ONTD Original - Scandals in the Evangelical Church
The anniversary of this shitshow is upcoming, so that's why it's being featured in this edition of ONTD Divinity School. Get your calculators out, jackals. Numbers abound!
Welcome to the
Buckle up sistren, there's fuckery to uncover
So. How the actual hell do all these terrible people manage to get their messages across to the masses? We're no longer in the era where you have only a limited number of broadcast television stations and whatever was on, including church based programming, was what was on. Well, there's always the radio and many non-denominational churches use radio waves to get their message to everyone. Back in the day, you didn't even need to know which station it was. They were usually all called the same thing.
The basis of this series are my own experiences with living in a Fundamental Christian/Born-Again household until I was in my 30s (when I escaped--I'm not even lying about that), I pulled many of these off the top of my head and then filled in memory with research that sent me down a path of recollections I would much rather forget, BELIEVE ME. Remember, you are not forced to read....but I do hope you learn.
Chapter 1: Hillsong | Chapter 2: James Dobson/Focus on the Family/Family Research Council/Family Talk | Chapter 3 - Part 1: Quiverfull/The Duggars/19 and Counting * Part 2 | Chapter 4: Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker/PTL | Chapter 5: What is a denomination ANYWAY? | Chapter 6: Jerry Falwell/Liberty University/Jerry Falwell Jr
Chapter 7: Harold Camping/Family Radio
Denomination: Interdenominational (you got money? WELCOME ABOARD!)
The Background: Family Radio was founded by journalist and radio pioneer Richard Palmquist. As a student at the Dallas Seminary College, he recorded sermons to be broadcast to the student body. He expanded his reach when he did missionary work in Alaska, where his broadcasts were heard all the way in Siberia, Russia. In the mid-1950s, he approached evangelical pastors Harold Camping and Lloyd Lindquist to help him start purchasing FM radio licenses. Palmquist wanted to start a series of non-commercial FM stations across the US where local churches could broadcast their services, as well as play spiritual music and other religious-focused entertainment.
The ministry was branded Family Stations Inc, and became colloquially known as Family Radio. Featuring mostly local services, there were several homegrown and national organizations that used the network to broadcast.
Popular network announcers and the programs they hosted included: Jon Arthur (The Quiet Hours, Big Jon & Sparky, Radio Reading Circle); Omar Andeel (The Morning Clock); Harold Hall (The Christian Home); Ken Boone (Music to Live By); Bob Swenson (Transition); and Jerry Edinger (Nightwatch).
Outside ministry programs included
Focus On The Family
Freedom Under Fire
Unshackled!
Back to the Bible
Family News in Focus
Beyond Intelligent Design
Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible*
and "Walk with the King"/The King's Hour with Dr. Robert A. Cook*
[*disclaimer: Dr. Donald Barnhouse is the namesake of Barnhouse Hall, one of the girls dorms at my high school alma mater, The Stony Brook School where my younger sister lived in her SBS days. He was a member of the Board of Trustees and a contemporary of the school's founder Frank Gaebelein.
Dr. Robert Cook was the president of The King's College from 1971 to 1985. I attended TKC from Sept 1987 to Jan 1988 while Dr. Cook was the Chancellor of the college, when I flunked out after burning out. (My dad died in '85, I went through 2 years of college prep at SBS and I had begged for a gap year after graduation in 1987. The answer was no. TKC was the compromise school after I got accepted to Spelman in GA but we couldn't afford it. MOTHER wanted me to go to Oral Roberts University. More on that in another sermon.)
I did learn a lot at both these schools and met one of the greatest historians in my life, Dr. Howard Vos, at King's. He was the first to discover that I had learning disabilities and told my mother to take many seats and stop thinking she was entitled to my advisor's (the aforementioned Dr. Vos) time to discuss my education. I was the advisee, not her. TKC was also where I first learned the actual sausage making of how The Holy Bible ™ was constructed book by book. 🤯 Christian robot fabrication: FAIL]
Camping became known as the voice of Family Radio, leading the nightly Bible Readings at 8 PM local time and Open Forum, a show for poor deluded souls to telephone in and gain 'wisdom' from Camping, mostly in the form of convoluted crack theories based on shaky doctrine at best. [Like the flood before The Flood my mother came up with based on his bullshit. No really. It's fucking mind boggling.]
The Scandal: Camping was a closet numerologist and loved to put times and dates on things. Mostly when the Earth was created (11,000 BC) and the date of the Rapture, the assumption of all true believers to Heaven and the start of the Great Tribulation, where God and Jesus abandon the Earth to Satan and the Antichrist to run roughshod until the Final Battle between the Men of the West and Mordor and the destruction of the One Ring and President Snow...or something like that. The Spice must flow. Gollum. (which if you actually read the Bible is a big no-no to do. Matthew 24:36 - "No one knows when that day and hour will be, not the angels of heaven, not even the Son, but only the Father.).
