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sleepy skunk
I should also mention I found my only shakabukus and I apologized for potentially getting them into a bad situation. I feel quite a lot better since I've done so, like I've restored the balance in the universe somehow. I really did worry about that for the last while. The good thing is they never mentioned that they ever went to a meeting when I talked to them. I don't feel I'm quite square and wonder if they'd forgive me but that is up to them I guess.

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Festinger stated that five conditions must be present if someone is to become a more fervent believer after a failure or disconfirmation:

A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.

The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual's commitment to the belief.

The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.

Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.

The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

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That warning turned out to be a false alarm. No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth, nor were any believers caught up in the clouds. Harold Camping, the octogenarian whose nightly Bible call-in show fomented doomsday mania, suffered a stroke soon afterward and mostly disappeared from sight. The press coverage, which had been intense in the weeks leading up to May 21, 2011, dwindled to nothing. The story, as far as most people were concerned, was over.

But I wanted to know what happens next. If you’re absolutely sure the world is going to end on a specific day, and it doesn’t, what do you do? How do you explain it to yourself? What happens to your faith in God? Can you just scrape the bumper stickers off your car, throw away the t-shirts, and move on?

In order to find out, I got to know a dozen or so believers prior to the scheduled apocalypse. I sat at their kitchen tables, attended their meetings, tagged along on trips to Wal-Mart, ate pizza in their hotel rooms, spent hours with them on the phone. Then, after Jesus was a no-show, I stayed in contact with them—the ones who would talk to me, anyway—over the following days and months, checking back in to see how or if their thinking had changed.

I learned a lot about the seductive power of radical belief, the inscrutable vagaries of biblical interpretation, and how our minds can shape reality to fit a narrative. I also learned that you don’t have to be nuts to believe something crazy.

“I Can’t Afford to Doubt”

On the night of October 22, 1844, they huddled in a barn in Port Gibson, New York. They stood by the graves of their departed loved ones in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. In Cincinnati, Ohio, 2,000 of them walked through downtown and climbed a hill to a park overlooking the city. Inside homes, on rooftops, in fields, alone or en masse, they waited for God.

These were devotees of William Miller, the prosperous farmer turned self-taught biblical scholar. It’s impossible to know for sure how many people he persuaded that the world was ending; estimates range from 50,000 to one million. Anyone who read a newspaper at the time would have been familiar with Miller’s prognostications. Along with those who identified publicly as Millerites, there must have been many more who privately took his warnings to heart.

More than a century later, a young social psychologist named Leon Festinger took an interest in the Millerites. What intrigued Festinger was why the failure of Miller’s multiple prophecies had done little to discourage the faithful. Miller had predicted the end of the world more than once. The end of the world hadn’t come. Shouldn’t that have been enough? Festinger wrote the following in his 1956 classic, When Prophecy Fails: “Although there is a limit beyond which belief will not withstand disconfirmation, it is clear that the introduction of contrary evidence can serve to increase the conviction and enthusiasm of a believer.”

When the world failed to end, they clung more tightly to their belief. Rather than folding, they doubled down. [www.religiondispatches.org]

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May 21 believers couldn’t afford to doubt either. Whenever I met one, I would ask: Is there any chance you might be wrong? Could someone have miscalculated, misunderstood a verse, botched a symbol? Just maybe?

I asked this question of a believer in his mid-twenties. He started listening to Harold Camping’s radio show in college and immediately went out, bought a Bible, and immersed himself in it. After graduation, he took a job as an engineer at a Fortune 500 company; a job he loved and a job he quit because he thought the world was ending. He wrote the following in his resignation letter: “With less than three months to the day of Christ’s return, I desire to spend more time studying the Bible and sounding the trumpet warning of this imminent judgment.”

He would not entertain the possibility, even hypothetically, that the date could be off. “This isn’t a prediction because a prediction has a potential for failure,” he told me.

“Even if it’s 99.9 percent, that extra .1 percent makes it not certain. It’s like the weather. If it’s 60 percent, it may or may not rain. But in this case we’re saying 100 percent it will come. God with a consuming fire is coming to bring judgment and destroy the world.”

I encountered this same certainty again and again. When I asked how they could be so sure, the answers were fuzzy. It wasn’t any one particular verse or chapter but rather the evidence as a whole. Some believers compared it to a puzzle. At first the pieces are spread out on a table, just shards of color, fragments of meaning. Then you assemble, piece by piece, finding a corner here, a connection there, until you begin to make out a portion of the picture, a glimpse of the scene. Finally, you only have a few pieces left and it’s obvious where they go.

A psychologist might call this confirmation bias, that is, the tendency to accept only evidence that confirms what you already believe, to search for pieces that fit your puzzle. We’re all guilty of it at times. But that label doesn’t fully explain the willingness to suspend disbelief: Believers selectively accepted evidence that caused them to quit their jobs, alienate friends and family, and stand on street corners absorbing abuse from passers-by. There is something else going on.

