When the Hereafter Was Now

It is easy to give offense when talking about religion, which is one of the reasons it’s so inviting for historians, especially in a secular culture, to avoid the subject. The trouble is that ignoring religious motivations in United States history leaves gaping holes in the overall national story, which is, in large part driven, by what various Americans at various times thought that God expected of them. With that in mind, I grasp the nettle and plunge on to speak of Heaven’s Gate, 1997, and of William Miller, 1782–1849.

Heaven’s Gate was the name of the religious group of 39 people of whose members committed suicide by swallowing barbiturates in Southern California last March. They apparently believed that they would resume their existence aboard a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. Another member killed himself several weeks later, after having spoken to his daughter of “dropping his shell” and anticipating a “future incarnation … to strengthen my connection with the Next Level Above Human.”

I was struck not only by the sadness of this story, but by its curious mingling of space-age themes with a concept traditional to many faiths—namely, that there is a better existence to come after physical death. That’s what such familiar terms as paradise, resurrection , and reincarnation imply. Heavens Gate was frighteningly different, of course, in urging its trusting followers to anticipate the transition by destroying their mortal “shells.”

But after shock and anger, what came to my mind was my recollection that, in 1844, hundreds of thousands of Americans of sound mind and regular habits were persuaded by an elderly preacher named William Miller that the world as they knew it was going to “end” on a precise and foreseeable date. Certainly, they were not urged to take their lives in anticipation. But they did try to prepare themselves for a different “afterlife.” How they did so, what their neighbors thought, and what happened afterward add up to a story that tells a good deal about the American scene of their day.

The foundation stone of the Millerite movement was the Book of Revelation, which predicted two cosmic future events: the millennium and the Second Coming (or Advent) of Christ. Satan would be shut away for a thousand years; Christ would reign with those who had been martyred for His sake; the dead would be resurrected and final judgment rendered on the wicked. There would be neither sin nor suffering: “no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” in “a new heaven and a new Earth.”

Concepts like these were in full harmony with a thought system common to millions of members of popular Protestant churches in the United States of the 1840s. It ran this way: Thanks to Jesus, salvation was available to all human beings tainted with Adam’s sin of disobedience, if they sought it in genuine prayer. Those who were “saved” experienced a “new birth,” a conversion from nominal to genuine Christianity by a painful (but not necessarily lengthy) process of repentance culminating in an ecstatic certainty of spending eternity in heaven. While waiting here below, converts would devote their lives to good works, which would include spreading the happy news of salvation to others. It was all clearly set forth in the Bible, which anyone possessing simple English literacy could understand. The whole scheme (including the Second Coming) blended easily with well-known individualistic, democratic, self-improving—and impatient!—impulses of the young nation.

Miller was such a born-again Christian. As a New York State farm boy, he had become a deist, doubting all creeds. But, after experiencing human depravity in the War of 1812, he returned to his Baptist roots and began to search Scripture diligently for answers to scoffers such as he himself had been. Miller came to believe that the Bible was true and self-explanatory. Its narratives described verifiable historical happenings, and its prophecies predicted concrete, real-time events to come. By 1818, he was convinced that “the second coming of Jesus Christ was near, even at the door…, and, by 1823, he concluded that it would occur “within 21 years—on or before 1843."

He was in no great hurry to sound the alarm. He made no public statement until 1831, when he was 49 years old, and did not publish his sermons and lectures until 1836. He was apparently a natural movement leader, convincing and likable, who drew steadily increasing crowds in small towns already afire with revivals. In 1839, he met Joshua V. Himes, a younger Christian activist with a modern gift for publicity, and they made a dynamic team. Himes, persuaded of the truth of Millerism, turned it within three years from a rural and localized phenomenon into a nationally visible crusade. He published excitingly named newspapers (Signs of the Times, The Midnight Cry), distributed books and pamphlets by the hundreds of thousands, and organized huge tent meetings where multitudes heard that the end was near. Though Miller at first resisted a precise date, he did not swerve from “the doctrine of Christ’s personal descent to this earth, to destroy the wicked, and glorify the righteous” sometime around 1843.

As that year opened, so did serious rifts between Miller and other clergymen who had previously approved of the contribution that he made to mass conversions by preaching that the time for repentance was short. It was one thing to believe in Christ's return to earth in an unspecified near future, but another to see Him descending through the clouds to bring an end to history in a matter of an exact few months or weeks. In addition, a majority of millennialist preachers believed that the Advent and Judgment would take place “postmillennially”—that is, after the thousand-year era of sinless perfection. Therefore they concluded that it was Christian duty to hasten that era’s appearance, to prepare the house for the master’s arrival, so to speak, by full-speed missionary and reform activity. The “heathen” must be brought into the fold, and the world purged of war, slavery, ignorance, drunkenness, and other sins. Visible Earthly improvements in communication would only make the job easier. Himes, originally a pacifist, an abolitionist, and a temperance advocate, saw God’s handiwork in an era “heaving and teeming with improvements, inventions, and innovations.” In short, religion, reform, and progress were marching in step.

But the doctrine of “premillennial” imminent return appeared to threaten reform activity by encouraging passive waiting for God Himself to clean house. William Lloyd Garrison, for one, complained that “multitudes … formerly engaged in the various moral enterprises of the age have lost all interest … and … talk of nothing else but the burning up of the world.” Plenty of reform-minded preachers agreed with that criticism, and Millerism was stridently condemned and ridiculed by large elements of both the religious and secular press. As a result, it is hard to know what really happened in Millerite ranks.

But, as the days of 1843 ticked off without the world ending, zealous followers pressed Miller to refine and specify. He recalculated, moved the expected date forward a few times, and finally, injudiciously, joined Himes in endorsing—or at least not challenging—the specific prediction of one Millerite lecturer that Christ would return exactly on the tenth day of the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar, the Day of Atonement, October 21–22, 1844. This was the true “midnight cry” that the Advent was immediately at hand. Himes shut down his newspaper The Advent Herald; another Millerite spokesman later testified that despite advice to neglect “none of the duties of this life,” certain “farmers left their farms, with their crops standing” and “mechanics their shops.” One adherent wrote a memorandum years afterward, describing how he locked his house, gave the key to a neighbor, and walked three miles to join fellow faithful in a vigil before the mighty climax. Countless other thousands spent their presumed last mortal night in wakeful prayer, expecting each second some indescribable miraculous manifestation and feeling their hearts sink as each hour passed in dreary ordinariness.

The Lord’s nonappearance on this occasion (Adventist historians call it the Great Disappointment) crushed further talk of times and dates close at hand. Miller sadly admitted that he must have made an error in his computations, though his faith in the ultimate fulfillment of the prophecies remained unshaken till his death in 1849. Himes and other Millerite spokesmen eventually returned to their various denominations, but not before several Adventist church bodies had been formed, some of which survive to this day. Most numerous and best known are the Seventh-day Adventists. The smaller Advent Christian Church operates Aurora University in Illinois, which owns important research collections that have helped trained Adventist scholars to clarify the story.

It is a very significant story. The collapse of Millerism was a short-run victory for the “postmillennialist” churches that spoke for reform in the here and now. But as twentieth-century reform movements focused increasingly on questions of social justice and economic change, their leadership and messages became secularized. Hence a split occurred between liberal “social gospel” clergy who joined in such protests and messengers of “old-time” sin-conscious, Bible-fixated religion—a category including today’s “Christian Right.” So, we feel the political results of long-past religious disagreements even now.