Transcript

Paranoid Protestants | Seventh-day Adventists

From Knowing Better · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 2 h 51 min · 23,154 words · 252 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Paranoid Protestants | Seventh-day Adventists", an episode of Knowing Better published September 11, 2024 (2 h 51 min, about 23,154 words). It mentions 24 people, works and ideas, including Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, William Miller, Great Disappointment, James White.

Who speaks in this episode?

  • George Storrs (Referenced doctrinal contributor (conditional immortality))

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 15:00: Seventh-day Adventists, William Miller, Branch Davidians, Joshua V Himes
  2. – 30:00: Great Disappointment, Little Disappointment, George Storrs, Signs of the Times
  3. – 45:00: William Miller, Brian Bates, Ellen White, Rachel Oakes
  4. – 1:00:00: Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, Brian Bates, James White
  5. – 1:15:00: Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, William Miller, James White
  6. – 1:30:00: Ellen White, Brian Bates, James White, John Harvey Kellogg
  7. – 1:45:00: Ellen White, The Great Controversy, John Harvey Kellogg, Great Disappointment
  8. – 2:00:00: Ellen White, The Great Controversy
  9. – 2:15:00: Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, The Great Controversy
  10. – 2:30:00: Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, William Miller, Branch Davidians
  11. – 2:45:00: Branch Davidians, William Miller, Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists
  12. – 2:50:52: Seventh-day Adventists, Great Disappointment, Branch Davidians

Notable quotes from "Paranoid Protestants | Seventh-day Adventists"

  • Their full, proper name was the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists.
    about William Miller · at
  • With this project, I’ve now covered all of the major cults. The Seventh-day Adventists have the most members in the world and they are, in my opinion, the least culty of the four.
    about Seventh-day Adventists · at
  • So many people were convinced of the October 22 date, that when it came and went and nothing happened, it became known as the Great Disappointment.
    about Great Disappointment · at
  • On October 23, 1844, the morning after the Great Disappointment, a Methodist Adventist named Hiram Edson was walking through a field when he was overcome by the Holy Spirit and…
    about Hiram Edson · at
  • Two months after Hiram, in December 1844, Ellen Harmon was in a prayer circle with some friends when she likewise fell into a vision.
    about Ellen White · at
  • The Albany Conference officially stated it had no confidence in any new messages, visions, dreams, tongues, miracles, extraordinary gifts, [or] revelations. But others, like Joseph Bates and James White, believed she was a prophet.
    about James White · at
  • Despite that as-yet-unknown future success, the Executive Committee voted to disfellowship John Harvey Kellogg in November 1907, along with his brother Will Keith.
    about John Harvey Kellogg · at
  • New Mount Carmel was purchased by two former Davidians named Ben and Lois Roden who had split off to form the Branch Davidians, named after Zechariah 6:12 The Branch Davidians…
    about Branch Davidians · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Ellen White — Person · Referenced prophet / central historical figure · 51 mentions · first at
    Presented as the post-1844 visionary whose revelations (visions/Testimonies) become a key pillar of Seventh-day Adventist identity and doctrine.
  • William Miller — Person · Referenced movement originator (Millerism) · 18 mentions · first at
    His end-times calculations (esp. tied to Daniel 8:14) catalyze the Millerite movement and set the stage for later Adventist splinter groups and reinterpretations after 1844.
  • James White — Person · Referenced organizer/publisher; SDA co-founder · 9 mentions · first at
    Depicted as a key institutional builder (publishing, “Gospel Order,” organization) and theological voice who amplifies Ellen White’s authority and helps formalize the SDA church.
  • Brian Bates — Person · Referenced early SDA leader / doctrinal connector · 8 mentions · first at
    Portrayed as a key bridge from post-1844 reinterpretations to distinctive SDA doctrines (Sabbath emphasis, investigative judgment framing, remnant identity).
    So, a man named Joseph Bates connected that to the Pre-Advent Investigative Judgment we discussed a while ago.
  • Hiram Edson — Person · Referenced post-1844 visionary / doctrinal pivot figure · 2 mentions · first at
    His field vision and reinterpretation of the “sanctuary” after Oct 22, 1844 is presented as a foundational rationale for the SDA investigative judgment framework.
  • John Harvey Kellogg — Person · Referenced institutional leader / later dissenter · 5 mentions · first at
    Used as an example of SDA health-institution building (Battle Creek Sanitarium) and later conflict with church leadership over theology (pantheism accusations) and control.
  • Joshua V Himes — Person · Referenced promoter/publisher (Millerism) · 1 mention · first at
    Presented as Miller’s chief organizer and media strategist—running speaking tours, publishing papers, and popularizing charts/tent revivals that scaled the movement.
    Himes became Miller’s top promoter and managed all of his speaking engagements.
  • Rachel Oakes — Person · Referenced catalyst for Sabbath adoption · 2 mentions · first at
    Credited with persuading an Adventist preacher to adopt Saturday Sabbath observance, a key distinctive that becomes central to SDA identity.
    On March 16, 1844, just before the Little Disappointment, a former Seventh-day Baptist named Rachel Oakes convinced her preacher to adopt the Saturday Sabbath rather than observing the Pope’s Day, as they called it.
  • Samuel S Snow — Person · Referenced date-setter (Seventh Month movement) · 1 mention · first at
    Credited in the narrative with popularizing the Oct 22, 1844 date via the Day of Atonement argument, intensifying expectations leading to the Great Disappointment.
    But in late August, a guy named Samuel S Snow, or SS Snow, stated that since Jesus died in the spring, it makes sense that– you know what?
  • James Caleb Jackson — Person · Referenced health reform influencer · 3 mentions · first at
    Presented as a major health/vegetarian movement figure whose water-cure ideas are portrayed as influencing (directly or indirectly) later SDA health reforms and institutions.
    Who wrote that life-saving article?
  • George Storrs — Person · Referenced doctrinal contributor (conditional immortality) · 2 mentions · first at
    Presented as a key minister who imported annihilationism/conditional immortality into the Millerite stream, shaping later Adventist views of death and hell.
    George Storrs, a Methodist minister, introduced the idea of conditional immortality.
  • Hazen Foss — Person · Referenced visionary precursor (Ellen White origin story) · 2 mentions · first at
    Introduced to frame Ellen White as the prophesied 'weakest of the weak' recipient of prophetic gifts, legitimizing her rise among Sabbatarian Adventists.
    But a few months earlier, a man named Hazen Foss had a vision which told him that God would give the gift of prophecy to the weakest of the weak. Which obviously meant Ellen.
  • Victor Houteff — Person · Referenced splinter leader (offshoot lineage) · 4 mentions · first at
    Included as part of the broader Adventist offshoot ecosystem that eventually connects (through later developments) to Branch Davidian history referenced earlier in the episode.
    Their full, proper name was the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists.
  • Florence Houteff — Person · Referenced offshoot leader (successor figure) · 2 mentions
    Appears as part of the Branch Davidian/Davidian lineage context (Adventist splinter movements) that the episode ties to later events like Waco.
    Their full, proper name was the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists.

Books & papers

  • The Great Controversy — Book · 9 mentions · first at
    On March 14, 1858, she had a very public, 2 hour long vision which she later published as: The Great Controversy between Christ and his Angels and Satan and his Angels.
  • Signs of the Times — Book · 2 mentions · first at
    And in February 1840, he began publishing a paper titled Signs of the Times to spread the message.
  • The Living Temple — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Provides context on Seventh-day Adventist beliefs and history.
    To help fund reconstruction, he also published a book titled The Living Temple where he expressed similar views as Waggoner regarding the Holy Spirit.
  • The Shepherd’s Rod: The 144,000 of Revelation 7 — Book · 1 mention · first at
    Fifteen years after Ellen White died, Victor Houteff published a book titled The Shepherd’s Rod: The 144,000 of Revelation 7.

Companies & orgs

  • Advent Christian Church — Company · 1 mention · first at
    The conference evolved into the Advent Christian Church in 1860, which continues to exist today with a few thousand members.

Concepts & topics

Places & events

  • Great Disappointment — Event · 12 mentions · first at
  • Little Disappointment — Event · 5 mentions · first at
    This date became known as the Little Disappointment or the First Disappointment.
  • Loma Linda University — Place · 1 mention · first at
    When the Battle Creek Sanitarium went secular, the church opened the College of Medical Evangelists as one of its replacement nursing schools.

Full transcript with timestamps

[Console typing] [Epic action music] ♫ [Epic action music] Let’s hope this works. [Beep beep] 5 minutes. Activating device. Beginning connection… now. [TV Static] Hey! You there? Were you asleep? Yeah man, it’s really early. It’s almost 9. Yeah… well… I mean… I kind- Look, I don’t need your judgment, alright?! What do you want? I finished the SDA video. Oh my god! I forgot about that. That was forever ago. [Scoffs] Wait, was that a VHS tape?! Yeah people don’t really have blank DVDs around here. You would. Look, that’s not the point, okay?

I need you to upload that video. Yeah, about that… umm… Just after I told you that you could make it and I would upload it to the channel, it suddenly became really uncool to upload other peoples’ work and pass it off as your own. But I’m you, just from the future. Naw, because you know things I don’t, so, you’re basically a different person. Yeah, I’d rather not risk it. So I did all that work for nothing?! Well, there might be a way around that but it’s going to take a while. Like how long?! Eh, you can never really know with these things.

No no wait! [Intro music] That ought to cover it, right? So here’s the deal. I’m just gonna give the game away right at the start. I think the Seventh-day Adventists are primarily responsible for a lot of the anti-government conspiracy theories we’re currently dealing with. Because of their beliefs, they seem more willing than others to think that the government is out to get them. Whether it’s through the legal system or the medical system. Don’t get me wrong, there are millions of people who believe in conspiracies.

Not all of them are Adventists and not all of them are religious. I’m not trying to say that they’re the only one who fall for this stuff. But I do think that SDA theology is unique in that it overemphasizes prophecy and actively teaches people to look for signs and connections everywhere. Which is a skill that lends itself to conspiratorial thinking. Now, if I were to ask you to name the quintessential conspiracy theorist from the last few decades, who comes to mind? [Elevator music] [Ding] It’s Alex Jones, right?

He’s not an Adventist, but do you know when he got started? It was after Waco in 1993. At 19 years old, he began a public access show that looked and sounded exactly like his modern InfoWars show. And, um, we didn’t play all the cuts from the leer, um, from the- Lehrer NewsHour but it says, yes, black helicopters, um, are being used for surveillance of the public by sheriff’s departments and police departments around the country. For all the Zoomers in the audience, there was a compound just outside of Waco, Texas that was owned by David Koresh and his religious cult known as the Branch Davidians.

In 1993, the federal government tried to arrest David Koresh, which resulted in a several-week long siege, and we just refer to that whole event as “Waco.” So if that’s what sparked this current wave of conspiracy theories, it’s worth asking, who were the Branch Davidians? Their full, proper name was the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists. A breakaway of a breakaway of a faction of a religious movement started by William Miller in the 1840s. For those of you who are behind on your Steampunk KB lore… Okay well, you were right, it all goes back to that one guy from 1844. So, I need you to make this video again, but this time for Seventh-day Adventists.

Nope. Whoa whoa wait! So I guess right off the bat, I have to point out that the Seventh-day Adventists are Christians… Which is itself a breakaway from another religion but I really don’t want to have to go back that far. Many of the other Protestant Christian denominations don’t consider the SDA to be Christian. Instead, they’re usually lumped in with what are collectively referred to as the “Four Major Cults.” The Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Christian Scientists, and the Adventists. In this case, they’re using the cultural definition of a cult, in that they follow a single charismatic leader or prophet with beliefs outside of the norm.

Not that it checks however many boxes on the BITE model. I personally don’t consider them all to be cults. But if you watch those videos, you’ll see that some of them fit the model better than others. With this project, I’ve now covered all of the “major cults.” The Seventh-day Adventists have the most members in the world and they are, in my opinion, the least culty of the four. By either definition. Adventist beliefs are pretty much indistinguishable from mainstream Protestantism, with a few quirks here and there, like that they go to church on Saturday.

If you consider how similar the Baptists and the Methodists are, the Adventists really aren’t that different from those two than they are from each other. And when I tell you who convinced the Adventists to switch to Saturday in the first place, that difference will become even smaller. Don’t worry, if you don’t know what makes the Baptists and the Methodists different, I’ll tell you that too. The one undeniable thing that separates the SDA from the traditional Protestant churches is that they believe in a post-resurrection prophet.

But I’ll be making the case for why I don’t really think that matters. You knew what you were in for when you clicked on this video: an almost irresponsibly long deep dive into the history and beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventists. And that is what you’re going to get. But since Adventists’ beliefs are not that far off from traditional churches like the Baptists and Methodists, this video is, by extension, a video about American Protestantism. I can’t really explain how a belief isn’t that strange if I don’t compare and contrast it to the mainstream understanding. Right?

So I hope you’re ready to do some learning. Let’s start at the beginning with that one guy from 1844. ♫ William Miller was born in 1782 and was a captain in the US Army during the War of 1812. He was a Deist. So he believed there was a creator, but they didn’t bother themselves with the daily lives of people. During the Battle of Plattsburg, a shell exploded just a few feet away from Miller, killing one and injuring several others. He was left completely unscathed which, according to him, caused him to find Jesus.

He started attending a Baptist church, which is what his family belonged to when he was a kid. Then he began a two-year intensive study of the Bible looking for clues as to when Christ would return. Turns out, doomerism isn’t just a recent phenomenon. There were things happening around the world that many people, not just Miller, believed were signs of the end times. The 1755 earthquake in Lisbon was a popular one. Many linked it to the great earthquake which happens after the sixth seal is opened in Revelation 6:12.

When one of Napoleon’s generals captured Rome and deposed the Pope in 1798, many connected it to the fall of Babylon announced by the second angel in Revelation 14:8. Pretty much every Protestant at the time – and many still today – viewed the Pope as the Antichrist and the Catholic Church as the evil and corrupt “Whore of Babylon.” Babylon being Rome and any time a prophecy mentions a woman, they’re talking about a church. So, the church in Rome. I’m not sure how that woman-church association came to be, but it’s one of those accepted facts of biblical prophecy.

