Seventh-Day Adventists

The Seventh-day Adventists are an American-born Protestant group that traces its roots to the mid-nineteenth-century activities of William Miller, a Baptist lay preacher and farmer from Low Hampton, New York. Miller developed a following preaching about a method of biblical interpretation that he claimed allowed him to predict the date of Jesus’s second advent. After two failed predictions, Miller settled on 22 October 1844, as the date Jesus would return to Earth. In the wake of that third failed prediction, an event now known as the Great Disappointment, Miller’s followers either disbanded or broke into factions that focused on interpreting the reasons for the failed prediction. One of those factions espoused the idea that Miller’s date had not been wrong, but that the event it predicted had been misunderstood. Rather than a return to Earth to judge humanity, 22 October 1844, marked Jesus’s entry into the heavenly sanctuary to begin its cleansing. When that event was completed, Jesus would return to the Earth to judge humanity. In the meantime, humans had a responsibility to live in preparation for the end times, which meant worshipping on the seventh-day (Saturday) and preparing for Jesus’s second advent by living properly, including following a vegetarian diet.