A Shrine to Stupidity

False Prophets and Super Catholics

In a comment on my most recent post, Battlemaiden82 asks …

Would you mind linking to the posts you wrote about Charlie Johston? His false prophecies caused a lot of fear mongering and stockpiling of dry goods in my family.

Although revisiting this will make me sick to my stomach, I will nonetheless oblige a loyal reader!  

I blogged regularly from 2007 to 2017.  The blog was called Waiting for Godot to Leave.  I had about 15,000 monthly readers.  I continued blogging, even as I became more and more disenchanted with the insanity within the Catholic Church - until our buddy Charlie Johnston did me in.  Well, not Charlie - but his followers.

I began posting about Charlie Johnston in 2015.  Here’s my first post on him, from September 2 of that year …

***

Charlie Johnston is from Belleville, Illinois, across the river from me.  He is becoming viral, sweeping the attention of conservative Catholics from coast to coast.  I’m hearing about him from all corners.  This is, sadly, due to a video of him posted on Vimeo, in which he talks to a group of serious Catholics, including Fr. Mitch Pacwa from EWTN.  Fr. Mitch’s presence in the audience of Charlie’s talk has made a huge difference to people’s perceptions of Charlie Johnston and Charlie’s “authority”.

As a commenter on the Mother of God site says …

If Fr Mitch Pacwa came to see Charlie. That spoke volumes to me! I Hold Fr Pacwa in very HIGH esteem. And Bishop Garcia is onboard as well, tells me to pay attention to Charlie. The Bishop is NO liberal for sure!!!

I found the video one of Hope for sure…

In the video, Charlie begins by saying some good things, such as how God works through the ordinary and how all we need to do as believers is to take the next right step.  Sound advice, and many others have said that.  But when the Q&A comes, Charlie expounds on his “visions”, delivered to him by an angel, he claims, of the coming “Storm”.  Charlie’s vision includes the following:

• A world wide financial collapse.

• The collapse of all order in society.

• The conversion of President Obama, who will not finish his term in office.

• The suspension of the 2016 elections.

• The appearance of the Virgin Mary sometime in 2017, to be noticed by all people.

• A utopia following the Storm, in which the Church is reunified and true believers live in harmony.  Our society will go from Ferguson to Mayberry, so to speak.

Charlie, however, also claimed that Christmas of 2013 would be our last normal Christmas.  When people point out to him that Christmas of 2014 was quite normal, he responds (in so many words), “Well, the government is now regulating Christmas lights and soon you won’t be allowed to decorate in front of your home and have a Christmas tree and we’re ceding territory to radical Islam and there’s Obamacare and you call that normal???  Oh, and nobody listened to Winston Churchill either.”  I’m paraphrasing, but read Charlie’s defense of this failed prophecy for yourself.

Note that when other Christians or Christian sects have made specific predictions about the End Times, and when the predictions are inevitably proven wrong, such false prophets typically respond, “I know we said the rapture was to take place at 12:01 am on September 2, 2015 - and everybody is still here - but it was a spiritual rapture and if you didn’t notice it, that’s your problem, not mine.  You’re not as spiritually sensitive as we are.  Oh, and we’re moving the date up to September of next year.  Be prepared!”

… And so when most ordinary people hear, “Last normal Christmas, Obama will convert, the Virgin Mary will appear”, they laugh, roll their eyes, and go about their business.  

But many Devout Catholics have apparently lost this quality, this virtue of common sense.

Charlie also says the summer of 2015 will be our “summer of discontent”.  As I write this, it’s almost Labor Day of 2015.  I’m still waiting for the beginning of the Storm, but I’m sure Charlie will tell me I missed it.

But there’s more.  

If you need more evidence of Charlie’s dubious status as a prophet, well, there’s this.  He claims to have walked across America.  He claims to have walked 3200 miles wearing a 70 pound backpack, even though he has nerve damage.  He claims to have slept outside, often fearing for his life in groves of trees in inner city ghettos.  He claims to have run into cougars.  He claims this experience changed him spiritually.  

From Charlie’s website …

Charlie Johnston is a former newspaper editor, radio talk show host and political consultant. From Feb. 11, 2011 to Aug. 21, 2012, he walked 3,200 miles across the country, sleeping in the woods, meeting people and praying as he went.

But if you look at Charlie’s own Facebook page, which he started for the purpose of chronicling this journey, here’s what you find …

• Charlie departs from Alabama on Feb. 11, 2011.