Babylon means Rome and woman means church; it is known. Miller began his study with the belief that the Bible was its own interpreter. So if there’s a parable or prophecy that you don’t quite understand, you shouldn’t need to go to some outside source. You’ll find the answers elsewhere in the Bible. To do that, Miller used Cruden’s Concordance, which was a sort of index or glossary for the Bible. They still exist today. If you’re trying to find more information about the sanctuary in Revelation, you’d open your concordance, find out where else that word appears, and see what that verse has to say about it.

Normally we’d call this syncretism, which is when you form a connection between two unrelated texts. For example, one might casually mention going to a sanctuary while the other takes place somewhere named Sanctuary. So you assume they’re talking about the same sanctuary. Miller paid particular attention to Daniel 8:14, which is now the most important verse in Adventist theology.

The sanctuary in Revelation was always understood to be Earth. So, using his concordance, Miller took the prophetic timeline from Daniel 8:14, assumed a connection, and applied it to the earthly sanctuary mentioned during the end times. With that in mind, we can rephrase the prophecy to help make more sense of it: After 2300 days, the Earth will be cleansed. But this is a biblical prophecy, so it’s actually 2300 years. Day means year; it is known. 2300 years from when? From the 457 BC decree by Artaxerxes that the temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt.

Because temple also means sanctuary; it is known. So, negative 457 plus 2300 gives you 1843. The Earth will be cleansed and Christ will return “about the year 1843,” as Miller put it. He didn’t want to nail down a specific day – smart – so the word “about” was being used intentionally. To back up that number, the Jerusalem decree also began the 70 weeks prophecy from Daniel 9:24. There are seven days in a week, over seven weeks, and that gives you 490 days – or rather, years. So negative 457 plus 490, and you get 33 AD, the end of Christ’s first Advent.

So obviously the 2300 days from the previous chapter of Daniel will mark the beginning of the Second Advent. I would’ve made a ridiculous conspiracy board to help you visualize all of this, but I already used this plot device in the last two videos, so, sorry. For what it’s worth, a follower of Miller eventually made their own conspiracy board explaining the 1843 calculation. Connecting all sorts of worldly events to biblical prophecy. Here’s the French Pope thing from 1798. But I mean, there isn’t any string or anything on this chart.

It’s not even clear where you’re supposed to begin reading this. It’s definitely not the top left corner or under the title. I really can’t figure this one out. I’m sorry, but if I were grading this as a teacher, I’d give it a D. And that’d just be out of pity. They clearly put time into this but like… Wow. Miller came up with his prediction in 1818, but sat on it for fear of being ridiculed until 1831. The story goes that he made a pact with God that he would tell the world about his findings if he was ever asked, and then he received a request on that same day.

Within a few years, he was ordained as a Baptist preacher and spread his message to at least 500 different towns, converting over 6000 Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and all the rest to Adventism. Miller wasn’t starting a new church, Adventism was, at this point, just a movement. So, you could still be a Baptist Adventist or a Methodist Adventist. It was an add-on to your main religion, not a replacement. One important convert was Joshua V Himes, who heard Miller speak in November 1839 and became an Adventist immediately.

He then invited Miller to preach his message to a church in Boston that December. Himes was himself a pastor and a member of the Christian Connexion. Yes, spelled with an X. They were a cross-denominational Christian movement that was looking to bring about the earthly millennium through social reform. The prevailing understanding at the time was that humanity had to create and maintain a perfect society for a thousand years, which would trigger Christ’s Second Coming. So, a postmillennial return. Sylvester Graham and the early vegetarian movement thought that a change in diet and abstinence from sex would help speed up that process.

But Miller, and now Himes, believed in premillennialism, which is that only Christ could create a perfect society. His return would mark the beginning of the millennium, when he will reign on Earth for a thousand years. Himes became Miller’s top promoter and managed all of his speaking engagements. He’s the one who made that chart. And in February 1840, he began publishing a paper titled Signs of the Times to spread the message. Traveling circuses had just become a thing, so Himes came up with the idea of using those same enormous tents to hold religious revival meetings.

Kind of like a pop-up cathedral. It was such a new idea that people came to hear Miller speak just for the novelty of being in a giant tent that could hold over 4000 people. By October 1844, they held 130 of these tent revivals, or “camp meetings,” and over half a million people heard Miller’s message directly from the source. There were only 17 million people in America at the time, this was like the Eras Tour of the 1840s. He was pulling huge numbers. As his message spread, several of the other key ministers from the Christian Connexion converted to Adventism and contributed their own ideas to the growing Millerite movement.

George Storrs, a Methodist minister, introduced the idea of conditional immortality. Stating that human beings do not possess an immortal soul. Everlasting life can only be achieved through Christ. Those who reject Christ do not go to hell to experience eternal torment. They simply cease to exist, which is a concept known as Annihilationism. They aren’t punished forever, but the punishment lasts forever. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one. To be fair, that is the most accurate interpretation of scripture.

But it goes against what the majority of Christians believe and our everyday language would suggest. When someone dies, we usually say that they’re “in a better place” or that they’re “smiling down” and “watching over us.” Implying that they are up in Heaven somewhere. Only when they’re an exceptionally awful person do we say that they’re “burning in Hell.” Hell itself is unscriptural. When Jesus was asked where people go when they die, he pointed to a burning trash pit named Gehenna. I hope he wasn’t standing too close, I know from personal experience, that shit will mess you up.

Get on the registry, Jesus. The point being that they're consumed by fire – or annihilated – rather than roasting over an eternal flame. But even more than that, what would be the point of the rapture, resurrection, and final judgment if everyone is already where they need to be? You know? According to Storrs, everyone who has ever died is currently in soul sleep. When Christ returns to Earth, he will execute his judgment by only resurrecting the worthy. The unworthy will simply poof out of existence. If you are sentenced to annihilation, you won't be told about it and there is no appeals process.

God issued commandments, not a Bill of Rights. In addition to that, Josiah Litch, a Methodist Episcopalian, introduced the idea of the Pre-Advent Judgment to the movement. Basically, there will be a bench trial in Heaven before Christ returns to Earth. You’ll be tried in absentia and you won't get a lawyer. Christ will be your advocate, while also being your judge. Which is some real Jim Crow era justice if you ask me. Unfortunately, this also meant that your trial date could come up at any moment between now and the Second Coming and you wouldn’t even know it.

So you need to be in good standing with Christ at all times just in case. As I mentioned earlier, Miller was reluctant to get any more specific than “about the year 1843.” But as the year 1843 began, he caved to the pressure and announced a more precise timeframe.

In February, a month before the projected Advent window, the Great Comet of 1843 appeared in the sky. Many saw it as a biblical omen, which is ridiculous, comets can only mean one thing: dragons. It is known. The comet hung around for a month, spring began, and the followers of Miller, who were now calling themselves the Second Adventists, went into overdrive when it came to spreading the good news. They started in their home congregations by interrupting services to preach about Miller’s prediction. The churches were none too happy about that and eventually disfellowshipped or kicked out many of them.

In July 1843, Charles Fitch, a Congregationalist, argued that the Babylon mentioned in Revelation wasn’t just the Catholic Church, but also included any Protestants who denied the premillennial Second Advent. So it was good that you were kicked out, actually. Fitch was calling for Adventists to completely separate themselves from their corrupt home churches so they could devote themselves to movement. In the following months, 50,000 people took his advice. Again, crazy numbers for the 1800s. This persecution was foretold in Revelation, which will be a recurring theme in Adventist history.

Whenever something bad happens or a prediction fails, they turn to the Bible and discover that it was supposed to happen that way, actually. Thanks to that prophetic reinforcement, the Millerites were even more convinced that they were correct and began to sell their homes and businesses to donate the proceeds to the cause. They resigned from their jobs, gave away their belongings, didn’t sow their fields, and didn’t harvest their crops. They had no doubt that the world was going to end, so they saw no need to plan for the future.

Now, I always hate when people do this because it’s self-evident, but it’s important to the story and there’s no better way to say it: The world did not end. March 21, 1844 came and went and nothing happened. You hear how dumb that sounds? Like yeah, obviously. This date became known as the Little Disappointment or the First Disappointment. Which, right away, implies that this is going to happen a second time. Pretend you don’t know that when it comes up later. It’s supposed to be a surprise. William Miller and the believers in the Advent Near, as they were sometimes called, were at a complete loss as to why the savior did not come on March 21.

Joshua Himes printed a public apology in the Signs of the Times, which had been renamed to the Advent Herald. Believing that Christ would still return at any moment, Himes cited Habakkuk 2:3 and Matthew 25:5 to explain the delay.

Jesus is the bridegroom in this verse, which means the bride is the church. Pretty much every Christian denomination from the Catholics to the Adventists believe they are the one true “Bride of Christ.” So, while the bridegroom tarried, everyone was just supposed to just wait patiently. The Adventists call this period the “Tarrying Time.” To tarry means to delay leaving or cause to be tardy. So, the Second Coming had to be put on hold because Jesus hasn’t put his shoes on yet! I sold my house to pay for this trip, and now everyone’s going to be late to the final judgment, because of you!

But in late August, a guy named Samuel S Snow, or SS Snow, stated that since Jesus died in the spring, it makes sense that– you know what? Now the Bible shows us that spring is the Passover event. The Day of Atonement comes in autumn. And what did the high priest do on the Day of Atonement? He cleansed the sanctuary. Does it not then follow that he will return to cleanse the sanctuary on that precise Day of Atonement? Yes. This is from a movie called Tell the World, produced by the Australian division of the SDA in 2016.

The only reason I mention who made it is that I want to set up a joke that won’t pay off for another hour. But I also think it’s important to look at how they depict themselves. For example, they completely skip over the Little Disappointment. They go from Miller making his “about the year 1843” prediction to Snow’s recalculation, with nothing happening in between. I’ll explain why later, but this was a deliberate choice. The Day of Atonement landed on the tenth day of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar, which Snow determined to be on October 22, 1844.

Since it was the seventh month of the Jewish calendar and it just so happened to be seven months after the March 21 prediction, this became known as the Seventh Month movement and was even larger than the first one. Why am I not surprised that someone with a name like SS Snow would take someone else’s work, add the bare minimum, and then have that version become even more popular than the original. Seems to be a pattern. As we just saw, Adventists give Snow all of the credit for thinking that Christ would return on the Day of Atonement.

But Miller made that same suggestion back on May 3, 1843, writing that he expected Jesus to return on October 22 of that year. So Snow took his idea and was just like, “I dunno, maybe that’ll happen in 1844?” And since he was cuter or something, that became the narrative forever. Miller himself was skeptical of Snow’s prediction, but as the date approached and prominent figures like George Storrs were telling him it’s definitely true, he again caved to the pressure.

Joshua Himes was so convinced by the October 22 calculation that he made this announcement in the Advent Herald on October 16th. Now, you would expect that a paper heralding the Second Advent would announce that the end will happen tomorrow and thus the paper will not continue. But, he didn’t make a similar statement just before the Little Disappointment. The March 20th edition barely mentioned what was supposed to happen the very next day. So many people were convinced of the October 22 date, that when it came and went and nothing happened, it became known as the Great Disappointment.

See, it doesn’t quite hit the same since you knew it was coming. The Adventists were in complete shock. Many of them stayed up all night waiting for Christ to return. And as you might expect, the next morning, they were relentlessly mocked in the streets.

In the aftermath of the Great Disappointment, there were four ways to interpret the events of October 22. The first, most obvious interpretation was that nothing happened and they were wrong. The majority of Second Adventists took that view and returned to their home congregations. A few of them renounced their faith entirely. Many fell into depression, or “deep melancholy” as it was known back then. Some of them committed suicide, while others were committed to asylums – including SS Snow. According to the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, half of all their religious cases that year were the result of the Millerite movement.

Miller himself continued to believe that the end was near and would occur any day now. Miller and Himes helped establish the Albany Conference in April 1845, six months after the Great Disappointment. The conference evolved into the Advent Christian Church in 1860, which continues to exist today with a few thousand members. They still believe we are near the end, but they aren’t looking forward to a specific date or time. Others who still held onto the Advent Hope went back to the Bible to look for other prophecies that might explain the delay.

Eventually revising the prediction to 1874, then 1878, 1881, 1914, 1925, 1975, and then back to 1914. Those people became the Jehovah’s Witnesses. My video about them went into all of the math, but in short: they now use a different prophecy and base it on the year the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, rather than rebuilt. While the Witnesses believe that Miller was correct about the impending end, but incorrect about the date, the final group believed the opposite. Miller had the correct date, but was incorrect about what was supposed to happen.

On October 23, 1844, the morning after the Great Disappointment, a Methodist Adventist named Hiram Edson was walking through a field when he was overcome by the Holy Spirit and experienced a vision telling him to “prophesy again.” In Revelation 10, an angel hands down a little scroll, which tastes sweet as honey but sours the stomach. This was an obvious metaphor for Miller’s prediction, since everyone ate it up and everyone was disappointed. But then the angel commands “you must prophesy again.” Just like his vision! What a coincidence!

Hiram incorporated the Great Disappointment into the prophetic timeline found in Revelation. That failed prediction was the “little scroll” which was foretold as a necessary prerequisite for Christ’s return. It was supposed to happen. See what I mean? After an intense Bible study with fellow Advent believers, Hiram came to the conclusion that the sanctuary to be cleansed in Daniel 8:14 wasn’t Earth, like Miller and every other Christian scholar ever believed. It was heaven. And what if we mistook the meaning of the word ‘sanctuary?’ But the sanctuary is the Earth.

Is it? Word of his prophetic vision and reinterpretation of the 2300 days quickly spread and those that subscribed to his understanding eventually became known as the Sabbatarians. All three of these religions hinge on the idea that William Miller’s October 22, 1844 prediction has some sort of spiritual significance. If it doesn’t, then the entire concept of Adventism falls apart. The SDA talks about William Miller as if he was uniquely gifted or perhaps even guided by the Holy Spirit. They frame his calculation as if it happened upon him in a flash of divine inspiration.

If each of Daniel’s days is one year, and then the 2300 days will be 2300 years until the Second Coming of Christ, and the time period begins at 457 BC, as indicated in Daniel 9, and confirmed by historians, then that brings us to… 1843. Events around the world had convinced numerous people that the end was coming. William Miller was just one of dozens, if not hundreds, of people making these predictions. Between 1800 and 1844, at least 65 of those people cited Daniel’s 2300 Days and said Christ would return sometime between 1843 and 1847.

