In a comfortable office, Bible placed firmly atop his lap, 89-year-old Harold Camping is waxing with utter certainty about the end of the world. “May 21, 2011 is the day of judgment,” he says with conviction, in a YouTube video posted last year. “It is the day that ends all gospel salvation activity. … It is the most important day by a billion times than any other day the world has ever known.” On that day, Camping estimates roughly 207 million people, or about 3% of the world’s population, will be plucked from the earth. What will follow is five months of earthquakes and other calamities until the world officially ends on October 21 of this year.
Like all who proselytize the end the world, Camping has spread his message using a small army of followers; in his case, they’re supported by a substantial budget that by some estimates is more than $100 million. There have been stories in the media of families selling their homes, quitting their jobs and budgeting their finances such that by May 21 they will be left with nothing. After all, they won’t need it, right?
But Camping has been wrong before. The former engineer, who started the Family Radio Network in 1958, predicted in 1992 that the world would end in September 1994. When the apocalypse failed to materialize, Camping cited a mathematical error and reemerged with a new date — May 21, 2011. Despite dubious evidence to support it, the current campaign has garnered a surprising number of followers, who hand out pamphlets, broadcast his message from the backs of trucks and plaster it on billboards nationwide — a fact that Paul Boyer, a historian at the University of Wisconsin who studies apocalyptic beliefs, attributes to Camping’s radio voice. “He has a very compelling manner of speaking,” Boyer says. “He speaks with conviction and there’s a certain percentage of people who will respond to that sort of belief.”
Throughout history, movements like these have sprung up, especially in times of war or economic and political instability. “When you think your world is going to hell in a handbasket, it’s comforting to say, ‘The world is bad, but God will take me out of this,'” says Doug Weaver, an associate professor of religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who teaches the history of Christianity. To that end, apocalyptic movements have surfaced in almost every era of chaos: following the Great Fire of London in 1666, for example, or during the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. The outbreak of World War I unleashed a torrent of end-of-the-world predictions: Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, predicted the second coming of Christ would occur in 1914, which he said would mark the end of time for non-believers.
The most famous example might be that of William Miller, a Baptist preacher, who predicted the world would come to an end sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844.