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Not that believers didn’t have their doubts in the beginning. Everyone I talked to assured me that they, too, weren’t sure at first. But after a certain point, maybe without consciously realizing it, they made a decision to abandon those doubts, to choose to believe. A young mother tried to help me understand the evidence before throwing up her hands. “It’s about the believers and the unbelievers, you know?” she said.

“They’ve been around forever and as much as we’re positive, there are going to be people who are going to question it because they don’t believe, if you know what I mean? If you believed it you’d be as sure as I am.”

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What happened after May 21 matches up fairly closely with what scholars of apocalyptic groups would expect. The so-called disconfirmation was not enough to undermine the faith of many believers. From what I can tell, those who had less invested in the prophecy were more likely to simply give up and return to normal life. Meanwhile, those who had risked almost everything seemed determined to reframe the prophecy, to search the scriptures, to hang on to the hope that the end might be nigh.

I was struck by how some believers edited the past in order to avoid acknowledging that they had been mistaken. The engineer in his mid-twenties, the one who told me this was a prophecy rather than a prediction, maintained that he had never claimed to be certain about May 21. When I read him the transcript of our previous interview, he seemed genuinely surprised that those words had come out of his mouth. It was as if we were discussing a dream he couldn’t quite remember.

Other believers had no trouble recalling what they now viewed as an enormous embarrassment. Once October came and went without incident, the father of three was finished. “After October 22, I said ‘You know what? I think I was part of a cult,’” he told me. His main concern was how his sons, who were old enough to understand what was going on, would deal with everything: “My wife and I joke that when my kids get older they’re going to say that we’re the crazy parents who believed the world was going to end.”

In the beginning, I was curious how believers would react, as if they were mice in a maze. But as time went on I grew to like and sympathize with many of them. This failed prophecy caused real harm, financially and emotionally. What was a curiosity for the rest of us was, for them, traumatic. And it’s important to remember that mainstream Christians also believe that God’s son will play a return engagement, beam up his bona fide followers, and leave the wretched remainder to suffer unspeakable torment. They’re just not sure when.

Among those I came to know and like was a gifted young musician. Because he was convinced the world was ending, he had abandoned music, quit his job, and essentially put his life on hold for four years. It had cost him friends and created a rift between some members of his family. He couldn’t have been more committed.

In a recent email, he wrote that he had “definitely lost an incredible amount of faith” and hadn’t touched his Bible in months. These days he’s not sure what or whether to believe. “It makes me wonder just how malleable our minds can be. It all seemed so real, like it made so much sense, but it wasn’t right,” he wrote. “It leaves a lot to think about.”

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"When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him.

In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one." – Karl A. Menninger, mental health pioneer

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TaitenAndProud

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Looks like this is the same San Antonio kaikan where I took to the mike to redress the culties almost 20 years ago. At last, I had grown courageous enough to speak the truth about the inequalities and unfair practices of the SG cult. As I read from a lengthy pre-prepared speech, I watched the crowd's agitation rising like a rocket. They began to seeth with anger as I continued my verbal reprimand of Gakkai rules and policies. Near the end of my statement, I could see some of the members struggling to keep themselves seated and their rage contained. I could sense how the audacity of my telling the unadulterated truth about the cult had brought me very close to being physically attacked. Culties do not want to hear about anything that does not conform to their pre-programed cult reality. It can be dangerous to step inside and stir the hornet's nest. But now I'm very happy that I did speak out against the cult at that old kaikan that I unwittingly donated so much of my precious time and energy to.

Spartacus, did you happen to save a transcript of your remarks? I would LOVE to see it!!

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For example, the actress Priscilla Presley, who joined Scientology in the 1970s, raised her daughter, Lisa Marie, in the church; the British writer and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, who currently maintains that he is not a practicing Scientologist, was nonetheless brought up in Scientology, at the church's worldwide headquarters. Other famous second-generation Scientologists include the actors Juliette Lewis, Elizabeth Moss, Giovanni Ribisi, and Danny Masterson, who introduced the faith to his girlfriend, the model Bijou Phillips, and to his former costar on That Seventies Show, Lauren Prepon. [www.nytimes.com]

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TaitenAndProud
I don't know of *anyone* who was born into a gakkai family over here in the states who continued practicing into adulthood - I think that's more of a Japanese thing.

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sleepy skunk
I should also mention I found my only shakabukus and I apologized for potentially getting them into a bad situation. I feel quite a lot better since I've done so, like I've restored the balance in the universe somehow. I really did worry about that for the last while. The good thing is they never mentioned that they ever went to a meeting when I talked to them. I don't feel I'm quite square and wonder if they'd forgive me but that is up to them I guess.