A farmer-preacher barnstorms the Northeast proclaiming that Christ is coming in 1844. Tens of thousands of excitable people latch onto the message and charge toward the appointed time, divesting themselves of earthly concerns and checking out of this world for the next. An amused public at turns mocks the gullible and warily eyes the clouds. The day finally arrives. Having abandoned farm and job, community and nation, the Millerites pass the day in white ascension robes on hillsides peering skyward. Jesus does not come on October 22. The Millerites are greatly disappointed, the public jeers, and Millerism dissolves in disgrace.

This is the narrative that Kevin Burton challenges in Apocalyptic Abolitionism. Instead of the thousands of Americans who believed in the imminent return of Christ – Millerites are referred to as “Adventists” throughout the book – withdrawing from their nation and the world, he makes the case that Adventists vigorously worked to found and form the movement to end slavery, taking abolitionism to its peak in the 1830s and 1840s, while supercharging other reform causes such as women’s rights. To show this, Burton employs hundreds of untapped primary sources from numerous archives, weaving a fresh narrative populated by actors known and unknown. In a veritable whirlwind of people, places, societies, organizations, and isms, Burton demonstrates that Adventists were movers and shakers in the abolitionist movement, and that their belief in an impending apocalypse largely drove them toward bringing justice on earth in this life, not away from it.

Apocalyptic Abolitionism highlights the antislavery and reform activism of numerous Adventists, including Sojourner Truth, Gerrit Smith, William Still, Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, and Samuel Ringgold Ward. Besides this, Burton reveals how top Adventist leaders, William Miller, Joshua Himes, and Charles Fitch, were engaged abolitionists at the height of the Millerite movement. We learn that Adventists persuaded William Lloyd Garrison to become an immediate abolitionist; founded and operated antislavery societies; published abolitionist papers; formed and strengthened abolitionist networks; launched significant initiatives to overthrow slavery; hosted pivotal abolitionist gatherings; participated in the founding of the antislavery Liberty Party; and even ran for president and vice president on an antislavery platform.

Kevin Burton has a wider project than just to show that Adventists were integral to the abolitionist movement, however. Millerite Adventists were premillennialists, meaning that they held that Christ would return to earth before the millennium, while most Americans in the early nineteenth century maintained that Christ would come after the 1000 years or indefinite period of peace. Historians and other scholars have falsely claimed, Burton asserts, that premillennialists were “conservative, pessimistic, and apolitical,” seen in the notion that the Millerites were disconnected from the world, while postmillennialists were “progressively liberal, optimistic, and political.” This “fiction still pervasively haunts the historiography,” inspiring influential schools and theories. Most haunting for Burton is the Great Reversal narrative, which posits that evangelical Christianity “reversed” from postmillennialism to premillennialism in the early twentieth century, and this theological shift caused evangelicals to become less concerned and active in improving society and to remedy its injustices (2–5).

Using the 1830s and 1840s as a test case, Kevin Burton contests the Great Reversal narrative in several ways. First, he shows that the largest premillennialist movement in American history, the Millerite Adventists, were invested in the social justice movements of their day, slavery being the most urgent. Next, Burton provides perhaps the longest available discussion of “comeouterism,” in which most abolitionists came out of their churches and religious bodies because they either supported or failed to condemn slavery. Their abandonment is one among many proofs that postmillennial evangelicals were largely not antislavery or abolitionist. Indeed, Burton contends, “conservatism has been a permanent trait of the evangelical majority throughout its history” (198). The religious communion that the Millerites created was of course not perfect, but was radically progressive for its time, with interracial gatherings, women preachers, black ministers, and abolitionist leaders.

One of the strengths of Apocalyptic Abolitionism is its extensive engagement with scholarship. At the beginning of the book, Kevin Burton states that he will challenge the “evangelical consensus historians” and their Great Reversal narrative, no small feat, but one that he is joining a bevy of young(ish) historians in challenging. He thus puts himself in opposition to towering figures such as George Marsden, David Moberg, Nathan Hatch, and Mark Noll. Yet it is evident that Burton wants to build, not destroy, as he uses and cites many dozens of scholars in the volume. This work is a departure, but it uses consensus to reach the place of departure.

Besides joining a number of recent works by Anthea Butler, Matthew Avery Sutton, Kathryn Gin Lum, Lerone A. Martin, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Robert P. Jones in challenging narratives of virtuous white American evangelicalism, Apocalyptic Abolitionism makes another key scholarly intervention. It develops an understudied category of abolitionism, premillennial apocalyptic abolitionism, that was a force at the peak of the abolitionist movement. Premillennialists “encouraged sociopolitical engagement precisely because the world was about to burn,” Burton explains. “Time was short, and society needed to quickly reform so that people were prepared to meet their God” (197). Burton’s rigorous examination of apocalyptic abolitionists should result in a renewed effort for scholars to examine religious and theological motivations and commitments for engaging in social activism, while challenging ingrained and simplistic assumptions.