• He appears to be on foot all the way to Houston, where he posts on Facebook on July 4, 2011, covering over 400 miles in about five months.

• He then posts from San Antonio, then Austin (a strange detour to the northeast), then from somewhere in New Mexico by Oct. 11, covering perhaps 600 miles in three months.

• He then gets on a plane and flies to Chicago on Oct. 18.  He has pictures of this.

• He stays in Chicago until Nov. 24, when he flies to San Diego.  He posts pictures from the plane window.  One of his Facebook friends doesn’t seem to realize that Charlie’s “walk across the U.S.” includes more than one plane ride and says, “So you have made it all the way to San Diego??? That’s truly incredible Charlie!!! God bless you.”  Charlie replies, “Ha! Most of the rest of the journey will involve going up and down mountains. Glad I had almost a year to train for that - because it is this second leg that, at least physically, is truly incredible.”  What’s truly incredible is the gullibility of Charlie’s Facebook friends.

• After the first of the year, in 2012, Charlie is posting from his hometown of Belleville, Illinois - 2,000 miles to the east of San Diego by foot. …

• By April, Charlie is posting pictures from the California coast.

• By May of 2012, he’s freely admitting that people are driving him pretty much everywhere he’s going.

• On April 25, he admits he rode in a car from California to Kansas.  After that, he says he rode into Colorado.

• He seems to be on foot part of the time and hitch hiking most of the time through the High Plains of Colorado through the spring of 2012.

• He spends the final two months of his “walk” living in Loveland, Colorado.

• He claims he climbs Mt. Meeker, where he plans to build a shrine that will probably cost (from the look of the design) upwards of $50 million to construct.  Mt. Meeker is the end of Charlie’s “walk across America” - a walk that included at least two airplane rides and that featured very little walking at all or that saw him riding in cars for the bulk of the final nine months of his journey.  And this is all documented on Facebook!

It seems that the day to day living of our Faith is apparently not sexy enough for us.  Even many of the Catholics I know who are skeptical about Charlie Johnston still want to believe him and are disappointed when I point out Charlie’s unreliability.

And that’s the core of the sin - wanting to believe him.  It’s a kind of morbid curiosity, a kind of morose delectation, a desire for more than what we have, which (as Catholics) is the presence of Jesus Christ Himself and His Spirit and access to His Father as adopted children.  What more can we want?

***

What more can we want you ask, Mr. O’Brien?  I’ll tell you what more we want.  We want to trade our birthright for a slop of pottage, that’s what we want!

As you may imagine, then, interest in Charlie’s BS continued to build, until even his archbishop had to get involved, preventing Charlie from speaking in his archdiocese. “Caution urged in face of claimed divine visions and messages,” The Denver Catholic reported in March of 2016, summarizing the archbishop’s initial investigation.  (Caution over these “visions”?  Ya think?)

By April, Charlie had found my blog posts and began lying about me - saying how he knew me personally, how he reached out to me via email, and how, over the course of an email correspondence that lasted several days, I apologized (via email) for posting about him and how I promised (via email) to take my blog posts down, but I never did.  Of course Charlie could not produce the emails he said we had sent one another: he could not produce them because they did not exist.  It was both funny, and - when people believed him - infuriating.  So I posted again on April 30, 2016 …

***

Charlie Johnston is from Belleville.

If you come from St. Louis, that's all you need to know.

Charlie is the kind of guy you'd meet in a bar in Belleville, Illinois - a working class community across the river from St. Louis, where I'm from.  Guys from Belleville - and from all over Southern Illinois - are characters.  They come up with tall tales and you sit on a bar stool listening to them and you take everything they say with a grain of salt because they're from Belleville.

***

But I still had hope in those days, hope that Charlie’s lies would be rejected by Super Catholics.  It turns out that as foolish as they were to want to believe this third-rate Nostradamus, I was just as foolish to want to believe what I wanted to believe: that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they seemed in the Catholic Church and among my Super Catholic friends. 

So I fought what I thought was the good fight.

On May 1, 2016, I sent out a “Mayday” (you might say), writing …

***

This is from the comment section of Terry Nelson's Abbey Roads blog.  I am responding to a defender of Charlie Johnston.  I am posting it here because I think it serves as a fair summary of the situation.

The defender says ...