When Miller started telling people about his specific interpretation of that verse in 1831, he was actually one of the last to do so. It’s impossible that he didn’t hear it from other people at that point. Which is why– Um, actually, he came up with it in 1818 and just didn’t tell anyone. When he finally spoke up, people had heard about the Daniel 8 prophecy multiple times already. So the church’s story that the people weren’t ready for his message or that Miller feared being ridiculed is just B.S. But while he certainly wasn’t the first person to come up with that prediction, he was definitely the most successful thanks to Joshua Himes.

At least three churches were spawned by his infamous calculation, all of which argue over what happened on that day. So it would be really awkward if that date turned out to be wrong. That’s William Miller himself admitting that his calculation was wrong almost two years after the fact. It’s important to point out that he never claimed to be a prophet. His prediction came from biblical study, not a divine source. You'll also note that he blames historians, implying that they got the date for Artaxerxes’ decree incorrect and that’s why his prediction failed.

But looking at Daniel 8, there’s really nothing in the prophecy to suggest that rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem was the start date. That’s why the 65 other people using this same prophecy came up with different answers. When Miller said “and the time period begins at 457 BC, as indicated in Daniel 9” he was talking about the 70 weeks prophecy that marked Christ’s First Advent. That wasn’t an original idea either. The first person to think of using Daniel 8 and 9 to reinforce each other was a German Calvinist named Johann Petri in 1768.

He thought the world would end in 1847. The thing is, I don’t need to use a Bible or debunk prophecies to prove to you that Miller’s prediction was wrong. I just need a calculator. And honestly, I don’t even need that. Here’s his math from that movie clip I just showed you. -457 for Artaxerxes’ decree +2300 years from Daniel 8:14 gets you 1843. So Christ will return sometime between March 1843 and March 1844, plus the seven months from SS Snow and you get October 22, 1844. Right? Wrong, actually. The year zero didn’t happen.

So he should have added one more year, which would give him 1844. So, March 1844 to March 1845, plus seven months, gets you October 22, 1845. Even if everything he interpreted about these prophecies was completely, 100% true, this is the date he should have gotten if he did the math correctly. As important as Daniel’s 2300 Days were, he only added 2299 of them. He made the same error when back-calculating the 70 weeks prophecy, so even his confirmation check was wrong. For what it’s worth, the Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t notice and fix that error in their own calculations until 1941.

So if any other church is still pointing to October 22, 1844 as a significant date, they should know that Miller arbitrarily picked a starting point, made an elementary school math error, and later admitted that he was wrong. October 22, 1844 is the most significant date in Seventh-day Adventist theology and their explanation for what happened on that day is complex. Returning to Hiram’s vision on the morning after…

So rather than returning to cleanse the earthly sanctuary like every Millerite had previously believed, Jesus moved from the first apartment of heaven, the Holy, to the second apartment, the Most Holy. Which is where the Ark of the Covenant is kept. The heavenly sanctuary has two apartments because Jewish temples at the time of Christ also had two apartments separated by a veil. Only the high priests were allowed into the Most Holy. Though, according to Matthew 27:51, Jesus’ death was supposed to have torn the veil, but let’s not get into that.

The point is, it’s that second apartment of the heavenly sanctuary that began to be cleansed on October 22. Jewish high priests had a two-phase ministry: the Daily, focused on forgiveness, and the Yearly, focused on cleansing and judgment. So it stands to reason that Jesus’ ministry would also have two phases. According to Hiram’s vision, Jesus had transitioned from the Daily to the Yearly. From forgiving to judging. So, a man named Joseph Bates connected that to the Pre-Advent Investigative Judgment we discussed a while ago.

The thing that was supposed to be happening in the years leading up to the Great Disappointment now began on that day. Jesus is currently performing the second step towards our salvation by reviewing his records in heaven and judging mankind. He began with the very first humans and is working his way forward to the present. Two months after Hiram, in December 1844, Ellen Harmon was in a prayer circle with some friends when she likewise fell into a vision. I was in prayer at the house of Mrs. Haines in Portland. I lost consciousness and I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.

The Advent people were traveling on a path towards a bright and holy city. Ellen Harmon and her twin sister Elizabeth were born on November 26, 1827 in Gorham, Maine, where her family belonged to a Methodist church. When Ellen was 9 years old, a classmate hit her in the face with a rock, causing severe head trauma and putting her into a coma for several weeks. She was left scarred and battled pain and depression for years and never went back to school, only completing 3rd grade. In 1839, her family heard William Miller’s message and converted to Adventism.

Just like tens of thousands of other followers, they waited on October 22 and were left disappointed. Ellen was 17 years old at the time of her first vision and was seen as a rather weak spiritual vessel. But a few months earlier, a man named Hazen Foss had a vision which told him that God would give the gift of prophecy to “the weakest of the weak.” Which obviously meant Ellen. Ellen became somewhat of an overnight sensation and multiple visions followed. Including a prediction that Christ would return in June 1845 and another one for September 1845.

William Miller and Joshua Himes didn’t buy into her visions. The Albany Conference officially stated it had “no confidence in any new messages, visions, dreams, tongues, miracles, extraordinary gifts, [or] revelations.” But others, like Joseph Bates and James White, believed she was a prophet. James White was a pastor in the Christian Connexion and was converted to Millerism by Joshua Himes in 1840. When he first met Ellen Harmon, he described her as an “ugly little creature.” Then on August 30, 1846, James and Ellen White got married.

How romantic. In the two years after the Disappointment, they had been traveling together to various camp meetings and I guess he got over the scars. The fact that she could commune with God probably didn’t hurt either. Ellen White being held up as a prophet by the Seventh-day Adventists is the reason why many other Protestant denominations view them as non-Christians, or even a “cult.” The reason I don’t really think that matters is the substance of her visions. On March 16, 1844, just before the Little Disappointment, a former Seventh-day Baptist named Rachel Oakes convinced her preacher to adopt the Saturday Sabbath rather than observing the Pope’s Day, as they called it.

The Methodist Adventist preacher, Frederick Wheeler, switched to Saturday services and his church became the first Sabbath keeping Adventist congregation. In February 1845, Thomas Preble published “A Tract, Showing That the Seventh Day Should Be Observed as the Sabbath, Instead of the First Day; ‘According to the Commandment’.” That’s not a description of the tract, that’s the actual title. Joseph Bates read Preble’s work and became a Sabbathkeeper. He soon converted James and Ellen White and these three became the founding trio of the Sabbatarian Adventists, who would later become the SDA.

Ellen White had a vision on April 3, 1847, where Jesus showed her the physical Ten Commandments. The tablet with the first four was shining more than the other, and the fourth commandment in particular was shining the brightest. Here it is for you heathens who don’t have it memorized.

Since the Sabbatarian leaders had already accepted that Saturday was the correct day several months prior, Ellen’s vision basically just amounted to a holy rubber stamp. And indeed, modern scholars will say that her visions served as confirmation rather than initiation when it comes to theological disputes.

Without the visions, the Adventists came to their beliefs by studying the Bible, just like all of the other Protestant denominations. The Methodists believe that babies should be baptized, while the Baptists think baptism should wait until the child is old enough to decide for themselves. Both of them cite the Bible as the source for their beliefs. That’s the difference, by the way. But since the Adventists studied the Bible, came to their conclusion, and were then shown the answer via prophetic vision, they’re a “cult.” Really?

Joseph Bates connected Sabbath keeping to the remnant church mentioned in Revelation 14:12. “Here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.” Since the Sabbatarians now observed the fourth commandment, they were the only church truly keeping the commandments of God. The Sabbath became the seal of the prophesied 144,000 that will make up that remnant. If the Pope is the Antichrist and the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, Bates made Sunday keeping the mark of the beast. Which begs the question: why was it ever Sunday in the first place?

Well you see, Judaism observed the Saturday Sabbath, so when Christianity – Damnit, I said I didn’t wanna have to go back this far… When Christianity first began, they also observed Saturday. But when the Roman Empire started persecuting Jews around 70 AD, the Christian Jews wanted to distance themselves from the rest of the faith by going to church on Sunday. Since that was the day Jesus rose from the dead. When Revelation was written in 95 AD, Sunday was already the day Christians were observing. Bates, and modern Adventists, think that Sunday was chosen as the Lord’s Day by the Catholic Church, when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313 AD.

The Pope didn’t come up with it, that was already the case. Sunday was the appropriate day for Christians to worship, only Jewish people observed Saturday. Over the centuries, the various rules of the Jewish Sabbath, like not working, were also applied to the Lord’s Day. By the 1200s, Saint Thomas Aquinas stated that Sunday keeping was part of the New Covenant. A few centuries later, Martin Luther said the fourth commandment only applied to the Jews. During the Protestant Reformation, when people began to read the Bible for themselves, some came to the conclusion that Saturday was the correct day afterall.

The Seventh-day Baptists were founded in 1650 based on that belief. Fast forward 200 years to Rachel Oakes introducing the idea to the Adventists, congregations switching to Saturday, and Joseph Bates convincing the Whites. Contrary to popular understanding and the way I’ve been describing it up until now, the Sabbath is not Saturday, but rather Friday evening to Saturday evening. So naturally, the Sabbatarians had to figure out exactly when evening was. Joseph Bates believed that the Sabbath began and ended at 6pm, while others, like JN Andrews, thought it should be sunset.

This is one of many theological arguments that I consider to be extremely petty. It sounds a lot like trying to figure out whether the color teal should be considered blue or green. Like, is that what we’re arguing about? Does it really matter? Apparently it does, because in November 1855, Ellen had a vision confirming that the Sabbath was in fact sunset to sunset. Ellen herself thought it should be 6pm, so it turned out she was wrong and had her mind changed by the Lord. Why didn’t God just give her the answer from the start? I’ll let James answer that.

Phrases like “gifts of the Spirit” or the “Spirit of prophecy” refer to Ellen White and her visions. We’re going to see all kinds of variations of this phrase, so be on the lookout for this highlight. Whenever you see this, it’s Ellen. Anyway, this is the basis for the modern argument that her visions only serve a confirmatory role. God will not teach his people the truth until they have vigorously studied the Bible and argued amongst themselves for months, if not years. Only then will they be told when the most important day of the week is supposed to start and end.

Now, most Christians will tell you that when Jesus died on the cross, he fulfilled the Old Covenant which included the Ten Commandments. After all, when he died, he said “it is finished.” While people still shouldn’t lie, steal, or murder, things like the Sabbath – or what time it began – can be ignored. But the Sabbatarians and later SDA didn’t believe the atonement was complete on the cross. Jesus is finishing that right now by cleansing the sanctuary in heaven. So we are currently under both the Old and the New Covenants.

Revelation 14:12 says that the faithful remnant consists of those who keep the commandments and their faith in Jesus. You need both. Which is why the SDA often refer to themselves as “the remnant.” Switching to Saturday was a tough sell for a lot of Christians, which was kind of the point. The Sabbatarians didn’t want new converts, they just wanted those who already believed. Citing Matthew 25:10, many of them, including Ellen, believed that October 22, 1844 was the last day anyone could’ve gotten right with God. He was done forgiving and was now judging.

The way was shut. It was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it. The dead being Jesus. Another thing to bring up, any time you see “I was shown” or “I saw,” it’s in reference to a prophetic vision. Something that God deliberately communicated to her through divine revelation. So if you weren’t a Millerite on that day, the Sabbatarians considered you to be lost. Conversely, if you were a follower of Miller and recanted after the Great Disappointment, you could still be saved. Because of that, the Sabbatarians were sometimes known as the People of the Shut Door.

In April 1848, the Sabbatarians held their first conference in Connecticut to come to a consensus on their various beliefs. As usual, whenever there was a disagreement, Ellen would fall into a vision and emerge with the answer.

Whenever Ellen spoke about a vision, she would say that it came from her “accompanying angel,” rather than God or Jesus. But that still counts as “divine inspiration,” we’re not going to split hairs on this one. At this point there were only 200 Sabbatarians, so during the third conference, Ellen had a vision directing her husband to begin a “little paper” to spread the word to the scattered Millerites. Present Truth was first published in July 1849 and allowed James to begin sharing his own theological understandings with the movement.

The first one I want to talk about is the Trinity, which James thought was unscriptural. Only God is eternal, Jesus was created later, and the Holy Spirit is nothing more than an influence – not a person. So at the start, the Sabbatarians were non-trinitarian. They’d eventually revisit that doctrine with the funniest loophole explanation I’ve ever heard. Look forward to that. Citing Joel 2:28, James made his wife part of biblical prophecy.

Basically, it states that gifts of prophecy and visions will continue until the Second Advent, since Ellen White was a ‘daughter who shall prophesy,’ she became a key piece of not just Adventist history, but Adventist theology. James then wove the Sabbatarians themselves into the story of Revelation, particularly when it comes to the Three Angels’ message found in chapter 14. The first angel proclaims that the hour of his judgment has come, which he equated to the original Millerite movement. The second angel declares that Babylon has fallen, which was symbolized by the Adventists being kicked out of their home congregations.

The third angel is the Sabbatarian movement itself, warning people not to accept the mark of the beast, which again, was going to church on Sunday. So, fittingly, the modern SDA also refers to itself as the “Third Angel’s Message.” There are a lot of names to keep up with, I know. The Seventh-day Adventists, the Sabbatarians, the Believers in the Advent Near, the People of the Shut Door, people with the Advent Hope, the Third Angel’s message, the Remnant Church. You’ll be fine as long as you pay attention. By November 1850, there were 2000 Sabbatarians, and Present Truth was combined with one of their other publications and renamed to the Second Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, often just referred to as the “Review and Herald.” The Sabbatarians had been predicting the end of the world since the Great Disappointment, but since their movement was so small, their failures went mostly unnoticed.

Now that they had a decently-sized periodical spreading their message, one date seemed to loom large over the calendars of those with the Advent Hope. Joseph Bates interpreted the seven sprinkles of blood needed to cleanse the altar in Leviticus 16:19 to mean that Christ’s heavenly ministry would last 7 years. Putting the new date for his arrival in October 1851. On July 21, 1851, a few months before Bates’ prediction, Ellen White stated in the Review and Herald that their movement should stop setting dates for Second Advent.

