How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [125]
The classic case study in millennial resiliency is the 1843 Millerite fiasco, also known as the “Great Disappointment.” A one-time deist and farmer from upstate New York, William Miller accepted the 6,000-year theory of creation but rejected Bishop Ussher’s specific calculations for the beginning and end. Miller believed he had found errors in Ussher’s chronology, concluding that the archbishop was off by 153 years. The end would not come in 1996, but in 1843. Miller published his theory in 1832 and began preaching and acquiring followers in the Boston and New York areas who were impressed that he was even able to pinpoint the date of the end. Using the Jewish year that runs from one vernal equinox to the next, Miller became “fully convinced that sometime between March 21st, 1843, and March 21st, 1844 … Christ will come and bring all his saints with him.” But when March 21, 1844, came and went without note, a great disappointment set in among many followers. Instead of abandoning the movement, however, the true believers set to task recalculating the Second Coming. It would be the “tenth day of the seventh month of the Jewish sacred year,” October 22, 1844. Miller announced at the beginning of the month that “if he does not come within 20 or 25 days, I shall feel twice the disappointment I did this spring.” When the new date passed without note, one disciple announced that “our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. We wept and wept until the day dawned.” That disciple was Hiram Edson who, after recovering from the great disappointment, concluded that Miller had misread the Book of Daniel. This was not the end, he said, but only the beginning of God’s examination of the names in the Book of Life. To hasten the process, Edson explained, the sabbath should be observed on Saturday, the seventh and last day of the Jewish week, instead of Sunday, and he went on to become a leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses must hold the record for the most failed dates of doom, including 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, and others all the way up to 1975. One of the more novel and audacious rationalizations for failed prophecy came after Armageddon’s nonarrival in 1975. In a 1966 book published by the Watchtower Society, Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God, the Witnesses established the date of creation at 4026 B.C., declaring that “six thousand years from man’s creation will end in 1975, and the seventh period of a thousand years of human history will begin in the fall of 1975.” The Watchtower Society’s president, Frederick Franz, at a Toronto, Ontario, rally, blamed the members themselves. Because Jesus had stated that no man will know the “day or the hour” of his coming, the Witnesses jinxed the Second Coming: “Do you know why nothing happened in 1975? It was because you expected something to happen.” Undaunted, they recalibrated again, citing October 2, 1984. as doomsday. Finally, in 1996, the leaders of the church learned the Millerite lesson. In the November 1996 issue of Awake!, members discovered that “the generation that saw the events of 1914” would not, after all, be seeing the end of the world. Instead, this oft-quoted line was replaced by a much vaguer “is about to” clause, reducing dissonance indefinitely.
A more recent example occurred on March 31, 1998. This time around it was the prophecy of one Heng-ming Chen, leader of God’s Salvation Church presently based in Garland, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), but originating from Taiwan. Chen’s original prophecy, published in his guidebook entitled God’s Descending in Clouds (Flying Saucers) on Earth to Save People, stated: “At 10 A.M. on March 31, 1998, God shall make His appearance in the Holy Land of the Kingdom of God: 3513 Ridgedale Dr., Garland,