Since St. Francis Xavier landed in Kagoshima in 1549, the Jesuit mission in Japan had achieved an amazing number of conversions, even though their activity lasted for merely about fifty years. Their great success came to an abrupt end in 1614 when the Bakufu government began the full proscription and persecution of the religion. An earlier ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had already banned Christianity and ordered the expulsion of foreign missionaries in 1587, but without strict enforcement. Since the 1630s, the former Christians were required to enroll in local Buddhist temples and annually go through the practice of treading on Christian icons in order to prove their apostasy. However, many Christians secretly retained the faith by disguising their true religious identity with Buddhist paraphernalia. These so-called “underground” (or sempuku) Christians survived more than two hundred years of persecution, and today some groups still continue to practice their own religion, refusing to join the Catholic Church. The present-day religion of the latter, called “hidden” (or kakure) Christians to distinguish them from the former, has drawn the attention of ample anthropological as well as religious studies.

The chamber pot was still full. The Dewy family's servant had not yet completed her morning chore of emptying the chamber pot when she dumped it over the head of their next door neighbor, Goody Ingerson. The unexpected assault was retaliation for the murder of some of the Dewys' hens. In 1714, the Dewys owned over 120 chickens, and as their closest neighbor, Ingerson grew tired of the fowl running freely through the Ingersons' property. The Ingersons chased those chickens out of their garden, barn, barley field, and scurried the unwanted guests out of their house. So, to show her unhappiness, Goodwife Ingerson wrung a few necks. The contents of the chamber pot did not slow her down, as Ingerson sent her daughter home with two more dead hens. Tensions escalated and a small brawl almost erupted when Abigail Dewy ordered her chamber pot wielding servant to apprehend the young girl escaping with the dead poultry. The Ingersons' daughter escaped the servant's clutches before Dewy could mete out a flogging with her whipping cord. The Ingersons' daughter made it home safely (perhaps to a chicken dinner). The case of the great hen squabble went to court, where the Connecticut magistrates ordered the Ingersons to pay for the dead chickens. However, when the court asked Abigail Dewy if she ordered her servant to drag Ingerson's daughter by the hair to the Dewy house, she lied and said no. For that, the Westfield church censured her for the sin of lying.

Stephen Riggs, Presbyterian missionary to the Dakota Indians, anxiously awaited a letter from the American Tract Society. He expected a reply about his proposed account of the recent war between the Dakotas and Euro-American settlers in Minnesota. After more than two centuries of contact between Dakotas and Europeans, and later Americans, relations had broken down entirely. Confined to reservations with some of their people starving, disgruntled Dakota warriors attacked villages and outlying cabins across southern Minnesota. Over several weeks in August and September 1862, they killed at least five hundred settlers and depopulated as many as twenty-three counties. The Reverend Riggs and his family barely escaped. Like so many Minnesota settlers, their home and possessions were destroyed. Military reinforcements eventually stopped the Dakotas' progress, compelling some to surrender and others to escape west to the plains. When hostilities ended, Riggs served as an interpreter in the negotiations over captives and at military tribunals organized to deal with detained Dakota fighters. He later visited Dakotas incarcerated in prison camps, paying special attention to the more than three hundred men sentenced to death for their part in the uprising. In light of his dramatic experience, Riggs proposed an account of his family's escape, along with details of the Dakota warriors' capture and confinement, in order to share how God had worked through this “mighty upheaval.”

With its violent images of heavenly and earthly combat, the book of Revelation has been criticized for promoting a vengeful and distorted version of Christ's teachings. Gerd Lüdemann, for example, has attacked the book as part of the “dark side of the Bible,” and Jonathan Kirsch believes that the pernicious influence of Revelation “can be detected in some of the worst atrocities and excesses of every age, including our own.” Yet, surprisingly, nonviolent pacifists have also drawn on the Apocalypse for encouragement and support. This was especially true for generations of Russian Spiritual Christians (dukhovnye khristiane), a significant religious minority whose roots trace at least as far back as the 1760s, when the first “spirituals” (dukhovnye) were arrested and tried in Russia's southern provinces of Tambov and Voronezh. Although they drew upon apocalyptic martial imagery, the Spiritual Christians were pacifists, some of whom came to identify themselves with the Woman Clothed in the Sun of Revelation 12.