Official Podcast Script: Charlie Group
*Church bells1 chiming, thunder2 rolling* “I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake.The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.” Revelation 6:12-14 (King James Version)
CHRIS: Wow, that’s dark. Was that a prophecy or a poem or something? and did people really believe that something like that was going to happen on earth?
NICK: Yeah, people did believe this biblical prophecy. Christians across the United States in the 1800s believed in this apocalyptic vision of the end of humanity.
JULIANA: But, the Millerites were the only Christian group at this time to give their followers an exact date for the end of the world.
CHRIS: The who?
NICK: The Millerites! They were a religious movement based in the Northeastern United States in the 1800s.3 They followed the teachings of William Miller, who led them to believe that in 1843, they would ascend to heaven to live a blissful existence in an eternal paradise alongside their lord and saviour Jesus Christ.
CHRIS: Really? That sounds like… a lot.
JULIANA: It does, but you have to understand that in the early 1800s, religion dominated people’s worlds. It dictated how they lived, what they did, even who they married. Religion then is a lot like politics now. Politics affect how people imagine themselves as citizens, and contribute to how we live.
CHRIS: Okay…..so maybe what they believed wasn’t so ridiculous. But I mean, it sounds kind of silly looking back since they were so wrong. We’re all still here living our lives, right? Their world never actually ended.
1 https://soundcloud.com/champignonsdesbois/church-bells-in-mont-louis-pyr 2 https://freesound.org/people/BlueDelta/sounds/446753/ 3 McNamara, Robert. "History of the Millerites." ThoughtCo, Dec. 6, 2018, thoughtco.com/millerites- definition-1773334.
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NICK: You’re right that the Millerites were wrong. On their predicted days of doom, the apocalypse they envisioned never occurred. Their physical world didn’t come to an end. But does that mean that their world, one that revolved around intense devotion to their firmly held religious beliefs, didn’t actually end?
CHRIS: Well... I don’t know, does it? I mean, when I think of the end of the world I think of a meteor or a plague or a bomb, you know something that leaves nothing behind, something like the fiery apocalypse that Miller predicted.
NICK: And you’re right those are potentially world-ending scenarios. But worlds can also be social, forged around a shared set of beliefs and experiences. An end to a social world can actually be just as, if not more devastating than a tangible sort of apocalypse that William Miller imagined. You see, the complete and utter shattering of one’s worldview can feel like the end of the, well, world. Imagine that there was one event, one watershed moment that caused you to rethink completely how you see your world and made you question your place in it.
CHRIS: Like when Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson broke up.
JULIANA: *laughs* You’re on the right track.
CHRIS: That was pretty devastating for me. But, nyways, I see your point, even though their physical world didn’t come crashing down, the social world that they inhabited did.
NICK: Exactly. What’s even more interesting is that social worlds are created and destroyed all the time! Just think about the recent presidential election. You could say that for Democrats, their world ended with the election of Donald Trump. Just listen to this:
*Montage of news clips4 after the 2016 election*
CHRIS: Wow that’s some pretty intense stuff.
JULIANA: Yeah... so just like the Millerites were living in their own world, one where an apocalypse was set to occur between 1843-1844, in our present day, Democrats were living in their own world just before the 2016 election — as you know, their world was characterized by social progress, where history was stained with inequality and oppression, but they saw themselves in the midst of a period of sweeping change, a world where the first female American president would vanquish a man who, in their eyes, stood as a symbol of sexism and racism...but then, it didn’t happen.
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtJvYdX4GKM
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CHRIS: Okay, I think I’m starting to get it… so Millerites lived in their own Biblical world that was shattered and Democrats lived in their own world of social progress right?
NICK: Yeah, pretty much. In fact, the way Millerites reacted to the end of their world is very similar the way that Democrats reacted to the end of theirs!
CHRIS: Oooooh interesting.
NICK: And we’ll explore that more right after this short break.
