Adventism and North American culture

Between republican ideals and eschatological expectation in the development of the interpretation of Revelation 13

Resumen

Rooted in the Millerite movement, Seventh-day Adventism shared a particular interest in Bible prophecy, and the Sabbatarian Adventists who emerged from it focused early on the two-horned beast of Revelation 13:11–17. The Seventh-day Adventist Church remains the only sizeable evangelical denomination whose prophetic system centers on the interaction between Roman Catholicism and American Protestantism, an end-time scenario lying at the core of its eschatological motif of the mark of the beast. How this distinctive reading first took shape, however, has received limited attention. This study investigates the first steps in the development of Adventist thought concerning the United States as a prophetic figure, examining how the cultural, political, and religious factors of the nineteenth century shaped this interpretation and its relationship to republican and Protestant ideals. Tracing the interpretation from its antecedents through Andrews, Loughborough, and Uriah Smith, the study shows how early Sabbatarian Adventists identified America with the two-horned beast on the basis of its western location, republican government, Protestant principles, and rapid growth, while reading Spiritualism, slavery, and Sunday legislation as its draconic acts. It further argues that, after the Civil War, Ellen G. White broadened this reading into a worldwide, principle-based framework, less bound to factual fulfillments and to the shifting course of American politics, that became the denomination’s mainstream interpretation well into the twentieth century.