The Millennium Year 2000

The Millennium Year 2000 marks a moment when DeLoy Bateman turned an apocalyptic expectation into a practical test for his children. On December 31, 1999, he and Eunice brought their large family to Las Vegas to watch the new year arrive in a place their religious community regarded as wicked—and where, according to the prediction, God would begin destroying the world. The night became a lesson in questioning religious certainty: midnight passed, the world remained, and the children saw the prediction meet ordinary experience.

Family Context and Purpose

By the time of the trip, DeLoy had lost his faith and left the United Effort Plan. His three oldest children were already married and no longer lived at home; they remained in the religion. He had worked to teach his other fourteen children to think independently and question what the UEP had taught them. He worried that, if he and Eunice died, the older siblings would take the younger children in and return them to the religion. The children might be content, he feared, but would lose the chance to exercise their imaginations.

The New Year’s trip was meant to prepare the children for that possibility and to cultivate skepticism toward religious dogma more broadly. Instead of relying only on argument, DeLoy brought the family to encounter a highly specific prediction at the moment it was supposed to come true. The date gave the lesson a public, observable test: the expected catastrophe could be compared with what actually happened.

The Night in Las Vegas

On December 31, 1999, DeLoy and Eunice loaded their entire brood into two vans and drove three hours to Las Vegas. Two large vehicles were necessary whenever the Batemans traveled together. They went to the center of the Las Vegas Strip, a place the family had been taught was among the world’s most wicked and the first God would destroy when the clock struck midnight.

The family stood outside the New York–New York Casino with thousands of other people. As the ball dropped, the crowd counted down the final seconds to the year 2000. The anticipated divine destruction did not follow: the millennium arrived, and the world did not end. The spectacle made the disconfirmation tangible for the children. They were not simply told that a prediction was wrong; they watched the appointed hour pass amid a large public crowd and the familiar celebrations of a new year.

Aftermath and Significance

DeLoy believed the night made a strong impression on the children. His laughter as he recalled it contrasts with the gravity of the fear that had made the trip necessary. A date associated with imminent judgment became, for his family, an occasion to test a religious claim against events and to begin loosening its hold.

The episode also gives the year 2000 a personal meaning beyond the calendar threshold. For the Batemans, it was a confrontation between a community’s sacred warning and a shared experience in secular public space. The predicted ending did not occur, and the children had seen that failure together. In DeLoy’s account, that experience supported the independence he hoped to foster in them: a willingness to question what they had been taught rather than accept an apocalyptic forecast as unquestionable truth.