#millerites

Hi!

I don’t know anything about adventists! But I know that the founder of the Bible Students (which became the jw later) Charles T Russel was influenced by adventists.

So I guess we’re kind of cousins!

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos (01.18.2021): 

What’s the difference between a cult and a religion? Scale. Every religion begins somewhere in a basement or a backyard or a barn with a small group of people and some scrap of received wisdom. Most of them end that way. But occasionally an idea, a leader, a concept, just … catches fire. It spreads, and adapts, and invariably mutates as it passes from that original founder or founding group out to a larger set of believers.

When that happens, when a cult crosses over to religion, it becomes hard to kill. Just the sheer number of believers means it’s extremely unlikely that something is going to happen one day to make everyone involved just abandon those beliefs.

[...]

By 1840, Millerism was a national movement and the Millerites were publishing their own weekly and even daily newspapers. In those papers, other voices came to the fore. Miller had hesitated to give an exact date for when the world would end, or exactly what would happen when it did. But there were several voices among his followers who were willing to provide their own dates, made by their own obscure calculations. Eventually, these followers more or less dislodged Miller from the leadership of his own movement, and he was not in attendance at a great “camp meeting” when the date of Oct. 22, 1844 was definitively set for the end of the world. That date was set by a man named Samuel Snow, who had once been a vocal atheist only to be converted to the cause after reading Miller’s pamphlet.

In preparation for the day, Millerites gave away homes and farms. They left families and friends. On Oct. 22, many gathered together on rooftops and hillsides, waiting … and nothing happened.

Following “The Great Disappointment,” some did leave the movement. In fact, tens of people not only abandoned Miller—they left Christianity altogether. But smaller groups persisted. Some decided that the prophecy wasn’t so much wrong as misunderstood; Oct. 22 had represented the date for some event in heaven, not on Earth. Others thought the date was simply wrong, but that the idea of a soon-to-be-realized End Time was exactly right. Those groups survive today as the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[...]

How does QAnon shape up against this history? The QAnon movement began on Oct. 28, 2017 with a post on 4chan from someone claiming to have “Q level” security clearance. This obscure access, limited to the Department of Energy, somehow allowed the mysterious “Q” to pass along cryptic information that the nation was in the "Calm Before the Storm." The first post on that thread was this:

HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M's will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.

Absolutely none of what was predicted happened. Later in the same thread, Q predicted that “the storm” would come on Nov. 3, 2017. Nothing happened on that day. Nothing happened on any of the days on which the thread predicted everything from a car bombing in London to a mass suicide of never-Trumpers to the arrest of Pope Francis. Over the last four years, “Q” made predictions about all manner of things, from the resignation of tech leaders to more dates for indictment of Hillary Clinton. Absolutely none of it came to pass.

it didn’t matter. As the predictions failed, the movement grew. Over time, each message from Q became more and more cryptic. The messages included references to the Pizzagate conspiracy, made claims that all mass shootings are fake, and painted the Mueller investigation as something created by Donald Trump to lure Democrats into a false sense of security while Trump collected the information needed to bring them down. Messages became embroidered with slogans, with apparently unconnected phrases, and with strings of nonsense letters or numbers. Q dismissed all the false predictions under a blanket claim that it was necessary to hide his real information. In all of the phrases, and letters, and numbers, Q followers began to “discover” messages that made the conspiracy vast enough to include everything from surviving Nazis to a hollow Earth.

[...]

QAnon as a cult/religion has lost its center. It will fracture. However, it’s very unlikely to go away. The core ideas—that there is some elite group that secretly controls the world and carries out terrible practices with impunity—is a very, very old one. It certainly goes back to the blood libel. And even that was surely not the first form of the basic conspiracy theory. Because this idea is immensely satisfying to believe. A decade from now, QAnon may be larger and more powerful than it is today. It may also be completely unrecognizable, with that core idea wrapped in all new layers.

After all, there are now almost 19 million Seventh-Day Adventists and 8 million Jehovah’s Witnesses. Both groups came from just a handful of stubborn Millerites after the majority of the movement had decamped in disgust.