For an eighty-nine-year old with a sepulchral voice, Harold Egbert Camping, president of Family Radio in California, certainly has a gift for grabbing public attention. His prophesy that Judgment Day will happen on Saturday, May 21, is emblazoned on billboards throughout North America and at selected sites throughout the world. The pesky naysayers only serve his cause by fetching him out of the obscurity to which he was consigned after his failed prediction that the world would end in 1994.
Mr. Camping has a remarkable capacity for making Judgment Day sound like a grim event even for true believers. He describes “the rapture” – whereby God’s elect are lifted bodily from Earth to join Christ in heaven – in perfunctory and mechanical terms, befitting the civil engineer he once was. But his cadaverous features shine with joy as he gloats over the fate of those left behind.
Having endured the torment of watching the elect parade into paradise, he explains, their lot is one of pestilence and death, as mighty earthquakes uncover the graves of the dead. The End of the World on Oct. 21, 2011, will bring no relief, because the non-elect – 97 per cent of everyone who has ever lived, according to Mr. Camping’s calculation – will be consigned to eternal damnation.
Some of his younger henchmen, such as Chris McCann of the EBible Fellowship
Why apocalyptic prophecy flourishes in the United States and why such prophecies receive avid public attention are intriguing questions – for which there are no easy answers. In his book Dreams of Millennium, University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell argued that speculation about the end of time is a response to symptoms of social disintegration, evidenced by apparently unrelated phenomena, such as the fear of AIDS and the fashion for body-piercing.
Certainly if we go back in history, we can see that devastating plagues prompted dreams of the apocalypse. The onset of the Black Death in medieval Europe, for instance, spawned doomsday cults.
Social and political upheaval has had a similar effect. During the English Civil Wars of the 17th century, many militant Protestants became convinced that the Day of Judgment was at hand, which emboldened their resistance to what they deemed the bogus authority of monarchs, aristocrats and bishops.
Apocalyptic notions, generally, have had a radical political edge. But the modern United States represents a deviation from this tendency. There, apocalyptic theory is linked to a conservative agenda. Before he became president in 1981, Ronald Reagan read and admired Hal Lindsey’s bestseller The Late, Great Planet Earth,
All this provides clues for answering our question: Why are Mr. Camping and his devotees taken seriously? A possible answer is: Because they occupy much of the same ideological and cultural turf as the mainstream conservatives for whom Mr. Reagan remains a secular saint.
To be sure, Mr. Camping is an embarrassingly unruly neighbour for “respectable” American evangelicals in the Pat Robertson mould, which is why they are among his fiercest critics. It is one thing to believe that the Day of Judgment will happen (such is orthodox Christian belief) or even that it’s imminent (as most evangelicals believe); it is quite another to assign, with much fanfare, a precise date for it. But such distinctions are easily lost in the maelstrom of American popular culture, where fantasies of the apocalypse are fuelled by books like the best-selling Left Behind series and the popular movies based on it.
Last thoughts: Does the forgoing apply to Canada? Probably not, thankfully. Catholics and liberal Protestants represent a larger portion of the Christian demographic here than in the United States. Catholics are encouraged to follow scriptural instruction to resist speculation about the timing of Christ’s Second Coming. Many liberal Protestants find the topic of the Day of Judgment to be rather distasteful, and steer well in clear of it.
But it’s just possible that Canadian interest in the apocalypse is actually hiding in plain sight. If you go to your local Chapters bookstore, you’ll be lucky to find anything from the Left Behind series. (Certainly it will never be one of Heather Reisman’s “picks.”) But go to Wal-Mart or Costco and you’ll see piles of the books selling fast. The Late, Great Planet Earth had a similar retailing history. Will Canadian interest in the apocalypse translate into pockets of support for the odious Mr. Camping? On Saturday we might get to find out.
John Sainsbury is a professor of history at Brock University.
