ABSTRACT
Two of the world’s most vigorous religious denominations, the Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, have their roots in a diffuse Adventist movement that arose in the early 1840s around a prophecy that the millennium was at hand. This chapter examines the origins and the logic of this movement, learning something about the remarkable individuals who were its founders, and questioning the extent to which a simple model of schism matches its social dynamic. Adventist movements seem generally to begin not in the schism of a denomination into two or more parts, although that did occur in the recent history of the Branch Davidians, but in rather more subtle processes that take place within a diffuse Adventist cultural system. The core assumption of the Adventist cultural system is the imminent Second Coming of Christ, and commitment to this belief limits the degree to which such groups can reduce their tension with the sociocultural environment.