Charlie is a good man. His main message is to "Trust God, Take the next right Step, and be a Sign of Hope to others". Please stop with the negative comments, he is doing much good for many people. We want as many of our brothers and sisters to come back to Christ asap. Read the comments after his blogs, it is one of the best places to be, all these commenters love God and Mamma Mary. God Bless!

I reply …

Kevin O'Brien 10:25 AM
He is not a good man. He has lied about walking across America and he lied about corresponding with me for several days and about me changing my blog posts. Today he admitted on his blog that he never corresponded with me. He explains his lie by saying that what he meant by "several days of correspondence" was his putting up blog posts that he assumed I read. He can't even lie well, but apparently that doesn't matter.

And, even though "Trust God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope to others" is a good message, the "next right step" in this case is to quit following and defending Charlie Johnston.

But the good news in all of this is that the system somehow works. The bishops are speaking out against him and banning him. National Catholic Register has published a well-written and well-researched article skewering him.

And in two years, nobody will remember who Charlie Johnston is. His followers will be on to the next false prophet.

… that last part, at least, was true.

Meanwhile, true believing commenters on my posts continued to defend Charlie and continued to tell me, “You need to go to confession!”

So I wrapped things up in May of 2016 with this …

***

I honestly don't think that Charlie Johnston's followers believe him.  They can't.  Nobody's that stupid.  Nobody's that gullible.  This is why no matter what evidence people like me present to prove that Charlie is a liar and a fraud, his followers defend him.  This is why when the elections are not suspended, Obama does not convert, the Virgin Mary does not appear in 2017 and all the other things that Charlie claims his angel has "predicted" fail to happen, Charlie's followers won't care.  They'll defend him all the more vehemently from folks like me who point out that this is all simply crazy.

Back when I first started hearing about him, I had two intelligent and devout Catholics from separate parts of the U.S say to me at separate times, "I don't believe Charlie, but I want to!"

Why?

Why would anybody want to believe this garbage?

Perhaps what we see in Donald Trump and Michael Voris is part of the answer.  People don't care if demagogues are consistent or honest or anything in particular.  They want to cheer for them.  They want to see them "stick it to the man".  They're mad at mainstream politicians and so they flock to Trump, regardless of his personal integrity as a human being because he feeds and stokes their anger and mollifies their frustration.  They're mad at the bishops, so they subscribe to Voris.  "Here's somebody sticking it to the bishops!" - and the rage porn flows.  The fact that Trump has no core beliefs or that Voris attacks people like Mark Shea and me when we criticize the likes of Fr. Corapi, implying that we're part of a great shadowy conspiracy of "professional Catholics"; or the fact that so much of what Voris is peddling is paranoia of one sort or another - none of that matters.

This is not about truth.

This is about finding a hero - or a villain - who makes you feel good and who gives your less than glamorous Christian existence a little verve and focus.

Those of us who think that the truth will matter to True Believers are fooling ourselves.  This is because this is not about True Belief - it's about anger and frustration finding some sort of false solution.

***

Considering what we now know about Trump and Michael Voris, all I can do is saddle up to the barstool in Belleville and say, “Charlie, who’s the real prophet here?  Huh, pal?  You or me - who’s the real prophet?  Meanwhile, let me buy you a drink and slip you a fiver for your shrine.  Don’t tell your archbishop I spoke to you.  Keep it on the DL.  Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to St. Louis - and I’m walking all the way!  You know the feeling, Charlie.  See you on the other side.”

Anyhow, it was Charlie Johnston and his followers’ continued defense of him that made me finally give up blogging, posting only sporadically between spring of 2016 and spring of 2017, and then stopping altogehter - until 2023 when I started writing longer-form pieces here.

I eventually took down all of my old blog posts, embarrassed as I was to have been shilling for the Party Line, as I sometimes used to do back then. But not always. I blogged mostly about the Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal in those days - and maybe I should repost some of those, as I wrote some of the most thorough pieces on (for instance) Bishop Finn, the only US bishop convicted (he pleaded guilty) of the criminal cover-up of child sex abuse. Good Lord, did the Super Catholics defend him too! … um, do you see a pattern here? Well, I didn’t. Until Epiphany of 2021, believe it or not.

So, even though I’m clearly a Big League Prophet, why the hell did I not see the complete collapse of the Super Catholic Thing coming? Why did I not see that they’d go all-in on Trump and Trump’s Big Lie the way they did on Charlie and Charlie’s Little Lies?

Some prophet I am!

Maybe I’ll walk across America and build a $50 million shrine - a Shrine to Stupidity.

Some profit that would be!