How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  The latest scholarship on the subject, generated primarily by Richard Landes and Stephen O’Leary from the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, is that the dates surrounding and marking the thousand-year anniversary of Christ’s nativity and crucifixion (1000 and 1033) “reflect not a variety of equally plausible dates in circulation, but a series of efforts either to speed up the millennium’s arrival, to postdate it, or to salvage a coming millennium after its passage.” In fact, an eclipse in 968 and the arrival of Halley’s comet in 989 were seen by many as signs of the apocalypse. The Europeanwide famine of 1005–1006 was interpreted as fulfilling one of Jesus’ admonitions to his disciples that this would be a sign of the end. In 1033 a mass pilgrimage was made to Jerusalem in preparation for the final judgment. And, especially, the “Peace of God” movements in the 990s and 1030s saw massive throngs of believers gather in open fields to venerate holy relics in the hopes of being healed before the end. So, while the year 1000 did not see mass hysteria, says Landes, “the end is not merely paralyzing terrors; it is also extravagant hope: hope to see an end to the injustice of suffering in this world, hope for a life of ease and delight, hope for the victory of truth and peace.” What do we see following the years 1000 and 1033? Landes quotes medieval chronicler Radulfus Glaber’s famous passage: “It was as if the whole world had shaken off the dust of the ages and covered itself in a white mantle of churches.” Destruction-redemption.

  Not all is lost when the end does not come. Hope springs eternal, even for apocalyptic doomsayers. From the Millerites awaiting the end on October 22, 1843 (and again a year later), to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who proclaimed that the generation who saw the Great War (World War I) would not pass before the second coming, to the Heaven’s Gate followers trip to The Evolutionary Level Above Humans, millennial scenarios do not just mean The End. They also mean The Beginning.

  WHEN PROPHECY FAILS—A.D. 2000

  What will happen in the year 2000 and after no one knows, but we can make some predictions based on what people have done in the past when the predicted collapse does not come. It is an interesting study that teaches us a lot about human nature. It turns out we are a remarkably resilient species.

  Psychologists who studied Leland Jensen and his Baha’i sect, for example, discovered that when the end of the world came and went, they did not quietly disband and go home. Psychologist Leon Festinger applied his theory of cognitive dissonance to failed prophecy, and argued that the stronger one’s commitment to a failing cause, the greater the rationalizations to reduce the dissonance produced by the disappointment. Thus, paradoxically, after the 1980 debacle in the bomb shelters, not only did Jensen and his followers not abandon the cause, they ratcheted up the intensity of future predictions, making no less than twenty between 1979 and 1995! Jensen and his flock employed one or all of the following rationalizations: (1) the prophecy was fulfilled—spiritually; (2) the prophecy was fulfilled physically, but not as expected; (3) the date was miscalculated; (4) the date was a loose prediction, not a specific prophecy; (5) the date was a warning, not a prophecy; (6) God changed his mind in order to be merciful; (7) predictions were just a test of members’ faith.

  The classic case study in millennial resiliency is the 1843 Millerite fiasco, also known as the “Great Disappointment.” A one-time deist and farmer from upstate New York, William Miller accepted the 6,000-year theory of creation but rejected Bishop Ussher’s specific calculations for the beginning and end. Miller believed he had found errors in Ussher’s chronology, concluding that the archbishop was off by 153 years. The end would not come in 1996, but in 1843. Miller published his theory in 1832 and began preaching and acquiring followers in the Boston and New York areas who were impressed that he was even able to pinpoint the date of the end. Using the Jewish year that runs from one vernal equinox to the next, Miller became “fully convinced that sometime between March 21st, 1843, and March 21st, 1844 … Christ will come and bring all his saints with him.” But when March 21, 1844, came and went without note, a great disappointment set in among many followers. Instead of abandoning the movement, however, the true believers set to task recalculating the Second Coming. It would be the “tenth day of the seventh month of the Jewish sacred year,” October 22, 1844. Miller announced at the beginning of the month that “if he does not come within 20 or 25 days, I shall feel twice the disappointment I did this spring.” When the new date passed without note, one disciple announced that “our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. We wept and wept until the day dawned.” That disciple was Hiram Edson who, after recovering from the great disappointment, concluded that Miller had misread the Book of Daniel. This was not the end, he said, but only the beginning of God’s examination of the names in the Book of Life. To hasten the process, Edson explained, the sabbath should be observed on Saturday, the seventh and last day of the Jewish week, instead of Sunday, and he went on to become a leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

