Most Americans dread Monday mornings, but it’s safe to say that no one is languishing more this morning than Harold Camping. The 89-year-old Christian radio broadcaster told the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday that he had “a really tough weekend.” Camping created a media firestorm with his prediction Jesus would return and the world would end last Saturday. The “Rapture,” as it’s known among Christians, didn’t happen, as both Camping and the world are still very much here. But the whole debacle leaves us wondering what, if anything, we can learn from this.
If you grew up in evangelical homes like we did, rapture-talk isn’t new to you. Evangelical pastors preach sensational end times sermon series, while their churches put on fear-inducing apocalyptic experiences during Halloween. The sense of urgency generated by this trend in American Christianity has created armies of evangelizers and hordes of Christian teens rushing to get that magical first kiss. They need to beat Jesus to the punch.
In such a context, so-called “prophets” thrive. Who could forget Hal Lindsey’s 1970 best-selling book The Late, Great Planet Earth or his follow-up, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, that predicted, “The decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it”?
Of course, California mega-church pastor Chuck Smith also predicted Jesus would return “before the end of 1981”? And what about controversy-prone Pat Robertson’s rock-solid “guarantee” that the end of the world was coming in October or November 1982? None of their predictions panned out, and for a time it seemed that Christians had learned their lesson.
More On Faith and May 21, 2011
Photos, video: Scenes from the apocalypse
Under God: How did Harold Camping calculate the Rapture?
John Shelby Spong: Camping does not represent Christianity
Richard Dawkins: Science explains the end of the world
Matthew Paul Turner: The harm that ‘Judgment Day’ will do
Panel responds: How do end-times theologies impact real world behaviors?
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