This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It looked to Junior Romero and a half-dozen other Christians like they had hit the jackpot earlier this spring when they rolled their RVs alongside Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City.
Mormons were streaming out of both the LDS Conference Center and the temple.
"We caught it right on the money," Romero recalls, "just perfect."
But, sadly, Romero says, few Latter-day Saints accepted the tracts he and his friends handed out, proclaiming that May 21, 2011, is God's Judgment Day.
"Nobody was belligerent. It was like snickers. We tried, but no one would accept them."
Now, a week before what Romero believes will be the end of the world as we know it, he is praying for those Mormons and the thousands of others who have snubbed his warning.
"My heart goes out to them," Romero, a retired mechanic from Patterson, Calif., says from Great Falls, Mont.
He is in one of four caravans of RVs (there are 20 in all) emblazoned with the Judgment Day message that have been rolling through the U.S. byways and cities since last fall.
Most are staffed by volunteers who have become convinced that Jesus Christ will come for his followers May 21. True Christians will be raptured to heaven, they say, while everyone else will be doomed to damnation, either immediately or in the earthquakes and global destruction that will ensue before the world ends five months later, on Oct. 21.
They follow the teaching of Harold Camping, the 89-year-old owner and president of the Oakland, Calif.-based Family Radio network of 66 stations and 150 translators in the United States and overseas, including 91.7 FM in Salt Lake City.
Camping previously predicted the world would end in 1994, but revised it to 2011 after life continued and he took a closer look at his math.
Family Radio spokesman Tom Evans says he doesn't know how much money has been spent on the message. "But it's in the millions."
Michael Garcia, the Family Radio special projects coordinator who arranged for five Judgment Day billboards to be placed in Salt Lake and Davis counties in April, says he was convinced that Camping is right after studying the Bible.
The Good Book doesn't name the exact date, Garcia says, but those who are willing to study can sort through the clues to reach the same conclusion.
Religion News Service summed up Camping's teaching this way: "God tells Noah the world will end in seven days; the Bible also equates a day to 1,000 years. The date of the flood has been set at 4990 B.C., so adding 7,000 years plus one for the missing year '0' produces the year 2011. Translating a biblical reference to a month and day, from the Hebrew calendar to the Gregorian, results in May 21."
But what if May 21 is a day like every other? What if Camping is wrong?
"The fact is, I really can't entertain that," Garcia says. "I am so convinced that all the Bible proofs point to this day."
Even Jesus doesn't know
Camping's prediction is very much in the apocalyptic stream that runs throughout America among both the religious and the secular. But it's also at the edges of mainstream Christianity.
"Camping's teaching about the Rapture is consistent with premillennial thought, but his pinpointing of the day is not," says Darrell Bock, a research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary.
The radio evangelist's conclusions also differ, Bock says, in that the period of suffering is not a matter of years, but five months "before the final, final day and new kingdom."
Camping condemns all organized religion Christian or not as infiltrated by Satan and insists a Christian can learn God's truth through the Bible alone.
Barbara Rossing, a professor of New Testament and a pastor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, says Camping is "way on an edge with this, setting a date."
Scripture quotes Jesus saying that it's not for humans to know the day or hour of his Second Coming, says Rossing, author of 2004's The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation.
"Jesus tells us to always be ready," Rossing says, "but he gently and firmly told us not to speculate."
Greg Johnson, president of the Standing Together network of evangelical Christian churches in Utah, says that's what he tells congregations whenever he preaches about the so-called end times.
Camping's prediction, he says, is wrong because Jesus declared that even he didn't know the hour.
"It's a well-guarded divine secret," says Johnson, a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals.
While Christians may be motivated by the notion that judgment could come at any moment, he says, it can be unhealthy if it becomes a preoccupation.
"There's a saying: 'Don't be so heavenly minded that you are no earthly good,' " Johnson says. "We are supposed to be men and women of both worlds."
The apocalypse in history
The notion of apocalypse predates Christianity by about 2,000 years, says John R. Hall, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis and author of 2009's Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity.
The Zoroastrians of ancient Persia were the first to conceive of "breaking through the end of history to an eternity in the future."
"They came to the idea that they were connected with divine history, and there was a history that was a struggle between good and evil. They put themselves on the side of good," Hall says. "This theme continues to be echoed in apocalyptic thought thereafter."
People have always been attracted, he says, to the notion that the world as they know it is crumbling and that they are integral to the plan to start anew.
Ancient Israelites had prophecies giving them a pivotal role in God's future kingdom. That view was part of Christianity from the beginning, although the early church moved away from proclaiming an imminent Second Coming.
The apocalyptic element of the Protestant reformation in the 16th and 17 centuries led people to transform their lives and society. It also was the background for the immigration of Puritans and Pilgrims, Hall says, and the movement of Mormons to the deserts of the West.
Secular groups have had the impulse as well.
The communist movement of the 19th and 20th century was about such transformation, Hall says, as was the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s and '70s.
"There was widespread sentiment [that] we were at the dawn of a new age, that the old order just couldn't hold."
Daniel Wojcik, author of 1997's The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism and Apocalypse in America, says the ideas are widespread.
They are "central to the belief systems of numerous Protestant denominations, Catholic apparitions of the Virgin Mary, New Age spiritualities, UFO religions, some environmentalist movements, and various other groups, not to mention the explosion of literary and popular culture doomsday fare," Wojcik, professor of folklore studies at the University of Oregon, writes in an email. "Such ideas have an extensive legacy in the United States, from Christopher Columbus' prophecy beliefs, to those of the Puritans, the Millerites, the Shakers, Mormons, Native American Ghost Dances, among many other groups."
The New Age movement even has an apocalypse on the burner now: 2012.
The Mayan calendar supposedly ends in 2012, and Hollywood has popularized the idea that it means the world also will end.
Richard Landes, director and co-founder of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, says his daughter calls 2012 "the hipster apocalypse," because it's giving young people an excuse not to get serious about life.
Apocalyptic thinking "relieves [people] of having to deal with uncertainty about the future," says Landes, whose book Heaven on Earth, will be published by Oxford Press this summer.
Camping, Landes believes, is hitching his wagon to the buzz about 2012 and will go down with a long line of Christians who have backpedaled after their doomsday predictions fizzled.
But Hall notes that Camping may not have a chance for a third swing if his May 21 prediction fails. He is, after all, nearly 90 years old.
Then again, if Camping is right ...