“END OF THE WORLD PROPHET FOUND IN ERROR, NOT INSANE”

A FAILED PROPHET’S SURVIVAL HANDBOOK

THOUGHT ABOUT BECOMING an an end-of-the-world prophet? It's not the make-or-break enterprise you might think, as much as your gut feeling may be that mobs of angry parishioners await the fortune-teller who talks them into making room on the calendar for the final trumpets, the Rapture, World War III, the return of Jesus, global computer meltdowns, or post-game shows on life hosted by great messiahs stepping out of the pages of history—only for the poor dupes to find themselves paying bills the next week.

Time and again, it hasn't worked that way. The beauty of blown prophecies is that failure is the beginning of success. That is, if you adopt the techniques of history's most successful faulty prophets. Through time-tested rebranding methods, they've reinvented failure as proof that they were righter than anyone could have imagined.

The very glue holding your congregation together can be a mistaken prediction and what you've invested in it. Thousands of apostles of Shaini Goodwin of Tacoma, Washington, known to admirers as the “Dove of Oneness” and to the Tacoma News Tribune as a “cybercult queen,” hold out for a Judgment Day that will justify all of her bad guesses.

Every year is supposed to be the year it happens: the revelation of NESARA (the National Economic Security and Reformation Act), a secret bill purportedly signed by President Bill Clinton. We are just a hair's breadth away. When the gag order is lifted,

NESARA will free the world from debt, stop the Iraq War, and—according to one Utah group of adherents, filmed in the documentary Waiting for NESARA—unmask Republicans as space aliens masquerading as fiscal conservatives.

The beauty of blown prophecies is that failure is the beginning of success.

For other bad prophets, it turns out it's the thought that counts. Maybe the seer was on the right track but just jumped the gun, the sense is, and interest heightens in the original questions he raised. Just consider theologian William Miller. His followers believed his prediction—based on calculations he derived from the Book of Daniel—that Jesus would return between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. This misfire was soon followed by the Great Disappointment of 1844, when a crowd of 100,000 people, many of them sober, respectable reformers and abolitionists, assembled to see the end-times that Samuel S. Snow, a Millerite (that is, a follower of Miller), had marked down for the 22nd of October. Supposedly using a more precise version of Miller's formula, Snow had worked out the exact day, and after some initial hesitancy Miller enthusiastically endorsed this specific prediction. As the clock ticked and everyone waited awkwardly for Christ, someone pointed out that the Holy Land had a seven-hour time difference. The sting of failure was worse for all the mockery they took from the townspeople: “What, not gone up yet?”

No, they were still here. For now. And yet Miller's bad guesses, far from leaving a foul taste in everyone's mouth, made them newly anxious about the great return they'd prepared themselves for. It even inspired the creation of new denominations, including the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses, a church that has since slated Jesus’ return for 1874, 1914, 1918, 1941, 1954, and 1975. And Miller awakened the fascination with the Rapture that today drives sales of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind books, which sell in the tens of millions, several years after the year 2000 failed to deliver on the millennial holocaust of non-Christians wished for by many Americans.

How can your sect rebound from failed prophecy in better shape than ever? According to one school of science, the answer starts with understanding the principle of cognitive dissonance.

You mostly find that term thrown around these days in Internet political debates, in which bloggers profess amazement that their foes can simultaneously hold conflicting beliefs. They reach for a formal name for what it is that permits (for example) Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who predicted that WMD would be found in Iraq, to exclaim in an interview with Salon, after no weapons had been found: “I was proved fucking right. That's what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, ‘There she goes again.’ But I was proved fucking right.”

“Cognitive dissonance” is a term coined by researchers from the University of Chicago who, under the leadership of one Dr. Leon Festinger, infiltrated a prophecy group in the 1950s: a fellowship of believers sure that a tidal wave was about to kill millions. In their humane but unsparingly detailed 1956 account, When Prophecy Fails, they described their efforts to find out just how far personal investment in strong convictions will go when what the material world calls “evidence” becomes the enemy.

