The book, by political writer John Bicknell, is published by Chicago Review Press. Not surprisingly, the Mormon leader/prophet/politician Joseph Smith’s run for the presidency is recounted by Bicknell. Smith died in June, long before James K. Polk was elected president.
Another preacher in 1844, William Miller, (seen above) thought that most of the world would shut down on March 21 of that year. While Miller is little more than an obscure footnote today, he nevertheless managed to convince at least 25,000 hard-core believers, known as “Millerites” (they preferred the term Adventists), that the world would end, and had perhaps 20 times as many sympathizers.
Miller was born in rural New York in 1782. In many ways, he followed the religious trends of his generation, Bicknell recounts.
Born a Baptist, early in his adulthood he became a deist, divorced from the emotionalism of evangelical behavior. Then, after witnessing violence and bloodshed in the War of 1812, the husband and father made a significant switch, becoming a convert of the Second Great Awakening, a movement that Bicknell explains was directly opposed to deism.
Bicknell accurately describes the temperament in early America that inspired men such as Miller, Smith and Alexander Campbell. He writes: “Religious life and religious practice had become democratized by state disestablishment -- the states’ withdrawing of government support for churches -- and new practitioners were flooding into the market, hawking new wares, selling a new brand of Christianity to a new nation. It was a very American idea; the individual, freed from the constraints of hierarchical tyranny, would discover and interpret the Word for himself.”
Despite Miller’s ultimate poor prediction, he immersed himself into Biblical study. Strictly conventional on many aspects, Miller was obsessed with finding the date of Christ’s second coming in Biblical passages, particularly the Book of Daniel, recounts Bicknell.
Miller believed that Daniel 8:14, which includes, “... Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed,” as meaning years. By factoring in some other considerations, he deduced that 2,300 years after 457 BC -- the Babylonian captivity -- meant that Christ would come to the earth in 1844. Although he initially kept his beliefs secret, eventually Miller began preaching his second-coming theory.
The first half of the 19th century was a time when disasters, economic or mechanical, were defined as godly warnings by many. Miller’s public profile prospered by the long economic distress which began in 1837 and, as Bicknell recounts in detail, a military arms explosion in February aboard the U.S. Princeton that killed several, including Secretary of State Abel Upshur.
By the time of the explosion, Miller was preaching across most of the civilized nation, including Boston, “where crowds were so thick that people stood for hours to hear him speak, and ’multitudes’ were turned away,” to Washington D.C.’s Apollo Hall, within shouting distance of the White House.
As Bicknell notes, much of the credit for Miller’s success -- besides his stamina -- was the entry into his inner circle of a convert named Joshua Himes, an abolitionist who was particularly skilled at public relations. Himes understood and exploited the power of the moving press, via newspapers and pamphlets, to move Miller’s messages into scores of thousands and more. As Bicknell writes, Himes started “the movement’s first newspaper, Signs of the Times, in 1840 ... and he was the driving force behind a vast array of tracts, pamphlets and books.”
Despite his popularity, Miller was mostly derided by prominent contemporaries. The Mormon leader Smith mentions him by name in a March 10 sermon, excerpted by Bicknell, when he told listeners “I take the responsibility upon myself to prophesy in the name of the Lord, that Christ will not come this year as Miller has prophesied.” Ironically, in the same discourse, Smith seems to indicate that Christ would come 40 years later.
A week before the date predicted, Miller retired to his village home by the New York, Vermont border to await Christ’s return. Many of his national followers, Bicknell writes, “quit their jobs or closed their businesses in anticipation of the end. Others gave away their earthly possessions.” Bicknell adds that one boy, 12, refused to chop wood, telling his father that winter would not arrive.
When Christ failed to appear, Miller’s credibility suffered generally the same fate as the late Harold Camping’s suffered when his claim in 2011 that Christ would return failed to occur. Most of his followers gradually deserted him and those who never believed him enjoyed a good post-humiliation chuckle at his expense.
As Bicknell notes, Miller had always given himself a little bit of leeway in his prediction and he never stopped believing that the return of Christ was coming at any time. He died in Hampton, N.Y., in 1849 at age 67. He does have a legacy. The church he inspired, Advent Christian, has 61,000 members today and the church owns his New York home, and maintains it as an historical site. His papers were donated to Aurora University.
-- Doug Gibson
Why are so many gullible to delusions?
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