A History of the End of the World (28 page)

The great day turned out to be the Great Disappointment, as historians have dubbed it. “Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before,” recalled a farmer named Hiram Edson, one of the disappointed Millerites. “We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.”
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And their skeptical friends and neighbors did nothing to console them in their grief: “What! Not gone up yet? We thought you’d gone up! Aren’t you going up soon?” one scoffer was heard to say. “Wife didn’t leave you behind to burn, did she?”
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A few Millerites were so distraught that they went mad or took their own lives, or so it was reported. Others repented of their hasty decisions during the last days and filed lawsuits to reclaim the property that they had so rashly given away. And some only blamed themselves: God’s secret plan for the end of the world is surely concealed within the scriptures, they continued to believe, and they had merely failed to find it.

“I still believe that the day of the Lord is near, even at the door,” insisted Father Miller himself, who entertained the reassuring notion that the spectacular public failure of his own prophecy had been God’s way of sending lukewarm Christians back to their Bibles in search of divine truth. As an authentic American visionary, Father Miller looked on the sunny side even when contemplating the end of the world.
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Among the undiscouraged Millerites was a young woman named Ellen White (
née
Harmon) (1827–1915). During the year of the Great Disappointment, at the age of seventeen, White experienced the first of a series of divine visions that eventually numbered some two thousand in all. She was convinced that Miller had been right about the year but wrong about what would actually happen. Jesus Christ, she believed, chose 1844 as the year to fulfill a prophecy in Revelation that she interpreted as an act of preparation for the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment: “And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.”
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As she continued to read and reinterpret the book of Revelation, with its obsessive references to the number seven, Ellen White came to believe that God was calling upon Christians to observe the Jewish Sabbath as the holiest day of the week. She insisted that anyone who hoped to be numbered among the saints on judgment day must prepare for salvation by renouncing coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco, abstaining from masturbation, and embracing sexual purity and vegetarianism. (White herself “battled heroically against her own addiction to Southern fried chicken.”)
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By 1863, Ellen White and her husband, a preacher named James White, founded a church of their own, the Seventh-day Adventists. Their “text of choice” was the book of Revelation.
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The Seventh-day Adventists were only the largest and most successful of the apocalyptic churches that proliferated and prospered in the wake of the Great Disappointment. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers, for example, and the Zion Watch Tower Tract Society, later renamed the Jehovah’s Witnesses, also harkened to “the state of emergency announced in the final words in the Book of Revelation: ‘And behold, I come quickly.’”
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And yet, mindful of the fate that had befallen the Millerites, they were always forced to confront the plain fact that the world still failed to “end on time.”

Thus, for example, the early followers of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and, perhaps not coincidentally, a childhood resident of the Burned-Over District), resolved to build a kingdom of saints with their own hands on the American frontier. Indeed, the Mormons were fearless and tireless pioneers who pulled their own handcarts across the vast stretches of the desert wilderness to reach the New Zion in Utah. Yet they were also convinced that various ills and afflictions of the world around them were sure signs of “that great day fast approaching when this scene of wickedness shall close,” according to a Mormon newspaper called
The Evening and Morning Star.
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“When they learned to tolerate that tension—knowing the end was near, but not knowing how near—they came a lot closer to the sensibility of the earliest Christians,” observes historian Richard Wrightman Fox in
Jesus in America.
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Far more ominous examples of the apocalyptic impulse can also be discerned in the tumultuous years leading up to the Civil War. An African-American slave named Nat Turner (1800–1831), a lay Baptist preacher with a strong visionary bent, came to believe that he had been called to bring down God’s wrath on the slave owners of the American South. He regarded a solar eclipse in 1831 as a sign from on high, and he was inspired to lead a band of fifty armed slaves in what turned out to be the single bloodiest slave insurrection in American history. Not unlike apocalyptic revolutionaries in other times and places, Turner was hunted down and not merely executed but obliterated: his corpse was skinned, and his remains were boiled down into grease.

Still, it is significant that the Great Awakenings were followed by the Great Disappointment. Americans clearly seemed to prefer the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness in the here and now to the contemplation of the horrors and terrors of doomsday. Even Christian believers saw the perfection of American democracy through social and political reform as a more worthy enterprise than watching out for signs of the end. “[M]ainstream Protestants still believed that the world would have an end,” explains American church historian James H. Moorhead, “but they would not admit that it should arrive with unseemly haste.”
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Only on the ragged edges of Christian true belief in America was Revelation still being read as a book of “future history.” By now, however, the apocalyptic idea—and the provocative rhetoric of Revelation—were deeply woven into the fabric of American culture. Inevitably, the old impulses of thought and language reasserted themselves when the very existence of the United States was placed at risk in the conflagration that we call the Civil War, which was not only a clash of arms but a social revolution and a Kulturkampf, too.

Americans had always looked to the future with bully optimism and stout self-confidence. Even the otherwise dour and censorious Puritans, as we have seen, were capable of visualizing the New Jerusalem as a bustling American metropolis. But the coming of the Civil War, with its industrial-scale carnage and the threat it posed to the very existence of American democracy, reminded even the most cheerful Americans of the dire events that are predicted in the book of Revelation. And so Revelation served yet again as a “language arsenal” for combatants on both sides of the struggle.