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NICK: Welcome back everyone, I’m Nick Edwards
JULIANA: I’m Juliana Madden
CHRIS: And I’m Chris Kosteva, and we are students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst exploring the connections between a religious movement from the 1800s, and the way that we think about politics today. Juliana and Nick are all read up on the Millerites, so I decided to pick their brains and learn some more.
NICK: Now, let’s get back to our discussion about the Millerites’ so called end of the world and how it might relate to modern day politics.
JULIANA: But before that, I think we need to get to know the Millerites and their founder William Miller a little more. So we invited Harvard Professor, David F. Holland, to speak with us.
NICK: Professor Holland is a renowned scholar of American religious history at Harvard Divinity School, and is THE John A Bartlett Professor of Church History in New England, and has studied the Millerites as well as Seventh Day Adventism, which is, a major christian
3 denomination that was founded by several former Millerites, and is partially based on the teachings of William Miller.
Prof David F. Holland: Millerites begin with William Miller’s own biblical discoveries. Miller had lost his religious faith early in his life until some experiences during the war of 1812 where he was brought to consider his own mortality and the purpose of his existence and rediscovered his baptist faith. Emm, he began a careful examination of the Bible. In the early nineteenth century, one of the major commitments of the surging evangelical movements, was that the Bible could be interpreted by just about anybody. It didn’t require a degree in theology, it didn’t require high social standing, the bible was accessible to everybody who picked it up and read it with true intent. It is one of the democratizing forces of the period is to see this sacred text in those terms. And Miller took that to heart and began thinking about history and the way the Bible describes the past and the way it predicts the future.
NICK: Wow that’s fascinating. But you know what’s also fascinating? They were so committed to their beliefs that they refused to harvest their crops and even climbed trees and fell out to try and get closer to God.5
CHRIS: Wow, they were really committed.
NICK: But let’s fast forward to the 2016 presidential election. Democrats at that time were living in their own world, characterized by social progress. They saw Hillary Clinton as the next logical step in our progression toward a more just society. When Donald Trump was elected, their world ended.
CHRIS: Okay but hold on, elections happen all the time in this country. You can’t just say that the world ended just because your candidate lost.
JULIANA: Ya, you’re right. But this election was different. Many progressives see the world as a march toward social progress. They see history as being stained with inequality and oppression, and they see us in the middle of a progression toward justice. Some people’s lives were affected more so than ever before from this election. I mean, just listen to the types of things that Trump was saying
*Montage of offensive Trump comments6*
5 Miller, Perry. “The End of the World.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 2, 1951, p. 171., doi:10.2307/1916901. 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAIfU5RBBso
4 NICK: We spoke to Basileus Zeno, a Political Science Graduate Student at UMass Amherst. Basileus is not only an Asylum seeker from Syria, he was also a political dissident and the co- founder of an opposition blog that took a brave stance against the Assad regime. He shared with us his feelings on the 2016 election, and how he, as a believer in social progress, has had to contend with a new Trumpian world.
Basileus Zeno: But for me, that night was two things. It was a wake up for many Americans who thought they were living in a paradise and they believed in the exceptionalism of the United States. That everything here is perfect, no, but what happened is that the disruption of the daily dreams. They believed in- What they believe in is a shared common sense between all people regardless of their position or location in terms of the system of power. Uh so that night I- there were many friends and random comments about people deciding to go to Canada, immigrate to Canada, and I remember there was an article about the website crashed- the Canadian immigration website crashed because many Americans are basically inquiring about moving there. So I wrote at the time, as a Syrian in the US, I don’t know where else to go. I don’t even have the luxury to make a joke about moving to Canada. At least, I didn’t take the positivist posters seriously since I have learned a dire lesson from the Syrian experience. Never trust the experts. Never build false hopes or dreams on a hopeless foundation. The sum of my life, fear was my past, fear is my present, fear is becoming my daily companion, my identity.
CHRIS: Wow, okay I’m getting it. It’s pretty easy to see how the world of social progress came crashing down when Trump was elected.
