Relax, We All Make Mistakes; it’s Not the End of the Word

An interesting study of subcultures is one of cults that predict the end of the world.  How do they start?  How do they function?  And what happens, when nothing happens? 

According to Harold Camping, the world was supposed to end yesterday, and after a quick look-around, 6:11 PM, he and his followers have had to face disillusionment.  The group’s culture was based on Camping’s knowledge of God, and his subsequent doomsday prediction.  Now, with that the basis of their collective belief system so summarily attacked, the culture faces destruction.

In America, people tend to think of such cults as pure scams, designed to rip off money from the gullible.  But such a con artist would never build his empire with such an obvious and fundamental flaw, essentially putting an expiration date on his scam and ruining both his credibility and his ability to make money in the future.  So when the end of the world does not come, the “strong leader” necessary to pull people together is just as jarred as his followers.  Doomsday cults deal with this by either disbanding, or by rationalizing the situation: their interpretation was wrong, they were inadequate, the world was inadequate, or even their faith was so strong, God called off the apocalypse.  The Yahoo! article “When Doomsday Isn’t, Believers Struggle to Cope” states that one third of members leave the cult, one third, redouble their belief, and the rest rationalize to reach a state somewhere in the middle.  Some failed doomsday predictions have lead to significant cult fractures, like the one that formed the Seventh-Day Adventist church.  Such dedication shows the power and importance of culture, even in the face of a seemingly irrefutable attack on core ideology and belief.