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How An Obscure Doomsday

1.97K

23
Prophecy Turned Into One of the
World’s Largest Religions
There are thousands of bad prophecies but this one succeeded where
others failed

Grant Piper Follow

Mar 7 · 6 min read

A contemporary pamphlet detailing the Millerite prophecy. (Public domain)

illiam Miller was not like other preachers. He served in the War of
1812 as a captain and saw combat. Rockets, mortars, and bullets
rained around him killing people here, wounding them there but
Miller exited the war without so much as a scratch.

When he returned home to Vermont after the war, his father and sister both
passed in rapid succession. This troubled Miller greatly. The death that he
had seen in the war had followed him home and it raised many questions
that he did not have the answers to.

In the mind of Miller, then a deist, death could only hold two options for
human beings. Either death was the ultimate end, a swift trip into oblivion,
or it had to lead to some sort of divine reckoning. At the time, both options
seemed frightful and neither very fulfilling.

In order to get to the root of the problem, Miller decided that he was going
to study the Bible. But he was not simply going to read the Good Book, he
was going to comb through it, verse by painstaking verse, until he felt
comfortable with what the words said.

He began with Genesis 1:1 and studied each verse in-depth, hanging on
words, dissecting meanings the best he could, and it was said he did not
move on from a verse until he was absolutely certain that he had divined
the true meaning of the text.

Miller embarked on his studies in 1815 and did not fully conclude them
until 1823. By the time he was done he thought he had discovered
something quite remarkable.

A prophecy discerned

A portrait of William Miller. (Public domain)

One of the problems with conspiracy theories is most people seem to

stumble upon them alone. They find secret knowledge when studying by
themselves. They see patterns where no one else can see them because no
one else was looking. Studying alone creates a vacuum that allows odd Top highlight

ideas to take root and grow without any outside cultivating presence.

By the time a person is confident enough in what they have discovered, by

their lonesome, they are so sure of themselves that no one else can
persuade them otherwise. The information becomes a one-way street
blowing outwards without letting any countervailing information to come
in.

This is exactly what happened to William Miller in 1820.

During his lengthy study of the Bible, Miller believed that he had solved the
puzzle of a two thousand old prophecy found in the Book of Daniel.

“And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall
the sanctuary be cleansed.” — Daniel 8:14, KJV

Out of all of the verses in the Bible, despite claiming to have studied each
individual verse in great detail, this is the one that stood out to William
Miller. He had found an answer that no one else had.

But he couldn’t be sure, at least, not at first. He continued to study the

prophecy, in secret, for many years. He did calculation after calculation,
running the numbers over and over again. There had to be something to
this 2,300-day prophecy. And eventually there was.

The world was going to end in 1843.

From William Miller to Millerites

William Miller became confident enough in his message to begin preaching
in 1831. He began by posting op-eds in the local newspapers and putting
out pamphlets laying out his beliefs. He did not find much early success but
with every good end-of-world prophecy, he found some early converts that
were determined to stick it out through the end.

Jesus Christ was going to return, sometime in 1843, and begin to purify the
sanctuary. The Second Coming was upon them.

The problem was, in 1831, 1843 seemed so far away. But as the date began
to get nearer, Miller began to attract more interest from curious people as
well as critics.

At some point along the way, Miller narrowed down his calculations to an
exact date March 21st, 1843.

William Miller’s rise corresponded with an overall religious revival that

began sweeping the United States in the first half of the 19th century. There
were a lot of preachers saying a lot of things but now Americans seemed
keen on listening.

In 1840 Miller was put in touch with a publisher in Boston who, like many,
was curious about Miller’s prophecies. He began to publish and mass
distribute Miller’s teachings to his many outlets. This is when Millerism
began to really take flight.

Miller updated his prophecy to say that Christ could return at any time from
March 21st, 1843 to March 21st, 1844.

By 1842 Miller and his followers were using the power of the press to target
individual groups. They wrote pamphlets for women. They posted slanted
op-eds in community newspapers. And it worked. Millerism began to grow
at a frenetic pace.

The Great Disappointment

A caricature depicting a doomsday Millerite. (Library of Congress / Public domain)

March 21st, 1843 came and went like any other day. 1843 ended like any
other year. Soon it became clear that if William Miller was going to be
correct, Jesus must appear on March 21st, 1844.

March 21st, 1844 also came and went. No Jesus. No Second Coming.

So they updated their dates, reworked the calendar.

The next date they settled on was April 18th, 1844. But Christ also failed to
appear on that day either.

Then, the final calculation produced a new day. This one was going to be
the day — October 22nd,1844.

But Christ did not appear then either.

October 22nd became known as the Great Disappointment. To his credit,

William Miller hung up his hat, admitted he had been terribly wrong, and
stepped away from the movement that bore his name.

And this is where the doomsday prophecy is supposed to end. Like every
one of the various doomsday cults and prophets, this one ended with a
thud. After you have run the gamut of dates, the followers are supposed to
swallow their pride and return to normal life. While many Millerites did do
that, many others did not.

Seventh-Day Adventists

Adventist membership as a fraction of the world’s population. (DEGA8 / CC BY-SA 4.0)

The splinter group of Millerites that did not give up their faith when their
prophet and prophecy both vanished into the night became the Seventh-
Day Adventists. The Millerites held conferences following the Great
Disappointment and began to craft a doctrine of their own. In 1863 the
official Seventh-Day Adventist Church was founded.

Today it is a thriving church with over 20,000,000 adherents and runs one
of the nation’s largest healthcare systems.

One of the most interesting tenets of the Seventh-Day Adventist faith is the
doctrine of Investigative Judgement which states that divine judgment has
been ongoing, as a process, since 1844.

William Miller was not wrong after all, he had just predicted a heavenly
event rather than an Earthly event.

It is the largest reminder that this denomination is a direct decedent of

Miller himself.

Against all odds, despite the fact that the founding prophecy and prophet
both gave up the ghost, the Millerite movement managed to survive,
reorganize, and, today, thrive, based on an erroneous end-of-days
prophecy.

This is by no means the first or last group that declared that the end was
nigh but very few of them hang on, well past the purported date, to become
an established religious force in their own right. (The Anabaptists were
another but their numbers are far smaller than that of Adventists today.)

The survival of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church speaks to Miller’s overall

credibility, the strength of the faith of his followers as well as the ability for
bad information to morph into something much greater than itself. It is
fascinating to look at the perseverance and the persistence of prophetic
words and the innate human desire to be right when everyone else is
wrong.

As for William Miller, he died in 1849 after completely abdicating his role as
a prophet to the people.

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WRITTEN BY

Grant Piper Follow

Hobbyist historian | Political scientist | Story teller | Lover of

animals | Freelancer | Always open for work ->
grantpiperwriting@outlook.com

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