A History of the End of the World (27 page)

The Puritan colonists, of course, were no democrats. Rather, they aspired to the kind of government that is deeply implicit in both Jewish and Christian scripture and especially the book of Revelation—“a
theocracy,
as near as might be, to that which was the glory of Israel,” according to John Mather.
²⁵
That’s why the earliest Puritan colonists in America, who aspired to create a religious utopia, felt thoroughly justified in denying citizenship to anyone who was
not
a member of a Puritan congregation, banishing religious dissenters, and even sending a few Quakers to the gallows.

Happily for the health of the American democracy, the Puritans were soon eclipsed by new arrivals to North America who did not feel obliged to impose their religious beliefs and practices on their fellow citizens. The Founding Fathers, for example, drew more inspiration from the proto-democracies of pagan Greece and Rome than they did from the divine monarchy that is celebrated so lushly in Revelation. Indeed, they were perfectly willing to tinker with Holy Writ itself. Thomas Jefferson, for example, disdained the book of Revelation and boldly took it upon himself to rewrite the Gospels to suit the spirit of a revolutionary and democratic age, keeping only what he regarded as “the very words only of Jesus” and cutting away “the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms as instruments of riches and power for themselves.”
²⁶

Still, the glowing theological core of Revelation—the sure promise that a new and better world was coming soon—appealed to even the most secular of the American patriots. Thus, for example, the apocalyptic vocabulary of abuse was put to good use by pamphleteers in the struggle for American independence. King George III was denounced as the Anti-christ, and the Stamp Act of 1765, which required the American colonists to affix a tax stamp bearing the king’s name and image to their papers and publications, was linked to the prophecy in Revelation that Satan would command all of mankind to display the mark of the Beast.

To be sure, many American patriots were also pious Christians, but when colonial preacher Samuel West sermonized on “that terrible denunciation of divine wrath against the worshippers of the beast and his image,” he was referring to the British lion rather than the satanic seven-headed dragon of Revelation.
²⁷
And the American version of the New Earth in 1776 was a place where every human being—or, at least, every adult white male—enjoyed the “inalienable rights” of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, free of the dictates of kings
or
priests.
Novus Ordo Seculorum
is the Latin motto that was adopted in 1782 and placed on the great seal of the United States: “A new order of the ages.” Even a red-hot revolutionary like Thomas Paine, who may have stripped his rhetoric of all religious trappings, expressed himself in terms of the millennial ideal that can be traced all the way back to the apocalyptic tradition of distant antiquity. And the destiny of American democracy, as Paine defined it, owes something to the words that were written down in John’s little book in biblical antiquity.

“We have it in our power,” he declared, “to begin the world over again.”
²⁸

Of course, the old ideas about the apocalyptic kingdom of Christ on earth were never wholly abandoned in colonial America. Now and then, the banked embers of religious true belief would burst into flame as preachers stoked the fears and longings of their congregations with the kind of hard-sell sermonizing that is the trademark of American evangelism. Again and again, the spirit of Christian revival attracted the crowds to church halls and tent meetings and whipped them into a spiritual frenzy—so often, in fact, that certain stretches of western New York State came to be called the Burned-Over District precisely because its populace was so susceptible to each new wave of religious enthusiasm.

The revival movement in America was “the forerunner of something vastly great,” according to Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the Puritan minister whose preaching sparked the so-called First Great Awakening in the mid–eighteenth century. Not incidentally, Edwards was the author of a vast commentary on Revelation titled
Notes on the Apocalypse.
²⁹
Starting with the prophecy in Revelation that the Antichrist will reign for 1,260 “days,” which he interpreted to mean “years,” Edwards decided that the reign of the arch-demon had begun in 606 and calculated that it would end sometime around 1866. And he saw the convulsions of the Great Awakening as “signs of the millennium lately begun in Northampton”—that is, the Massachusetts town where his own pulpit was located.
³⁰

Some of the more sober clergy, however, were skeptical of spontaneous mass conversions, and they fretted that the men and women who experienced such powerful revelations during the revival meetings of the Great Awakening “had fallen prey to dangerous enthusiasms and delusions.”
³¹
When another wave of revivalism erupted in the 1790s, the Second Great Awakening, the religious idealism of some Christians in America began to express itself in quite a different way. A new generation of Christians was inspired to agitate for the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women as a way of hastening the millennial kingdom. Here, too, were the first stirrings of a distinctively American version of the apocalyptic idea, a “high-octane blend of millennial fervor and patriotic enthusiasm,” according to American cultural historian Paul Boyer, that expressed itself in efforts to improve the quality of American democracy.
³²

Indeed, the gloom and doom of Revelation were far less compelling to the high-spirited and high-minded American nation builders than, say, the promise in Matthew that the kingdom of heaven was open to anyone who clothed the naked, fed the hungry, and sheltered the homeless. Thus, Christian piety was translated into what later came to be called the Social Gospel—that is, a call “to build on American soil a society worthy of the exalted vision of the new Jerusalem found in the book of Revelation,” including principled crusades for the abolition of slavery and alcohol, the reform of prisons, and the opening of shelters for the homeless and the hungry and asylums for the ailing—“the least of these my brethren,” as Jesus Christ puts it.
³³

“Christian ity is primarily concerned with this world,” explained one theologian, “and it is the mission of Christian ity to bring to pass here a kingdom of righ teous ness and to rescue from the evil one and redeem all our social relations.”
³⁴

