I bet I’m not the only guy who forgot, but May 21st was the fifth-anniversary of the day that Harold Camping said the good, decent, godly folk were going to get whisked out of here.
In 2001 American Christian radio host Harold Camping stated that the Rapture and Judgment Day would take place on May 21, 2011, and that the end of the world would take place five months later on October 21, 2011. The Rapture, in a specific tradition of premillennial theology, is the taking up into heaven of God’s elect people.
Camping, who was then president of the Family Radio Christian network, claimed the Bible as his source and said May 21 would be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment “beyond the shadow of a doubt”. Camping suggested that it would occur at 6 pm local time, with the rapture sweeping the globe time zone by time zone, while some of his supporters claimed that around 200 million people (approximately 3% of the world’s population) would be ‘raptured’. Camping had previously claimed that the Rapture would occur in September 1994.
The vast majority of Christian groups, including most Protestant and Catholic believers, did not accept Camping’s predictions; some explicitly rejected them, citing Bible passages including those stating “about that day or hour no one knows” (Matthew 24:36). An interview with a group of church leaders noted that all of them had scheduled church services as usual for Sunday, May 22.
Following the failure of the prediction, media attention shifted to the response from Camping and his followers. On May 23, Camping stated that May 21 had been a “spiritual” day of judgment, and that the physical Rapture would occur on October 21, 2011, simultaneously with the destruction of the universe by God.
The universe is still here, but Camping was ‘called home’ on December 15, 2013, still puzzled that the universe hadn’t blown-up.
Once upon a time, I quite seriously intended to write a sort of history of the End Times, and I have a couple of shoeboxes filled with 3×5-cards of notes. The narrative difficulties with such a book are profound, however. Seriously: How many salable chapters can you write beginning with the words, “And then this other pack of nutjobs said the world would end on … whatever.”? Knowing, even as you peddle the book that, somewhere, some brand-new con artist is selling the same lie to the same fools?