Sidenote: The word 'Rapture' never appears in the actual text of the New Testament. The origin of the term extends from passages in First Thessalonians, which use the Greek word harpazo which translates to 'seize' or 'snatch up'. The concept of The Rapture as the precursor to the Great Tribulation started in approximately 1830 in the United States and has spread worldwide as a core tenet of Evangelical doctrine.
Camping made three separate claims of the Second Coming of Christ--the first in a 1992 book called 1994? (the first year he predicted the end of the world would come) which went mostly unnoticed because the interwebz and the 24-hour news cycle was not nearly as prevalent as it is now. It's not even that Camping was the only one to have made these kinds of predictions; they've been made since what feels like the beginning of the Common Era.
The second and third announcements, however, put Camping and his crack philosophies on blast on an international level.
On his Open Forum program in the beginning of 2011, Camping announced that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and The Rapture would happen on May 21, 2011, with the subsequent five months comprising the Great Tribulation. He stated that 200 million people (approximately 2.8% of the world's population in 2011) would be taken up. Family Radio, via his broadcasts, publicized the prediction in numerous countries. October 21, 2011 would be the date for the Battle of Armageddon marking the end of the world as we know it. [And we'll feel fiiiiiinnnnneeeeeeee.]
Where did he get the evidence for these dates with such clarity? Camping taught that a calendar had been hidden in the Scriptures, especially highlighting Daniel 12:9 and Revelation 22:10, detailing dates of the imminent end of the world, of the "end of the church age" (which asserts that churches would no longer the vehicle used by God to lead people to salvation, 1 Peter 4:17); and of predestination (Ephesians 1:4--5), according to which God determined before the beginning of the world which individuals are to be saved. [And again, lead into the flood before The Flood my mother is convinced happened. S I G H.]
But Camping didn't stop there. Family Radio spent millions of donated dollars to put up advertisements all across the world proclaiming that The Rapture was coming. Billboards, bus ads, radio ads, TV ads. It was everywhere for months. At 6 PM on May 21, 2011, Jesus was coming to take the faithful home starting with rolling earthquakes that would travel around the world like New Year's Eve fireworks. REPENT YE LOWLY SINNERS.
Sadly, these tactics caused a 14-year old girl to unalive herself in Russia, since she felt there was nothing to bother living for. Poor kid.
At 6:01 pm, I got a phone call from my mother in Florida. She called to wish me a Happy Rapture.
For the first time in her life, she was totally fucking around. I fell out the chair I was sitting in.
Needless to say, the Rapture and its supposed earthquakes never happened.
Did that stop Camping? Of course not.
Calling the May 21 date a 'spiritual judgment', he doubled down on his predictions on May 23, stating that the whole bang would happen on October 21, 2011 - the Rapture, the Tribulation, Armageddon, guys drilling on an asteroid to blow it up, The Hunger Games, the Dance of Dragons, ALL OF IT! He just needed to switch the math up after a day of contemplation.
At 6:02 October 21, 2011, I got another phone call from my mom in Florida. "I'M STILL HERE? UGH, SO DISAPPOINTED."
[This is so appropriate since Mom got me hooked on Hercules, then I found my OTFandom in Xena.]
Yes. I ugly laughed. There haven't been many times I've been on the same page with my fundie NMom--I can actually count them on one hand. This was number three. [#2 was the aforementioned May 21st, #1 was voting for Obama.]
There was no comment made by Family Radio on either October 21 OR 22. Family Radio and those who had spent thousands of their own money became laughing stocks when The Freedom From Religion Foundation brought up the majority of billboards that had been showing FamilyRadio.Com adverts about the end of the world and started blazing them with 'Fool me once...", "Still Here" and "Every Day is Judgement Day. Use Yours. Use Reason."
And commercials like this one:
Ron Reagan Jr. still puts these out in the year of our petty Lord 2024, and that outro line still SLAPS
The mainstream Christian media, most of whom did not (openly) buy into Camping's message, immediately re-declared him a false prophet (they'd said the same after the May 21 non-event but they really dragged ha after October), and churches who had continued to broadcast their services on their local Family Radio affiliates after the May fiasco jumped ship like rats.
