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God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World
The years leading up to the second millennium saw the appearance of a number of interesting studies on millenarianism in the United States, with a particular focus on the followers of William Miller, a New York Baptist farmer who predicted that the Apocalypse would take place in 1843 and then in 1844. These publications include David Rowe's Thunder and Trumpets (Chico, CA, 1985); George R. Knight's Millennial Fever and the End of the World (Boise, 1993), the essays in Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, The Disappointed (Bloomington, 1987); and, not cited in the volume reviewed here, Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium (Syracuse, NY, 1986). These studies examine this controversial movement in a scholarly and even sympathetic fashion, so Rowe's biography does not so much correct "myths and stereotypes"about Miller—as its back cover claims—as it deepens our understanding of this rather shadowy but influential figure in American religious history.
Perhaps the main reason that the voluminous Miller archive has not previously resulted in a scholarly biography is that he was neither a firebrand evangelical nor a charismatic visionary. A sober and industrious family man, Miller was neither well educated nor particularly introspective, despite his melancholic tendencies. His message that Christ's second coming was imminent was based not on a mystical vision, as in the case of nearby Joseph Smith, but on painstaking analysis of prophetic passages in the Bible that were linked to subsequent historical events such as Napoleon's 1798 imprisonment of the pope (interpreted as the deposition of the antichrist). Convincing as Miller's mathematical calculations may have been to those who believed in the literal truth of the Bible, his message would not have been heard far beyond his home community on the southern New York-Vermont border had it not been picked up and broadcast by the skillful and charismatic promoter, Joshua Himes of New York City.
Even though the image of Miller that emerges in this empathetic but not uncritical biography is a rather familiar one, Rowe does rise to the challenge of making him an interesting figure by stressing his internal struggle as a young man, torn between the political radicalism of his father's family and the Calvinist piety of his mother's family. Thus, we learn that Miller was guilt-ridden after his marriage because he had abandoned his parental family to move to the community of his more worldly in-laws. There, he became a local notable as well as an avowed deist, only to return to religion and his mother's home after his experiences as a militia officer during the War of 1812 focused his attention on human mortality. His wife, who had not been a faithful correspondent during the war, obviously had little say in the matter. [End Page 176]
Miller's internal conflicts did not end with his spiritual rebirth, for the increasingly enthusiastic mass meetings were strongly influenced by the new measures revivalism that he disapproved of as a Calvinist who had a "rational" approach to determining God's will. Miller was also swept along somewhat unwillingly by pressure to specify the exact date that the Apocalypse would take place. After the "great disappointment," he was torn between Himes's efforts to mitigate the damage by institutionalizing the movement as an evangelical church and his own sympathies for the more radical leaders who claimed that the "door" to heaven had been closed behind the true believers in 1844.
One minor shortcoming of the book, at least from a Canadian perspective, is that Miller appears to enter an undifferentiated and uncertainly located geographical void when he crosses the forty-fifth parallel to visit his two sisters and preach, which he did no less than six times between 1835 and 1849. Lower Canada is confused with Upper Canada in a couple of cases, but the fact remains that this thoroughly researched and well-written study can be recommended to anyone interested in what the author identifies as "the most significant popular millenarian mass movement in American history" (p. 233).