This is the end

By now you’ve probably seen the billboards, bumper stickers, or RVs around town warning that Judgment Day is nigh. According to the listeners of Family Radio, a Christian station founded in the 1950s and based out of Oakland, God will unleash his wrath on the unsaved this Saturday, May 21.

Harold Camping, the 89-year-old station Family Radio president, UC Berkeley civil-engineering grad and self-taught Bible student, has spread his bad-news gospel across the globe. After Family Radio billboards in Dubai pissed off residents, a government agency had them taken down. Media outlets as far away as New Zealand and Hindustan have reported on the ministry.

Camping should be used to all the media attention. After all, this is the second time he’s predicted the end of the world.

In his book 1994?, Camping first laid out his case for Judgement Day that year. His calculations were a little off. So why May 21, 2011?

Family Radio’s headquarters is near the Oakland airport, a humble building sandwiched between a car-parts shop and a psychic reader. Inside, Family Radio media rep Tom Evans argued that May 21 is exactly 7,000 years to the day after God unleashed the worldwide flood in Genesis. His math is fuzzy.

It’s not easy to explain the arithmetic behind his and Camping’s calculations. The official May 21 timeline is in the back of Camping’s book Time Has an End, which this writer ordered from Amazon.com a few weeks ago. It didn’t make their reasoning any clearer. Consider passages like this: “The year 391 B.C. is the year when the Old Testament was finished, and 2,011 + 391 - 1 = 2,401, or 7 x 7 x 7 x 7. In the perfectly complete end of time, Christ will finish speaking to this present world.”

Despite the dubious math, Campbell’s prediction is that, around 6 p.m. on May 21, two events will take place. First, a massive worldwide earthquake will throw open the graves of the undead. Then, both the living saved and the remains of those that were saved will be transformed in an instant and taken up to God—the biblical event commonly known as the rapture.

The rest of us—heathens, gays, vegans, SN&R readers—will endure a world of calamity and disaster and death until October, when God finally destroys all creation.

Camping’s predictions have met considerable resistance. The strongest opposition, Evans explains, comes from other Christian churches. They point out that in the New Testament, Jesus himself, when speaking about his own return, tells disciples, “No man knows the day or the hour.”

Still, some Family Radio listeners sacrifice dearly to spread the May 21 word. In the station’s lobby, there was a man who had just returned from a preaching trip, hitting cities in Nevada and Colorado. Another man, an Eastern European immigrant, had driven up from Los Angeles that morning.

Evans says that some listeners in China have sold their homes and are donating the money to Family Radio’s campaign.

NPR has reported that one U.S. couple—with one kid and another on the way—cashed out their savings accounts and budgeted to run out of money on the big day.

But not everyone at Family Radio headquarters buys into the May 21 prediction.

While sitting in the lobby, for instance, there’s a memo listing the company’s 2011 holidays; Thanksgiving and Christmas are still on the list.

History has plenty of examples of doomsday predictions that never panned out. The big question is: What happens when the world wakes up to life as usual on May 22? Will that spell the end of Family Radio?

Probably not. One section of Time Has an End, titled “Progressive Revelation,” gives Camping a spiritual escape clause that will allow him to salvage some credibility in the ears of any remaining listeners: “Thus, we can know that, in the Bible, many truths are declared. But God may not reveal to students of the Bible an understanding of those truths until long after the students’ first exposure to them. We can call this progressive revelation. That is, God has his own timetable for giving an understanding of those truths.”

Here’s a prediction: On May 22, Camping will declare that God had (again, like in 1994) withheld vital information. Expect a third end-of-the-world date to follow.