Doomsday Update

May 21 has come and gone, and so far as I can tell, Judgment Day has not occurred. Whether that’s good or bad is a debatable question.

What is not debatable is the discrediting of one of the world’s best publicized prophecies, and one of the few prophecies specific enough to be fully disconfirmable. I refer, of course, to the Family Radio network’s prediction that the Rapture and the beginning of Judgment would occur on May 21, 2011.

Harold Camping, Family Radio’s “Bible teacher,” went down with his flag nailed to the mast. Throughout last week, he told callers on his daily call-in program that he wouldn’t even consider questions about the possibility that the Rapture wouldn’t happen on the 21st. On May 17, for instance, he remarked, “If you were talking to me three or four years ago, I would have said, well, there’s a high likelihood [of climactic events in 2011]. . . . But beginning about three years ago, God has shown us proof after proof and given us sign after sign. . . . I know absolutely, without any shadow of a doubt whatsoever, that it is going to happen on May 21. . . . It is absolutely going to be May 21. The Bible guarantees it, without any question. So we cannot countenance any other idea. It is absolutely going to happen.”

Liberty provided one of the first nationally published heads-ups and explanations about this matter in its December issue, in the article entitled "An Experiment in Apocalypse." Early this month I continued the discussion. The topic has proven surprisingly interesting to our readers, as it has to millions of other people, worldwide. I am receiving a lot of requests for updates, and I will provide them.

The really interesting thing, of course, isn’t the fact that Family Radio has been proven wrong. The interesting thing is seeing how individuals and institutions respond to the disconfirmation of ideas that they regarded as fully justified by reason and authority. Full evidence about Family Radio’s response will take a while to come in. Its offices were closed over the weekend (starting on Friday, May 20), and all or almost all programming from then till now has been prerecorded. (I write in the early evening of May 22.) The swarm of media attention simply washed over the recumbent form of Family Radio, occasionally sweeping out one or another follower who discussed his disappointment in vague, colorless terms.

But we can expect to learn more, and I have already learned some things. One interesting thing to me is the fact that throughout May 20 and 21 — even as late as 6:30 p.m. on the latter day — the station was still broadcasting invitations to call up and order “Judgment Day, May 21” pamphlets and bumper stickers — thus making itself even more ridiculous than it would have become, had it simply ceased all ads for mail-order material several days before.

Nevertheless, even the most ridiculous things in life happen because somebody decides to make them happen. Somebody — and a number of people would have to be involved — decided to keep running those ads. Somebody scheduled them. Somebody provided them to local stations. Somebody at the local stations ran them. In only one instance (at 1:25 a.m., PST, on the purported day of Rapture) did I hear evidence that an ad might have been spiked by the national network or my local station, with four minutes of music substituted. As I write, Family Radio’s website still declares in bold letters: “Judgment Day, May 21, 2011: The Bible Guarantees It!”, and its clock says there are “00 Days Left.” Yet someone at Family Radio switched Camping’s prerecorded lecture, which runs on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, from one of his constant Judgment Day diatribes to a discussion of divorce (he’s against it) that was broadcast “25 or 26 years ago,” according to the prerecorded announcement — which also says that copies of the divorce lecture will be “available this week” if you call or write for them. Divorce is exactly what would interest you, on Judgment Day or immediately afterward, right? It should be noted that on May 10, a woman called in to ask Camping about that very topic, divorce, and he told her that “it’s all academic,” because the world was ending and her husband wouldn’t have time to divorce her anyway.

Absurdity upon absurdity. But what do these absurd contradictions mean?

They may show the depth of institutional inertia, even within a relatively small, voluntary organization, an organization, mind you, that is operated by zealots, not by the pension-pursuers at the DMV. The thinking may have been, “We’ll just keep running whatever we’ve been running, whether it makes sense or not. That’s what we do” — even if it makes our own cause ridiculous. If Family Radio can achieve inertia like this, imagine what a government can do, in the face of all the evidence against its theories and programs.

The contradictions may, however, indicate something exactly opposite to inertia, but equally significant. They may indicate that dissenters within Family Radio, of whose existence there has already been a good deal of evidence, decided to assist the organization in rendering itself absurd, thus making the ousting of its current leadership more likely. These people could have halted the post-Doomsday ads for Doomsday literature; they could have snaked out some lecture that wasn’t about (of all things) divorce. But they used their individual initiative to do something more complicated.

That’s a guess. But here’s the idea, in brief: what happens within organizations and individuals is a contest between inertia and initiative, each with its own set of rewards: security, stability, and conservation of energy on the one hand; new opportunities (for power, for revenge, for simple rightness) on the other. If enough data emerge, the next stage of Family Radio’s existence will constitute a fascinating experiment in conflict, institutional and individual.

I will keep on this beat. My own prediction is that Mr. Camping will be ousted from leadership during the coming week by irresistible forces of change in the organization he founded. But this prediction is disconfirmable. Stay tuned.