CHRISTMAS EVE, 1954, and Dr. Charles Laughead stood waiting for the disaster outside a home on South Cuyler Avenue in the western suburbs of Chicago, hemmed in by a media circus. A week ago, this neighborhood was supposed to have become the basin of a new sea, along with most of the central United States. It didn't, but the tidal wave must be crashing over the Great Lakes soon. The stakes were too high for him to change his mind now.

“I’ve given up just about everything,” he'd said in recent days. “I’ve taken an awful beating in the last few months, just an awful beating.”

He'd been laughed at and fired from his job at the medical school. The administration didn't like that he was upsetting medical students with his warnings that North America was about to be cleaved into western and eastern islands and flooded with a new ocean that would make Cook County a reef before graduation. With an upbeat, can-do spirit, he preached at the group's meetings that “the boys upstairs,” rescuers beyond our solar system, would spirit away humans who were ready to hear the call.

Other believers wept when silence came instead of cataclysm. But Laughead wasn't about to quit now. He rallied the group, discarding despair in favor of twentieth-century PR. He phoned reporters. A press release, sent to newspapers across the country, read: “Due to the confusion which has arisen from the prophecy we have decided to unite forces to complete the prophecy...”

The story went national. The Chicago Daily Tribune wrote, in an article headlined “SECT EXPECTS TO DEPART THIS EARTH TONIGHT”:

Mrs. Dorothy Martin, 707 S. Cuyler Av., Oak Park, said yesterday she, Dr. Charles Laughead, 44, and other associates have received word from “the space brothers” that they will be “lifted up” from the face of the earth tonight.

Mrs. Martin said the group will gather in front of her home at 6 P.M. “We have been instructed to sing carols while we wait to be lifted up,” she said.

Dorothy Martin alerted them first to the spacelanders coming to retrieve them from the flood. Soon, settling down across the earth, including in the suburbs of Chicago, the “peapod ships” would evacuate eight to ten souls each. The space arks would leave behind a new sea filling the bowl between the Alleghenies, the Catskills, and the Rocky Mountains. There would be a “washing of the top to the sea, for the purpose of purifying it of the earthling, and the creating of the new order…. [A]ll things must first be likened unto the housecleaning….”

“Weren't the spacemen supposed to pick you up at 6 P.M.?”

No metal was allowed on board. No bra clasps; therefore, no bras. Men cut the zippers from pants. As the expected exit date neared, and everyone stood ready, Dr. Laughead discovered that one of the undercover psychologists was still bezippered, and performed last-minute surgery—hands trembling, according to the report.

A prophet faces a thousand humiliations. This week proved no exception. Jokesters kept making phone calls, claiming to be spacemen with names like Captain Video, calls that Laughead refused to rule out, though his daughter insisted otherwise: that the aliens wouldn't be making contact under the call sign of TV’s then-famous space ranger. But everyone was so coiled up for first contact, and ready to hear from the aliens in coded signals, that the signs lay everywhere. After a boy phoned and invited the seekers to a party, Mrs. Martin decided this was it. “Put your coats on,” she said and led a delegation across town, only to return, disappointed. Then there was the cheap shot the Tribune took, saying the Laughead kids must not think Armageddon was coming, seeing as how they'd set up ornaments in the living room for Christmas morning.

What was Dr. Laughead going to do about presents? The phone rang and another awkward exchange took place, transcribed verbatim in the Festinger report:

NEWSMAN: Dr. Laughead, I wanted to talk to you with reference to this business about—you know—your calling the paper to say you were going to be picked up at six o'clock this evening. Ahh, I just wanted to find out exactly what happened…. Didn't you say they sent a message that you should be packed and waiting at 6 P.M. Christmas Eve?

DR. LAUGHEAD: No.

NEWSMAN: No? I’m sorry, sir. Weren't the spacemen supposed to pick you up at 6 P.M.?

DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, there was a spaceman in the crowd with a helmet on and a white gown and whatnot.

NEWSMAN: There was a spaceman in the crowd?

DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, it was a little hard to tell […]

NEWSMAN: […] Did you talk to him?

DR. LAUGHEAD: No, I didn't talk to him.

NEWSMAN: Didn't you say you were going to be picked up by the spacemen?

DR. LAUGHEAD: No.

NEWSMAN: Well, what were you waiting out in the street for, singing carols?

DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, we went out to sing Christmas carols.

NEWSMAN: Oh, you just went out to sing Christmas carols?

DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, and if anything happened, well, that's all right, you know. We live from one minute to another.

NEWSMAN: […] Uh, well how do you account for the fact that they didn't pick you up?

DR. LAUGHEAD: As I told one of the other news boys, I don't think a spaceman would feel very welcome there in that crowd…

The tidal wave and the peapod ships never came. Soon the doctor's aggrieved sister tried to have him committed to an asylum. But at his hearing, a psychologist testified that the doctor “showed no obvious illusions or hallucinations and his conduct and manner seemed entirely normal.”

“END OF THE WORLD PROPHET FOUND IN ERROR, NOT INSANE,” reported the Tribune. Police, however, briefly considered charging the duo with contributing to the delinquency of minors—Chicago Police Chief Kearin explaining, it said in the paper, that “children of the neighborhood had talked to Mrs. Martin about space travel with the result that some of the youngsters had trouble sleeping afterwards.”

YEARS LATER, Dr. Laughead would roam the Americas, still seeking the space brotherhood, whom he believed to be linked to an ancient South American civilization. Meanwhile, Leon Festinger and his team had begun to assemble a theoretical framework for understanding why the seekers hadn't disbanded in shame after the failure of their prophecy but instead proselytized even more fervently about their saviors from deep space.

Reaching back to early failed prophecies in the Christian world, as well as the story of William Miller, they came to the conclusion that given the right set of conditions—including great personal investment in preparing for the end—what kicks in is Festinger's syndrome (a/k/a, cognitive dissonance). Failed prophecy might make a church redouble its efforts at proselytizing, instead of questioning its premises:

“The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”

Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, but he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: What will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.

Since then, When Prophecy Fails (which changed the names of its subjects) has been the love-it-or-hate-it starting point for all other studies of bad prophecy. Other scholars have repeated the original experiment, often succeeding to some measure, though sometimes proposing new conditions to account for when this reaction is likely to happen, or not happen.

In the last few decades, a more forgiving school of researchers has grumbled at Festinger's unsparingly literal approach. Outsiders don't get to decide if a prophecy fails or not, its adherents say.

One major figure in this gentler approach to prophecy is Dr. G. Gordon Melton of Santa Barbara. His passion for proving the sanity and rationality of new religions has even taken him to Japan on the dime of the Aum Supreme Truth church, there to maintain that the group couldn't possibly have gassed Tokyo subway commuters in 1995 (as they did) to hasten the apocalypse. Adopted by Festinger's critics, Melton's influential view, developed in the mid-1980s, is that failed prophecies don't fall flat so much as they become “spiritualized.” They are transformed from literal predictions into deeper visions of the hidden cosmos.

Whatever the quibbles, however, Festinger's general idea—that faith is often invigorated by disconfirmation—still stands strong, even if the predicted result—more proselytism—hasn't always been the pressure valve for the new burst of faith. Whether it happens, though, seems to depends on a number of factors, including the degree of ridicule to which the group has been subjected and whether the religion offers more than just apocalyptic predictions as something to fall back on, such as tradition or community.

