The Books of My Life: The Disappointed

I was a student of radical religious oriented social movements in New England and the Burned Over District of upstate New York and north eastern Ohio for many years. I was, in particular, a student of Mormonism, the group I ended up writing my dissertation on, and, if much less intensely, the Shakers and the Oneida Community.

My interest was not in these sects, denominations, or new religious movements, or even in religion per se. It was in the role ideology and meaning played and plays in the social and cultural construction of identity and community in new social and cultural movements. The study of new sects or new religious movements, the study of new meaning systems in other words, in 19th century America, seemed as good a place as any to explore the role ideology played in the social and cultural construction of identity and religion. It also seemed a great place to explore how meaning systems, like social movements in general, routinise and institutionalise over time becoming, in the process, less charismatic and more bureaucratic in form.

Given my interest in the new sects and new religious movements of 19th century New England and especially New York it was probably only a matter of time before I would get around to reading about another one of the many sects that arose in New England, New York, and the Midwest, Adventistism or Milleritism. The edited collection The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarians in the 19th Century, edited by Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, second edition 1993), is a fascinating and enlightening collection of essays focusing on what we might call Primitive Adventism or Millerism from the 1810s to the 1860s. David Rowe's essay explores Primitive Adventist demographics showing, in the process, that the notion that millenarianism is the religion of the economically distressed is problematic when applied to nineteenth century Millerism. Wayne Judd's essay focuses on the father of Primitive Adventism, William Miller, the man who mathematically calculated when Jesus would come again in the 19th century. David Arthur's essay focuses on Primitive Adventism's Saint Paul, the evangelist, publicist, publisher, and spreading the word innovator, Joshua Himes. Louis Billington's essay explores the success of Adventist evangelists in Great Britain. Eric Anderson's essay explores Primitive Adventist hermeneutics of the apocalypse and its rereadings of earlier Adventist calculations relating to the end times. Ronald and Janet Numbers's essay explores the link between Milleritism and madness, something many contemporaries accused Primitive Adventists of bringing about. By looking at archival records from asylums in New England, upstate New York, and the Midwest, Numbers and Numbers find a more complex picture of the relationship between madness and Millerite millenialism than previously offered by apologists and polemicists. Ruth Alden Doan's essay focuses on the similarities between Primitive Adventism and mainstream evangelicalism. Mainstream evangelicalism was, Doan argues, modernising and liberalising at the time that Adventism arose and flourished and, as a result, modernising and liberalising evanglicalism emphasised the differences, particularly when it came to the millennium, between the two evanglical groups in order to establish clear boundary markers between the two movements. Michael Barkun's essay explores another somewhat similar process of boundary demarcation, in this case the one made by John Humphry Noyes's, the founder of the Oneida Community, to mark off his Oneida Perfectionist community from the Primitive Adventists so that Oneida Perfectionists would not be accused, as Primitive Adventists were accused of, of being mad. Lawrence Foster explores the similarities and differences between Millerism and Shakerism and focuses on one--there were more--Primitive Adventist who joined a Shaker community in Ohio after the great disappointment of 1843 and 1844, the disappointment that arose among Millerites after Jesus did not come again. Jonathan Butler's essay explores the transformation from boundless Primitive Adventism to consolidating Seventh Day Adventism, or, to use Weber's terminology, from charismatic sect to bureaucratic denomination.

Given my interest in Mormonism it should not be surprising that I tended to fixate on the similarities and differences between Mormons and Millerites as I read The Disappointed. The similarities first. Both social movements were apocalyptic and believed that Jesus was coming again soon. Both social movements were utopian in that they believed the kingdom of god would be established on earth. Both social movements were primitivist in that they sought to restore the true apostolic church to the world again. Both social movements were hybrid Hebraic/Christian restoration movements. Both social movements believed in continuing revelation and a god that acted in history. Both movements harvested the mission field of Great Britain relatively successfully. Both religious social movements had dietary reform aspects. Both social movements were attacked and "persecuted" by the vigilante mobs that were common in 19th century and 20th century America. The victimisation and martyrdom members and leaders of both social movements felt played an important role in the social and cultural construction of Primitive Mormonism and Primitive Adventism and Primitive Mormon and Primitive Adventist identities. As for differences both social movements differed in their conception of the second advent of Christ, the organisation of their apostolic churches, their visions of a utopian future, their Hebraic emphases, their emphasis on continuing revelation, and their dietary restrictions, pointing up the need to explore the role culture plays in social and cultural movements and the difference different culture brings to social and cultural movements.

I very much enjoyed my sojourn through The Disappointed. I recommend it to anyone interested in American history, particularly US 19th century history, meaning systems in general and the social and cultural construction of new meaning systems, in apocalypticism, in social movements, in theoretical approaches to social movements, and in American culture in general. After all, with respect to this last, one of the important building blocks of American culture has been religious and more specifically Protestant culture and ideology.