Just to remind you, she’s not talking about something she saw with her eyeballs. God told her this. To this day, the Seventh-day Adventists do not have an end date for Christ’s heavenly ministry, just that he’ll be done soon. You’ll recall that this is also what William Miller and the Advent Christians thought after the Disappointment. These two churches believe the same thing, they just came to their conclusions at different times. Modern Adventists are not told about these failed predictions for the same reason the movie did not depict the Little Disappointment.

Everything has to be about October 22, 1844. It’s the only date the Millerites were looking forward to and it’s the only date Adventists look back on. The movie ignores all of the date setting and portrays “soon” as the dominant belief from the beginning. Maybe we were wrong about what was supposed to happen on October 22. So, Jesus is still coming back soon then. We just don’t know how quickly? Exactly. So if the world wasn’t expected to end any time soon and the door to heaven had been shut years ago, how was the movement supposed to continue?

“Hey, join us in looking forward to Christ’s Second Coming that may or may not happen during your lifetime and if it does, you won’t be getting into heaven because you weren’t part of our club when it was founded.” Not exactly the best recruitment strategy, right? And what about all of the people that Sabbatarians had since married, who were now members of the movement too? What about their children? Are they not getting in? Recognizing these issues, in February 1852, James White reminded people that, while Jesus closed the door to the holy, he opened the door to the most holy, and that should be their focus.

So the door had been at least partially opened for those who were related to Sabbatarian Adventists without having been Millerites themselves. The door is shut, but as long as you know someone on the inside you can still get in. With that, James and Ellen White began to stress the need for Gospel Order, which just meant a formal organization. There were no official clergy, so anyone could call themselves a Sabbatarian minister and preach whatever they wanted. They initially solved that by simply listing their approved ministers in the Review and Herald, but by 1853, they were issuing signed ID cards to them as well.

Before long, James White and Joseph Bates were ordaining their own Sabbatarian ministers. Ellen White was never officially ordained, but she was listed as a minister so she could be paid a salary. To this day, no woman has ever been ordained by the Seventh-day Adventist church. The printing press, publishing house, and most of the other property donated to the movement were legally under James’ name. Which were huge burdens that he wanted to get rid of. I imagine he had to pay taxes on all that. So in the fall of 1860, a general conference of Sabbatarians was called to discuss these issues and perhaps create some sort of church structure.

The problem was that early Millerites argued that any church would become Babylon the moment it was organized, which was why Millerism was never more than a movement. Many Sabbatarians still held onto that belief. So JN Andrews suggested that rather than incorporating as a church, they could form a legal association to hold onto their collective property. This is another recurring theme in Adventist history. They need to do a thing, but their beliefs say they can’t, so someone grabs a thesaurus and calls it “gospel order” or an “association” to get around the fact that they’re totally organizing as a church.

The conference adopted that proposal, but before the Sabbatarians could form an association, they had to come up with a name for it. We cannot incorporate our publishing work until we choose a name. For some reason, modern Adventists make this process sound much more contentious than it actually was. As if choosing a name in itself was Babylon. We have been called the people of the shut door because we believe that the door to the Holy Place was closed, and the door to the Most Holy Place in the Heavenly Sanctuary was opened.

Should that be part of our name? Perhaps we should look to our two pillars of faith - the Sabbath and the Second Coming of Jesus. What do we say to being called the Seventh-day Adventists? Aye! This reminds me of that scene in Lord of the Rings when Elrond was way too proud of himself for coming up with the title for the first movie. You shall be the Fellowship of the Ring. Remember, the Millerites were known as the Second Adventists and the Sabbatarians switched to Saturday because of the Seventh-day Baptists. So calling themselves the Seventh-day Adventists was not that clever or original.

Through Ellen, God approved of that name – big surprise – and they incorporated the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association in the state of Michigan on May 3, 1861. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the Sabbatarians had mostly relocated to Battle Creek, Michigan in 1855 after being convinced by John Preston Kellogg. But you already knew that because you’ve seen my previous videos. While the budding SDA were dipping their toes into Gospel Order, they also realized that they needed a list of core beliefs. Many of the ministers in attendance were against that idea, seeing it as a form of “creedal rigidity.” Since people were still receiving visions and “new light” as they called it, it would be silly to lock themselves into certain beliefs.

So rather than a creed or a list of doctrines, they signed a umm… Church covenant. That’s it, that’s the entire covenant. The only two things they wrote down were that they would keep the commandments and faith in Jesus. Again referencing the remnant church from Revelation. You also probably noticed that they willingly called themselves a church here, because at this point, the writing was on the wall. It was going to happen. Both the covenant and the publishing association were created a few months after the beginning of the American Civil War in April 1861.

As the war picked up steam, rumors were floating around that Lincoln might institute a draft and the Adventists were worried about what that might mean for them if they were ordered to kill. Here’s James White’s opinion on the matter.

So according to James, if you’re drafted and the government puts you on the front lines, the government is the one breaking the sixth commandment not to kill. Not you. Your conscience is clear. There are modern translations of the Bible that have interpreted that commandment as being against murder. But back then, pretty much everyone was using the King James version: Thou shalt not kill. So that was their concern. On the flip side, James stated that if you refuse to do your duty, the penalty could be death, and if you allow that to happen, you are complicit in your own suicide.

Which is also against the law of God. Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I feel like killing someone else is way worse than letting myself be killed for refusing to kill. I don’t know, maybe I’m weird. Lincoln signed the Enrollment Act on March 3, 1863, beginning the Civil War draft for every male citizen between the ages of 20 and 45. Two months later, on May 21, 1863, the Seventh-day Adventists officially incorporated as a church. You see, there was a conscientious objector provision in the Act, but you had to be a member of a recognized church in order to apply for it.

The SDA incorporated just in time to take advantage of that loophole. Conscientious objectors were allowed to take non-combat roles if they chose and the SDA encouraged its members to volunteer for those positions. In fact, they still do. I’m sure at least a few of you have been waiting for me to mention Desmond Doss, the WW2 veteran who earned a Medal of Honor for his legitimately heroic actions at Hacksaw Ridge. They made a movie about him. Though they make it seem like the Army had never encountered an Adventist before and manufactured a bunch of drama about him getting court-martialed for refusing to carry a weapon.

The defendant's rights as a conscientious objector are protected by an Act of Congress and he cannot be compelled to waive those rights. I’m sure his fellow soldiers gave him grief about it, but the military was well acquainted with the concept of conscientious objectors at that point. In any case, in 1863, the Seventh-day Adventists had finally organized as Babylon – I’m sorry – had “instituted Gospel Order” and were legally recognized as a church. They had 3500 members, 30 ministers, and 30 missionaries at the time.

Yes, you heard me correctly. Missionaries. The SDA, then and now, believe they are the Third Angel’s message. It is their job to announce the end of the world and according to Revelation 14:6, Jesus will only return once every person has heard the good news.

So the church sent missionaries to preach the message to the far off nations of… California and the western Plains. Look, they were on a budget, okay? When a Polish convert to Adventism named MB Czechowski asked Ellen for permission to bring his new faith back to Europe in 1858, she denied his request. Who’s going to pay for that? After years of trying, Czechowski gave up and went next door to the Advent Christians and was able to convince them to sponsor his mission to Europe in 1864. While he there, he preached the SDA message in spite of the people who actually footed the bill.

In 1867, he established an Adventist church in Tramelan, Switzerland, the first one outside of North America. The SDA were completely unaware of any of this. So when a Swiss man showed up to their General Conference in June 1869, they were beyond confused. They taught him English, ordained him as a minister, and sent him back a year later. It took them until 1874 to send JN Andrews as their first sanctioned missionary to continue what Czechowski started in Switzerland in a more official capacity. You may be asking yourself how or why the SDA was bothering to convert anyone when the door was shut to anyone without the Advent hope three decades earlier.

And the answer is that no it wasn’t, actually. See? She just thought that the door was closed. That was her opinion. It’s not like God had shown her that Jesus had shut it. Oh whatever, she said that like twenty years ago.

Present truth is just that: the truth for the present. It’s always evolving with newer light. The door was always open. It is known. At this point, Ellen’s visions were no longer serving a confirmatory role, but rather, bringing new light to her followers. On March 14, 1858, she had a very public, 2 hour long vision which she later published as: The Great Controversy between Christ and his Angels and Satan and his Angels. Her eyes were wide open and she appeared to be in rigor mortis. James even invited people on stage to examine her while she was in that state.

Here is an eyewitness account of that event. There are no physical tests in the Bible, I’m not even sure what that was supposed to mean. But, remember this. It becomes important later. The Great Controversy vision was basically the story of how Satan fell, how Adam and Eve were tempted, and how Christ’s plan for salvation was set in motion. Satan was a repentant angel that God refused to grant mercy. He discovered God’s newest creation, man, and got them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Heaven was unprepared for their corruption, but thankfully Jesus came up with a plan to save them using a cross.

None of that was in the Bible, this was all new information. So when it was published in September 1858, the Adventists regarded it as her most important work. Ellen had another very important visit from her accompanying angel on June 5, 1863, which the SDA now refers to as the “Comprehensive Health Vision.”

From that point on, Adventists were encouraged to follow these rules: No alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, spices, or condiments. Snacking and rich desserts were likewise forbidden. All meat was bad, but especially swine. For the longest time, Adventists made up the largest group of vegetarians in the country. In addition to that, they were to drink lots and lots of water, get plenty of sunshine and fresh air, exercise regularly, and bathe daily. If that all sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen my previous videos.

These ideas were not unique and had in fact been floating around for several decades before Ellen’s vision. Ellen White had four children. Henry, Edson, Willie, and John Herbert. John Herbert died after only two months. In January 1863, all three of her remaining children contracted diphtheria, which is a bacterial infection of the nose and throat. It’s preventable with a vaccine and easily treatable with antibiotics. But they didn’t have either of those yet. Back in the day, your only treatment options were snake oils or thoughts and prayers.

Ellen typically relied on the latter, which managed to get them through previous illnesses. But this time, she read an article in the newspaper which advocated for using copious amounts of water to draw out the illness and getting plenty of sunshine and fresh air. She tried that, and it worked. Who wrote that life-saving article? James Caleb Jackson, another character from the previous videos. He was a major player in the vegetarian movement and owned a water cure facility in Dansville, New York named Our Home on the Hillside.

People at the time pointed out that many of her suggestions sounded a lot like those proposed by Jackson and she dismissed them with what I can only describe as the chef’s kiss of convenience excuses.

She’s using third person here, which she does from time to time and the Author of Truth is God. Basically, if this is the way God wants us to live, it makes sense that he would tell more than one person. Clever right? So her kids got diphtheria in January 1863 and she read an article about the water cure and Graham diet written by Jackson. Six months later, she had the Comprehensive Health vision. Now, I need to read an excerpt from one of my sources about what happens next, because it’s simply too funny. This comes from A Brief History of the Seventh-day Adventists by church scholar George R Knight in 2012.

Ellen White's June 5, 1863 vision placed Adventists in the health reform movement. Unfortunately, it was easier to read about health reform than it was to live it. As a result, an overworked and intemperate General Conference president by the name of James White suffered a paralytic stroke on August 16, 1865. His wife decided to take James for treatment to Dr. Jackson's institution in Dansville. So a “president by the name of James White” suffered a stroke and “his wife” took him to Dr. Jackson’s institution. At this point in the book, James White has been discussed at length. He isn’t some new character.

His wife was Ellen White. Ellen White took James White to see James Caleb Jackson. Why would the author want to create a separation between Ellen White and James White’s unnamed wife who took him to see Dr. Jackson? Because six months later, on December 25, 1865, Ellen had a vision telling her she should open her own health institute and George Knight didn’t want you to think that’s where she got the idea. The Western Health Reform Institute opened in Battle Creek, Michigan in September 1866, less than a year after Ellen’s Christmas vision telling her to do so.

Just like Jackson’s Our Home, it focused on the water cure and fed its patients the Graham diet, which was basically just bread and water. The Institute wasn’t all that popular and struggled for years. Since Adventists thought the end was near, they didn’t really see much point in sending their kids to school. The church had tried to set up schools and failed. They had one in upstate New York before the move to Battle Creek where they opened another one. Both closed after only a few years. There just weren’t enough students.

But in 1867, there was enough interest to try again. The Whites sent their youngest two children and they were joined by both John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg – the cereal brothers. ♫ John Harvey Kellogg. William K Kellogg. Edson White. William White. Okay so, in the context of this movie, that was supposed to be an epic name drop of people that Adventists know will become important later, just not in this movie. Kind of like what they did with JFK at the end of Oppenheimer. But there are a few things about that scene that don’t make sense and I need to complain about it to someone.

Right off the bat, this wasn’t the first school. They opened one in New York in 1853, then one in Battle Creek in 1856, and then the one I just told you about in 1867, which closed in 1870. Much like a modern charter school, they just couldn’t seem to keep them going for longer than a few years at a time. In June 1872, the General Conference decided to fully support the creation of a fourth school, which was more or less permanent and spawned the entire SDA education system. Today, the Adventists operate over 9000 elementary and secondary schools, 50 vocational training centers, and 110 universities and colleges around the world.

So that’s the one they decided to feature in the movie. Fine, I guess. But then they took that 1867 student body and put it into that 1872 classroom. Which really screws with the timeline. In reality, John Harvey was 20 years old in 1872 and attending Robert Trall’s Hygeio-therapeutic College. He’s seated next to his younger brother William, who was 12 years old and appears to have been taking human growth hormone. Edson White is the most out of place. He was 23, married, and attending the same medical school as John Harvey.

This is one of the last scenes in Tell the World. It ends 4 minutes later with them sending JN Andrews to be the first missionary in Europe. They’re sending Brother Andrews to Switzerland! [Cheers] He will spread the good news of Christ’s soon return to Europe. And beyond that, we must tell the world. Roll credits! No literally, roll the credits. [Tape winding] The movie clocks in at 2 hours and 34 minutes and covers the Adventist story from William Miller to Ellen White in excruciating detail. A few of the reviews on IMDB specifically mention how ungodly long it is.

Breaking in with a recent development. I filmed all of this back in March and April. On April 17, 2024, the SDA released a new movie telling the story of William Miller and Ellen White titled The Hopeful. This movie is only an hour and thirty minutes and– wait what?! The Advent people were traveling on a path toward a bright and holy city. Yeah, so the director took Tell the World, cut out an hour of the stuff people complained about on the internet, and then released that as a completely different movie 8 years later.