Even those who still believed that the end is near began to subtly repurpose the text of Revelation in ways that meshed with sturdy and vigorous American values of Yankee ingenuity, material comfort, and personal self-improvement. Samuel Hopkins, the abolitionist pastor of a Congregational church in Rhode Island in the late eighteenth century, imagined the millennial kingdom as a place where “all utensils, clothing, buildings &c will be formed and made in a better manner and with much less labor,” thanks to improvements in “all useful branches of the arts and sciences that promote spiritual and bodily comforts in this life.” Only two or three hours of work each day will be required to earn a livelihood, he predicted, and leisure hours will be spent in “reading and conversation,” all of which would be conducted in a universal language that all of humankind will speak. All of these prophecies, Hopkins promised, would be fulfilled in not more than a couple of centuries.
³⁵

By the 1850s, the dividing line between faith in God and faith in progress was even murkier. A Methodist women’s magazine, for example, praised the invention of the telegraph as “the means of extending civilization, republicanism and Christian ity over the earth,” which amounted to a new and thoroughly modern definition of the kingdom of Christ on earth: “Then shall come to pass the millennium.”
³⁶
And the westward expansion of the United States—an enterprise that has been likened to a war of genocide against the people who were already here when the Puritans showed up—was seen as nothing less than a divine mandate.

“We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past,” writes John O’Sullivan in the 1839 article that inserted the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” into the American political vocabulary. “In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True.”
³⁷

A fault line runs between these two ways of understanding of the apocalyptic idea, one embraced by revivalists and the other embraced by reformers. On one side are the true believers who lift their eyes heavenward and search the skies for a sign of the Second Coming. On the other side are the more practical believers who hunker down to the task of building the millennial kingdom with their own hands right here on earth. A great many earnest men and women, of course, were capable of straddling the line and trying to do both at once. But, as we shall see, the landscape of American democracy would be shaken again and again by the tremors that result when these two tectonic plates collide.

The apocalyptic idea, as we have seen, is supposedly linked to oppression and persecution. The victims, we are told, console themselves with visions of revenge like the ones that are described so rousingly in the pages of Revelation. The fact is, however, that the text is capable of stirring up the passions of ordinary men and women who suffer from nothing more than overactive imaginations. Even in the New World, for example, and even in an era of peace and prosperity, the prospect of the second coming of Jesus Christ and the end of the world was a thrilling notion to otherwise comfortable and complacent Americans like an upstate New York farmer whose name was William Miller (1782–1849).

Miller was a Baptist from the Burned-Over District, wholly untutored in Bible scholarship and backsliding in the direction of deism. While serving as an officer in the War of 1812, however, he experienced a battlefield conversion, and when he returned to civilian life on the family farm, he devoted himself to the study of the Bible. His eye fell on a passage in the book of Daniel where the prophet is told in one of his visions that twenty-three hundred days shall pass, and “then the sanctuary shall be cleansed.”
³⁸
Like the author of Revelation and countless other biblical finger-counters, Miller was convinced that he had stumbled across a line of scripture that contained a coded reference to the end of the world, and he spent the next two years trying to crack the code.

Miller figured that the biblical reference to twenty-three hundred
days
actually means twenty-three hundred
years
—of course!—and he fixed the starting point for the countdown clock in 457
B.C.E.
, which he calculated as the year when the exiled Jews commenced the rebuilding of the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem. The “sanctuary,” he decided, was a code word for the world. Then, simply by doing the math, he calculated that the second coming of Jesus Christ and the beginning of the end of the world would take place “sometime around 1843.”
³⁹

“I believe,” wrote Miller, “that the Scriptures do reveal unto us in plain language that Jesus Christ will appear again on this earth, that he will come in the glory of God, in the clouds of heaven, with all his Saints and angels.”
⁴⁰

Miller “did not rant or rave,” preferring to patiently explain his approach to the scriptures “in a low-keyed schoolmasterish fashion.”
⁴¹
At first, he confided only in his friends and neighbors. By the 1830s, however, Father Miller, as he had come to be called, was attracting the attention of evangelical ministers and their small-town congregations around New England. Among his followers were some capable and imaginative men who understood how to put a message across to a mass audience, and they resolved to let the rest of America know what awaited them in the very near future.

Like the revivalists of the Great Awakening, the leaders of the so-called Millerites organized tent meetings that attracted earnest seekers by the thousands. And, like the televangelists of our own era, they made good use of the latest information technology of the mid–nineteenth century, the high-speed printing press, to produce the elaborately illustrated publications, tracts, and broadsheets—including periodicals titled
Midnight Cry
and
Signs of the Times—
that explained Miller’s complex theories of biblical prophecy in simple and colorful terms.

Some of Miller’s hard-charging handlers encouraged him to commit himself to a more specific prediction than “sometime around 1843.” By redoing his calculations according to what he called “ancient Jewish reckoning,” Miller came up with a somewhat narrower prophecy: Jesus Christ would return sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When the new deadline passed without any sign of the Second Coming, one of his enterprising followers claimed to have found a calculational error and fixed D-day for October 22, 1844. And then, at last, Father Miller and his followers put down their pencils and waited for the day that would surely bring the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies of Revelation about the second coming of Jesus Christ.

“If he does not come within 20 or 25 days,” Miller announced at the beginning of October 1844, “I shall feel twice the disappointment I did this spring.”
⁴²

As the glorious day approached, the Millerites prepared to greet Jesus Christ when he descended from heaven to the soil of the New World. They spurned the petty concerns of the old earth in preference to the new one that seemed so close at hand: “Some left their jobs, boarded up their businesses, confessed to unsolved crimes, sold their farms and everything they owned, and let their crops go unharvested,” writes American historian and theologian Timothy P. Weber, “so that they could spread the word of Christ’s coming and meet him with clean consciences and free of debt.”
⁴³
The most ardent true believers donned white “ascension” robes, according to some contemporary accounts, and gathered on rooftops and hilltops all over the Burned-Over District of western New York and elsewhere around America to greet the Lamb of God as he descended from heaven on a cloud.