Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [101]
Plenty of people draw their own dramatic conclusions about the fate of the earth—or, for that matter, about perpetual motion, the health risks of microwaves, and what really happened at Waco—but very few achieve international stature and throngs of followers. In all probability, Miller would have spent his days preaching about the Advent in obscurity if he hadn’t chanced to team up with one Joshua Himes. Himes was Rasputin, Warren Buffet, Karl Rove, and William Randolph Hearst rolled into one: a canny advisor, a formidable fundraiser, a brilliant politician, and a public relations genius. The two met in 1839, when Miller, who had been a low-key figure on the itinerant-preacher circuit for some years, was modestly describing his doctrine to a small crowd in Exeter, New Hampshire. Himes came to believe in the tiny Millerite movement, and then to transform it. He promptly launched two newspapers, Signs of the Times and The Midnight Cry, which soon achieved a combined weekly circulation of 60,000. (Other papers would follow.) He issued millions of copies of pamphlets, hymnbooks, and illustrated posters explaining the timeline of the end of the world, and then established book depots around the country to make these publications available. He pushed Miller to take his message beyond small towns and farming communities and into the big cities of the Eastern Seaboard. At the same time, he ordered the construction of a giant tent to house massive Millerite revival meetings in rural areas. He focused on recruiting other ministers (some 400, by his own estimate) rather than just congregation members, in order to amplify the impact of each new convert. Then he developed a preaching schedule for each of them so punishing that it makes American presidential campaigns look like a walk in the park. These efforts, combined with a zeitgeist that was particularly conducive to religious fervor, quickly turned Millerism into a household word.
At first, Millerite doctrine did not specify the exact date of the Second Coming. Its timing was contingent on the fulfillment of a series of other prophecies, arcane in their details, and Millerites argued among themselves at length about whether those prophecies had already come to pass. Miller himself had long held only that the Rapture would probably occur “about the year 1843” when pressed, he finally stated that he thought the world would end sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When the latter date passed without incident, Miller’s followers began to be anxious, but also to believe the Judgment Day must be increasingly near at hand. (Recall Leon Festinger, who found that failed prophecies often lead to an upsurge in faith.) Ultimately it was not Miller but one of his adherents, the preacher Samuel Snow, who proposed the date of October 22 and presented the calculations to justify it.
Perhaps because of the climate of anxiety and expectation, Snow’s suggestion caught on like wildfire. In short order, Advent in October became an article of faith among rank-and-file Millerites. Whether because they were irked by Snow’s presumption or chastened by the failure of their earlier predictions, Miller, Himes, and other movement higher-ups were slower to jump on the bandwagon. Miller himself wrote that he was not convinced “until about two or three weeks previous to the 22d of October, when seeing [that faith in Snow’s date] had obtained such prevalence…I was persuaded that it was a work of God.” (Fifty million Millerites can’t be wrong.) By the beginning of the fateful month, there was near unanimity among the devout: the long-awaited Rapture was almost upon them.
A lecture chart used by William Miller, detailing 2,520 years of fulfilled prophecies expected to culminate in 1843, Miller’s original forecast for the date of the Second Coming.
Whatever else may be said of Miller, Himes, and their