I didn't even know you could do that. Despite the movie ending when their health, education, and missionary projects were set up, Ellen White continued to have visions and lead the church for another 40 years. We’ve barely crossed the halfway point in her life. Or this video. Be on the look-out for the director's cut of this video in 2034, I guess. After the school system was established, Ellen wrote that one of its many purposes was to create men of character.

Men like John Harvey Kellogg, who graduated from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York and was appointed as the general administrator of the Western Health Reform Institute in October 1876. He immediately changed the name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium and got up to all kinds of crazy hijinks involving enemas and corn flakes. But you’ve already heard that story. Ellen White was a prolific writer, much of her work was compiled into series like Spiritual Gifts, with four volumes, and Testimonies for the Church, which had five volumes by the 1880s, but would eventually have nine.

All of Ellen’s writings are collectively known as the Testimonies. Some people break them down into smaller categories, but for our purposes, they’re all Testimonies. The church held that both the Bible and the Testimonies were divinely inspired, but were not infallible. The writers were describing what God had shown them, they weren’t copying down his exact words.

The Bible being written by inspired men and not the word of God himself kind of calls all of those prophecies into question, but we’ll leave that alone. Ellen also described her own work as inspired.

The important part here is that Ellen’s words are her own. God showed her things and then she described them. She wasn’t directly speaking for God, even though many of her followers privately believed that to be the case. On August 6, 1881, James White died from a fever at the Sanitarium. Joseph Bates had also died there back before Kellogg took over. That left Ellen White as the last living member of the founding trio. Less than a year later, she bought into her followers’ beliefs and declared that everything she had ever written, including personal correspondence, was infallible.

She doesn’t use the word infallible, but that’s clearly what she’s communicating. Her Testimonies are not her ideas, they are God’s. So denying her work is basically blasphemy. It’s safe to say that at this point, Ellen White was in full control of the Adventist message and had placed herself in the divine hierarchy. Older leaders within the movement, like Uriah Smith, still held the Bible above the Testimonies and expressed frustration that placing too much emphasis on Ellen’s divine work might backfire.

This whole thing may have started because of Miller’s calculation, but since nothing visibly happened on that day, the only evidence Adventists have for their beliefs are the testimonies of Ellen White. It all hinges on her. If she didn’t have those visions, then the heavenly sanctuary isn’t being cleansed, and their entire theology falls apart. The 1888 General Conference in Minneapolis was basically the SDA’s Council of Nicaea; major changes were made to their beliefs. Two newer ministers, AT Jones and EJ Waggoner argued that instead of focusing on keeping the commandments, Adventists should emphasize their faith in Jesus.

Remember, both are essential to the remnant church; they’re just arguing which one should be more important. The old guard felt that since every Christian denomination proclaimed faith in Jesus, the only thing that set the Adventists apart as the true church is their keeping of the commandments. Christians in the audience will recognize this as the salvation by faith versus salvation by works argument, with following the commandments being the “works.” Salvation by faith is sprinkled throughout the Bible. Ephesians 2:8 states “for by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” You are saved by faith and not by your own doing.

So if all you need is faith, which Adventists referred to as “cheap grace,” then what’s the point of all those rules? Why do you need works at all? Most Christian denominations go with the answer that you need both. It’s sometimes referred to as salvation by faith plus works. Which can also be found in the Bible.

The Baptists say that if you have faith, those good deeds will just come naturally to you. Works are a result of salvation, not a means to achieve it. Hard work and following the rules don’t get you into Heaven. But the people chosen to get into heaven just so happen to work hard and follow the rules. That was the position Jones and Waggoner were advocating for and Uriah Smith was against. The debate was so heated that they repeatedly asked Ellen to have a vision to find the answer. The two sides had thoroughly discussed the topic from every angle, so they were calling on Ellen to be the divine tiebreaker as she had been many times before.

But she refused. Before the conference began, Ellen was shown that Jones and Waggoner would bring a special message to the church. So her mind was already made up before they even started talking. The General Conference chose to adopt the new, salvation by faith plus works message, which caused several of the older leaders to resign from the church in protest. Uriah Smith, for whatever reason, chose to stay. There were several other theological arguments which he felt needed to be hashed out. For example, there are two parts to salvation: Justification, which is bestowed upon anyone who accepts Christ, and Sanctification, which is the result of being judged by your works.

We know that both happen as part of the process, but which one occurs first? Or, do they happen at the same time? As you can see, I have a 64-box of Crayola crayons here. I never quite got over the trauma of showing up to elementary school with a box of only 16. So now that I’m an adult, I can spend my own money on things that truly matter to me. Look, it even has a sharpener! Forget the gold play button. This is how I know I’ve made it. I mean look at this thing, it has so many colors. Reds, oranges, greens, blues, and all the rest.

[Sped up music] Now, I was hoping to set this up as a visual demonstration of where teal belongs in the green versus blue debate. Like, once I had them all lined out it would be obvious where it is. The color of the paper would be a dead giveaway, right? Well, it turns out that this mega, every-color-you-could-ever-need box doesn’t have teal anymore. They discontinued it back in 2003. How do you discontinue a color?! I kinda wish I knew that before I bought this, but whatever, it was worth it just to make up for my childhood.

But I can’t just leave this up to a mystery. This matters to me. So I went on eBay and used an embarrassing amount of my adult money to buy a 20-year old discontinued crayon. It arrived in this special box and– Oh! Would you look at that! Teal blue! According to Crayola, the ultimate authority on all things color, teal is blue. It is known. Look, I don’t care about justification, sanctification, or which one happens first, okay? We have significantly more important things to figure out, like the Trinity. Once again, Uriah Smith held firm to previous Adventist beliefs: God is the only eternal being.

Jesus Christ is the first and most important creation. And the Holy Spirit is an influence sent by God to comfort us until the Second Coming. That understanding is known as the Godhead. Only God is eternal, and he created the other two. But Waggoner believed that while Christ did come from the Father, he was created so far back in time as to be functionally co-eternal with God. God is infinity years old and Christ is infinity minus one. If you’ve taken any sort of advanced math class, you know that infinity minus one is still just infinity.

It sounds like it should be different, but it isn’t. This is the loophole-trinity I was talking about earlier. Funny, right? It’s the Godhead, but so long ago that it’s indistinguishable from the Trinity: where God went through cellular mitosis to become three distinct beings, all of which are still the original. As AT Jones put it:

If you ask an Adventist today, they will tell you that they believe in the Trinity. They may not even know about the weird loophole-godhead-trinity that their church came up with over a hundred years ago. The personhood of the Holy Spirit, the third part of the Trinity, was also hotly debated. As we just heard, AT Jones believed it to be a separate being and Uriah Smith thought it was just a divine influence. EJ Waggoner preached that the Holy Spirit was in everything, from grass to water to sunlight. This is an interesting take and we’ll come back to it in a bit.

But in the end, Ellen White came around to Jones’ view: the Holy Spirit is a person, the third co-equal, co-eternal being of the Trinity. So here’s a related divine-personhood question for you: when Christ was born, not created spiritually, but born here on Earth, was he human? Did he possess our sinful nature or was he perfect? Pretty much the entire New Testament is dedicated to telling the story of how Jesus overcame temptation. He is presented as a divine example of how you’re supposed to live your life. So if he was born perfect and he didn’t fight the human tendency towards sin, then what’s the point of the book?

Ellen White believed that Christ was physically human, but spiritually divine. Therefore, he did not possess the same human passions that we do. Again, she was trying to have it both ways. AT Jones, on the other hand, argued that Christ was born fully human. He had to conquer his fleshly desires and sinful nature to open a consecrated way for his followers to achieve salvation. The majority of Adventists adopted his view. That said, the human nature of Christ and salvation by faith versus works are still hotly debated among Adventists today.

Along with another very important question: Was Ellen White actually a prophet? In November 1891, Ellen White traveled to Australia to preach the combined faith plus works message and begin production on her biopic. That was the pay off. While she was there, she did a lot of writing on the loving nature of Christ, rather than focusing on doctrinal matters like she had before.

Before she left, she expressed concern over the lack of outreach to black people in the South. So her elder son James Edson White decided to take on the challenge in 1893. White Southerners weren’t too happy with that idea and constantly threatened him. So he built a ship called the Morning Star and used that as a floating chapel as he traveled down the Mississippi. Three years later, the Adventists established the Oakwood Industrial School in Huntsville, Alabama, which later became Oakwood College, and then Oakwood University.

It is now a recognized HBCU. Every congregation that they organized remained separate from any nearby white congregations. Because this was turn-of-the-century America, of course they were segregated. Ellen White stayed in Australia for ten years and when she returned in 1901, she convinced the General Conference to adopt a new organizational structure for the church. At the top, you obviously have the General Conference, or GC. At the time this was adopted, they met every other year, but today, it’s every five years.

Between these quinquennial meetings, control rests in the hands of the Executive Committee, who are elected by the conference itself and likewise choose a President. The GC is made up of directors of various church organizations and representatives from each of the 13 Divisions. These Divisions are why women still can’t be ordained as ministers. The General Conference has brought the issue to a vote many times over the last century. While North America and Europe typically vote in favor of allowing them, other areas of the world keep rejecting it.

A few local conferences have ordained women, but they’re going against the position of the church and aren’t officially recognized. Divisions are made up of smaller Union conferences. The North American Division has 8 of them. The Southern Union Conference, the Atlantic Union Conference, the Pacific, the Mid-American, you get the idea. Union conferences are further divided into Local conferences that are generally the size of states. The Mid-American Union has six of them. Minnesota gets their own conference. While the Dakotas have to share one.

Same goes for these other pairs. But that’s only five, where’s the sixth? It’s the separate "colored" conference established in 1952 which covers this entire region, known as the Central States Conference. The GC authorized the creation of black conferences in 1944, and 80 years later, the Seventh-day Adventist church continues to practice segregation in the United States. The religion as a whole is quite racially diverse, they don’t have any doctrines regarding the mark of Cain or anything like that. It’s just an issue here in America, because of course it is.

Anyway, within those local conferences, you have the actual churches where Adventists go every Saturday. The Executive Committee was meant to replace the previous, solitary position of President. So rather than one or two men being able to control the direction of the church, it was now twenty-five. And at least a quarter of them were in the pocket of John Harvey Kellogg. When the Battle Creek Sanitarium burned down in February 1902, Ellen White refused to foot the bill for reconstruction. She felt Kellogg was asking for too much and wanted to bring the facility under direct church ownership.

Kellogg vowed that he would never let that happen – the Sanitarium was his baby. So he went outside of the church and secured loans from local businessmen. To help fund reconstruction, he also published a book titled The Living Temple where he expressed similar views as Waggoner regarding the Holy Spirit.

Now, there’s obviously some sort of life force in trees and flowers, whether you want to call that a soul, or a divine presence, or a biological process is up to you, I guess. But Kellogg said it was the Holy Spirit and Ellen White read that as pantheism. The idea that the universe is God, he is present in everyone and everything. And you know, if everything is divine, then nothing is. Curiously, she didn’t seem to have this reaction when Waggoner was preaching these same ideas in the 1890s. She only ever accused Kellogg of being a pantheist.

Ellen White already held a grudge against Kellogg for not being able to save her overworked and intemperate husband. But with all this drama concerning pantheism and ownership of the Sanitarium, their relationship really began to sour. She wrote numerous testimonies denouncing Kellogg by name and saying things like, “the Lord is not very well pleased with Battle Creek.” Battle Creek had become the Rome or Salt Lake City of the SDA. The Sanitarium was staffed almost entirely by Adventists and the attached nursing school prepared them for medical missionary work.

When Kellogg dissociated the Battle Creek Sanitarium from the church, they lost a major source of revenue, employment, and publicity. Everyone knew the Adventists were behind corn flakes. In order to continue arousing others to their sacred duty to attend to their health, the SDA were forced to open their own sanitariums and medical schools. Today, they operate over 400 hospitals and clinics around the world. Despite that as-yet-unknown future success, the Executive Committee voted to disfellowship John Harvey Kellogg in November 1907, along with his brother Will Keith.

John couldn’t have cared less, not because he wasn’t religious, but because he didn’t believe Ellen White was a prophet. And apparently never did. Hey so, remember that time James White invited all those people to examine his wife while she was in a vision? Turns out, several doctors took him up on the offer, including John Harvey’s older brother, Merritt Gardner Kellogg. This is a letter Merritt wrote to John over a year before he was disfellowshipped.

I’m not sure if he administered the physical tests given in the bible, but his diagnosis tracks with the eyewitness testimony we heard earlier. She faints. The Australian SDA movie only portrayed her first vision that way. During every other revelation, she is depicted as semi-lucid, able to speak, and loft heavy bibles over her head. This is the inspired testimony of God. Merritt’s theory wasn’t new, back in July 1869, our old friend James Caleb Jackson stated that Ellen’s visions were the result of a diseased condition of the mind or nervous system.

What evidence would lead him to that conclusion? At the age of 9, Ellen White was hit in the head by a large rock which put her into a coma for several weeks. Did you forget that already? It was like the first thing you learned about her. In addition to that, Ellen White’s father was a hat maker and while growing up, she often worked in his factory… Where she was exposed to mercury, which was used to create felt and causes insanity in even small doses. This substance caused so many hat makers to lose their minds that it became a cliche.

Where do you think the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland came from? Once John Harvey was kicked out of the church, the cracks in Ellen’s visions began to show. In October 1907, he gave an extensive interview with some pretty sharp criticisms.

Now, the back half of that quote is quite the charge. He claimed that people were going to Ellen with their ideas and that she took them, claimed they were from God, and published them as testimonies. You have no idea how right he was. It’s time to reveal to you that this has been a green screen the whole time, and actually, this is a video about plagiarism! [Intro music] This video is brought to you by my supporters on Patreon. I went without a traditional sponsor on this video because I wanted to see what I could make if I didn’t have a deadline.

I was really able to focus on the details in this one, so hopefully it was worth it. Someone suggested that I finish the video and then get a sponsor for it. But after 8 months, I thought it would be weird to say that some company made this video possible when the truth is that it was my patrons. They’re the ones who paid for the voice actors, stock footage, and discontinued crayons, in addition to paying my rent and buying my food. This video would not have been possible without their support. So thank you, every single one of you.

