180 years ago this month, New York-based Baptist preacher William Miller’s predicted date of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ failed to occur. This “Great Disappointment” left thousands to ponder their faith in the months and years afterward and resulted in various new American religious sects, including what would become the Jehovah’s Witnesses and various Adventist movements.​

Years earlier, Miller became fascinated with the biblical book of Daniel and convinced the text contained key prophetic insights into his own time. Starting from the estimated end of the Israelites’ exile in Babylon in 457 BCE, Miller added 2,300 years — an interpretation of Daniel 8:14 — and arrived at the year 1843. Miller initially asserted that Jesus would return at some point in between March 1843 and March 1844, but he eventually provided a date of October 22, 1843, following internal pressure for specification.​

​64 years ago this month, Democrat presidential candidate John F. Kennedy spoke before some 300 members of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, an influential Protestant group. The address, given at Rice Hotel in Houston, Texas, aimed at easing Protestant voters’ fears that electing a Catholic president may pose a threat to religious freedom, as a Catholic president, it was thought, may answer to the Pope first and the American people second.

Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, had been counseled by advisers to reject the group’s invitation to speak, fearing political disaster. The United States had never before had a Catholic president, and prejudice against the church and its adherents ran deep in the strands of American history, especially in the Bible Belt, where Catholics had been frequent targets of the Ku Klux Klan.