Times Square and Hollywood Boulevard, cleaned up in recent years, remain icons of depravity, modern Sodom and Gomorrahs full of drugs, prostitution, and pornography, which is why last spring they were among the places one was most likely to come across the billboards set up by ninety-year-old Family Radio personality, retired civil engineer, and end time prophet Harold Camping, announcing, Judgment Day: May 21, 2011
Cry mightily unto God. In 1958, he helped start Family Radio in San Francisco, and since 1961 he has hosted a daily call-in show, Open Forum, on which he answers questions about the Bible. By the time he had Judgment Day: May 21 plastered across the United States, in English and Spanish, Family Radio owned almost 150 radio stations and affiliates and was wealthy enough to invest millions of dollars into disseminating bad news.
Camping cobbled together his idiosyncratic eschatology from his own Biblical calendar, initially published in 1970 as The Biblical Calendar of History. According to him, the world was created in 11,013 BC; the Flood took place in 4,990 BC; and Christ was crucified on Friday, April 1, AD 33. In his most recent works, We Are Almost There! and To God Be the Glory!, he writes that the Rapture would take place on May 21, 2011, immediately transporting the righteous approximately 3 percent or just over 200 million of the worlds nearly seven billion inhabitants to heaven. The remainder would be completely annihilated, along with the earth itself, on October 21. When May 21 rolled around, Camping, a twiggish, rail-thin figure with long grey sideburns who looks like an old-time country preacher, retreated to his suburban home in Alameda, California. Meanwhile, clutches of his followers gathered at the Family Radio compound, waiting for the ultimate moment. When the Rapture did not occur and the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that would torment the earth for five months before its final destruction did not begin, he acknowledged in his folksy way that he was flabbergasted, suggesting that an invisible judgment had taken place, and anyway the real event was not until October.
While Camping may appear to be a nutty codger embarrassed by the ill-advised precision of his predictions (in June, he suffered a stroke and is still recovering at home, and his talk show has been cancelled), he has plenty of company, especially in the United States. In the nineteenth century, William Miller, an American Baptist preacher from upstate New York, predicted that Jesus Christ would return and the world would end on October 22, 1844. Like Camping, Miller arrived at his prophecy via an ad hoc mix of passages from the Hebrew prophets and a juggling of the Roman and Jewish calendars, but when the date finally arrived thousands of his followers having sold all their possessions and gathered in fields, eyes turned to the heavens, to await the Rapture nothing happened. After what has come to be called the great disappointment, excuses were made, calculations adjusted, new dates proposed.
Yet the disenchantment that follows unfulfilled predictions of the kind made by Miller, Camping, and others has by no means diminished the public appetite for the Apocalypse. New Age adherents of the 2012 prophecy, which has created an Internet frenzy and a small publishing industry, believe the end of the ancient Mayan calendar, on December 21, 2012, will coincide with the end of the world. Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlsons The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), along with Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins Left Behind series, which has sold more than 35 million books, eagerly anticipate the imminent conveyance of believers to heaven, and Armageddon for everyone else. Why all the doom? Why the persistent predictions of volcanic eruptions, mega-earthquakes, tidal waves, new ice ages, the obliteration of life as we know it, and even the annihilation of the earth itself?
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“Apocalypse Soon” by Daniel Baird | The Walrus | January 2012