THE LUBAVITCHERS OF BROOKLYN, the subjects of another study, were able to go on as usual after a major prediction by some of its adherents failed to materialize, and one scholar wanted to know why. In 1991, just after Saddam Hussein was driven from Kuwait, the Hasidic Jewish group put up fliers proclaiming that the Messiah walked in Crown Heights in the person of the white-bearded sage Rabbi Menachem Schneerson:

DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSION

These are amazing times. The Iron Curtain has crumbled. Iraq is humbled. The people of Israel emerge from under a rainstorm of murderous missiles. An entire beleaguered population is airlifted to safety overnight. A tidal wave of Russian Jews reaches Israel. Nations around the world turn to democracy. Plus countless other amazing developments that are taking place in front of our eyes. Any of these phenomena by itself is enough to boggle the mind. Connect them all together and a pattern emerges that cannot be ignored. The Lubavitcher Rebbe emphasizes that these remarkable events are merely a prelude to the final redemption. The era of Moshiach is upon us. Learn about it. Be part of it. All you have to do is to open your eyes. Inevitably, you will draw your own conclusion.

Even after Schneerson fell into a fatal coma in 1994, believers guessed that he'd descended into the world of death only to begin his unification of all souls and his work on earth. He would soon gather together his powers, spring to life, and save the world of the living. When it didn't happen, an official proclamation explained that he lay suspended in a “state of concealment,” like when Moses was on the mountaintop and couldn't be seen.

After his death, some held out for resurrection; some privately acknowledged to Simon Dein, a psychiatrist who studies the cultural aspects of religion, that they'd made a mistake; but Lubavitch Magazine said that it was their naysayers who were discredited. They pointed to an acceleration of Lubavitch activity all over the world, as new temples went up in Schneerson's honor. And some maintain he is the Messiah, even if he hasn't ended war and suffering. Among many there was an agreement that, whatever you thought of these events, there was no doubting that a miracle had happened. Dein's conclusion: These were “sane people who try to reason their way through facts and doctrine.” Their prediction had become spiritualized.

THE “CHURCH OF THE TRUE WORD” tried everything.

At one point it comprised 135 splinter Baha'i survivalists in Montana, led into fallout shelters to await mass nuclear death and the return of Jesus. Over a span of several years, True Word leaders Leland Jensen and Neal Chase predicted so many dates for World War III and other misadventures that studies of the group have names like “When the Bombs Drop” and “When the Bombs Still Haven't Dropped.”

By the 1990s, blown predictions had become a lifestyle. Indeed, Leland Jensen, the group's soothsayer, had covered every possible base in explaining why everyone was still alive. Researchers keeping tabs on Jensen's excuses tallied up a list so all-encompassing that it covers just about every justification ever applied to an inaccurate prophecy.

1) It really did happen, just not in the material world.

If God's world is the spirit and ours is just matter and flesh, how can you expect to use our reason as the measuring stick?

In keeping with this popular axiom, Jensen predicted that Halley's Comet would start ripping apart earth's cities on April 29, 1986, raining down deadly chunks for a year. When it harmlessly passed by instead, Jensen explained that it “did take place. A spiritual stone hit the earth.”

The Jehovah's Witnesses similarly defended the 1844 date of Snow and Miller's failed Second Coming prophecy by arguing that this date was when Christ arrived—in the second apartment of a sanctuary in heaven. And a 1914 prediction date was explained later as the time that Jesus’ kingdom began—but in the spirit world.

2) It really did happen, only in a much more ordinary way than you expected.

The “bowl of wrath” that was supposed to be flung into the air by the seventh angel turned out, according to Jensen and Chase, to be all the news coverage touched off by their explosive predictions.

3) Just testing.

Famously, God was just messing with Abraham when he asked him to knife his own son. Why not take a page from him? When World War III wasn't declared on time, Church of the True Word leaders said their warning was “God's fire drill.”

A variation is to shame followers by telling them they blew God's test. On the morning of June 18, 1975, a Japanese prophet/healer named Katsuichi Motoki appeared on a radio station, explaining that if an apocalyptic earthquake didn't hit Japan that morning, he'd “take the blame and dissolve the sect.”