Patrons and YouTube members get early access to videos, they saw this one a month before everyone else. They also get access to the Discord, which is a pretty fun time. You can also get access by subscribing to me over on Twitch, where I’ve started doing coworking or study-with-me streams. You could have watched me write, film, and edit this very video. All of these people keep the channel afloat between videos and allow me to focus on quality rather than quantity. If you’d like to support the channel as well, head over to patreon.com/knowingbetter.

Alright now back to the plagiarism. ♫ Recall that Hazen Foss had been told in a vision that God would grant the gift of prophecy to “the weakest of the weak.” Foss received numerous visions throughout 1844. In September, a month before the Great Disappointment, he saw Jesus leading the Advent people to the City of God. Ellen White knew who Hazen Foss was, she’d heard him speak about his visions. But after the Disappointment, he decided he no longer wanted to be God’s spokesperson and lost the gift. When Ellen just so happened to have the exact same vision that December, he urged her to accept her position as a prophet.

She was obviously the weakest of the weak, as was foretold to him. So, right away, Ellen’s first vision from her accompanying angel was a rerun of someone else’s vision, which she’d already heard about. It’s either that, or she had a seizure which caused her brain to recall a memory of Foss talking about his vision. I guess we’ll never really know for sure. Fast forward to March 14, 1858, when Ellen White had her Great Controversy vision. Did any of you feel like you had already heard that story about the conflict between Jesus and his angels and Satan and his angels?

Because I sure did. And so did JN Andrews, who immediately asked her if she had ever read Milton’s Paradise Lost, to which she said, “No.” Sure enough, when the Great Controversy was published six months later, it contained details that weren’t present in her original vision and could’ve only come from one source. In 1957, Elizabeth Burgeson published a comparative study of the two works.

Burgeson might not know the answer to that question, but we do. I mean, it’s either that or plagiarism, right? Again, who can say? But taking someone’s 200 year old ideas to retell them in your own voice is a pretty weak form of plagiarism. Milton’s work was definitely in public domain at that point. It’s not like she was taking extracts from contemporary authors, changing the words around, and passing them off as a vision. That would be pretty hard to defend.

As Kellogg pointed out, Ellen White took at least 14 pages from James A Wylie’s History of the Waldenses and adapted them for her book on the Great Controversy. She even included his historical inaccuracies, just like a college student trying to hide that they used Wikipedia. Here’s Willie C White describing how that could’ve happened.

The authorities in question there were Uriah Smith and JN Andrews, who both had their work incorporated into the 1884 edition of the Great Controversy. Entire pages were used without any alteration or attribution. This wasn’t limited to ministers, she’d even steal from her copyists. Here’s a letter from Fanny Bolton to Merritt Gardner Kellogg.

In 1909, after John Harvey gave his interview and other authors began to notice their work being copied, Ellen White told her copyists that from now on, any works she quotes or borrows from should be footnoted. The only book to ever receive that treatment was the 1911 edition of the Great Controversy, which contained 400 cited references to 88 different authors. Those were just the ones they remembered to add, a later analysis revealed just how much they missed.

Church leaders were well aware that this problem wasn’t isolated to just the Great Controversy. It was pervasive throughout all of the Testimonies. One of them was William W. Prescott, who had his work borrowed for one of Ellen’s books in 1901. In April 1915, he wrote a letter to Willie expressing concern over the fact that his plagiarized words were being passed off as the word of God.

Prescott was the head of education for the SDA church. He knew she was plagiarizing. Her son Willie knew. Kellogg knew. It’s safe to say that all of the church leadership were well aware of what was happening, but were happy to go on letting people think she was channeling God. Here’s a quote from the President of the General Conference just a few years earlier, describing her as infallible.

So when Ellen White died on July 15, 1915 at the age of 87, the church had to decide once and for all where to place her in the divine hierarchy. Was she a prophet and “the only infallible interpreter of the Bible?” Was she divinely inspired? Was she just another minister? A plagiarist? Or was all of this the result of a diseased condition of the mind? The 1919 Bible Conference was called specifically to answer questions like that. Though I doubt they seriously considered that last option. Prescott again expressed his concern about ministers and members of the church venerating Ellen’s work to the level that they had, and what that meant in the broader scope of their faith.

Arthur G Daniells, the President of the General Conference, argued that the Spirit of Prophecy wasn’t inspired at all, and gave some pretty compelling evidence as to why. This is him saying that watching Ellen write and repeatedly edit one of her divine visions caused him to doubt her gift. But seeing the plagiarism for himself sealed the deal.

Even the President of the GC was fooled by Ellen into thinking her work was original. Which remains the case for most Adventists, even today. They don’t know that the Testimonies sent to Ellen by God were actually someone else’s words. At the end of the 1919 Bible Conference, the status quo was maintained. Ellen White’s Testimonies remained as divinely inspired, if not infallible, and Adventists continued to hold them in higher esteem than the Bible. The Executive Committee knew that if lay members heard about any of this, they would lose their faith.

So the notes and minutes from that conference were sealed. We would have had no idea that there was any dissent at the time if not for the research of Walter Rea. Rea was a Seventh-day Adventist who began making compilations of Ellen White’s writings in the late 1940s. Eventually, he started to notice similarities with other authors’ work. He wrote to the General Conference to express his concerns, and they put him to the task of looking for any other examples of plagiarism. Presumably expecting him not to find any.

But he super did. In January 1980, he presented his research to the Glendale Committee, which was created specifically for this reason. Here’s a quote from one of the attendees. The historical fact he was pointing out was exactly what the 1919 Bible Conference feared. When someone discovers the true nature of her work, they become disillusioned and leave. It’d be one thing if it was a regular minister. But when it’s the infallible prophet of your church, it’s somewhat more difficult to justify. An editorial appeared in the Adventist Review a few months later informing the general membership of the situation in the most watered down way possible.

Her “use of sources?” She copied whole pages! It was obvious to anyone who looked that she did much more than just use a source. Fred Veltman didn’t need two years, he published his findings in April 1981.

Remember what I said about phrases like “I saw” and “I was shown?” It was meant to communicate that Ellen received that information through a vision. Walter Rea discovered that Ellen White would take someone else’s work, add “I was shown” to the beginning of the sentence, and then pass that off as a vision from God.

Rea’s evidence was so potentially damaging to the faith that the leadership did the dumbest thing you could imagine. Seriously, take a moment and think of the worst possible move they could make here. [Elevator music] [Ding] That’s right, they swept the whole thing under the rug and dismissed him from the church. We’ve all seen this story before, you know what happens next. In 1982, Walter Rea went public and released The White Lie. Because, obviously. I’m not sure what else the church expected. This is an hbomberguy-level exposé of Ellen White’s plagiarism with line-by-line comparisons.

And he did all of this before you could just use Google and control-F your way through the process. Now, I know what you want. You want to see some examples. And that’s fair, there are literally hundreds to choose from. In fact, I’ve already shown you a couple. Remember this quote about why the first schools were established?

While that should sound familiar, that wasn’t the version I played you earlier. That was the original, from the March 1869 issue of Southern Home Journal. This is from Ellen’s 1903 book titled Education.

This is the level of plagiarism we’re talking about. “Men who are not for sale” became “men who will not be bought or sold.” She kept the same order and everything, but turned it into one long run-on sentence by changing all the periods into commas. Here’s the introduction chapter of John Harris’ The Great Teacher, published in 1836. Can you find Ellen’s 1901 quote about people needing to learn the whole story of Jesus? [Elevator music] [Ding] Time’s up.

Ellen White took his short list of essay titles and turned it into a sentence about what teachers should discuss in the classroom. But I’ll do you one even better. So far we’ve only talked about stuff that was meant for public consumption. While doing missionary work in Europe with her son Willie, she wrote this diary entry on May 15, 1887.

Really weird that I would get a guy to read out her diary, unless… Yes, even her diary entries are plagiarized! That was from James A Wylie’s History of Protestantism. The same guy she stole from for the Great Controversy. What happened to “the words I employ in describing what I have seen are my own?” This is a journal, not a vision. What do you even gain by doing that?

She believed that her personal diaries were a living letter to all in regard to her faith. They were divinely inspired works of God, without one heretical sentence, to be preserved for future generations. She had convinced herself and her followers that she was a prophet whose life would be studied for generations. And she was obviously correct in that regard. Perhaps because she was a cataleptic with a 3rd grade education, she felt she had to plagiarize others’ words in order to live up to that reputation. Or perhaps Walter Rea, who researched this much more than I did, was correct with his conclusion that Ellen White was nothing more than a fraud.

I still accidentally said Ellen herself knew well enough. There’s something about the lighting in this room, the way I printed, uh, this on a piece of paper, and just the size of the text, or something, it’s making my eyes scan it wrong. I don’t know what’s going on. What’s wrong with me?! Again, most Adventists, then and now, didn’t know about any of this. Following the 1919 Bible Conference, they continued to believe Ellen White was an infallible prophet, or at the very least, divinely inspired. That became a problem for the SDA in the decades that followed.

Like many other Third Great Awakening religions, they wanted to be recognized as a mainstream Protestant Church, rather than one of the “four major cults.” To do that, they needed to ditch some of their more controversial beliefs. The first major change came in 1929, when the Bible was promoted from just being the work of inspired men to being the infallible, inerrant word of God.

Just a reminder, this went against Ellen White’s view of the Bible. She described the writers as God’s penmen, not his pen. Next, they swapped out the loophole-godhead-trinity for just the plain old Trinity, which many Adventists were none too happy about.

They were going to need to do more than that to get into the American Protestant club. So in 1957, the General Conference published Questions on Doctrine to appeal to the mainstream by performatively throwing Ellen under the bus.

You better believe Adventists were furious about this too. For decades they had been doing the opposite. Despite these protests, Questions on Doctrine had the desired effect. Adventism became more acceptable to the mainstream. This is what one prominent minister said in the Christian magazine, Eternity.

That didn’t necessarily settle the issue, there are still many Christian denominations that view the SDA as a cult, but of the four, they’re definitely the most widely accepted. The majority of Adventists saw Questions on Doctrine for what it was, a PR document that said what was needed to appease the general public. They disregarded it and continued to hold Ellen in very high regard. In fact, if you look at it today, Adventist theology and doctrine really hasn’t changed much from when Ellen died in 1915. The things they argued about back then are the same things they argue about now.

Thankfully, in 2005, the church published their 28 Fundamental Beliefs. Not everyone fully agrees with them, but they are the official position of the church. We’re going to run through each one, some you’ve heard, some you haven’t, and some are complete 180s from previous beliefs. Starting with the first one, the Holy Scriptures, which reversed their 1957 position on the Bible. The Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, are the written word of God, given by divine inspiration. The inspired authors spoke and wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

So it’s just divinely inspired. The writers were channeling God’s ideas, but not his exact words. Just like the infallible Ellen White said. Two is the Trinity. God is a unity of three co-eternal persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. I know we’ve talked this one to death, and it sounds like the issue is settled. But there is something worth pointing out. This list was originally called the 27 Fundamental Beliefs when it came out in 1980. The General Conference published Seventh-day Adventists Believe in 1988, detailing each of these beliefs.

In this church publication, Number 2 was called “the Godhead” and had pretty much the exact same description as the modern number 2. So… Do they really believe in the trinity or are they just trying to slip through that loophole again? Number 3 is about God the Father, nothing special or unexpected going on there. Number 4 talks about Jesus and reverts back to Ellen’s view that Jesus was both divine and human. Forever truly God, he became also truly human. He lived and experienced temptation as a human being, but perfectly exemplified the righteousness and love of God.

Next is the Holy Spirit, who is a person, not an influence, and an equal member of the Trinity and/or Godhead. He’s on Earth right now providing comfort and spiritual gifts. Six has to do with Creation. Adventists believe God created everything in six literal days and rested on the seventh. I’d show you a clip of them saying that, but the SDA video on this one leaves that fact out entirely. It just talks about how we were given dominion over the Earth. Officially, the church does not endorse Young Earth Creationism, which is the idea that the Earth is only 6000 years old.

But unofficially, Ellen White did, so many Adventists do as well. George McCready Price became the father of modern creation science when he came up with his Grand Canyon flood theory. He then advised the anti-evolution side in the Scopes Monkey Trial. He was a Seventh-day Adventist. I rest my case. [Gavel slams] Number 7 has to do with the creation of man. The SDA believe that when Adam and Eve ate the apple, they doomed humanity with a fallen nature that we all still carry. They don’t believe in “original sin,” in the same way Catholics do.

You’re not born with sin, it’s just a sinful nature. Though, instead of having to atone for sins you committed before your birth, they do think you can continue accumulating sins after your death. So if you create a violent extremist group and then die, you are still responsible for all the hateful things that group does after you’re gone. The 8th Fundamental Belief is titled the Great Controversy. No points for guessing what this one is about. They believe that the events described in Paradise Lost, and rephrased by Ellen White, literally happened.

Satan rebelled and was cast down, all of that. The next one is just the second half of Paradise Lost. To save man from sin, Christ came up with his plan for the crucifixion and resurrection. When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, he knew it was Christian fan-fiction. He was making up a story. He never once claimed that it was real or that he saw it in a vision. To be fair, plenty of other Christians believe things from the works of Milton and Dante, often without knowing their source. I made a few well-costumed videos about that.

The sexy, and even sympathetic depiction of Lucifer started with Milton’s Paradise Lost. Satan is the protagonist of this story. The next two say basically the same thing. Number 10, through Christ, anyone can overcome temptation and experience salvation. Number 11, through the Holy Spirit, you can become more like Christ. Eleven is the one they added in 2005 to bring the total up to 28 and I really don’t understand why. If you can find a significant difference between these two, please let me know. The next one has to do with the Church itself.

Again, churches are always female, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church in particular is the “Bride of Christ.” Number 13 is a bit tricky, because it has two wildly different interpretations. Most Christians will read this thinking it’s talking about them, that they will be part of the faithful remnant when the time comes. But the Adventists believe that time came in 1844, We are already in the last days, so they are that remnant. They keep the commandments and the faith, and herald the Second Advent. Everyone else is corrupt and part of Babylon.

The 14th Amendment says that everyone is equal under the law. The 14th Fundamental Belief says that everyone is equal in the Body of Christ. That’s just a fun, post-2005 coincidence. Back when this was just the 27 Fundamental Beliefs, it was the 13th. Fifteen talks about baptism. Adventists believe it should be done by full immersion and not until you’re old enough to understand the eternal commitment you’ll be making. However, they don’t have a set “age of accountability.” You can’t make an eternal commitment to a student loan until you’re 18, but, life-long religious vows?

