Las Vegas is the destination DeLoy Bateman and Eunice Bateman choose to turn an apocalyptic prediction into a public, firsthand test. On the night of December 31, 1999, the city’s Strip provides the setting for a family outing intended to help their children think beyond the religious teachings surrounding them.

The family’s visit

To prepare their children for a possible return to the religion if their parents were no longer there, DeLoy and Eunice sought to cultivate skepticism toward religious dogma. They brought all their children to Las Vegas, making the three-hour drive in two vans; the size of the family meant that traveling together required at least two large vehicles.

New Year’s Eve on the Strip

The family went to the center of the Las Vegas Strip, a place DeLoy says their religious community regarded as among the wickedest on earth and the first place God would destroy when the clock struck midnight. They stood in the street outside the New York–New York Casino among thousands of other people, watching the ball drop and counting down to the year 2000.

A prediction put to the test

The night’s significance lay in the contrast between the warning the children had been taught and what they saw: midnight passed, the millennium arrived, and the world did not end. DeLoy believed the experience made a strong impression on them. Las Vegas thus mattered not simply as a place outside their religious community, but as the setting for a shared encounter in which an ominous prediction could be compared with observable events.