Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Will an Apocalyptic "Great Awakening" arrive for the Qanon Cultists? Not if Past Is Prologue.
June 2, 2021
Will an apocalyptic “great awakening” arrive for the Qanon cultists? Not if past is prologue.
By Bill Berkowitz
What Does Harold Camping’s 2011 Judgment Day prediction have anything in common with QAnon’s Great Awakening? Absolute certainty, a disdain for reason, and ultimately, disappointment! Camping predicted the world would end on May 21, 2011. When life went on, he revised the date to October 21. Neither dates proved to be correct.
Camping had a relatively small band of End Time followers. In contrast, “15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters,” according to a new poll released by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, as reported by The New York Times Giovanni Russonelle. The poll also found that “20 percent of respondents said that they thought a biblical-scale storm would soon sweep away these evil elites and ‘restore the rightful leaders.’”
While Camping’s Grand Finale (my terminology not Camping) has long been a fixture of the apocalypse-heavy wing of the Religious Right, QAnon believers is a relatively new phenomenon with believers acting out of an internet conspiracy-driven anti-democratic fervor. “Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants,” Robby Jones, the founder of P.R.R.I., said in an interview. “So it lines up there with a major religious group.”
Great Awakenings are part of the fabric of U.S. history. The first Great Awakening in America was aimed at combatting the rise of the influence of the Age of Reason in the English colonies, during the 1730s and 1770s. QAnon’s “Great Awakening” is also an assault on reason.
The Second Great Awakening, a Protestant religious revival, occurred in the US from about 1795 to the mid-1800’s and coincided with south and westward American expansionism. Revival meetings – often in tents, were attended by hundreds of thousands of people, church attendance multiplied, and new sects proliferated. The Second Great Awakening made soul-winning the primary function of ministry.
While there is some debate as to the number of subsequent Great Awakenings, they shared key characteristics: populism and an emphasis on a personal connection to “god” and, they helped to energize the rise of social movements such as abolitionism, women’s rights, and the temperance movement.
In 2011, Christian radio broadcaster Harold Camping’s Oakland ministry spent millions of dollars spreading the word that the Day of Judgment was coming. For Camping and his followers, it would be the Grand Finale. Camping told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Justin Berton that, “he ha[d] developed a mathematical system to interpret prophecies hidden within the Good Book.” Camping, a civil engineer by trade, had “crunched the numbers and was stunned at what he’d found: The world w[ould] end May 21, 2011.”
This year, QAnon’s “Great Awakening” was supposed to be the grand finale for the Democratic Party: The Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic Party’s pedophilic sex ring would be destroyed, and Donald Trump would triumph as the hero who took it down, and would go on to serve a second term as President.
Compared to QAnon and other apocalyptic conspiracy theories, Camping seems downright “quaint,” Charles Sarno, an associate professor of sociology at Holy Names University, a small Catholic liberal arts college in the Oakland hills, recently told the San Francisco Chronicles Matthias Gafni. “There’s lunacy out there. Camping in relation to the storming of the Capitol is kind of benign.”
A Grand Finale to the Great Awakenings? Not so fast…
Camping’s prediction was not so benign for many of his followers who were all in on The Rapture. (The Rapture is the end-time event to end all end-time events, when all Christian believers that are alive -- along with resurrected believers -- will rise in the clouds, to meet the Lord.) Believing in Camping’s prediction, many followers sold their homes, emptied their bank accounts, gave away their possessions, and dressed their children in their finest outfits. Some of those Camping-ites are still around. Camping … not so much … he died in 2013.
At the time, Camping was sucking up all of the oxygen in Armageddon-ville to the chagrin of his rapture-believing evangelical comrades did not like it. Most evangelicals thought that setting a date certain for the End Times was a bad idea; bad for their followers, and bad for business. Joel Rosenberg, a prominent Christian Zionist, and best-selling author, suggested that by setting the date for Judgment Day, Camping was being "unbiblical, wrong and misleading," and "invit[ing] ridicule, scorn and discredit upon followers of Jesus Christ who study the Bible seriously and teach the Word of God -- including prophecy -- carefully and soberly."
Evangelical Christian leaders continued to declare that "harbingers of the apocalypse have been gathering for decades" but "most of the world has been largely oblivious to the gathering tempest and prophetic warnings." Now, however, more people may be paying attention to these warnings because of the impacts of, "global instability—geopolitically, financially and culturally."
Camping wasn’t the only evangelical Christian hyping the rapture. The late evangelical leader Tim LaHaye, milked the heck out of the rapture with Left Behind, a series of best-selling apocalyptic novels -- co-authored with Jerry B. Jenkins.
For the most part, evangelical Christians have not publicly emphasized Rapture talk in recent years. “The rapture is a racket," wrote Barbara R. Rossing in the first sentence of her book The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Westview Press, 2004). Rossing, a New Testament scholar and an associate professor at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, maintained that the Rapture is a fraud of monumental proportions, as well as a disturbing way to instill fear in people.
"Whether prescribing a violent script for Israel or survivalism in the United States, this theology distorts God's vision for the world," Rossing writes. "In place of healing, the Rapture proclaims escape. In place of Jesus's blessing of peacemaking, the Rapture voyeuristically glorifies violence and war.... This theology is not biblical. We are not Raptured off the earth, nor is God. "
Circling back to Camping’s legacy: According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Gafni, there has been a change in Camping’s non-profit Family Radio with the ministry’s relocation from Oakland to the Nashville Tennessee area. “In August 2018, Family Radio President Tom Evans, … went on a religious podcast and apologized for the non-profit’s role in the Judgment Day debacle.”
Gafni reported that Camping’s audience grew between 2008 and 2011, the years preceding the false prediction. “Family Radio took in $77.3 million, mostly in donations, and spent $16.3 million, according to tax returns.” Despite currently operating on a deficit, the organization still “owns valuable property and broadcasting licenses.”
The Rapture is now mostly relegated to movies and novels, but the Rapture Ready Index still exists. Currently, the index number stands at 188, or as the Index indicates, “Fasten your seat belts.” The Index provides a 1-5 score for each of 45 categories including Debt & Trade, False Christs, Occult, Wild Weather, Inflation, Globalism, Financial Unrest, etc. You may be happy to learn that the score in the Satanism category has been downgraded because of a “lack of activity.”
QAnon’s Great Awakening
It is unclear whether QAnon’s Great Awakening has already reached its zenith. According to Mashable’s Matt Binder, there has been less QAnon social media activity in recent months. “The reason you may not be seeing so much QAnon online isn't because they're not there. It's because they've gone undercover. QAnon content is still spreading on mainstream social media platforms thanks to a number of tactics its believers are using to get around the bans,” Binder recently wrote.
Mike Rothschild, author of a forthcoming book, The Storm is Upon Us, about QAnon, told Mashable’s Binder that "QAnon believers excel at ban evasion." Rothschild added, "The most popular book about the movement by believers is literally called QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening.”
Apparently, the invitation is still open!
Meanwhile, with Camping’s Grand Finale gambit, there is no evidence that Family Radio has tried to pay back believers who sold their houses and liquidated their earthly possessions. What happened to those followers is up in the air.
Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland, California-based freelance writer covering right-wing movements. His work has appeared in BuzzFlash, The Nation, Huffington Post, The Progressive, AlterNet, Street Sheet, In These Times, and many other print and online publications, as well as being cited in several books.
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