Why So many apocalyptic doom cults rinse our wallets

Written by Sallust on November 25, 2024. Posted in Current News

The Telegraph has published an entertaining review of a new book called A Very British Cult: Rogue Priests and the Abode of Love by Stuart Flinders.

Your correspondent has no connection or link to the book, publisher or author, but it struck him that Daily Sceptic readers would enjoy some of the article and immediately be struck by its unintended links to the daily warnings that climate change is about to end the world. The piece, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, starts off with an anecdote about The Simpsons:

One of the funniest episodes of The Simpsons begins with Homer Simpson watching a film called The Rapture and persuading a busload of other Springfield residents that the end of the world is indeed nigh. Soon they are all standing on a rocky outcrop outside town holding balloons, while Homer checks his watch and confidently performs a countdown.

Nothing happens. “My watch must be running fast,” he reassures everyone. “Wait for it… wait for it…” Several hours pass, rain starts to fall, and Homer’s voice becomes a plaintive croak. “Wait for it… wait for it…”

It’s tempting to view this scene as a contemporary satire. After all, there’s no shortage of modern doomsday cults, from the Children of God – which relocated from California to Thailand in preparation for an apocalypse that was predicted to take place in 1993 – to the notorious Heaven’s Gate commune, 39 members of which committed suicide in 1997 in the expectation that they would be picked up by an alien spacecraft and whisked off to eternal happiness in outer space.

That’s in addition to the more recent phenomenon of wealthy survivalists who are currently building sophisticated bunkers – Mark Zuckerberg’s compound is reported to cost up to $270 million – as part of their preparations for any future breakdown of social order.

Yet predictions that civilisation is coming to an end are nearly as old as civilisation itself, and religious leaders in particular have long enjoyed darkening the present with shadows cast by the future. The 19th century was certainly no exception. In Germany, one archdeacon announced that the world would end in 1823, and settled with his followers in Konigsberg, where they were accused of promoting sex as the only way to sanctify the body, while in New York State a group known as the Brotherhood of the New Life was hailed by its founder as “The New Eden of the West”.

Among other lunatics, Britain had its own “rogue Anglican priest named Henry James Prince, who was known to his followers as ‘Beloved’ and in the 1840s announced himself as the voice of God on earth or the ‘Holy Ghost personified’”.

Before meetings he liked to be compared to Christ’s second coming, so that his arrival could be announced with “Behold, He cometh! He cometh!”

He quickly gathered around himself a loyal band of followers through a mixture of preaching and personal contacts, most of them women, who believed his promise that the world was coming to an end and the saved would be carried off to heaven without first having to undergo the indignity of dying.

It soon emerged, that like so many apocalyptic doom cults one of the guiding principles was taking money off people’s hands and coercing them into living lives of self-denial. Sound familiar?

Prince managed to persuade his acolytes that the first step to preparing themselves for the afterlife was to rid themselves of all earthly attachments, particularly their money, which he was generously willing to take off their hands. Before long he had collected enough to build a luxurious new mansion and chapel in the sleepy Somerset village of Spaxton.

Completed in 1848, it was hidden behind thick wooden gates topped with iron spikes and protected by ten-foot high brick walls.

A journalist visited and found a rather innocuous way of life while the residents waited for Armageddon:

Living there seems to have been like a cross between a religious cloister and a holiday camp. Its appeal was especially strong among Prince’s female followers, some of whom were given new names such as Sweet Mercy and The Cheerful One.

Whereas in the outside world they would have been expected to marry and raise children, within the Abode of Love’s high walls they were free to live more or less how they pleased.

Prince died in 1899, pre-empting the imminent end of the world and a former priest called John Smyth-Pigott took over:

By this time, the Abode of Love was becoming less the centre of a cult than a retirement home for what one witness described as “a number of quite frowzy old ladies, wrapped in woollies and wearing caps, and some moth-eaten old gentleman”. In 1927 Smyth-Pigott also died (one newspaper carried the headline “‘MESSIAH’ DEAD”), and his grave was left open for a whole day, as if his followers really were expecting a resurrection.

A couple of decades later only a handful of survivors remained. Their world had indeed ended – not all of it, but certainly the Victorian world that had given birth to this socially conservative “No sects please, we’re British” cult.

To read that one in full, it’s here.

Eventually, the Abode of Love simply fizzled out. Like all apocalyptic movements, the underlying premise (the end of the world) having never happened. The review falls short of making the more obvious links to our own time. But it does illustrate very well the essential problem for all doom-mongers. This is pulling off the claim that while previous end-of-the-world predictions were all wrong, now it’s for real.

In the Rev. Prince’s case, at least he purported to offer his followers hope (in return for cash and sexual favours of course). The trouble with today’s climate doom-mongers is that their message is one of no hope. And that is troubling governments everywhere.

The other day Tom Harris wrote a piece in the Telegraph about Keir Starmer’s delusions of a climate utopia while trying to run a “two-pronged strategy”:

The first was to persuade us all that we must change the way we live, limit our appetites for carbon-emitting forms of transport, food production and domestic heating and be prepared to make the sacrifices in our standards of living that will be necessary in order to limit the amount by which the Earth’s temperature will rise in future years.

The second prong of the strategy was to remind us constantly that none of this is working and that despite our efforts we’re all going to die horribly in a fiery Armageddon. That part hasn’t changed. But the first one has.

Most people were able to recognise the fundamental flaw in the strategy and it’s a circle that governments all over the globe had to square if they were to succeed in avoiding turning us all into extras in a Roland Emmerich movie. To get people on their side, to win their support for their own climate ambitions, voters needed to be told that all their sacrifices had to be worth something.

Now Starmer is trying to reframe his message, says Harris, by speaking to COP29 delegates and “embracing the ‘opportunities for tomorrow’”:

This Reaganesque optimism was ably represented in his opening comments: “This is a huge opportunity, for investment, for U.K. businesses, for British workers, if we act now to lead the world in the economy of tomorrow.

And while the stick has been rebranded as a big, juicy, irresistible carrot, the regular warnings of climate apocalypse are no less frequently broadcast: projected temperatures are still rising, this or that line on the thermometer will be crossed soon, irreparable damage is about to be inflicted on our natural environment. It’s all aimed at motivating our leaders to do something, but so far its chief accomplishment has been to encourage them to use less harsh language or not turn up at all.

The fundamental problem is that this Government, and many others like it, have persuaded us that they, not we as individuals, have the responsibility for saving the planet. Which means that they, not we, have to take the blame when their measures don’t work.

All we have to do is wait for all those bright, shiny promises to come true and wait, even more patiently, for those thermometer readings to come down. Because that’s what we were promised, right? And surely our own leaders wouldn’t lie to us about something that important?

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