  The Jehovah’s Witnesses must hold the record for the most failed dates of doom, including 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, and others all the way up to 1975. One of the more novel and audacious rationalizations for failed prophecy came after Armageddon’s nonarrival in 1975. In a 1966 book published by the Watchtower Society, Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God, the Witnesses established the date of creation at 4026 B.C., declaring that “six thousand years from man’s creation will end in 1975, and the seventh period of a thousand years of human history will begin in the fall of 1975.” The Watchtower Society’s president, Frederick Franz, at a Toronto, Ontario, rally, blamed the members themselves. Because Jesus had stated that no man will know the “day or the hour” of his coming, the Witnesses jinxed the Second Coming: “Do you know why nothing happened in 1975? It was because you expected something to happen.” Undaunted, they recalibrated again, citing October 2, 1984. as doomsday. Finally, in 1996, the leaders of the church learned the Millerite lesson. In the November 1996 issue of Awake!, members discovered that “the generation that saw the events of 1914” would not, after all, be seeing the end of the world. Instead, this oft-quoted line was replaced by a much vaguer “is about to” clause, reducing dissonance indefinitely.

  A more recent example occurred on March 31, 1998. This time around it was the prophecy of one Heng-ming Chen, leader of God’s Salvation Church presently based in Garland, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), but originating from Taiwan. Chen’s original prophecy, published in his guidebook entitled God’s Descending in Clouds (Flying Saucers) on Earth to Save People, stated: “At 10 A.M. on March 31, 1998, God shall make His appearance in the Holy Land of the Kingdom of God: 3513 Ridgedale Dr., Garland, TX 75041 U.S.A. I guarantee this on my life.” What would God look like? Not surprisingly, he would look like Chen, only he would be able to walk through walls, speak numerous languages, and clone himself into as many copies as necessary to greet anyone who came into the home that day. Exactly one year later—March 31, 1999—the chosen few were to travel to a rendezvous point on the shores of Lake Michigan in Gary, Indiana, from where they would board flying saucers to take them to heaven, with a brief stopover at Mars. Chen and several followers went so far as to go to Gary, Indiana, in January 1998 to perform a “purification ceremony” involving rice, fruit, and ceramic dragons, all in the bone-chilling thirty-seven-degree waters of Lake Michigan. In 1997 they traveled through British Columbia and into Alaska, in a quest to find a six-foot-tall, twenty-eight-year old man who looked like Abraham Lincoln, but whom Chen described as the “Jesus of the West.” But there was no available account of what they did on the March 31, 1999, date.

  Like so many other New Age religions, God’s Salvation Church grew out of a cultural milieu fascinated by UFOs. They moved to Texas from Taiwan in the summer of 1997, purchasing over thirty homes for about $500,000 in cash, and moved in about 150 of the faithful. They dressed completely in white, including white cowbo
y hats and white tennis shoes. Members were told by their leader that he talks to God through a diamond ring on his hand and receives divine messages through golden balls floating in the sky. Why Garland, Texas? Because, the forty-two-year-old “Teacher Chen” (as he is known) explained, it sounds like “God’s Land.” The other reason, Chen continued, is that in 1999 Asia will succumb to a nuclear holocaust he calls the “Great Tribulation.” Proof of the coming disaster, he says, can be seen in the recent storms, fires, and economic problems experienced in Asia. Galactic goings on, not El Nino, are the cause of the severe storms in Asia and America, he explained.