Family Radio removed all the Open Forum archives from their website that had anything to do with Camping's predictions. Camping himself had a stroke on June 9, 2011 and was slowly pushed out of active leadership of Family Radio as donations nosedived and supporters fled. It wasn't until March of 2012 that Camping admitted that his predictions were in error, stating: "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing" and promised to never make predictions on the Rapture and the End Times again.
In May 2012, a year after the failure of Camping's prophecy, Religion Dispatches published a report on Camping's disillusioned former followers, some of whom had reportedly come to view him as a cult leader. Prior to the 2011 predictions, Camping was calling churches in the mainstream 'apostate' and useless for salvation of the soul. The only messaging and teaching needed...was his own, of course, broadcast over the Family Radio airwaves.
Current Ministry: Camping died in 2013 due complications after a fall. [Aw. Shucks.]
As of 2024, Family Stations Inc. owns 36 stations in 11 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. This is down from the 216 owned, broadcasting to 150 radio markets before the 2011 scandal. The ministry's headquarters moved from the Bay Area in California, where it had been since its founding, to Nashville, TN in 2019.
For many years, you were still able to hear Camping's voice from the Great Beyond, as his Family Bible Study (daily readings of the Bible), excerpts from Open Forum (pre-May 2011) and Bible Class of the Air were broadcast in the very early hours of the AM--meaning never tuning to Family Radio at 3 in the morning unless you really wanted nightmares. Camping-lead programming was finally phased out for good in 2018. However both Walk with the King and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible are still on the schedule, even though their founders have long departed from this mortal coil.
As most media does these days, Family Radio now has its offerings both as an online stream and a downloadable streaming app. The website offers an audio reading of the entire Bible in both King James and English Standard versions. Thankfully, neither are in Camping's creepy-ass voice.
disclaimer: I do believe in a higher power out there in the cosmos (I choose to call it 'God', you good sistren can call it whatever it is you want to). Be a good person. Treat others how you want to be treated. DO NOT LET SOME FLASHY ASS GUY ON THE RADIO TELL YOU WHAT TO BELIEVE. Or one who stands in front of you in a pulpit on Sundays either. The best lesson I got out of my years of Christian captivity (oop, education) was the one that my mother really didn't want me to have: QUESTION EVERYTHING. The Bible is a book, claiming to be the Word of God but written by FALLIBLE HUMAN MEN. It has been messed with multiple times and fashioned to fit what a small group of people (white men) WANTED it to say. You're allowed to challenge it. As a matter of fact, it's your duty to.
tl;dr: Matthew 7: 3-5
Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye...
Welcome to the
Buckle up sistren, there's fuckery to uncover
So. How the actual hell do all these terrible people manage to get their messages across to the masses? We're no longer in the era where you have only a limited number of broadcast television stations and whatever was on, including church based programming, was what was on. Well, there's always the radio and many non-denominational churches use radio waves to get their message to everyone. Back in the day, you didn't even need to know which station it was. They were usually all called the same thing.
The basis of this series are my own experiences with living in a Fundamental Christian/Born-Again household until I was in my 30s (when I escaped--I'm not even lying about that), I pulled many of these off the top of my head and then filled in memory with research that sent me down a path of recollections I would much rather forget, BELIEVE ME. Remember, you are not forced to read....but I do hope you learn.
Chapter 1: Hillsong | Chapter 2: James Dobson/Focus on the Family/Family Research Council/Family Talk | Chapter 3 - Part 1: Quiverfull/The Duggars/19 and Counting * Part 2 | Chapter 4: Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker/PTL | Chapter 5: What is a denomination ANYWAY? | Chapter 6: Jerry Falwell/Liberty University/Jerry Falwell Jr
Chapter 7: Harold Camping/Family Radio
Denomination: Interdenominational (you got money? WELCOME ABOARD!)
The Background: Family Radio was founded by journalist and radio pioneer Richard Palmquist. As a student at the Dallas Seminary College, he recorded sermons to be broadcast to the student body. He expanded his reach when he did missionary work in Alaska, where his broadcasts were heard all the way in Siberia, Russia. In the mid-1950s, he approached evangelical pastors Harold Camping and Lloyd Lindquist to help him start purchasing FM radio licenses. Palmquist wanted to start a series of non-commercial FM stations across the US where local churches could broadcast their services, as well as play spiritual music and other religious-focused entertainment.
The ministry was branded Family Stations Inc, and became colloquially known as Family Radio. Featuring mostly local services, there were several homegrown and national organizations that used the network to broadcast.
Popular network announcers and the programs they hosted included: Jon Arthur (The Quiet Hours, Big Jon & Sparky, Radio Reading Circle); Omar Andeel (The Morning Clock); Harold Hall (The Christian Home); Ken Boone (Music to Live By); Bob Swenson (Transition); and Jerry Edinger (Nightwatch).
