” are fear and rationalism. Don’t think that because I said that these movements were reacting against deist rationalism that they were opposed to propounding their theories as rationalistic, no, they simply insist on an alternate “type” of rationalism. One which seeks to reconcile all of science, history, and the Bible into a definitive worldview.
The other great tool was fear, and I need not tell you how the Millerites must have used fear to their advantage. But once the Disappointment happened, there needed to be new “threats”. For JWs this became the rest of Christendom, seeing themselves as the only true, chosen believers, a belief which directly ties into the effects of Millerism. After having their own disappointing prediction for 1914, JWs insisted that Jesus has returned invisibly and chose the organization of the JWs as the “faithful slave” to carry out his teaching. For the SDA, it became the threat of the Government removing the rights to their Sabbatarian worship. You may not have heard of this before but there have been scares among the SDA that the government will enforce worship on Sunday, nicknamed “Sunday Laws”. Articles abound, such as “How to Survive the Coming Sunday-Law Crisis”. And, due to their Adventist persuasion, the belief that Christ’s return is immanent is important to the SDA faith.
So, this leaves us with the picture of a strange event which accidentally helped determine the direction of much of religious activity in America for the last few centuries. Another things these groups tend to have in common is a distrust in religious organizations, therefore they start a more “informal” grouping of believers surrounding magazine publications, such as The Watchtower magazine. But as these groups develop and gain more authority, their beliefs often get more restrictive and less permissive of alternate perspectives. And while a group like the JWs is largely considered a cult which uses inhumane forms of control, a group like the SDA seems to not use such means of control, but while presenting their beliefs externally as something which may differ from what is actually taught internally. Needless to say Miller’s legacy is complex and the similarities/common ancestor between these various groups shouldn’t be under-emphasized, as they seem to have been.
But what of Miller himself? Did he still believe in his own prophecy? He insisted that Christ’s return was immanent, but admitted he must have miscalculated. Despite the power he wielded over a whole swath of American followers, it should not be seen as insignificant that he decided to “retire” from his position rather than create some type of cult-ish group of his own. In my opinion, it seems as if he reluctantly thought what he had found was true and felt the need to share it for the safety of others, no matter how ridiculous this belief may seem to us today. He found a unique way to bring Christians of all stripes together, and ultimately, he broke them apart, causing such a great fracturing in teaching between groups in a way humanity had never seen before.