It turned out to be a nice day. “We are saved,” cried out the apostles as they made for Motoki's “Shrine of the Fundamental Truth.” But when they got there, they found Motoki bleeding to death, having tried to commit ritual suicide, samurai style, after his failed prophecy. Had he offered his life to the spirits for saving Japan? They admired his sacrifice.

The next month, out of the hospital, he gathered them together and chewed them out.

“All of you are failures,” he said. “Why? You thought that if God's prophecy did not materialize, you would be so scorned and slandered.…”

They'd thought only of themselves—that was what mattered. Their self-consciousness had shamed God. And Motoki had taken the heat for their lapse of belief. “God had transferred the cataclysm to my own body,” he explained, describing a vision in which he morphed into the islands of Japan.

It worked and he kept his group. Of the twenty-one who lived at his dorm, he retained seventeen.

4) The numbers were off.

Sometimes it's easiest just to say you forgot to carry the one. On May 6, 1980, the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune of Missouri reported, under the headline “DOOMSDAY IS RESCHEDULED FOR WEDNESDAY MORNING,” that “the prediction of a holocaust for April 29 at 5:55 P.M. was in error because sect members were not interpreting Biblical time references correctly.” Jensen's messenger didn't fear ridicule. “They laughed at Noah,” he said. Jensen reiterated that on the following Wednesday the world would be rocked by either nuclear detonation or an assassination.

In London in 1524, there was some commotion over fortune-tellers who predicted that a flood would wipe out the city; 20,000 people were said to have left, including the wealthy. Later, instead of drowning the soothsayers, there was widespread agreement that they'd calculated incorrectly and that the true date was 1624, according to Charles Mackay, author of the great 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Mackay devotes a chapter to English prophecies of doom, including the story of the chicken whose egg came out marked “CHRIST IS COMING.” That led to a stir until it was discovered that the words had been written in human-made ink, then stuffed back into the bird.

5) Who said anything about being prophets?

Hey, they just took a stab at the stuff. Chase and Jensen didn't have a direct line to God. “We can't be false prophets because we don't claim to be prophets,” said Chase and Jensen after one nuclear war turned up missing. “We simply interpret what is already there in the Bible.”

6) Erring on the safe side.

The nuke prophets said it was their moral responsibility to warn humanity, regardless of whether the end came. Faced with the choice of embarrassment or letting everyone die horribly without warning, wouldn't you choose the embarrassment?

NOW THAT YOU’VE SEEN how the world's most successful failed prophets turn poorly phrased predictions into success, let's see if you can identify time-tested disconfirmation dynamics in this case study.

Once upon a time, a con man, Clyde Hood, went to prison for tricking his victims into signing up for bogus “prosperity plans.” But just as dupes of Nigerian email scams imagine that nonexistent millions must still be in a suitcase somewhere in Abuja, some of Hood's victims refused to believe that the money was a fantasy.

Hood had even pled guilty to swindling and making it all up. But victims clung to the idea that the wealth was winging its way to them.

Enter Shaini Goodwin, a woman in the Pacific Northwest whose online “Dove Reports” describe the machinations of secret plots, supposedly revealed to her by top sources, kept from us by secret gag orders, that will soon release the fund to the world.

By day the excuses grew evermore complex.

Any day now, the checks would come.

Any day now, the forces of darkness would stop holding back the checks.

Any day now, Christ himself would return in a spaceship, bringing news that in 2000 President Clinton had signed a secret law, with the heavenly acronym NESARA, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service. The National Economic Stabilization And Recovery Act would forgive all debt and topple the Bush Administration.

From lack of evidence came a volcano of faith. The conspiracy theory has now spread across the Net to thousands of websites.

Waiting For NESARA, a little documentary by Salt Lake City filmmakers Zeb and Elisa Haradon, films a Utah group who weren't the original scam victims but were converts to the beliefs that grew out of the con: the Open Mind Forum, a group that meets at a Kentucky Fried Chicken to giddily await the announcement of NESARA.