Whenever you’re ready. The next one is titled “The Lord’s Supper,” and before I explain it, I want to give you a little bit of background. I’ve been touching on Adventism for a while now, and they were a pretty big part of my previous project. But I started working on this video specifically back in October 2023. Once I had read 2 or 3 of the eventual 8 books I used for this topic, I did what I normally do. I put out a call on Twitter asking if any of my followers were Adventists and could share their experiences with me.

Quite a few reached out and I appreciated that. But I very quickly noticed a pattern in the way they talk about their faith. They seem to be under the impression that Adventists are especially unique. Now, every denomination believes that to some extent. But you have no idea how many times someone explained one of their “weird beliefs” to me, only for it to be something completely normal. For example, here’s what one person said. I asked for permission before reading this. “The weirdest thing we do is Passover. It's not like the Jewish Passover.

It's more like a ‘Last Supper’ ceremony, with foot washing and the eating of unleavened bread and drinking of ‘not real’ wine.” “Oh, my Mom is fact-checking me. We call it communion and it’s apparently four times a year.” Really? Tell me more about this “communion” thing. The Lord’s Supper, or Communion, is often misunderstood because of the language Christians use to speak about it. Eating and drinking Jesus’ body and blood? That may sound strange to people who are unfamiliar with the Lord’s Supper. But hopefully this video can begin to clarify what this central Christian practice actually means.

It’s just Communion, with the bread and the wine and all that. The same communion that basically every Christian denomination ever partakes in. Some churches do it once a year, others do it once a month. For the Adventists, it’s every three months. I’m sorry, but it’s not that weird. And that’s a big part of the reason why I don’t think this religion belongs in the “cult” category. The Seventh-day Adventists don’t have any beliefs or practices that are unique to them. Every Christian, by definition, believes that Christ will return and the world will end at some point.

Adventists just think that we got one step closer in 1844. They don’t have their own version of the Bible. They don’t believe Jesus came to America. And they don’t believe illness is a figment of your imagination. Everything they believe can be found in another Protestant Christian denomination. The only thing special about them is their specific combination of these relatively tame beliefs. Not even number 18, the Gift of Prophecy, is unique.

A female prophet whose writings help to explain the Bible and guide the church? Where have I heard that one before? Mary Baker Eddy is the prophet of the Christian Scientists. Just like Ellen White, her work is still held in very high regard, often above the Bible. Here is the current President of the General Conference, Ted Wilson.

The Fundamental Beliefs playlist on the SDA Church’s official Youtube channel only has 27 videos in it. This was made post-2005, so number 11 is the topic you’d expect – Growing in Christ. The Gift of Prophecy is the one that’s missing. The main thing that other Christians cite as to why the Adventists are a cult is conspicuously absent. It kind of seems like they’re trying to pull another Questions on Doctrine by obfuscating the fact that they believe Ellen White to be a prophet. The 19th Fundamental Belief states that the Old Covenant and that the Commandments are still in effect.

Their video on this one – which is the 18th video in the playlist thanks to the previous one being omitted, throwing off the entire numbering system – emphasizes faith over works. The works being following God’s laws. Nowhere does God state that following these laws would result in redemption, that is, being saved. The law does not save us, because we are all sinners. We need God’s grace, not his law, to be saved. I know I said I didn’t care about this earlier, but there are two parts to salvation. Justification, which comes from faith in Christ, and sanctification, which is the result of being deemed worthy.

Going back to the law example, when your spiritual trial date comes up, you won’t be judged on your faith. You need to have faith to get in the courtroom, then you are judged on how well you kept the commandments. I guess what I’m trying to say is that justification comes first. And teal is blue. You need faith plus works, even if their video doesn’t communicate that. Otherwise, the next Fundamental Belief, about the Sabbath and how you’re not supposed to work from sunset to sunset, wouldn’t be on the list. Up until 2022, the SDA Church Manual stated that you’re not even supposed to think on that day.

Stewardship is the 21st and discusses the 10% tithe due by every member of the church, which began back in 1876. That’s the number specified in Leviticus 27:32, so a lot of churches use that same 10%. Twenty-two is a big one, it’s basically the Comprehensive Health vision. No alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. A vegetarian diet, and plenty of exercise and rest. They even have suggestions on what to wear.

So, Adventists are encouraged to abstain from wearing jewelry, even wedding rings are controversial. Ellen White was personally against them, saying “Not one penny should be spent for a circlet of gold to testify that we are married.” Speaking of, according to Fundamental Belief 23, marriage is between one man and one woman. Just in case you were wondering what side of that argument they’re on. Genesis introduces marriage between a man, a woman, and God. It is a spiritual union of three. Whoa, whoa. If that’s the case, Jesus needs to be doing the dishes more often.

Putting another L in the marriage column, they also seem to be against no-fault divorces. I love that the advice given to people in terrible relationships is to just pray about it. Twenty-four talks about soul sleep and that Christ began the investigative judgment in the heavenly sanctuary on October 22, 1844. This is arguably the most important Fundamental Belief, it’s what makes Adventists Adventists. If you don’t believe this one, you’re just a vegetarian Christian who goes to church on Saturday. To this day, ministers claim William Miller was correct about the date, but not the predicted event.

They almost never mention that he later recanted. The last four Fundamental Beliefs are basically just a summary of the book of Revelation, you get the idea just from the titles: The Second Coming of Christ. Death and Resurrection. The Millennium and the End of Sin. And The New Earth. Many biblical scholars today disregard Revelation. It was written decades after Jesus and was pretty obviously about the downfall of Rome. The beast was meant to be the emperor Nero. More importantly, it was talking about Rome the civilization, not the church.

The Catholic Church didn’t exist yet. Despite that, it’s Adventists’ particular focus on Revelation and biblical prophecy that makes them so susceptible to conspiracy theories. I know it’s been a while, but that was the thesis for this entire video, not the plagiarism thing. That was just a fun side quest. Let’s get back on track. Fifteen years after Ellen White died, Victor Houteff published a book titled The Shepherd’s Rod: The 144,000 of Revelation 7. Victor believed that all of the 144,000 chosen by God to go to Heaven would be Adventists.

But in 1930, there were 300,000 members of the church. So clearly, not all of them would be getting in. He stated that the SDA was too comfortable in its knowledge of the truth, causing them to become spiritually lax. Even Ellen White warned against having too much confidence in their beliefs.

Victor’s new light was that Adventists shouldn’t be content with just announcing Christ’s Second Coming to the world. They should be doing more. Echoing Charles Fitch in 1843, Houteff was calling for the SDA to consolidate and seclude itself from the rest of the world so it could devote itself to preparing for Christ’s return, rather than just talk about it.

Like William Miller, he was not trying to create a separate church. He just wanted to reform the SDA from within. And just like the Millerite movement leading up to 1844, Houteff’s followers would interrupt services or debate Adventists in church parking lots to spread his ideas. Predictably, many of them were dismissed for causing too much trouble. Victor needed a place for his followers, then known as the Shepherd’s Rod, to gather and wait for the Second Coming. So in 1935, he bought 200 acres of land 7 miles outside of Waco, Texas and named it Mount Carmel.

He believed that this would fulfill the prophetic “gathering of Israel” mentioned in Revelation. Because at this point, the country of Israel did not exist and the Bible doesn’t really specify a location for that event. So it might as well be Texas. Two years later, Victor, who was 52 years old, married Florence Hermanson, who was 17. Gross. She immediately became his primary assistant and second in command. Remember how the SDA officially organized specifically to get out of the Civil War draft? Well, in 1942, Victor Houteff incorporated his group as the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists to stay out of World War 2.

King David’s throne is where Jesus will sit once he returns to Earth and since his Houteff’s group were preparing for his arrival, they were the Davidian SDA. He hoped that by including the Seventh-day Adventists in their name, the Davidian church would gain some added legitimacy with the government. And it worked. Victor Houteff died on February 5, 1955 at the age of 69 – Nice. The Davidians were expecting Houteff to lead them to the new kingdom himself. So when he died and Florence took over the group, she needed to account for that to stay in power.

On November 9, 1955, Florence announced that Victor would be resurrected and Christ would return, on April 22, 1959. Exactly 1260 days from the date of that notice. I didn’t bring this up earlier because it’s just kind of extra, but let’s go back to Miller’s 1843 chart. Recall that 1798 was an important year for the Millerites. When the French deposed the Pope, they ended the 1260 days prophecy from Revelation 11.

So you take 42 months, with 30 days in a month, and you get 1260 days. Since day means year, it is known, these 1260 years are supposed to represent the rise of the little horn from Daniel 7, which is the Catholic Church. This 1260-year period was known as the Great Apostasy and lasted from 538 AD, when the Vandals and Ostrogoths were defeated in Rome, to 1798 when the Pope was captured. Why 538 AD and not when the Papacy actually began? Because then the math wouldn’t work. So Florence took that same 1260 years prophecy, reverted it back to days, and set a new date for the end of the world.

At the same time, Florence announced that they needed to redouble their recruitment efforts by using radio targeted towards Seventh-day Adventists. Like the early Sabbatarians, they didn’t want any new converts. They wanted people who already believed, but maybe needed some guidance. To raise funds for that project, the Davidians auctioned off their Mount Carmel property and traded it for 941 acres on Double Ee Ranch Road, naming the new location “New Mount Carmel.” Their radio show, the 11th Hour Call, was broadcast on ABC and told the faithful to come to Waco to await the Second Coming of Jesus.

About a thousand non-Davidian Adventists showed up. You already know I hate saying this, but here we go. April 22, 1959 came and went and nothing happened. Shortly afterwards, the Seventh-day Adventists hosted a sort of reintegration event for the Davidians and any other followers who were disappointed by the events in Waco. In the end, only 50 Davidians remained. Florence admitted she was wrong and by 1962, she had disbanded the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists and sold the property. New Mount Carmel was purchased by two former Davidians named Ben and Lois Roden who had split off to form the Branch Davidians, named after Zechariah 6:12

The Branch Davidians were trying to turn New Mount Carmel into the temple of the Lord, so that’s fitting. So here we are, the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists. A breakaway of a breakaway of a faction of a religious movement started by William Miller in the 1840s. Now that Israel was a literal place on the map, Roden believed that they needed to go there to establish a community for the 144,000. They bought property in Jerusalem and sent Lois to get things started. Waco was no longer the gathering place, it was a staging area to prepare Adventists for their eventual trip to Israel.

The group quietly chugged along until 1977, when Lois returned from Israel and announced that she’d had vision proving that the Holy Spirit was female. Making God both masculine and feminine, which some considered to be blasphemy. But her husband supported her claim and declared her to be a prophet. Much like what that overworked and intemperate General Conference president by the name of James White did with his wife. When he died the next year, she automatically became the next leader. Just like Ellen. Only in Lois’ case, her son George challenged her position and demanded the group vote on it.

Lois won, but he didn’t accept the results and continued to harass the group until she took out a restraining order forbidding him from the property. While the group was legally incorporated as the General Association of the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists, Lois began calling it the “Living Waters” from Revelation 7.

As this was happening, Vernon Howell was attending an SDA church in Tyler, Texas. He frequently interrupted services with questions about modern prophets, wondering why God wouldn’t keep sending messages. The Adventists recognize the visions of plenty of people before Ellen White. The whole thing was started by Hiram Edson’s vision the day after the Great Disappointment. But once Ellen got the gift, that was it. Nobody else ever became a prophet. That’s when Vernon was told about this group in Waco and a woman named Lois who was having visions.

In the summer of 1981, he drove down to New Mount Carmel, which was no longer being referred to as “new,” and during his first visit, he decided to stay. Despite the awkwardness, he became Lois’ constant companion. She hired him as her personal driver and they often had private Bible study sessions, which many of her other followers rightly assumed involved sex. He was trying to have a child with the prophetess in order to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah 8:3. Which would have been something considering she was 67 years old.

He was only 24. I know, right? Gross. What’s with this group and having sex with their considerably younger proteges? Hearing about this, George returned to Mount Carmel, took control, and forced Vernon and his two dozen followers to leave the compound. In 1984, Vernon, now 25, married Rachel Jones, who was 14. What? That’s legal in Texas if you have their parents’ permission. In fact, it still is. Gross. The next year, he and Rachel traveled to Israel so their child could be born in the Holy Land. While there, Vernon had a divine experience and they returned to Texas early, where he announced his revelation.

He declared that he was King Cyrus, the only gentile messiah mentioned in the Bible. As such, he took the name David Koresh, a combination of King David and the Hebrew version of Cyrus: Koresh. He was also the Lamb from Revelation, the one destined to open the Seven Seals and bring about the apocalypse. At this point, it’s like we’re in a lame version of Lord of the Rings. I half expected Koresh to declare himself the prince who was promised, the bearer of the one ring, who will bring balance to the force. Unlike William Miller and Ellen White, Koresh was not a reluctant prophet or messenger.

He was more than happy to make himself the main character. The Lamb is normally interpreted as Jesus. But in Isaiah 53, it’s mentioned that the Lamb “shall see his seed.” Jesus had no kids, but David was about to. So clearly, he’s the Lamb. In Revelation, the Lamb is attacked by Babylon and all of his followers die. The Branch Davidians, much like the Adventists themselves, believe that the US government is also Babylon – or at the very least, working with or being controlled by Babylon. Back in 1888, around the same time that Thanksgiving and Christmas became national holidays, a Sunday law was introduced in the US Senate.

Meaning it would be illegal to work on that day. The stated purpose was to keep America Christian by protecting the sacredness of the Lord’s Day. Several states already had similar laws on the books. Our old pal Willie C White was arrested for operating a printing press on Sunday in California, of all places. The Adventists interpreted the national bill as the formation of the beast in Revelation and even though it didn’t pass, the perception of the government as Babylon never really went away. In the summer of 1985, Koresh went to the quinquennial General Conference of the SDA in New Orleans to recruit new members by singing Christian Rock songs outside.

It didn’t work out so well. Then he went to Loma Linda, California, which became an Adventist hot spot after their break with John Harvey Kellogg. When the Battle Creek Sanitarium went secular, the church opened the College of Medical Evangelists as one of its replacement nursing schools. In 1961, the name was changed to Loma Linda University. Today, Loma Linda, California is one of only a few “Blue Zones” around the world, meaning that an unusual amount of people live to be 100. Likely due to their vegetarian diet and temperance practices.