  As doomsday grew closer, Chen predicted that God would appear on Channel 18 at 12:01 A.M. on Wednesday, March 25, 1997. When God was a no-show, Chen recanted his prophecy and said that his prediction that God would appear in Garland was “nonsense.” With that the media hype was over and the more than one hundred reporters went their separate ways, assuming that a Heaven’s Gate replay was unlikely. But Chen’s followers remain undaunted. Chin-Hung Chiang, for example, explained that the world actually did end, spiritually: “The world of the spiritual is invisible. It’s very difficult to explain what is going on.”

  Even those who help bring about their own apocalyptic end—Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, and Waco come to mind—there is often a positive spin put on the ultimate outcome. Jim Jones told his flock on November 18, 1978 (as can be heard in the shocking audiotape with screams in the background): “I’m glad it’s over. Hurry, hurry my children … . No more pain … . Death is a million times preferable to ten more days of this life. If you knew what was ahead of you you’d be glad to be stepping over tonight … . This is a revolutionary suicide. It’s not a self-destructive suicide.” Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven’s Gate group were the epitome of this brand of apocalyptic spin doctoring. As we all saw in the videotaped final interviews with the suicidal members, they were gleefully looking forward to their passage on a UFO to The Evolutionary Level Above Humans, where there would be no gender, no need for food or sustenance, and “an eternal body—an everlasting body.” Heaven’s Gate is the passageway to this next level, “a transitional training ground—a proving ground for potential new members of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Destruction-redemption.

  The most apocalyptic guru of them all was David Koresh, who believed he was God’s representative on Earth and as such he would lead his people to the promised land—but only after a great conflagration. As cult expert Richard Abanes concluded from his study of the Branch Davidians: “Koresh would loose fire upon his faithful followers, thereby killing off their old nature and transforming them into flaming entities of divine judgment who would smite the enemy.” Whether they set the fire themselves, or the FBI triggered the blaze, or some combination of bureaucratic bumbling and self-fulfilling prophecy caused it, we may never know. But in the Bible of one of Koresh’s many wives, Abanes discovered highlighted passages indicating that the Branch Davidians believed the end would come by fire (recall, they named their compound Mt. Carmel). In the margin of the book of Amos 1:27, which states “The Lord will roar from Zion … and the top of Carmel shall wither … I will send fire,” Koresh’s wife scribbled “The fire that will cleanse.”

  In this phrase—the fire that will cleanse—is the essence of the millennium. But what is the lure?

  THE LURE OF THE MILLENNIUM

  Most of us would never be taken in by the likes of Jones, Applewhite, or Koresh, but the attraction of the millennium is not restricted to a handful of religious fanatics and survivalists holed up in compounds and bomb shelters in rural America. In fact, a U.S. News and World Report poll conducted November 14 to 16, 1997, found that “66 percent of Americans, including a third of those who admit they never attend church, say they believe that Jesus Christ will return to Earth some day—an increase from the 61 percent who expressed belief in the Second Coming three years ago.” Linking the Second Coming to the millennium, an April 1993 poll conducted by Yankelovich Partners for Time/CNN found that 20 percent of the respondents answered “yes” to the question, “Do you think that the second coming of Jesus Christ will occur sometime around the year 2000?” One in five is not a trivial figure. And this is only those who hold to a religious millennialism. There is a new brand of secular millennial conceptions that envision the end of the world coming by global warming or nuclear war, by genetically engineered viruses or chemical bombs, by overpopulation or mass starvation, or by cosmic collisions or alien encounters. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride again. Why? What makes the story of the millennium, the apocalypse, the end, so compelling? What is the appeal of these chiliastic movements? To begin to construct an answer, let’s step back and look at the larger picture of: (1) humans as pattern-seeking animals; (2) humans as storytelling animals.

  1.

