Both Britishers and Americans expanded Bible applications beyond the Mediterranean world. The scattering and gathering of Israel was the means for promoting and defending that expansion. It also dovetailed with other ideas, such as the existence of scriptures--including the ten commandments--on American soil (and Joseph of Arimathea's visit to English shores).
The Book of Ether addresses the idea of a chosen, promised land more than other books in The Book of Mormon. (See specifically Ether 2:9-10.)
However, in truth, The Book of Mormon is extremely diffident about Millenarian ideas. The Millennium is never mentioned. 2 Nephi refers to Satan being bound for a period. 3 Nephi refers to Christ's day of judgment. No reference is made to the number of years involved or the order of events.
This diffidence is less apparent in Joseph Smith's day-to-day speech and revelations--and could be the product of common cultural discourse (what is accepted as a given doesn't need to be explained). Still, The Book of Mormon makes little effort to prophesy the exact end of times with definite dates or astrology-based explanations. It is remarkably rational in comparison to a great deal of Millenarian discourse (though, again, that discourse is wide-ranging).![]() |
Joseph Brickey |
In addition, a deep antipathy for destruction runs through The Book of Mormon, despite the tragic ending. Moroni's sheer despair is enough to lift the book out of Millenarianism's rather unlikable pleasure in catastrophe to something closer to poetry:
And my father also was killed by them, and I even remain alone to write the sad tale of the destruction of my people. But behold, they are gone, and I fulfill the commandment of my father...I am alone. My father hath been slain in battle, and all my kinsfolk, and I have not friends nor whither to go; and how long the Lord will suffer that I may live I know not. (Mormon 8:3,5)
Moroni's final words in his own book are generous in the extreme, reflecting the transcendent magnanimity of which Joseph Smith was capable.
Harrison sums up the inherent tension here (end of times, sure, but no, no, not yet!) very well:
If, however, the Book of Mormon had been no more than another speculative account of American Israelism, it would not have made the impact that it did. Its themes were essentially the age-old problems that have perplexed men in all generations: the nature of God's revelations, good and evil, personal salvation. These were the problems which agitated many people in western New York (the Burned-over District) in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and the Book of Mormon can be seen as a projection of the beliefs and attitudes of post-revival sectarian religion...One of the problems of popular millenarian religion is that it has to handle complex theological and philosophical issues at a level which can be generally understood; but the level must not be too simple or it will not satisfy those seekers after salvation whose rejections of their earlier beliefs is the motive for their turning to the next prophet. Joseph Smith's solution to this problem was extremely well-tuned to the needs of labouring people in American and England in the 1830s and 1840s. He did not offer an allegorical or abstract interpretation of the Bible in place of earlier and now unacceptable formulations, but added his own scripture which was to be taken literally. He rejected the harshness of Calvinism and the emotionalism of revivalism, while retaining the Puritan work ethic and direction by the inner light of the Spirit. He was as Arminian as Wesley (salvation was offered freely to all who respond to Christ's call): but he spoke with the authority of God's prophet. (Harrison 183-184)
An unapologetic extrovert, Joseph Smith seemed to want to gather people for the sake of gathering people. Gathering people/binding them together = fun and exciting and expansive. Leading them out on a hill to get consumed or gathered up or saved or, in any case, taken away = not so much.
The best way to understand Millenarianism is to accept that human nature doesn't change, not fundamentally.
Millenarianism thrived in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries in England and America. Once Protestantism opened the door to ordinary citizens determining their own theologies, they did (much to the consternation of Protestant leaders like Luther and Calvin) and what they determined is that all that cut-and-dried God-is-this stuff pushed on them by religious leaders was just not their cup of tea. (See the history of every backlash against a dogmatic ideology ever.)
In sum (from a religious angle), they wanted their saints and angels back. They wanted the culture and rituals and pageantry of Catholicism without Catholicism plus a whole lot of other stuff, like astrology and fortune-telling. That is, it is no mistake that Millenarianism took off around the same time as Gothicism. As the modern world made greater in-roads into people's lives, people began to hanker for what they imagined the past to be. For some, that imagined past was Gothic. For some, it went back even further.
Millenarianism's hey day was the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century but it has lingered. When I was growing up, Millenarianism was somewhat more
popular than it is now. Many people at church honestly believed (or spoke as if
they honestly believed) that the Second Coming was right around the corner. Food
storage was important not as a debt-saving maneuver but as a prelude to
building storm shelters from when the Soviet Union invaded.
I
found the idea increasingly bizarre--and not one
that I encountered at home. Reading about the plague in Europe pretty
much cured me of being scared into apocalyptic visions by earnest, middleclass, employed, comfortably-situated people who spent
most of their time--when not preaching doom--going to work and paying their taxes and sending their kids to college.
