Is William Miller a Freemason

Answer 1

David L. Rowe, God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World (Eerdmans: 2008) gives extensive documentation of Miller's Masonic connections, noting that he attended a meeting as a youth on March 4, 1798; joined the Morning Star Lodge in Poultney and eventually rose to the rank of Grand Master. David L. Rowe, God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World(Eerdmans: 2008), p27.

Miller resigned his Masonic membership in 1831, stating that he did so to "avoid fellowship with any practice that may be incompatible with the word of God among masons".[20] By 1833 he wrote in a letter to his friends to treat Freemasonry "as they would any other evil".[21] ...William Miller letter dated September 10, 1831 quoted in David L. Rowe, God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World (Eerdmans: 2008), p94.

Unfortunately, Mr. Rowe's scholarship is extremely dubious and some of what he says about Miller's Masonic membership is certainly untrue. The idea that William Miller might have attended a Masonic meeting at the age of 16 is impossible, as only members may attend meetings and members must be 21 years old to join. A William Miller was Master or Warden of Morning Star Lodge #27 (as it then was) in Poultney in the years 1809 and 1810; this may have been the same man. However, he was never the Grand Master. A large number of Masons felt obliged to end their Masonic involvement due to massive public pressure in New York State and Vermont in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Resigning one's Masonic membership was an act of political correctness.