Koresh was targeting a somewhat younger demographic and found comparatively more success recruiting among the university crowd than he did outside of the GC. Lois Roden died in 1986, leaving her son George in physical control of Mount Carmel and Koresh in spiritual command of the group. That same year, Koresh introduced New Light to the Davidians, saying that God instructed him to take an additional wife. And then another. And then another. Until finally he said that all women in the group, married or not, were now his.

According to Revelation 4:4, he was supposed to have 24 children. Wives would still perform household duties for their legal husband, but would only have sex with Koresh. All men in the group were to remain celebate. Some of the members obviously left, but those who stayed competed with each other to bear his children. Why not?! After all, he was the prophet and the Lamb, the one who would open the Seven Seals, enter the Source, and free humanity from the Matrix. In November 1987, Koresh and his followers tried to sneak back into Mount Carmel, a shootout with George Roden commenced, and all of them were arrested.

David Koresh and his group were acquitted of their charges. But George was sentenced to 6 months for violating the restraining order banning him from the property. With George out of the way, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians were in full control of Mount Carmel and they decided to enter the firearms business. In 1992, there was a rumor floating around that the federal government was about to ban assault weapons. So they began to buy up as many semi-automatic rifles as they could to convert them to fully-automatic before that happened.

Converting weapons was not illegal at the time. But doing so without filing the proper paperwork and paying taxes was. They also began to bulk order grenade shells and black powder. Two things that are legal to own separately, but once you put them together, you’re going to have a bad time. Now, I don’t know how many of you pay attention to this sort of thing, but it’s usually the same person delivering your mail every day. It’s the same Fedex or UPS driver. They have assigned neighborhoods. Well, the UPS driver for Waco, Texas started to notice a pattern in what he was delivering to Double Ee Ranch Road.

You have to tell UPS what’s in the box when you ship something. So these were all labeled “black powder,” “upper receivers,” and “ammunition magazines.” You don’t need a vision from God to figure out what’s happening at that address. The UPS driver alerted the Sheriff, who in turn alerted the ATF. According to Koresh’s interpretation of Revelation, Babylon was supposed to attack them and they would all die. Koresh would then be resurrected at the head of Heaven’s army.

The Branch Davidians were not only willing, but expecting to die to fulfill biblical prophecy. Religious cults committing suicide was nothing new. Jonestown happened just 15 years earlier. To add to the situation, the ATF had just botched a raid in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, wrongfully killing Randy Weaver’s wife and son. So they really needed a win here. On February 28, 1993, 76 ATF Agents stuffed into cattle trailers drove onto the Mount Carmel property to execute a search warrant. I don’t really know what happened after that, I was pretty young back then, but I assume everything went to plan.

It was only after the raid that the Branch Davidians learned the truth about Koresh, which was that his entire persona was plagiarized! Oh, you thought we were done with this plotline. Well, no! It’s plagiarism all the way down. In October 1869 an alchemist named Cyrus Teed claimed he turned lead into gold. He then had a vision from a female Holy Spirit, telling him he was the Lamb from Revelation and would open the Seven Seals. He was also a new iteration of King Cyrus, the only gentile messiah mentioned in the Bible, and as such, he took the name Koresh.

Cyrus Teed likewise claimed that the end was near and believed in the Hollow Earth theory. So I like to imagine that he was running around warning people that Godzilla was coming. By the 1890s, his followers, known as the Koreshans, had mostly settled in Estero, Florida and had begun a publication called The Flaming Sword to spread Cyrus’ teachings. There were enough of them that they were able to sway local elections and grant huge tax breaks to themselves to build their compound, which made citizens furious. Over the years, Koresh was involved in several sex scandals.

And I mean, if you’re gonna steal some of it, you might as well steal all of it, right Vernon? In 1906, the people of Estero and Fort Myers attacked Cyrus Teed and he died of his injuries two years later. Much like the next Koresh 85 years later, he had fulfilled the prophecy of the Lamb. He was attacked by Babylon, died, and nothing happened. In the most Florida ending ever, his tomb washed out to sea during a hurricane in 1921. Despite all that, in 1931, his followers compiled his work and published it as Koreshanity: The New Age Religion.

They were a pretty small group, so only a few copies were made. For whatever reason, a new edition of Koreshanity was issued in 1971. It still wasn’t a very popular book, but it managed to find its way onto a few library shelves. Including the Waco-McLennan County Library, which acquired their copy in November 1972. It’s impossible to prove if Lois Roden or Vernon Howell ever checked out the book, but c’mon. We all know they did. ♫ Alright, so let’s tie it all back to my original thesis: that the SDA are responsible for a lot of the anti-government conspiracy theories that we’re currently dealing with.

The original Adventist movement began when William Miller took biblical prophecy and secular historical events, did the math, and made a calculation for when the Second Advent of Christ would occur. When it didn’t, the movement fractured into a number of different churches, most of which kept making future predictions. The Seventh-day Adventists decided that Miller was right about the date of the event, but not about what was supposed to happen on that day. Instead of Christ returning to Earth, he entered the second apartment of the heavenly sanctuary.

They believed it was their duty to announce the Second Coming, or as they put it, “tell the world.” According to Revelation, once everyone had heard the message, he would return. Victor Houteff didn’t think that was enough. Instead of just spreading the good news, they should be laying the necessary foundations for the events of Revelation to happen. They needed to establish a place for the 144,000 to gather, fulfilling another prophecy and ushering in the Second Advent. Once Israel was established as a literal place, the Branch Davidians felt that the only remaining step was the big battle.

There’s a natural, and perhaps even inevitable, progression from expecting a thing to happen, to announcing it, to preparing for it, to bringing it about. If a religion preaches that someone used certain biblical signs and prophecies to predict future events, and that those events actually happened, people are going to keep making predictions. And when you trace the history from William Miller to Ellen White to David Koresh, it becomes clear that the Adventists are uniquely susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. This isn’t just my opinion, this is a well known problem among the SDA community.

Every person I talked to on Twitter mentioned it. This is from Spectrum, an Adventist magazine not owned by the church: You can see that cognitive dissonance from the very beginning. William Miller said that Christ would return on October 22, 1844 and he didn’t. Rather than accept that they were wrong, they decided that something else happened. Ellen White herself went on to make numerous predictions after the Great Disappointment that didn’t come true. Not that they happened spiritually in the heavenly basement or whatever. They just didn’t happen.

Instead of disregarding her beliefs, she came up with the alternate explanation that everyone had to hear Christ’s message before he would return. Which would effectively take forever, so there are no more dates. That didn’t stop others in the church from trying to decode scripture themselves and splitting off to form their own movements. Which is how we ended up with David Koresh and Waco. Waco was 9/11 before 9/11. “Who started the fire?” was the 1990s version of “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.” Right wing militias exploded in popularity after that, primarily fueled by the idea that the government was somehow infringing on the Branch Davidians’ Second Amendment rights.

Timothy McVeigh was hoping to start a revolution by blowing up the Oklahoma City Federal Building on April 19, 1995. Exactly 2 years after the final day of the Waco siege, which he had personally driven out to witness. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban took effect on September 13, 1994 by the way. Since Congress didn’t renew it in 2004, like everybody at the time wanted… Well, here we are. The ban kept those militias relatively small. They didn’t see a second surge in recruitment until Obama became president and Sandy Hook happened.

Alex Jones got his start by spreading Waco conspiracy theories and he went bankrupt by spreading Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. He was involved throughout all of this. As much as I wish we could dismiss him as a crank, a lot of his insane beliefs have worked their way into the mainstream. They’re everyone’s problem now. While not an Adventist, Alex Jones has been warning his audience about the Mark of the Beast for decades. Here’s that verse from Revelation.

This has been attributed to all sorts of things from Social Security numbers to barcodes. Honestly, if the government wants you to have it, Alex Jones has probably called it the Mark of the Beast. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but the latest iteration is the COVID vaccine. Many Adventists equated not being able to buy and sell things without the mark to not being able to go to movie theaters without your proof of vaccination card. And if they believed in anti-vaxx conspiracies, they’d often find themselves wrapped up in QAnon.

Which is itself a religious doomsday cult. For the uninitiated: Someone named Q claimed to work in the government with a Q-level security clearance and was supposedly posting their inside information on the anonymous website, 8chan. The Q-drops, as they were called, were basically gibberish. Often just lists of names or questions. It was then left to the Anons to decode them and figure out their hidden meanings. Mass arrests would take place on this day. JFK Jr would reveal he’s actually alive on that day. And Trump was supposed to be restored to office on another.

The government had been corrupted, politicians and celebrities alike were members of a secret blood-drinking cabal, and their savior would return to set things right. Sound familiar? The message of Revelation is not about how evil forces run the world. But rather, about how God won’t allow evil forces to infect the world forever. Jesus will come back to make all things right. As ridiculous as conspiracies like QAnon or even Flat Earth sound on the surface, when you peel back the layers, you discover that at their core, they’re based on religion.

There’s been a recent resurgence in belief of a flat Earth. Television documentaries, internet posts, and entire websites are devoted to the idea. Some people claim that the Bible teaches us that the Earth is flat. You can’t make it five minutes into a Flat Earth video without a reference to Scripture. They think the Earth is flat because Genesis 1:7 says that on the second day, God created the firmament. You had your five major religions including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Each of these groups had their own version of what is known in Genesis as the firmament, or the flat circular world enclosed by a solid dome-like barrier from where the creator, or creators, looked on.

You can show them all the evidence you want. They can even design their own experiments and be proven wrong. But they still believe the Earth is flat, because underneath it all, the Bible tells them it is. That essentially makes them unreachable. Because in order to convince them the Earth is round, you also have to convince them that the Bible is wrong. Good luck with that. And that core belief isn’t just at the heart of fringe conspiracies that cause people to storm the Capitol. You can see its influence across multiple political issues.

I use this example a lot because it will never not be shocking to me. 49% of Americans attributed the severity of recent natural disasters to “What the bible calls ‘the end times.’” In their view, a climate catastrophe is supposed to happen in order for Christ to return. So, any attempts to stop it or slow it are actually preventing the Second Advent. I think this is the mindset of a decent chunk of people who say that “yes, climate change is happening, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” Because it’s supposed to happen.

Switching to another pressing current event, many American Protestants support the state of Israel specifically because they think it fulfills the gathering prophecy in Revelation. The same one that the Branch Davidians did. In addition to that, the Bible lists out which countries will attack Israel during the final battle. Each one takes turns being the big bad. During the Cold War, it was Russia. Today? It’s Iran. It’s scary to think that our foreign policy is based, at least in part, on a religious prophecy. As I said in the beginning, Adventists are not the only ones who believe in this stuff.

But they’ve been around long enough and have so many members that I think they are indicative of the wider issue. Evangelical Christians also make up a large portion of the End Times crowd. The only difference between them and the SDA is that they go to church on Sunday. And the Evangelical movement is just that, a movement, not a church. Though if history has taught us anything, that’s how it starts. When the Sabbatarians emerged from the Great Disappointment, there were only 50 of them. Today, there are 22 million Seventh-day Adventists worldwide.

The most famous of which is probably... Ben Carson. Do you even remember that guy? I do want to reiterate that while I dug into them pretty hard during this video, the Adventists are probably the most harmless and least culty religion I’ve discussed so far. Despite claiming to be a prophet, Ellen’s visions were pretty mundane. Aside from believing that Jesus is cleansing the heavenly sanctuary, pretty much every Adventist doctrine was taken from somewhere else. Even going to church on Saturday was a Baptist idea. The Seventh-day Baptists still exist.

The Adventists may have a more conspiratorial bent than other denominations, but I’m not sure they deserve to be lumped in with the rest of the American Christian Cult Canon™. They may have given us David Koresh and Waco, but they also gave us Kelloggs and breakfast cereal. So it all evens out in the end, right? I’ll actually have to give that one some thought. But at least now, you know better. ♫ There, I finished it. Now you can stop pestering me. I don’t know why you put it on a VHS tape, but it was basically unusable.

I had to redo the whole thing. Put up the green screen, get out the old costume, everything. Hey, you there? I said, I finished, and you can stop pestering me! [TV Static] [Tense music] You see, I found this ancient artifact that lets– wait, you believe me? Well at least make a better connection. Could you stop messing with stuff? I’m trying to make a video here. Hah, did you see when this thing was made? [Tense music] Nope. Nope. Not gonna do it. [Portal music] I’d like to give a shout out to my newest golden fork patrons Jaden, Misti, Space Kitty, Antti, Cassandra, Snow Doggo, and Ivan.

If you’d like to add your name to this list of approved ministers, head on over to patreon.com/knowingbetter. Or for a one time donation paypal.me/knowingbetter. Don’t forget to bless that subscribe button, or the join button if you’ve already been saved. Check out the merch at knowingbetter.tv/. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and join us on the subreddit. [Outro music]

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Paranoid Protestants | Seventh-day Adventists"?

George Storrs (Referenced doctrinal contributor (conditional immortality)).

What is discussed in "Paranoid Protestants | Seventh-day Adventists"?

In order: 0:00 Seventh-day Adventists, William Miller, Branch Davidians, Joshua V Himes; 15:00 Great Disappointment, Little Disappointment, George Storrs, Signs of the Times; 30:00 William Miller, Brian Bates, Ellen White, Rachel Oakes; 45:00 Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, Brian Bates, James White; 1:00:00 Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, William Miller, James White; 1:15:00 Ellen White, Brian Bates, James White, John Harvey Kellogg; 1:30:00 Ellen White, The Great Controversy, John Harvey Kellogg, Great Disappointment; 1:45:00 Ellen White, The Great Controversy; 2:00:00 Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, The Great Controversy; 2:15:00 Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, William Miller, Branch Davidians; 2:30:00 Branch Davidians, William Miller, Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists; 2:45:00 Seventh-day Adventists, Great Disappointment, Branch Davidians.

What is mentioned in this Knowing Better episode?

24 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventists, William Miller, Great Disappointment, James White, Brian Bates. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Paranoid Protestants | Seventh-day Adventists"?

The episode runs 2 h 51 min; the transcript is about 23,154 words in 252 timestamped sections.

More from Knowing Better

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.