J.F.C. Harrison's The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 focuses on trying to understand the supposed cognitive dissonance here rather than mocking it. Harrison points out that the adherents and preachers of Millenarianism were not uneducated or slothful or deceitful. They were intelligent, contributing members of society.
Likewise, many self-styled prophets--such as Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers--were supported by establishment clergymen, some of whom lost their parishes by providing that support. Others, however, did not get booted out. Their attendees agreed with them enough to sanction that support. In addition, many Millenarian beliefs were shared by reformers and artists. It was a wide-ranging ideological system.
Harrison sums up the attraction best: "[I]t provided an explanation of the mysteries of life to [those] who were dissatisfied with both the orthodoxies of evangelical religion and the claims of Enlightenment reason" (229).
Some of the beliefs shared by Milleniarians:
1. Prophets and visionaries
God's words were not confined to the labeled prophets of the past and designated interpreters of the present. God did deliver visions. God cared about current problems--such as the French Revolution.
William Blake was one of these visionaries. It wasn't an artistic pose (well, not entirely). He truly believed in his visions, as did many people--about Blake and about themselves.
As Harrison states,
Given certain common premises, the claims of millenarian prophets were not easy to refute on logical grounds...Few were prepared to deny absolutely that God might still speak to men through prophecy, so prophets and prophetesses could not be dismissed a priori. [V]isions and voices were validated by a great weight of Christian testimony, and could not be simply put down to hallucination. The strength of the inward witness of the Spirit (inconvenient as it always was for orthodox or majority denominations) means that millenarian claims were assured at least of a hearing in certain quarters. If millenarian visions and visitations were to be discredited they had to be shown to be from the devil...rather than flatly denied as having any existence at all. (227)
2. The Gathering of Israel
For Americans, this gathering meant providing a history/story about and to the Native Americans. As David G. Hackett describes one Millenarian leader--
In
seeking to restore the ancient government of the judges, [Noah Ararat]
looked to a primordial past for guidance. This impulse resembled that of
contemporary Masonic ritualists, Christian primitivists, African
American race historians, and Native American members of the Keetoowah
Society, who all sought an anchoring in ancient wisdom amid the readily
changing present. Moreover, like Joseph Smith's restorationist vision
for the Latter-Day Saint, Noah's plan called for the gathering of
religiously minded settlers from throughout the world in a theocratic
refuge governed by Scripture and the contemporary embodiments of
biblical leaders. Both men also called for people of Israelite descent,
including tributes of American Indians, to populate the new colonies.
(202-203).
3. Last Days
Harrison (kindly) points out that Milleniarians seemed far more fascinated by the drama of the possible destruction of everything than its actual occurrence and fall-out.
I think this fascination is part of the human condition. With most of us, a desire for upheaval wars with a desire for stability--hence books that dwell with loving detail on the Rapture but fail to mention Jesus Christ; riots during COVID lock downs; paranoid trolls on social media; the exceedingly bourgeois (not a dirty word) church members I knew growing up who liked to trade stories about possible nuclear winter and missionaries being killed in Jerusalem while paying their taxes, etc. And so on. (My mother, who has a vivid imagination, never enjoyed discussions of the Last Days: to her, the fall-out was real or could be real.)
Consequently, there are amusing yet entirely believable (in terms of human nature) stories of Milleniarians like Ezekiel Hale, who gave up his business to his oldest son when he thought the end was nigh (he didn't simply burn it down); he then wanted to take it back when the final days didn't arrive. Lawsuits ensued.
Harrison suggests the focus on Last Days is about a larger idea or problem:
[The sub-culture of millenianism] prominent in Millerism...presents a peculiar psychological problem: how to prepare for the Last
Day? Familiar as one might become with scenes from romantic painting and
with the imagery of the Book of Revelation, it is difficult to take in
such a stupendous idea as the sudden appearance of the Divine Being and
the complete ending of the world in its present form. Just how to act
and speak in the presence of the Lord, whom one is expecting shortly to
meet face to face, presents thoughts which could (or should) have
enormous implications for each believer. From accounts of the Millerites
one is left with the impression that they struggled hard to comprehend
their situation and made the appropriate responses in words, but that
they were so bogged down the literalness of their interpretation as to
be incapable of grasping the full meanings of the End of Time. (196-197)
To be continued with Millenarianism and the Book of Mormon...
Bibliography:
Hackett, David G. That Religion In Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture. University of California Press, 2015.
Harrison, J.F.C. The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780-1850. Rutgers, 1979.