Failed Prophecies Are Fatal

Many scholars of new religious movements claim that religious belief and religious groups generally survive failed apocalyptic or millennial prophecies. This claim originates with the original cognitive dissonance study, When Prophecy Fails, and has been reiterated by recent surveys of the field. In this article, I argue that this is false. I argue that the literature on religious groups which experience failed prophesy suffers from survivorship bias. I then demonstrate that even setting that aside, the extant case studies of failed prophecies show that the most common outcome for a religious group following a failed prophecy is group demise. I also argue that groups that root their prophecies in a broadly accepted source of authority, such as biblical interpretation, fare better after prophetic failure than groups that base their prophecies on novel sources of authority such as personal revelation or a leader who claims divinity or psychic powers.