How Do Movements Survive Failures of Prophecy?

This paper confronts the issue of how a movement survives prophetic failures and how contradictory events are denied, forgotten, or reinterpreted. The contemporary French messianic movement of Georges Roux is examined in relation to three influential models of prophetism: those of Festinger, Douglas, and Burridge. By comparing these models and the movement ¹ that each of these investigators studied firsthand with the history of Rouxism, new hypotheses are generated. It is suggested that a movement is more likely to survive if, soon after the failure of its prophecies, it creates rules that translate dissonance into pollution, locates it in some offending organ of the members body, and then proposes a ritual of purification for relief. A second hypothesis is that a credible expansion of the claims and identity of the prophet will help to contain the disruption of a significant prophetic failure. The third and major hypothesis is that to survive the failure of an important specific prophecy, a movement must become more hierarchical—demoting the unreliable and consigning nonbelievers to insignificance but, most importantly, elevating the prophet and his original and most trusted apostles and disciples by introducing new roles and statuses for them near the summit of the hierarchy. The implications of this hypothesis and how it differs from conventional views of new religions and their “routinization” are explored.