Randall Balmer

Apocalypticism in America: The Argot of Premillennialism in Popular Culture

On the evening of good friday, 1878, Charles Taze Russell and a handful of followers, all clad in white robes, gathered at the Sixth Street Bridge in Pittsburgh to await the Millennial Dawn, which would provide their translation into heaven. His study of the Scriptures had convinced Russell, a haberdasher from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 and that now, three-and-a-half years later, the kingdom of God would begin, and the faithful would be summoned to heaven. Russell later denied the incident—Pittsburgh newspapers insisted otherwise-and revised his theology to accommodate this disappointment. The Kingdom of Jehovah, he said, would begin in 1914, whereupon God and Satan would rule the world jointly until the Battle of Armageddon vanquished the forces of evil and inaugurated a theocratic millennium.