“Some people have asked, ‘Why does Jesus need a spaceship?’” a grandmotherly lady tells us. Well: “It might be more comfortable…”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You need to go on Google for yourself and see, because words can't do justice to the scope of this thing. Type in “NESARA,” which turns up an amazing 118,000 hits as of this writing. You need to see a picture of one of the rallies these people throw in Washington, DC, and in foreign countries, plastering NESARA signs on trucks that they rent to circle Capitol Hill, demanding the government reveal “the true NESARA law.”

He claims to have been told in a vision from God that the hidden law was passed “in a secret joint session of Congress with the walls of the House Chambers lined with Navy Seals and Delta Force.”

Sometimes someone drives by and gives them a thumbs-up, which they interpret as a wink from a politician in the know.

Typical of many NESARA websites—headlined “The Public Announcement of NESARA in the United States is Imminent!”—is the one maintained by a soul going under the name “Patrick Bellringer” to elude identification. He claims to have been told in a vision from God that the hidden law was passed “in a secret joint session of Congress with the walls of the House Chambers lined with Navy Seals and Delta Force.”

Members tune in to updates from the Dove, who says that the “White Knights,” supernatural avatars, will step in any day now to reveal the law and bring about a New World Order. In one message left on Dove's dial-a-prophecy answering machine, a supposed alien being is heard to explain that 9/11 was a plot to stop the prophecy of NESARA, saying in an extraterrestrial voice: “HUMANS HAVE TO GET OVER THEIR ANGER. WE WERE THERE INSTANTLY TO BEAM THEM UP OUT OF THAT BUILDING.”

The group in the documentary, which has little to fall back on, eventually breaks up. The discussion leader is ridiculed on a local talk-radio station, where a caller sneers at him: “Who are these White Knights—the Knights of Columbus?”

“That's pretty cute,” he says, trying to brush it off.

Even worse, it's pointed out to him that if the aliens make us all rich, it'll just lead to inflation. And then, of course, NESARA fails to be revealed.

“We have to go with the flow,” Jim tells the group in explanation. “Plans change.”

That was years ago. But the Dove continues to claim victory is at hand. In mid-2006, she posted that the evidence just kept coming: “About 90 percent of Navy SEALs are aware of the true NESARA law,” she wrote, suggesting that it's “possible to confirm that the new ‘rainbow’ currency has already been printed.”

Goodwin called me about this article, beginning the conversation by asking if my phone was tapped. Assured we were on a secure line, Goodwin told me that the US Congress was “attempting to move this forward, but there's so much control from the US Supreme Court.” Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill had confirmed NESARA’s existence, she claimed. “If they were publicly to discuss NESARA they would be arrested,” she said; the situation is “as serious as a heart attack.”

AND IT GOES ON and on. In April 2000, Trinity Broadcasting Network evangelist Benny Hinn “prophecized” that God Almighty was “fulfilling His plan” for Syria's Hafez Al-Assad to sign a peace treaty with Israel: “They have to, because God says they will.” It was a reason for viewers to send him checks. When Assad died two months later without having signed a treaty, Hinn backpedaled and said, in a flourish worthy of Spinal Tap: “It was God's plan for it not to happen, really.”

The end has been nigh as far back in time as anyone can remember. The slip-ups are at least as old as the Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 B.C.E. that said, citing the disgusting morality of the times: “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end.” While archaeologists have no signs of whether this ancient version of Benny Hinn did well for himself, preachers in our time have unmistakably made a fortune regardless of—or is it because of ?—bogus prophecies.

Our own Hinn reaped $89 million in donations in 2003, despite having predicted that a devastating earthquake would hit the East coast in the 1990s, that American gays would be wiped out by fire in 1995, and that the Rapture was less than two years away in the fall of 1990.

And that Jesus would be arriving in the next two years.

That was in 1997.