Apocalypse Then
On Dec. 20, 1954, a small religious group in Illinois was hugely disappointed when the world did not end that day as expected.
This apocalyptic cult, described in a 1956 social psychology book titled When Prophesy Fails, believed that a flying saucer would swing by earth on the date above and rescue them from certain destruction. When it didn’t happen, unsurprising to virtually everyone else, the disciples of “prophetess” Dorothy Martin calmly accepted her explanation when faced with such a potentially devastating reversal. The almighty, Martin opined, had simply changed His mind and decided to postpone the apocalypse. For now. Conveniently, as with all such prophesies, no uncontestable facts existed to irrefutably negate any of it because the invisible purported authenticator of the prophesy was literally nowhere to be found.
Clearly, this has happened a lot in history, since we’re still here and end-time prophesies have been all too common in all times. Those mis-predictions seem to have generally begotten a kind of Monday morning quarterbacking that waves the failed forecast away with a similarly breezy rationalization. There’s even a reason we do this—to relieve “cognitive dissonance”—as reporter Kristin Wong noted in a May 22, 2017, article in The New York Times titled “Why It’s So Hard to Admit You’re Wrong.”
On the other hand, some enraptured end-time cultists—like the Christianity-based Heaven’s Gate group—came up with an innovative way to avoid all that disappointment.
Heaven’s Gate eventually planned a failsafe strategy that successfully shielded members from conscious existential dismay no matter what happened on their journey to salvation. But not with their first try. In 1975, group leaders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles persuaded 20 people to desert their families, discard their possessions and move from Oregon to Colorado. A spacecraft was purportedly there (why is it always a spaceship?) to transport them to the “kingdom of heaven.” Sadly, the ship never actually arrived, the cult leaders’ resulting excuses apparently weren’t very compelling, and the cult largely fizzled out before Nettles died a decade later. But the cult didn’t fade away completely.
Applewhite began recruiting new members near San Diego, California, in the 1990s, and when cult members learned the Hale-Bopp comet would whizz past earth in 1995, they somehow divined that a sacred spacecraft was traveling in tandem with the comet, opportunely hidden behind it. When the comet reached its closest approach to earth in late March 1997, Applewhite and 38 of his disciples drank lethal cocktails of barbiturates and alcohol, lied down in matching dark outfits and Nike running shoes, and died. They expected their spirits would leave their bodies and enter the unseen spaceship for a one-way journey through Heaven’s Gate and onto immortal bliss. The failsafe was that they would never know if it never happened.
But, to date, all apocalypticals (if that’s a word) have ended up having to consciously accept their hopes’ inevitable failures. And that’s when all the dissembling occurs as the disconsolates try mightily to deal with their cognitive dissonance, the disturbing conflict between what they only imagine in their minds and what reality irrefutably reveals as fantasy.
Unfortunately, we reportedly feel better if we refuse to accept reality and stick to our original stories, instead of caving and bowing to manifest real-world evidence against them. Psychiatrists say that the latter strategy feels weak, like giving up, which we humans are generally loathe to do. So, we usually don’t.
Which is one key reason supernatural religion perpetuates and people continue to insist spaceships are hiding behind comets to rescue them from themselves.