Outside ministry programs included
Focus On The Family
Freedom Under Fire
Unshackled!
Back to the Bible
Family News in Focus
Beyond Intelligent Design
Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible*
and "Walk with the King"/The King's Hour with Dr. Robert A. Cook*
[*disclaimer: Dr. Donald Barnhouse is the namesake of Barnhouse Hall, one of the girls dorms at my high school alma mater, The Stony Brook School where my younger sister lived in her SBS days. He was a member of the Board of Trustees and a contemporary of the school's founder Frank Gaebelein.
Dr. Robert Cook was the president of The King's College from 1971 to 1985. I attended TKC from Sept 1987 to Jan 1988 while Dr. Cook was the Chancellor of the college, when I flunked out after burning out. (My dad died in '85, I went through 2 years of college prep at SBS and I had begged for a gap year after graduation in 1987. The answer was no. TKC was the compromise school after I got accepted to Spelman in GA but we couldn't afford it. MOTHER wanted me to go to Oral Roberts University. More on that in another sermon.)
I did learn a lot at both these schools and met one of the greatest historians in my life, Dr. Howard Vos, at King's. He was the first to discover that I had learning disabilities and told my mother to take many seats and stop thinking she was entitled to my advisor's (the aforementioned Dr. Vos) time to discuss my education. I was the advisee, not her. TKC was also where I first learned the actual sausage making of how The Holy Bible ™ was constructed book by book. 🤯 Christian robot fabrication: FAIL]
Camping became known as the voice of Family Radio, leading the nightly Bible Readings at 8 PM local time and Open Forum, a show for poor deluded souls to telephone in and gain 'wisdom' from Camping, mostly in the form of convoluted crack theories based on shaky doctrine at best. [Like the flood before The Flood my mother came up with based on his bullshit. No really. It's fucking mind boggling.]
The Scandal: Camping was a closet numerologist and loved to put times and dates on things. Mostly when the Earth was created (11,000 BC) and the date of the Rapture, the assumption of all true believers to Heaven and the start of the Great Tribulation, where God and Jesus abandon the Earth to Satan and the Antichrist to run roughshod until the Final Battle between the Men of the West and Mordor and the destruction of the One Ring and President Snow...or something like that. The Spice must flow. Gollum. (which if you actually read the Bible is a big no-no to do. Matthew 24:36 - "No one knows when that day and hour will be, not the angels of heaven, not even the Son, but only the Father.).
Sidenote: The word 'Rapture' never appears in the actual text of the New Testament. The origin of the term extends from passages in First Thessalonians, which use the Greek word harpazo which translates to 'seize' or 'snatch up'. The concept of The Rapture as the precursor to the Great Tribulation started in approximately 1830 in the United States and has spread worldwide as a core tenet of Evangelical doctrine.
Camping made three separate claims of the Second Coming of Christ--the first in a 1992 book called 1994? (the first year he predicted the end of the world would come) which went mostly unnoticed because the interwebz and the 24-hour news cycle was not nearly as prevalent as it is now. It's not even that Camping was the only one to have made these kinds of predictions; they've been made since what feels like the beginning of the Common Era.
The second and third announcements, however, put Camping and his crack philosophies on blast on an international level.
On his Open Forum program in the beginning of 2011, Camping announced that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and The Rapture would happen on May 21, 2011, with the subsequent five months comprising the Great Tribulation. He stated that 200 million people (approximately 2.8% of the world's population in 2011) would be taken up. Family Radio, via his broadcasts, publicized the prediction in numerous countries. October 21, 2011 would be the date for the Battle of Armageddon marking the end of the world as we know it. [And we'll feel fiiiiiinnnnneeeeeeee.]
Where did he get the evidence for these dates with such clarity? Camping taught that a calendar had been hidden in the Scriptures, especially highlighting Daniel 12:9 and Revelation 22:10, detailing dates of the imminent end of the world, of the "end of the church age" (which asserts that churches would no longer the vehicle used by God to lead people to salvation, 1 Peter 4:17); and of predestination (Ephesians 1:4--5), according to which God determined before the beginning of the world which individuals are to be saved. [And again, lead into the flood before The Flood my mother is convinced happened. S I G H.]
Click to viewBut Camping didn't stop there. Family Radio spent millions of donated dollars to put up advertisements all across the world proclaiming that The Rapture was coming. Billboards, bus ads, radio ads, TV ads. It was everywhere for months. At 6 PM on May 21, 2011, Jesus was coming to take the faithful home starting with rolling earthquakes that would travel around the world like New Year's Eve fireworks. REPENT YE LOWLY SINNERS.
