Everyone’s favorite cult leader, David C. Pack, is at it again. In part 541 (I wish I was being hyperbolic, but alas, he’s been preaching the same sermon series for years now, setting dates for the return of his convoluted version of Jesus, resetting those dates, and resetting them still again, literally hundreds of times) of “The Greatest Untold Story,” he made some comments about the averted longshoremen strike. He, of course, made it seem like such a strike would result in the end of the United States itself. But God has had mercy on us:

Now God seems to have allowed it to abate, maybe for our sake or because of his work, but that’s what would come come winter and certainly in the spring, if time went on and the wrong person was elected, which may or may not happen.

What is most striking about this is the double-think involved in it. Pack and his predecessors before him (namely, Herbert Armstrong) always asserted that the fall of the United States was a certainty, that it was, in fact, the central element of God’s end-time plan. It would be something someone who really believes this silliness would positively anticipate, with almost giddy excitement. He wouldn’t go around saying this fall will almost certainly happen “if time went on and the wrong person was elected.” Since God is orchestrating the whole thing, it’s utterly impossible for “the wrong person” be be elected.

It makes me think, yet again, that these guys know what they’re saying is utter bullshit but they have fallen in love with the power and prestige (prestige in the eyes of a few hundred people at most, but god-like prestige all the same) they have.