The story of Rev. Camping's deadline for the end of the world and the rapture of the faithful just barely crossed my consciousness at first. Others had predicted the end of the world and had lived to see the deadline come and go, to see the sun rise the following morning and set the following evening. I had seen a billboard announcing the end and made some passing comment to the other passenger in the car I was in. Then I pretty much thought of other things. But then news organizations began focusing on the predicted event, on the man who made the prediction, on the followers who were preparing to leave this earth, and on the millions of dollars of donations that Family Radio has received.
On Thursday, NPR posted a request on Facebook that people choose the song or musical composition they thought was most appropriate to be listening to as the end approached. Thousands of Facebook friends complied, and, for fun, I created a Countdown to the End of Time play list of my own, and when I told my adult children what I was doing, they started creating their own play lists. I first scrolled through the responses of NPR's FB friends and chose from those suggestions songs that I liked. Then I added my own pensive suggestions. When I finished, I had 30 songs on my End of Time playlist, and I posted the list in my notes on Facebook, along with YouTube links to performances. Some of the songs I chose were melancholy (Eliza Gilkyson's "When You Walk On"), others comforting and hopeful (Modest Mouse's "Float On"), and some downright silly (Monty Python's "Galaxy Song: Remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving...").
My family shared our songs, we noted the next day the times that Reverend Camping said the Rapture would begin, and also noted that the Rapture could be happening and the four of us would not know it because, well, we expected to be left behind if such an event really occurred--though there was a time when I, a child of the Southern Baptist Church, would have expected to be in the number of those rising into the clouds.
As Saturday evening waned, I expressed some sympathy for Reverend Camping and his followers, who were discovering what they so longed for was not going to happen as predicted. We wondered what these disappointed folks would do now. And then we passed the evening in playing a game of Scrabble.
Then, this morning I began some selected reading online and came across Tiffany Stanley's finger-wagging article "The Media's Shameful Obsession" on The New Republic's website. Stanley takes to task those in the media who have expressed smugness or superiority in their coverage of Harold Camping and his followers. She labels the coverage "a media circus."
There's a cruelty underlying our desire to laugh at this story [Stanley writes]--a desire to see people humiliated and to revel in our own superiority and rationality--even though the people in question are pretty tragic characters, who either have serious problems themselves or perhaps are being taken advantage of, or both.
Well, maybe that's so in many cases, but as a survivor of The Rapture--or, rather, of obsession with The Rapture--I think that I need to feel no shame at creating my playful play list for the end of times and for shaking my head at the hubris or senility or insanity of a man who thinks he can predict the end of the world.
In the Southern Baptist church in which I grew up, I was immersed in the literature of the End Times. We read Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, studied it in evening services, pored over its confident charts outlining the ages of man and world events that all inevitably led to the world's ending....maybe in the 1980s. In any event, we were convinced that the end was near. My sisters and I, a performing trio in our church, sang a song "I Wish We'd All Been Ready," which not only scared the hell out of me (literally, I decided to be baptized a second time, just in case the first baptism didn't take) but also gave me nightmares (Christ came in the clouds, and my feet couldn't quite get off the ground).
I was a smug, self-righteous twerp who also agonized too intensely over the state of her own soul. But because I was also a studious child, really interested in the world and in the viewpoints of other people, and also, of course, sinful beyond my own childish imaginings, I outgrew that insular religious phase. The world didn't come to an end. And when, in 1978, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords, my love affair with The Rapture and the teachings of the end times in the Southern Baptist Church pretty much ended. I watched the news with great expectation. The 70s had been full of violence, and the thought of two enemies trying to make peace between their nations filled me with hope. Yet many people in our churches did not welcome this event; it was viewed through the distorted lenses of a particular interpretation of the most controversial book in the New Testament, The Revelation. The predictions were that instead of ushering in peace, the agreements heralded the approaching end of the world.
I began to note that every movement toward peace was viewed with suspicion, as evidence that some crazy Anti-Christ was going to take over the world. How mixed up is that, I thought. It's almost as if the those who revel in the chaos of some End Time are working toward a self-fulfilling prophecy--reacting with suspicion and even outright hostility to any person or world event that suggests peaceful solutions are possible. Any charismatic leader with a message of hope was a possible Anti-Christ.
That world view has consequences today. Hal Lindsey can suggest that Barack Obama, with a campaign message of hope and change, may be the Anti-Christ, the Beast described in The Revelation, and thousands, perhaps millions, of people take his comment seriously. Michelle Bachmann, a possible Republican candidate for President, can negatively twist Obama's speech on the Middle East, and thousands of Christians will believe her distorted version, especially when she purses her lips into the dog whistle that those who reject Israel (in whatever way she defines "rejection") will be "cursed."
In 2010, the Pew Research Center, in conjunction with The Smithsonian, polled Americans to discover what they thought about the future of the world and the United States. Forty-one percent of those polled believed that Jesus Christ will return within the next 50 years. If you're expected to be taken out of the world in an instant, in a flash of lightning, you're not going to get too torqued about world peace or global climate change or Medicare or Medicaid--or in making the world a better place in any number of ways. In fact, you might be pretty hostile to any organization or group of people who would attempt to make the world a better place or the lives of others less fraught with peril. A peaceful world--or even a somewhat peaceful world--would undermine your whole world view, that only you and other selected good people will be saved while the world erupts in flames.
I hear and understand the dog whistles. My ears were once atuned to those high-pitched tones. I've lived in Oz; I believed in Oz. But I've been behind the curtain, and I didn't like one bit what I saw. Unfortunately, those who would laugh at that forty-one percent also might not recognize the serious consequences of a belief that absolves one of responsibility toward a world one expects to be providentially destroyed in one's lifetime.
So, here's to Reverend Camping and all those who would divert us from trying to solve the problems that we have here on this one world: John Lennon--"Imagine."
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