NICK: Definitely! We even invited Massachusetts Congresswoman and the Vice Chair-elect of the Democratic Caucus Katherine Clark to speak with us. Just listen to how she reacted to her world coming crashing down.
Congresswoman Katherine Clark: I never had a doubt that Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. My friends called me the Consoler in Chief. I kept telling everyone that this race is going to be a lot closer than we can imagine, but in the end I really believed that the voters of this country would not elect Donald Trump. I was obviously completely wrong, and it was....devastating... is the word that I would use. I have been on the winning side and the losing side of my own campaigns and other campaigns I have worked on, but this just felt like it was shaking fundamental values, and that the election of Donald Trump, and for me his very quick appointment of Steve Bannon to go into the White House just made me very concerned and worried for the future of our democracy. It was a very difficult time and I have never had an election affect me in that way.
5 CHRIS: So you were absolutely right. This election was clearly an exceptional one for so many people. And listening to Congresswoman Clark, it’s pretty clear how the election constituted and end of the world for believers in social progress.
NICK: Now, I’m sure you're wondering, what happens next? What happens after a social world ends?
CHRIS: How did you guess?
NICK: Well Chris, we can get back to that in a moment. But first, let’s take a quick break and hear a quick message from our sponsor.
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NICK: So let’s take it back to the Millerites. Even after the Millerites’ prophesied end of the world was disconfirmed, many followers doubled-down and continued to believe. They started many splinter groups that also looked towards an apocalyptic end, but most of these fizzled out after the Second Great Awakening had passed.
CHRIS: So was that just the end for the Millerites? I can’t imagine they’re still around today.
JULIANA: Actually, not all of the Millerites’ ideas, beliefs, and ethics were lost to history. The Seventh-Day Adventist movement, which is one of the fastest growing religious organizations in the world, was founded by former followers of William Miller.7 The early adventists believed Miller was still right, but his dates were wrong. This group, led by Hiram Edson, would come to be seen as the “true successor to the once powerful Millerite movement”.
7 Lechleitner/ANN, Elizabeth. “Seventh-Day Adventist Church Emerged from Religious Fervor of 19th Century.” Surgeon Bailey Reflects 25 Years after 'Baby Fae' :: Adventist News Network, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, 17 Dec. 2013, news.adventist.org/en/all-news/news/go/-/seventh- day-adventist-church-emerged-from-religious-fervor-of-19th-century/.
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NICK: Thanks to preachers like Ellen White, the Seventh Day Adventist church would grow and prosper, and it’s still actually going strong today. Through the adventist church, some of William Miller’s theology and teachings still live on, and impact the lives of millions of christians worldwide.
Prof. David F. Holland: Yeah for sure, I mean Seventh-Day Adventism is a major world presence. There is nearly eighteen, well more than eighteen million seventh-day Adventists around the globe that trace quite explicitly and directly their spiritual lineage back to Millerism. They have increasing influence, Ben Carson was a major political candidate for this past election cycle. He is a practicing Seventh-Day Adventist, there is a good historical argumentation that seventh-day adventism is the seed bed for the creationist movement, the anti- evolution movement… in the early twentieth century, certainly the Seventh-Day Adventist has been an important force in American medicine. Medical education coming out of Seventh-Day Adventist institution is highly respected, and there are hospitals around the globe that are driven by Ellen White’s Millerite inflected vision about the ways in which christians are to work in the world.
CHRIS: See that sounds a little ridiculous to me. How could the Millerites just continue to believe in Miller even after he was proven wrong?
JULIANA: It might not be so strange after all. In the 1950s, psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter published the book, When Prophecy Fails. In their book, the authors argued that when a person believes in an idea with all their heart, they are incredibly hard to change, sometimes even doubling down in a belief that has been proven wrong.
JULIANA: The study says that five conditions must be met in order for a person to never give up on their beliefs. First, a belief must be held with deep conviction and it must in some way affect the person’s actions.
