Family Radio

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Family Radio, operated by Family Stations, Inc., was founded in 1958 in Oakland, California, by Harold Camping together with Lloyd Lindquist and Richard Palmquist, beginning broadcasts the following year over KEAR-FM in San Francisco before growing into one of the largest independent, non-denominational Christian broadcasting networks in the United States. Camping served as the network's president from its founding until his death in 2013, with Tom Evans serving as president and general manager since.

The network built its reach through decades of ordinary Christian radio programming, Bible teaching, hymn broadcasts and listener supported fundraising, well before the biblical numerology that would later define its public reputation came to dominate its output. Camping himself was the network's central on air voice for most of that history, hosting long running Bible teaching programs that built the loyal listener base the network would later depend on for both its ordinary operating budget and, decades on, the donations that funded its billboard campaigns. That earlier, longer institutional history, four decades of steady growth from a single Bay Area station into a national network under three founding figures rather than one, is easy to lose behind the single episode the network is now most remembered for, but it is the foundation the network built everything else upon.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

From the 1990s onward, Family Radio became closely associated with Harold Camping's own biblical numerology and his repeated calculations of specific end times dates, most prominently May 21 and October 21, 2011, which the network promoted heavily through broadcasts and billboards purchased with listener donations. Camping calculated that the Rapture would occur on the first date and the world itself would end on the second, claims the network carried across its full broadcasting reach in the months leading up to both dates.

After the predicted dates passed without event, Family Radio scaled back Camping's own Bible teaching programming, and the network posted a statement afterward acknowledging that setting specific dates had been a mistake. Family Radio has since distanced itself from that end times teaching and today carries outside programming including Alistair Begg and Answers in Genesis, continuing as an active nonprofit Christian radio network under Tom Evans's leadership well after the predictions that briefly made it a subject of national attention had passed without the event they foretold.