Long Version of my Op-Ed in the LA Times or: What I Learned From Prepping for Everything

On Sunday, April 5, the Los Angeles Times published an Op-Ed by me with my thoughts on religion the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece was cut down significantly and so I publish the full version below.

Apocalypticism Transformed: What I Learned from Prepping for Everything

By Erin Prophet

I recently began to use a bottle of long-shelf-life ointment that I purchased more than thirty years ago during what I call the “shelter episode,” when thousands of the members of my mother’s church moved from California to Montana and built what I believe is still the largest privately owned group of fallout shelters in the United States. We were prepping not just for nuclear war, but for a series of disasters that my mother, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, had predicted in her “vision of the Four Horsemen”—disasters including war, economic collapse and waves of epidemics, along with earthquakes and windstorms. Yes, Prophet is our real family name, but for my parents, who called themselves prophets in an Old Testament sense, it took on greater significance. In any case, we prepared for the predicted disasters by building an underground storage bunker the size of an aircraft hangar where we stocked what we calculated would be seven years of supplies—including pallets and pallets of toilet paper and a generator that could run on woodchips—oh, and a variety of weapons to protect our stockpile in the anticipated anarchy.

The COVID-19 panic feels familiar to me since I spent my childhood in anticipation of some sort of calamity. When I was seven, we first bought land in Montana to store camping equipment and dehydrated food. But we later became more optimistic and I went to high school and college in California. Yet I always imagined that one day we would return to Montana—when things got bad. And so we did, in 1987, but the only disaster that happened was to our finances and credibility when our 1990 “danger period” passed with no war or other calamity—though some of us decided that our prayers and preparations had averted the prophecies. I left the church in 1992 but became my mother’s legal guardian after her diagnosis with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 1998. She died in 2009.

Today, some of my mother’s followers have no doubt concluded that she was right all along—just thirty years premature. That’s the problem with apocalyptic prophecy—it can always be adapted to fit the next disaster. A Christian friend recently texted me I Thessalonians 5:3, “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.” I reminded him that the Bible is filled with all-purpose disaster quotations. Fitting the coronavirus pandemic into biblical prophecy, as many are already doing, is one way to try to get control of a situation that seems out of control. Apocalypticism always includes a promise that a certain in-group will do well while their enemies will suffer. It is usually more about a search for justice and restoration than a realistic vision of the future.

There are three major strains of apocalypticism in the United States—Christian, New Age, and environmentalist. My mother’s apocalypticism drew from both Christian and New Age themes. Many of her followers had also studied Edgar Cayce, the medical intuitive known as the “sleeping prophet,” who predicted that parts of Montana would one day feed the nation, after floods and earthquakes split apart the continent. Cayce’s medical advice has proved more durable than his future visions. He was operating out of the New Age millennial scene, which drew not only on the Bible but the Hindu concept of a “Kali Yuga,” a recurring period of destruction and collapse that is believed to herald a new beginning.

I can’t bring myself to buy into any of the apocalyptic scenarios about COVID-19—the Christians who see the pandemic as a sign of the “end times,” New Age people who imagine that it is inaugurating a global “shift” in consciousness, or even environmentalists who imagine it is the beginning of a chain reaction to our collective folly, which will eventually return us to a pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer society. All of these are idealistic scripts. Even if millions die, those left alive will still have to figure out how to live. Yes it’s possible to see COVID-19 as Nature’s revenge—for overconsumption and disrespecting our fellow creatures. But rather than personifying nature, perhaps we should just see it as a wake-up call. For one thing, it has shown us that we can, indeed, stop burning fossil fuels. I hope that the lessons we take are that we need one another, we need to figure out better ways to live on earth, care for our children, sick and elderly, to live more fulfilling yet sustainable lives. Each of the idealistic scripts above could lead to fatalism and a save-yourself-first mentality, when what we really need is a transformation of the apocalyptic script.

Many people assume (wrongly) that when prophecy fails, religious people either become disillusioned and abandon their belief system altogether or reduce their cognitive dissonance by continuing to promote their system in spite of evidence. While we do see examples of both, a far more common response, as the noted religion scholar Gordon Melton has demonstrated, is for people to transform their expectations into something more positive and this-worldly. Global disasters have a way of pushing a reset button on religious belief. I am hoping that all the kids who grew up reading Left Behind novels and anticipating the Rapture will eventually realize that any future transformation of the world, whether in preparation for the Lord’s return or simply a response to unimagined events, will be accomplished by us, real people working together, regardless of religious belief or doctrines.

Thirty years after I dragged my duffel bags of supplies out of our shelters following the final drill, as panic buying and stockpiling have set in around the world, I look back on our scenarios. We certainly did not want them to happen. But if they had, life would have been unimaginably difficult for those of us who survived. The batteries, toilet paper, dehydrated food, and long-shelf-life cosmetics would have eventually run out as we struggled to eke out a living on an arid patch of land with a short growing season. Our one dentist and handful of doctors would not have been able to save us from a lack of medical supplies. A least some of the people I prepped with—kind, well-meaning people all, who stored extra food for the neighbors––have come to realize that we are only as good as our society. Isolation and prepping may work for a short time, but in the long run, you will run out of everything. I think of that when I get out my jar of ointment—I’d have that, but not all the other things I have bought in thirty years, not just cosmetics, but the writers I did not have in my underground library—Karl Popper, Robinson Jeffers, Arundhati Roy, to name a few.

I hope that the one percent, who have decamped to second homes, no doubt some with shelters, and those who are currently stocking up on weapons, will eventually come to see that no matter how prepared you are, no matter how much stuff you have, you really do need other people, you need civilization and what it has to offer. I hope that we will take this moment as one that exposes the weaknesses in our culture and a time to channel our desire for change not into apocalypticism but into the slow but ultimately more satisfying process of building a better world.

In Montana, some of my mother’s followers are developing a natural hot springs spa. Many of my childhood friends went into medicine or education. This spring at the University of Florida I have been teaching a class on the paranormal. I joked with my students—“you didn’t realize, when you signed up for this class, that you were going to enter a real, live zombie apocalypse, did you?” As we look out on our empty streets and squares, it may look like a futuristic dystopia, but it’s our disastrous present, and hopefully an opportunity for more than one generation to reassess what is really important.

Erin Prophet, MPH, PhD, is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida. She is the author of “Charisma and Authority in New Religious Movements,” in the Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements Vol. 2 (2016), and Prophet’s Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet Inside Church Universal and Triumphant (2009).

Twitter: @ErinProphet