Doomsday Cult

A doomsday cult is a cult that believes in apocalypticism and millenarianism, including both those that predict disaster and those that attempt to destroy the entire universe. Sociologist John Lofland coined the term in his 1966 study Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith, about a group of members belonging to the Unification Church of the United States. In 1958, Leon Festinger published a study of a group with cataclysmic predictions: When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World.