Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [187]
to comfort his fellow Millerites. For most Millerites, this community-mindedness would not last long. Unsurprisingly, given the close relationship between the communities we live in and the beliefs we hold, the Great Disappointment unraveled not just the theological but also the social underpinnings of Millerism. In the immediate aftermath of their failed prophecy, the Millerites were united in (and by) their shared suffering. But as the initial shock subsided, the once-cohesive community began to splinter—a double blow for those who had lately gotten both their spiritual and social sustenance from Millerism. As one scholar of the period wrote, “Before the disappointment, a common burden to carry the message to the world, and a bond of brotherly love existed in the face of the expected end of all things. Now the divergent opinions and intolerance of another’s views broke the body of Adventists into factions and bitter internecine controversies broke out.” (Dick, 159.) Or, in the words of Luther Boutelle, “No Advent Herald, no meetings as formerly. Everyone felt lonely, with hardly a desire to speak to anyone.” (Dick, 156; Numbers and Butler, 211.)
the Seventh-Day Adventists. See especially Jonathan M. Butler, “The Making of a New Order: Millerism and the Origins of Seventh-Day Adventism,” in Butler and Numbers, 189–208. Seventh-Day Adventists are far from alone in their faith that the Judgment Day is close at hand. Although no major religious movement since Millerism has attached a firm date to the Second Coming, a 2006 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 20 percent of Americans claim to think Jesus will return to earth during their lifetimes, 33 percent believe that the exact date of his return is foretold in the Bible, and fully 79 percent believe he will return to earth someday.
“continued to set times [for the Advent] for the next seven years.” Butler and Numbers, 199.
“the long march of history.” George W. Bush, “Status of the Nation and the War: The President’s News Conference,” Washington, D.C., Dec. 20, 2006. The speech is available at http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/12.20.06.html.
alternative-universe teleportation device. Tetlock, 146.
“if we were ourselves in the place of the deity” (FN). James, The Will to Believe, 6.
CHAPTER 11 DENIAL AND ACCEPTANCE
I am grateful to Penny Beerntsen for the generous and detailed interview around which this chapter is built. Unless otherwise noted, all the specifics of her assault and the subsequent legal situation come directly from her. Likewise, quotations from Peter Neufeld are from an interview with him, except where otherwise indicated. That interview and various follow-ups with the Innocence Project helped tremendously in the writing of this chapter, as did Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted (Doubleday, 2000), the book Neufeld cowrote with Innocence Project cofounder Barry Scheck and with the journalist Jim Dwyer.
My discussion of denial and self-deception was influenced by the philosopher Sissela Bok’s Secrecy: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Vintage Books, 1989), especially Chapter V, “Secrecy and Self-Deception,” and by Alfred R. Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton University Press, 2001). Mele actually argues against the conventional notion that self-deception is paradoxical, but in doing so, he does an unusually good job of laying out the two prongs of that paradox: first, that being self-deceived