  We evolved to be pattern-seekers—we are the descendants of the most successful pattern finders. But as we have seen, this does not guarantee we will not make errors in our thinking. In fact, it guarantees that we will make errors in our thinking, because magical thinking is a spandrel of clear thinking. Recall the two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: Believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: Rejecting a truth. The belief that the millennium harbors an apocalyptic end of humanity is a Type 1 Error in thinking. It is an error because it is more likely that the apocalyptic images in Revelation were not portents of things to come in the distant future, but commentary on their own times. The Antichrist figure, for example, is believed to allude to the Roman emperor Nero, who killed himself by falling on his sword. The battle of Armageddon described in Ezekiel probably refers to the Scythian invasion of Israel in pre-Christian times. The Bible was written for the people of that time as history, social commentary, and political analysis, not unlike what Nostradamus did in his quatrains written as social and political exegesis on the sixteenth century, rather than prophecy for the twentieth.

  2.

  We tell stories about the patterns we find in nature. For thousands of years before the advent of writing, myths and religions were sustained by the oral tradition of stories with meaningful patterns—gods and God, supernatural beings and mystical forces, and our place in history, in the world, and in the cosmos. We may live in an enlightenment culture of science and rationality, but we hold on to and cherish our stories nonetheless because it is in our nature to do so. Science does not come naturally. Storytelling does. And our most popular stories are in the forms of myths—stories about life and death, growing up and growing old, rites of passage and marriage, and especially the creation and destruction of the world.

  The millennium combines the best in pattern-seeking and storytelling. What could be more dramatic than the pattern of a round number ending in three zeros with a story about the end of time and our redemption to follow? Damian Thompson expressed this nicely in his work on The End of Time: “It seems to represent a deep-seated human urge to escape from time, which in the earliest societies was usually met by dreams of a return to a golden past. Apocalypticism offered a radical change of direction, a move forward into a world ruled by the saints in which the enemy had been vanquished.” Even for those with no particular religious inclinations toward a millennial holocaust, there are plenty of secular versions to go around, starting with what I call the beautiful people myth.

  HEAVEN ON EARTH

  Long, long ago, in a century far, far away, there lived beautiful people coexisting with nature in balanced eco-harmony, taking only what they needed, and giving back to Mother Earth what was left. Women and men lived in egalitarian accord and there were no wars and few conflicts. The people were happy, living long and prosperous lives. The men were handsome and muscular. well-coordinated in their hunting expeditions as they successfully brought home the main meals for the family. The tanned, bare-breasted women carried a child in one arm and picked nuts and berries to supplement the hunt. Children frolicked in the nearby stream, dreaming of the day when they too would grow up to fulfill their destiny as beautiful p
eople.

  But then came the evil empire—European White Males carrying the disease of imperialism, industrialism, capitalism, scientism, and the other “isms” brought about by human greed, carelessness, and short-term thinking. The environment was exploited, the rivers soiled, the air polluted, and the beautiful people were driven from their land, forced to become slaves, or simply killed.

  This tragedy, however, can be reversed if we just go back to living off the land where everyone would grow just enough food for themselves and use only enough to survive. We would then all love one another, as well as our caretaker Mother Earth, just as they did long, long ago, in a century far, far away.

  There are actually several myths packed into the beautiful people myth, proffered by no one in particular but compiled from many sources as mythmaking (in the literary sense) for our time. This genre of storytelling, in fact, tucks nicely into the larger framework of golden-age fantasies and has a long and honorable history. The Greeks believed they lived in the Age of Iron, but before them there was the Age of Gold. Jews and Christians, of course, both believe in the golden age before the fall in the Garden. Medieval scholars looked back longingly to the biblical days of Moses and the prophets, while Renaissance scholars pursued a rebirth of classical learning, coming around full circle to the Greeks. Even Newt Gingriclu had his own version of the myth when he told the Boston Globe on May 20, 1995, that there were “long periods of American history where people didn’t get raped, people didn’t get murdered, people weren’t mugged routinely.”