Julia Ward Howe, for example, pointedly invokes the iconography of Revelation in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” when she glorifies “the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword” and conjures up “the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,” an oblique allusion to the passage in Revelation where “the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.”
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A less celebrated line of the same famous song offers an even more literal reference to the passage in Revelation that describes the final battle between the Lamb of God and the Devil in the guise of a red dragon: “Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel.”
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Indeed, the book of Revelation provided a template for sermonizers and propagandists in both the Union and the Confederacy who sought to rally the troops and strengthen the resolve of the civilians back home. “The Lord is mustering the nations to the last great struggle between freedom and slavery, truth and error,” insisted one preacher whose text was reproduced and circulated to Union soldiers in an anthology of speeches and sermons titled
Christ in the Army.
“We are entering, fellow-citizens, upon a period foretold by prophets of old—looked for and longed for by lovers of their country in past generations—which kings and prophets waited to see, and have not seen—a period of the overthrow of despotism, and the downfall of Anti-Christ.”
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When the Civil War ended, however, America found itself in a world that was wholly unforeseen by the prophets of old. Americans began to leave farms and small towns for the big cities in ever greater numbers. Village workshops were replaced by the smoke-belching factories of the kind that Blake called “satanic mills.” Horse-drawn carriages and ox-drawn Conestoga wagons were left behind in the smoke of locomotives. Communications flashed across the continent, first over telegraph lines and then over telephone lines. America had been an immigrant nation since the first Pilgrim Father stepped onto Plymouth Rock, of course, but now Ellis Island and Angel Island were beginning to teem with new arrivals from exotic places all over Europe and Asia.

All of these phenomena were proof of the success of the American experiment, but not everyone welcomed the newcomers
or
the new ways of life. Here was a new culture war in the making: the changing face of America was seen as the march of progress by some observers and as the decline and fall of civilization by others. And one way of understanding—and resisting—the brave new world in which Americans now lived was the religious stance that came to be called “fundamentalism”—that is, a return to what were imagined to be older and more authentic values in culture, politics, and religion. Thus, for example, the latest generation of Bible literalists, known as “premillennialists” because they believed that they were living in the final age before the Second Coming and the millennial kingdom of Jesus Christ, came to be convinced that they were witnessing the signs of the end-times as predicted in Revelation.

“[A]ll premillennialists seemed to have a real stake in the unraveling of modern life,” explains Timothy P. Weber. “As far as premillennialists were concerned, the turbulent and troublesome decades after the Civil War were proof positive that everything was right on schedule.”
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“Premillennialism,” and a related if more nuanced term, “dispensational premillennialism,” are used to describe the eschatological stance of one strain of Christian fundamentalism—the belief that Jesus Christ will return to earth and reign over the millennial kingdom exactly as described in the book of Revelation.
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That is, the premillennialists refuse to content themselves with an allegorical reading of Revelation, and they are convinced that they will behold with their own mortal eyes the sight of Jesus Christ descending from heaven on a cloud, seating himself on an earthly throne, and reigning over a kingdom of saints for a thousand years. For premillennialists, then, the second coming of Jesus Christ is a “real, literal, personal bodily coming.”
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Strictly speaking, premillennialism is based on the belief that Jesus Christ will return to earth
before
the establishment of the millennial kingdom. By contrast, “postmillennialism” is based on the conviction that Jesus Christ will return only
after
the millennial kingdom has been established through “the triumph and rule of the true church” and “human progress and moral advance achieved through the prayerful efforts of Christian believers in the present age.”
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Thus, as a general if not invariable rule, postmillennialists tend to focus on good works in the here and now, and premillennialists tend to cast their eyes heavenward in the hope of spotting Jesus Christ coming on a cloud of glory. To put it another way, the followers of Father Miller were premillennialists, and the adherents of the Social Gospel were postmillennialists. Both camps, however, embraced the apocalyptic idea, and they disagreed only on the timing of the end of the world.

“The theory put the end indefinitely far away,” confesses postmillennialist theologian William Newton Clarke (1841–1912), “and yet I listened trembling for the trump of God in every thunder-storm.”
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None of these notions were wholly new when they surfaced in America in the years after the Civil War. Indeed, as we have already seen, the debate between those who read Revelation “carnally” and those who read it “spiritually” goes all the way back to Augustine. Now, however, the banked fires of apocalyptic true belief burst into flames yet again, and they burned as hotly in the New World as they had at any time since Montanus and his prophetesses first announced that the New Jerusalem would descend out of the clouds at any moment.

Yet the apocalyptic true believers in nineteenth-century America insisted on putting a new spin on the oldest texts. Ironically, the Bible literalists were perfectly willing to tinker with Holy Writ when it came to the troubling prospect of what will happen to good Christians in the end-times. The plot twist that they introduced into the gloom-and-doom scenario of Revelation was the single greatest innovation in the apocalyptic tradition since John first described the visions that came to him on the isle of Patmos. Remarkably, the apocalyptic preachers rewrote the history of the end of the world with the happiest of endings.

A
plain reading of Revelation suggests that everyone on earth in the endtimes—men, women, and children, saints and sinners alike—will be compelled to endure the suffering to be inflicted on humankind by the Antichrist during the final years of persecution and oppression known as the Tribulation. Only after the Tribulation is over will the dead saints and martyrs be raised from the grave and allowed to enjoy their just rewards in the kingdom to come.

Certain cheerful Christians in nineteenth-century America, however, refused to believe that they would be called upon to endure such afflictions, and they insisted on embracing a new and highly inventive version of the end of the world. Christians who are worthy of salvation, they preferred to believe, will be miraculously plucked up and elevated to heaven before the Tribulation begins in earnest. Seated in the galleries of heaven, they will be privileged to look down and watch as everyone who has been left behind on earth suffers and dies under the Antichrist. Only when the Tribulation is over will they return to earth in the company of Jesus Christ to dwell in the millennial kingdom. Their comforting theological innovation came to be called the Rapture.