NICK: Second, the person holding the belief must have committed themselves to it in a way that makes it hard to go back on, think of it as donating money or time to a political party today.
JULIANA: Third, the belief must be specific and concerned with the real world.
NICK: Fourth, undeniable evidence must occur that proves their belief wrong, and it must be acknowledged by the individual holding the belief. Last, and most importantly, the individual believer must have a social support.
JULIANA: This is the same way Democrats picked up the pieces of their shattered world. They refused to believe that their world of social progress ended. Instead, they doubled down too.
7 They committed themselves to electing more Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections which saw record breaking voter turnout and historic Democratic wins.
CHRIS: And Congresswoman Clark shared a very similar sentiment! Even though her her word was shaken, she is still a believer in social progress and she, and many other Democrats re- committed themselves to their cause.
Congresswoman Katherine Clark: I absolutely believe that we will continue to move towards social progress. And my period of utter despair really ended with the Women’s March right after Donald Trump’s inauguration. And that march, that outpouring, that turned into so many candidates running for office in the midterms as Democrats, and then finally winning the midterms has finally restored my faith. We also saw just a lot of candidates who have never run for office before just step forward. I was co-chairing what we call the red to blue program that recruits and supports and mentors candidates who are in Republican held districts that we thought we could flip, and working with those candidates and working to help them make their decision on running for congress, and then raising them the resources, and then making sure they assembled good teams around them to get to victory was incredibly rewarding. Behind them was just this army of people, many of whom i had spoken with over the past few years who never were involved in campaigns before, and maybe had never voted for a democrat, but they felt the call to get involved and to make sure their voice was heard.
CHRIS: Okay so now I can see what you guys are saying. The way that the Millerites committed themselves to their beliefs even after they were proven wrong sounds kind of irrational. But actually, it might just highlight the way that humans tend to organize themselves around their beliefs in general. The 2016 election is a great example of how this type of thinking plays out today. Even though for some Democrats’, their world view was shattered, they doubled down on their beliefs and reorganized to grow stronger. As it turns out, we humans just think in predictable ways.
JULIANA: Exactly. We know that Millerites, at their core, were people. And Democrats, at their core, are people too. And whether it’s Democrats or Millerites, whether it’s 200 years ago or today, people, human beings, organize themselves behind their beliefs in much the same way.
NICK: Great disappointments aren’t just limited to the Millerites. They happen continuously at different times in different ways. The way that we pick up the pieces, the way that we come together after these earth-shattering events, that’s the part that stays the same.
JULIANA: So it really makes you think: Who will experience a “Great Disappointment” next? And how will they pick up the pieces of their shattered world?
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Once again, I’m Chris
I’m Juliana
And I’m Nick. Thanks so much for listening in with us today. We want to give special thanks to Basilius Zeno, Congresswoman and Vice-Chair elect Katherine Clark, as well as Harvard Divinity School Professor David Holland for joining us. We’d also like to give a shout out to our professor Paul Musgrave for making this all happen. We hope you enjoyed and be sure to check out the other episodes of Final Examination touching on topics like climate change, Native American history, and nuclear war.
References
Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/champignonsdesbois/church-bells-in-mont-louis-pyr https://freesound.org/people/BlueDelta/sounds/446753/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtJvYdX4GKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAIfU5RBBso
Lechleitner/ANN, Elizabeth. “Seventh-Day Adventist Church Emerged from Religious Fervor of 19th Century.” Surgeon Bailey Reflects 25 Years after 'Baby Fae' :: Adventist News Network, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, 17 Dec. 2013, news.adventist.org/en/all-news/news/go/-/seventh- day-adventist-church-emerged-from-religious-fervor-of-19th-century/
McNamara, Robert. "History of the Millerites." ThoughtCo, Dec. 6, 2018, thoughtco.com/millerites- definition-1773334.
Miller, Perry. “The End of the World.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 2, 1951, p. 171., doi:10.2307/1916901.
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