BY JOHN NASH

The Anabaptist movement began in the early 16^th Century in a civilised, bottom-up, grassroots move away from the authoritarian, top-down, Catholic Church. The Baptists believed in religious freedom and the separation of church and state – “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”, another way of saying that a government has no right to monopolise or interfere with religious belief. Get ‘orf my land.

Like many other sombre and quietist ascetics and Puritans, they believed we should all be solemnly concentrating on God, so, in addition to avoiding distraction by government, we shouldn’t be doing any of those other nasty, evil earthly distractions like hierarchies, warfare, weapons, drinking, smoking, meat-eating or playing hide-the-sausage, either – strangely enough, a rejection of all of the things that blokes tend to enjoy in life.

And so it came to pass that the Millerites were a US religious movement who followed the teaching of a rather po-faced Baptist preacher and former captain in the US War of 1812, one William Miller. Around 1816, affected by the uncivilised violence of warfare, perhaps, he became particularly focussed on the Bible’s prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation, especially the bit in Daniel 8:14, “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed”- also known as the 2,300-day prophecy. 

Like today’s climate-apocalyptics, it anticipated the End of Days. Using the prophesy, the Rev. Bill worked out that the Second Coming of Christ would be on March 21, 1844.

Many believers sold their possessions and waited expectantly on Ascension Rock near his farm that day. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for the sinners and fornicators amongst us), the day passed without incident, as did a re-calculation for October 22, 1844.  Unsurprisingly, this became known as “The Great Disappointment” and also, unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of piss-taking by a heretical public who unkindly jeered that it was more rupture than rapture.

In the resulting confusion, the Millerites broke up but, undaunted, a large group continued on as the Seventh-day Adventist Church, officially founded in Battle Creek, Michigan on May 21, 1863. They sustained their holy emphasis on diet (because the animals in the Garden of Eden were Kosher vegetarians, we must be, too) and, of course, if you must have sex, you filthy beast, it must be exceptionally hetero, probably with your eyes closed, strictly only within marriage and definitely not with yourself – a horrifyingly destructive and damnable “solitary vice”. You get the picture, I’m sure.

Soon after the church started, one of its founders, Ellen G. White, wrote a book, “An Appeal to Mothers, the Great Cause of the Physical, Mental, and Moral Ruin of many of the Children of our time” still available online if you are worried about the grave dangers involved in pulling your parsnip, so to speak.

^{Ellen G. White}

Ellen’s book warned mothers to watch out for masturbation among their children, since tugging your todger would lead to “headaches, dizziness, depression, irritability, insomnia, fatigue, guilt, absent-mindedness, forgetfulness, bodily pain, sullenness, rebelliousness and jealousy, imbecility, dwarfed forms, crippled limbs, misshapen heads, and deformity of every description.”

In girls, “who possess less vital force than men”, the consequences of tickling their fancy would be just as grave, “seen in various diseases, such as catarrh, dropsy, headache, loss of memory and sight, great weakness in the back and loins, affections of the spine, [and] the head often decays inwardly. Cancerous humor,” she went on, “which would lay dormant in the system in their life-time, is inflamed and commences its eating, destructive work. The mind is often utterly ruined and insanity takes place.” Those who indulge in ménage à moi, she wrote, “are just as surely self-murderers as though they pointed a pistol to their own breast, and destroyed their life instantly.”  Crikey… and I thought you only went slowly blind…

You can imagine that, in the general ambience of eating only Edenic plants and the idea that just about any human pleasures are a ticket to Hell, these frightening warnings about spanking the monkey would make a powerful impression on any young mind. 

Especially on that of the 12-year-old printer’s devil who had to typeset this terrifying book, word for word, ready for printing.  His name was young John Harvey Kellogg, and he went on to found the great Battle Creek Sanatorium, where he developed cereal based foods to cool the body and quell the passions and an industry that would one day turn religious dogma into lifestyle and span the globe. 

^{John Harvey Kellogg}

Today the breakfast cereal market is worth US$105 billion globally, still as fundamentalist as ever – for rather more commercial than religious reasons, perhaps –  and pumping millions of $$$ of self-interest into nutty ascetic vegetarian industries and the persistent, finger-wagging “peace and love” and anti-meat “ethical” research that in turn supports the vilification of factory farming, meat eating and animal hunting today.

Enjoy your cornflakes.

There’s much history in every bowl.