Sadly, these tactics caused a 14-year old girl to unalive herself in Russia, since she felt there was nothing to bother living for. Poor kid.
At 6:01 pm, I got a phone call from my mother in Florida. She called to wish me a Happy Rapture.
For the first time in her life, she was totally fucking around. I fell out the chair I was sitting in.
Needless to say, the Rapture and its supposed earthquakes never happened.
Did that stop Camping? Of course not.
Calling the May 21 date a 'spiritual judgment', he doubled down on his predictions on May 23, stating that the whole bang would happen on October 21, 2011 - the Rapture, the Tribulation, Armageddon, guys drilling on an asteroid to blow it up, The Hunger Games, the Dance of Dragons, ALL OF IT! He just needed to switch the math up after a day of contemplation.
At 6:02 October 21, 2011, I got another phone call from my mom in Florida. "I'M STILL HERE? UGH, SO DISAPPOINTED."
[This is so appropriate since Mom got me hooked on Hercules, then I found my OTFandom in Xena.]
Yes. I ugly laughed. There haven't been many times I've been on the same page with my fundie NMom--I can actually count them on one hand. This was number three. [#2 was the aforementioned May 21st, #1 was voting for Obama.]
There was no comment made by Family Radio on either October 21 OR 22. Family Radio and those who had spent thousands of their own money became laughing stocks when The Freedom From Religion Foundation brought up the majority of billboards that had been showing FamilyRadio.Com adverts about the end of the world and started blazing them with 'Fool me once...", "Still Here" and "Every Day is Judgement Day. Use Yours. Use Reason."
And commercials like this one:
Ron Reagan Jr. still puts these out in the year of our petty Lord 2024, and that outro line still SLAPS
The mainstream Christian media, most of whom did not (openly) buy into Camping's message, immediately re-declared him a false prophet (they'd said the same after the May 21 non-event but they really dragged ha after October), and churches who had continued to broadcast their services on their local Family Radio affiliates after the May fiasco jumped ship like rats.
Family Radio removed all the Open Forum archives from their website that had anything to do with Camping's predictions. Camping himself had a stroke on June 9, 2011 and was slowly pushed out of active leadership of Family Radio as donations nosedived and supporters fled. It wasn't until March of 2012 that Camping admitted that his predictions were in error, stating: "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing" and promised to never make predictions on the Rapture and the End Times again.
In May 2012, a year after the failure of Camping's prophecy, Religion Dispatches published a report on Camping's disillusioned former followers, some of whom had reportedly come to view him as a cult leader. Prior to the 2011 predictions, Camping was calling churches in the mainstream 'apostate' and useless for salvation of the soul. The only messaging and teaching needed...was his own, of course, broadcast over the Family Radio airwaves.
Current Ministry: Camping died in 2013 due complications after a fall. [Aw. Shucks.]
As of 2024, Family Stations Inc. owns 36 stations in 11 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. This is down from the 216 owned, broadcasting to 150 radio markets before the 2011 scandal. The ministry's headquarters moved from the Bay Area in California, where it had been since its founding, to Nashville, TN in 2019.
For many years, you were still able to hear Camping's voice from the Great Beyond, as his Family Bible Study (daily readings of the Bible), excerpts from Open Forum (pre-May 2011) and Bible Class of the Air were broadcast in the very early hours of the AM--meaning never tuning to Family Radio at 3 in the morning unless you really wanted nightmares. Camping-lead programming was finally phased out for good in 2018. However both Walk with the King and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible are still on the schedule, even though their founders have long departed from this mortal coil.
As most media does these days, Family Radio now has its offerings both as an online stream and a downloadable streaming app. The website offers an audio reading of the entire Bible in both King James and English Standard versions. Thankfully, neither are in Camping's creepy-ass voice.
disclaimer: I do believe in a higher power out there in the cosmos (I choose to call it 'God', you good sistren can call it whatever it is you want to). Be a good person. Treat others how you want to be treated. DO NOT LET SOME FLASHY ASS GUY ON THE RADIO TELL YOU WHAT TO BELIEVE. Or one who stands in front of you in a pulpit on Sundays either. The best lesson I got out of my years of Christian captivity (oop, education) was the one that my mother really didn't want me to have: QUESTION EVERYTHING. The Bible is a book, claiming to be the Word of God but written by FALLIBLE HUMAN MEN. It has been messed with multiple times and fashioned to fit what a small group of people (white men) WANTED it to say. You're allowed to challenge it. As a matter of fact, it's your duty to.
tl;dr: Matthew 7: 3-5
Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye...