The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation

by Daniel G. Hummel

A notoriously difficult group to define, evangelicals in America have been categorized as much by the tensions they manage between “head” and “heart” religion, and between populist and establishment aspirations, as by the theological commitments they profess or the sociological profile they share. And yet a history of dispensationalism, which has played a decisive role as a system of theology and a subculture, recasts our understanding of evangelicalism in at least two important ways. First, dispensationalism brings to the fore the interdependent relationship between theology and culture that has shaped American evangelicalism.

dispensationalism has overlapped with a cluster of related movements that modern definitions of evangelicalism tend to subsume, including fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, Christian nationalism, and New Calvinism, among many others.

Second, a focus on dispensationalism illuminates contemporary trends toward polarization that have plagued evangelicalism in recent decades. These trends, I contend, are deeply intertwined with the “rise and fall” narrative of dispensationalism. While it was never the only theological tradition among fundamentalists or evangelicals, dispensationalism supplied at least four generations of white conservative Protestants, stretching from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, with a theological framework to read the Bible and understand the world. Insiders and outsiders differed over how accurate or helpful dispensationalism was, but its teachings supplied a reference point to millions of Christians all the same. With the fall of dispensationalism as a formal theological system in the 1990s, the white conservative Protestant community has deepened an ongoing crisis in theological identity, with many outside observers now questioning whether theology has much to do with evangelicalism at all. Rather than treat the current state of affairs as normative, a study of dispensationalism reveals the historical development of a theologically thin, while politically robust, popular evangelical culture. Conservative white Protestantism has always had other theological contenders, but the inherited theological tradition of dispensationalism, which now has fewer living theological proponents, played a significant role in shaping the “evangelical mind” until very recently.

Three distinctions are especially important to highlight at the outset: the historical boundaries of dispensationalism; the extent of dispensational theology beyond end-times beliefs; and the sociological scope of the dispensational tradition.

The original dissenters were unique for teaching that all of history was divided into a series of dispensations that inevitably ended with the failure of humans to fulfill their obligations to God. They taught that the current dispensation was nearly complete, revealing the failure of organized Christianity, and that soon the state churches and the societies they enabled in Europe and North America, which they called Christendom, would be destroyed. These dissenters originally congregated in cities like Dublin and London, with one of their largest assemblies in the southwestern English port city of Plymouth. As a group they refused to be called anything but “Christian,” so they became known as “the brethren from Plymouth.” The name stuck, and they became known as the Plymouth Brethren.

One of the Exclusive Brethren’s founders was a well-educated Englishman who grew up in Ireland by the name of John Nelson Darby (1800–1882). Darby taught that the Church of Ireland, and by extension the entire Anglican Communion, had failed the current dispensational testing by God and fallen into deep apostasy. The state church perpetuated false doctrine, gave cover to millions of nominal Christians, and subsumed its authority to worldly British imperial interests.

The story of dispensationalism invariably begins with Darby and his teachings, but it would be a mistake to think that dispensationalism was a simple transmission of Darby’s teachings. True, key parts of what would become dispensationalism originated in Brethren thinking, but other aspects of Brethren teachings (such as radical separation from all denominations) found almost no resonance with dispensationalists. Americans used Brethren ideas to meet their own needs. To mention some examples, Americans held their own interests in religion and revivalism, in certain conceptions of geography, economics, race, class, gender, and American power, that supplied their interpretations of “dispensational time” with unique significance.

Americans who adopted Brethren teachings in the nineteenth century were uniformly “premillennialists,” meaning that they believed that Jesus would return before establishing the thousand-year kingdom of Revelation 20. But they did not all agree on what premillennialism ultimately meant.

Projecting any term backward in time obscures a key insight that historical narratives can provide, namely, that the packaging of beliefs into an “ism” is often a contested process, and remains so even after an “ism’s” seeming permanence is established.

Its features are largely the product of a “literal” reading of the Hebrew prophets and book of Revelation, meaning a biblical interpretative strategy, or hermeneutic, that assumes physical and observable fulfillments of prophecy in historical time that are not simply allegorical or spiritual. The “system” of dispensationalism employs this literal hermeneutic and combines it with a “historical grammatical” method that strives to discover original authorial intent by reducing allegorical readings of all biblical passages in favor of a single objective interpretation. This objectivity extends to prophecy, which dispensationalists anticipate as being fulfilled in a single, preordained way by God. In addition to an eschatology, dispensationalism is also a theory of time. Dispensationalists divide history into discrete units, or “dispensations.” Most commonly, dispensational authors teach that there are seven total dispensations. In this system, we live in the sixth, or second to last. The most crucial point, however, is not the number but the pattern. If human history is a story of dispensations, it is a history of human failure and God’s persistent faithfulness.

Dispensationalism is as much a theory of the church as it is of dispensations. Or rather, dispensationalism divides humanity into three distinct groups: Israel, the church, and the nations. The first two are each in covenant with God. Israel has the starring role as God’s direct partner for redemption. But because of the rejection of Jesus by both Rome and Israel, God is using the church as the current agent for world redemption, which will ultimately be taken up again and completed by Israel.

This separation of God’s purposes into church-Israel, earth-heaven dualisms set the Brethren apart from virtually every other Christian tradition, suggesting a more complicated development than traditional supersessionism, which saw the church taking over the role of Israel in God’s plans. Rather, the dispensational view was that God’s promises to Israel in the prophetic literature awaited literal fulfillment in the future.

Dispensationalism arose in the United States as a social critique, though one directed toward the post–Civil War American situation rather than the dynamics of Great Britain that exorcised the Brethren. American adopters beginning in the 1860s prioritized sectional white reconciliation between North and South, and they found Brethren teachings helpful toward this goal.

The institutional and theological structures of dispensationalism in the nineteenth century were forged by white evangelicals who privileged the goal of white reconciliation after the Civil War over the aims of Reconstruction. While the project of reconciliation achieved astounding success in creating a broad coalition of white evangelicals, it also killed a potential (if unlikely) future of a racially diverse dispensational tradition. Later generations exacerbated earlier decisions, and with few exceptions dispensationalists have never led in advocating for social or political equality. In many cases they actively supported such discriminatory measures as racial segregation. They often did so for expediency and for reasons unrelated to the specific theological commitments of dispensationalism. But sometimes they did connect social attitudes to their theology. It is in these examples, which span from responses to Reconstruction to Cold War anticommunism, that dispensationalism’s social and political location is most visible. The geographical spread of dispensationalism is tied to its demographics, too. A remarkable subplot in the story of dispensationalism is how its teachings originally gathered a regional following in the Great Lakes basin and then, over time, spread to the South and the West Coast while retreating from New England. By and large, the South slowly and only haltingly adopted dispensationalism, and then in ways that accommodated other southern-specific fact...

dispensationalism has been formative for many Christians who no longer subscribe to its tenets but have been indelibly shaped by them.

The elites in the Church of Ireland, in other words, had abandoned their heavenly duty to win souls and had embraced a worldly political Protestantism subservient to the interests of the British Empire.2 The accuracy of Darby’s account is debatable. There is only a sparse record of Protestant conversions in Ireland in the mid-1820s. The archbishop of Dublin, William Magee, did write a policy statement in mid-1827, one which Darby angrily responded to in an unpublished letter, but Magee hardly said what Darby thought he did. Moreover, just two years later the Roman Catholic Relief Act, part of the ongoing campaign of Catholic emancipation in the United Kingdom, removed most demands that Catholics renounce the authority of the pope in order to become full citizens. Catholic converts did not suddenly flood the Church of Ireland then, either.

For the most part, the mission of the Brethren was aimed at nominal or otherwise cultural Christians who made up much of organized Christianity. As one friendly observer noted of Darby in 1835, “He says he feels his office principally lies in urging believers to walk worthy of their high and holy calling.”6 The Brethren, like so many like-minded dissenter groups, were passionate to revive existing Christians as much as to make new converts.

similar to mega churches and much of the revivalist movement in between

The Holy Spirit was on the move in the 1850s, but what were its designs? For those caught up in the transatlantic revivals, the call was to individual holiness, to embody the “fruit of the Spirit,” and to realize the promise of spiritual power to aid the believer in right living. These aims bridged the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition that emphasized the sovereignty of God and authority of the Bible, and the Wesleyan tradition that placed its emphasis on personal faith and holiness. In the spirit of revival, both centered on the fate of the individual’s soul.

The process of individual sanctification—of the Holy Spirit freeing the Christian from sin and making one like Christ—became a frequent fixation for Protestants for the next fifty years, spawning an emphasis on holiness not only in the Wesleyan churches but also in Reformed circles, the Keswick, or Higher Life, movement, which taught of the power of the Holy Spirit to shape human behavior.

In the 1850s, Brethren quickly grew concerned that the bulk of revival energy was being channeled into individualistic reform, based on faulty Wesleyan notions of sanctification, while ignoring the deeper ruination of the church. More important to them than entire sanctification was ecclesial revival from the bottom up, leading to the institutional renewal of the church and its return to the purity of the New Testament.

North America, in this schema, was a rich field for teaching. Brethren expansion was organized on this principle: focus on established clergy, preach against wrong belief, and unmask false religion within Christendom. This mission animated the Brethren popularizers who adapted Darby’s teachings for the target audience of “worldly” Christians. Their message and tone included a dose of religious populism, driving to make accessible their complex theology for a wider lay audience and calling to task institutions and their leaders. Novel ideas like the rapture, and novel images like the prophecy chart indicating the dispensational progression of time, extended Brethren teaching far beyond the places they personally visited.

this can be seen in 7 mountains, city reaching and other revival.movments still influe ced by thiese.ideas

The truth is that Darby managed to convince few North Americans of the need to separate from their churches. He found more success in spreading awareness of “the Lord’s coming,” and especially of his distinctive teaching of the imminent rapture. But such a partial reception of his ideas was only a little better than rejection. His vision for a heavenly church was received incompletely and selectively; the Americans he met adapted his teachings—often a single insight—for their own ends, in ways he would never have approved of.

Early American premillennialists endorsed both works as necessary tools, while the first American-made concordance by James Strong appeared in 1890.

concordences are fairly new it is a technological innovation

The Bible Reading method informed the emergent tradition of interpretation based on induction and literal meanings of words. Terms like “heaven,” “earth,” and “Israel” referred to the same thing, no matter where they were found in the Bible—as indicated by cross-referencing and concordances. Prophecy passages were no exception to this rule. The thousand years of Revelation 20 meant one thousand trips around the sun for the earth, while the coming of the Lord meant, in the common premillennialist language of the 1870s, “a real and bodily coming of Christ.” The antichrist, too, “is a literal person, and not an ecclesiastical system, nor a succession of rulers.”27 This literalism, also described as a “plain” reading of Scripture, was not so facile as to negate any allegorical or symbolic meanings (when John the Baptist introduces Jesus as “the Lamb of God,” this was not an invitation to reclassify the species of the Christ). But literalism did insist that such a passage directly corresponded to a historical event and represented it accurately.

The logic of who selectively adopted Brethren teachings and when was complex, but one overriding factor was that both Brethren evangelization and American adoption were taking place in the years surrounding the American Civil War. The experience of white evangelicals in the border states, in particular, proved to be fertile ground for Brethren reception. The trauma of war made some Americans in the border states allergic to overtly nationalist conceptions of the church. This aversion was carried into the era of Reconstruction, when border-state Christians became some of the loudest proponents of sectional reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites. By 1870, the outlines of a new radical subculture emerged that combined the priority of sectional reconciliation with key Brethren teachings about the heavenly nature of the church and the premillennial arrival of the kingdom of God. These radicals created a new interpretive community—first in the border states and then beyond—with its own ways of talking about the Bible, salvation, the church, prophecies, and the future. They ditched the old premillennial methods of date setting, making a break with the long-standing premillennial tradition in America. They also rejected key aspects of Brethren teachings, including anticlericalism (most of the early new premillennialists were professional pastors), ecclesiastical separatism (most remained in their denominations), and the Brethren resistance to the holiness movement (mo...

Darby’s teachings were unexpectedly suited for a time of civil war.

tethology nearly always addresses contmepoary concerns

He warned his readers, perhaps as a public reminder to himself, that “‘Napoleonism’ has exerted a wider influence than ‘Millerism’” in prophecy circles in recent years and warped the conversation. The solution was simple: “We should, therefore, learn to interpose no event before the coming of the Lord to receive his waiting Church”—in other words, teach the any-moment-rapture to guard against date setting.29

part of the reality of christian history is a lot of mistaken discernment

Moody was equally passionate about a more immediate problem in the wake of the Civil War: sectional reconciliation. The revivalist faith he fashioned in the 1870s, and which spread throughout his sprawling network, carried with it a powerful call to address the social tensions of the Reconstruction era by suppressing disruptive efforts for racial justice. Rather, it was reconciliation, in Moody’s eyes, that better advanced the goal of Christian unity and global evangelization. New premillennialism, forged in a radical dissenter Brethren community, then appropriated by border-state evangelicals, found its most successful adaptation in this Northern, reconciliationist revivalism of the 1870s. The theology became a critical tool to encourage reconciliation—especially across sections and denominations—in the service of fulfilling the Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). Moody and the network he built moved new premillennialism to the center of Northern evangelical culture, which it would continue to occupy for the next century.

In the aftermath of the war, Moody idealized sectional reconciliation. During Reconstruction he minimized the political issues and moral stakes of the conflict and instead called for overcoming division through forgiveness and common religion. The reconciliation he spearheaded after the war cannot be separated from his repudiation of the radical goals of social reform proposed by victorious Republicans. For Moody, a Unionist as much as Brookes was a neutralist, this historical moment made interdenominational networking on the basis of separating churchly from political issues—race and Reconstruction in particular—deeply appealing.

Far from the careful and complex theology of Darby, Moody’s premillennialism was simple: Jesus could come at any moment, and you don’t want to be left behind.

The second way Moody fused new premillennialism to his revival messages was by merging premillennialism and Higher Life teachings to unite Northern and Southern whites, sacralizing the reunited republic in the language of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Moody’s goal was to turn the country’s Christians away from the past and the world, and toward the future and heaven. In practical terms, Moody encouraged Americans to abandon political analyses of the country, which in the mid-1870s meant dropping the polarizing issues of blame for the war and Black civil rights.

He broke down barriers between white Christians—between denominations and confessions, between sections, between classes—which came at the expense of racial reform and integration. Judged by his sermons, the Black church lay outside Moody’s vision of reconciliation. As the most consequential religious leader in late nineteenth-century America, Moody played an outsized role in depoliticizing the Civil War and bridging divides between North and South during Reconstruction. But this program of forgiveness was narrow and narrowly conceived, premised on bracketing existing racism and discrimination, ignoring the rise of racial segregation regimes in the South, and rekindling fellowship and brotherhood with secessionists and advocates of Jim Crow. This deal was one that premillennialists not only tolerated but, in later decades, embraced. The benefits to shared missionary efforts and Christian unity were too important to pass up. These two implications of Moody’s ministry—the popularization and fusion of new premillennialism with revivalism—could hardly be separated. They worked together to form a potent and wildly successful message.

Wartime experience introduced Moody and Sankey to the possibilities of working across denominational lines. After the war, the drive to cooperate was especially powerful among urban revivalists and preachers, who shared common religious sensibilities (including revivalism and gospel music), a common experience of war, and a common desire to build new organizations that bypassed old bureaucratic structures and divisions for the sake of global evangelization. By 1870, Moody and Sankey were at the head of a sprawling movement of interdenominational evangelicalism that included dozens of organizations and thousands of pastors and churches. This network of associates cooperated to organize and expand the causes of evangelization and reconciliation.

Moody’s interdenominational network generally drew its leaders from Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregationalist ranks. They generally embraced Higher Life theology, which emphasized spiritual discipline and the power of the Holy Spirit to multiply efforts and serve the church. The very nature of the movement de-emphasized church hierarchy. Moody set the tone and others followed: unity of Christians in common cause took precedence over unity of the churches. New premillennialism was woven into interdenominationalism. Moody and his acolytes did not expect a mass conversion of the world in these days, but they did feel the burden of presenting the gospel to as many humans as possible, in the quickest ways possible.

Pierson called for all peoples to receive “the knowledge” of the gospel, not for all humankind to respond to it. As one prophecy conference speaker explained in 1878: “We have failed [at missions] simply because we have been aiming at universal conversion and not at universal evangelization. We have been trying to convert patches and not evangelize the whole.”18 To civilize as well as Christianize—the long-standing order of denominational missions work—was foolhardy and ineffective, based on a triumphalist postmillennial eschatology of an earlier age. Interdenominational efforts, on the other hand, focused solely on presenting the gospel.

there is western paternalism in both but this was an explicit movement away frim disciplship toward evangelism as the primary goal

As superintendent at Moody until 1904, Torrey exercised an outsized influence in the nascent Bible institute scene. The 1890s witnessed several additional school openings—in Toronto; Providence, Rhode Island; Cincinnati; and Minneapolis—and Torrey’s What the Bible Teaches for Greatest Profit (1898) was indicative of what this experimental educational model would convey to students. The textbook wove together premillennialism, Higher Life theology, and modern business strategies—all in the service of training Christian workers.

The 1890s witnessed a plethora of experimental “faith missions”—modeled especially on the examples of Hudson and Maria Taylor, who had decided to become independent missionaries to China with financial support provided solely “as answer to prayer in faith.”28 They adopted this idea from the Brethren, whose leaders, Darby among them, pioneered the “faith principle” of independence from a single church or denomination for financial support. By the 1880s, the role of philanthropy—especially of individual large benefactors—aligned with this theological principle, providing expansive growth based on personal relationships rather than denominational affiliations. Along with the “faith principle,” the Brethren practice of lay ministry also influenced these new faith missions. Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission, founded in 1865, was the model. Taylor, a British nonconformist, was deeply influenced by Open Brethren practice of faith missions. Like his Brethren colleague George Müller (and Darby), he did not require ordination of missionary workers. China Inland Mission empowered laity to assume any leadership position. This expansion of lay leadership was a profound expression of Brethren values. Missionaries squared the egalitarian impulse through the premillennial conviction that global missions were a feature of the last days, requiring new tactics to achieve their goals. Taylor’s mission inspired other agencies, too. Albert B. Simpson, a longtime follower of Hudson’s work, fo...

Amzi Clarence Dixon,

tomas dixon's brother. Thomas Dixon wrote rhe book which inspired Birth Of A Nation which inspired the 2nd version of the Klan

In his massive Northern revival circuit of 1875–1877, Moody had invited select Southerners, such as evangelist William Swan Plumer of South Carolina, to share the podium and enact a microcosm of white Christian fellowship. Moody was welcomed in the South with thronging crowds; his meetings were segregated; he prayed for the Confederate dead; and he signaled his desire that Christian unity take precedence over racial equality. Moody won praise as a unifier and embodied the prevailing mood among white Americans. Over the following decades, even as Southerners embraced the “Lost Cause” and implemented Jim Crow segregation, Northerners like Moody pursued fellowship for the sake of reconciliation.

At Moody’s own Chicago Avenue Church, Amzi Clarence Dixon, a Southern Baptist born in North Carolina, ascended to the pulpit in 1906. An opponent of the new theology, biblical higher criticism, and the Social Gospel movement, Dixon viewed racial difference through the lens of his Southern roots. He was no zealous segregationist like his brother, Thomas Dixon, who was one of the South’s most popular novelists. Thomas’s The Clansmen (1905), about the victimhood of the South at the hands of the North during Reconstruction, was adapted into The Birth of a Nation (1915), the first American blockbuster film and a cornerstone of white supremacy in the twentieth century. While Thomas proudly promoted Jim Crow segregation, his brother (who preferred to be called Clarence) conveyed a more paternalistic attitude toward nonwhites in a Northern evangelical culture committed to global missions.

The distinction between individual and social agency, and between spiritual and corporeal brotherhood, allowed Dixon to wax about spiritual equality while ignoring social racism in his midst. Northerners as well as Southerners inhabited cities stratified by race and material inequality, yet Dixon was muted on why such a situation existed. The “solidarity of the race” was God’s intention, Dixon preached, but sin broke it. “Now God is making a new solidarity which begins at Calvary and is based upon the new creation,” and yet the plane of transformation was narrowly spiritual. “Only the cross can make the confusion of Babel give way to the fusion of Pentecost,” he taught, referencing God’s act of dispersing humanity into separate tribes and language groups, and the latter coming of the Holy Spirit to diverse early followers. “Only in this fire of God’s love can races be molded into one family with the spirit of true brotherhood.”11 Clarence was no Thomas, yet the distinctions he made fueled new premillennialist views of racial difference.

While mapping imprecisely onto American racial lines, Israel, the church, and the nations—which new premillennial writers called “races”—shaped the new premillennial imagination. “Two races shall occupy the Millennial earth,” Albert Simpson explained in 1912, representing one popular view. Jews would reign in their historic land, while “the Gentile peoples shall also be left on earth.” At this point, both “races” would be Christian “and raised to all the immunities, privileges, and blessings of the highest Christian civilization.”16 A third race of humans, the raptured church, would exist above and rule over the earth as helpers to Jesus. They would, in Simpson’s speculation, “reign upon the earth and yet possess a heavenly life and a spiritual body” and “shall have free and constant access to the material world and the whole system of human life, visiting men, visible to them, and oft engaged in conflicts with them but living on a far higher plane.”17 American racial categories often underpinned these otherworldly speculations, however. For G. Campbell Morgan, who directed the Northfield Bible Conference upon Moody’s death, the rapture would take white people only. “Should He come soon,” Morgan wrote in 1907, “I do not think any of His angels would go into the interior of China. I do not think they would go into the heart of Africa. I think these angels would be in the great centres, all about the parts where white men congregate.” This echoed an observation by Moody more...

Scofield’s first pamphlet was Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth (1888),

From the Great Lakes basin to China, from Los Angeles to the Sudan, Scofield’s notes were exported alongside, and were often inextricable from, the gospel message itself.

Like Dwight Moody, Sunday did not so much preach precisely as he did evocatively, which in the end helped premillennial sentiments lodge themselves in the “old-time religion” of the sawdust trail. “No man can be true to his God without being true to his country,” he preached in the intoxicating days of mobilization in 1918.26 The confluence of Christianity and nationalism that Sunday channeled into his ministry remade his brand of premillennialism into one that Brethren thinkers a half century before would have found unrecognizable.

Mauro’s unease began when he first picked up the Scofield Reference Bible. He was anticipating its arrival after years of hype and the high esteem in which he held “the editor and his co-workers.” But Mauro did not make it past Scofield’s notes on Genesis 1, which allowed for a nonliteral reading of “days” of creation. “I found to my surprise and disappointment that these notes made room for, and indeed rather favored, the absurd notion that the ‘days’ of Genesis 1 were long periods—ages—of time.”

Mauro’s concerns with new premillennialism were many. Scofield’s distinctions between the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, and the church appeared to Mauro to diminish the universality of key ethical teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, to apply to just a portion of humanity. Moreover, the new premillennial teaching that the kingdom of heaven of the Gospels was in fact the “earthly” kingdom of Israel—a realization that Mauro apparently did not make until his thorough study of Scofield’s notes in 1918—weakened the power of Jesus. Scofield’s teaching of “free grace” allowed Christians to keep sinning, all the while claiming salvation.

Mauro’s new thinking stood in contrast to the new premillennial leadership, still deeply influential in the vast Moody movement, which taught the future kingdom as a cardinal doctrine. Mauro was becoming a new thing himself: a fundamentalist.

Like almost everywhere in this book. I have some sympathies for evangelism and for ecumenical activity and for working outside of church structures. But I am not at all a dispensationalist. At the same time I keep reading the critics and I have some sympathies for some of their points of conflict. In this case I agree with his point about the earthly kingdom not being a modern state of Israel and I am concerned about the way it implicates ethics and the sermon on the mount. But I am not at all a fundamentalist who wants to fight over the 7 day creation, biblical literalism or some of his other concerns. I want to know the history. But I don’t need to pick sides because as much as anything, this is history is grounded in issues that are not current. And so we don’t really have to take a side and fight on it. Their issues were just different from our current tissues. We have a different set of issues of discernment because our reality is a different reality.

Among the patchwork of fundamentalist factions that emerged after World War I, two shaped the movement’s early fate. The role of premillennialism in both was instructive to how the tradition of new premillennialism would both advance and suffer renewed scrutiny in the early years of fundamentalism. Laws was a denominational fundamentalist, someone who prioritized denominational institutional power. Among Northern Baptists and Northern Presbyterians, denominational fundamentalists attempted to amass enough followers to unseat the modernist leadership of their churches. A second fundamentalist party eschewed denominations entirely and was animated instead by a Christian nationalist vision of American society. The nationalist fundamentalists were the most popularly identifiable faction in the 1920s, advancing their cause not in denominational meetings but in the most heavily trafficked civic spaces: the antivice crusades of John Roach Straton in New York City, the prohibition politics of Billy Sunday, and the antievolution campaigns of William Jennings Bryan. These nationalist fundamentalists, among whom Philip Mauro counted himself, based their activism on upholding biblical authority as the basis for right religion and right citizenship, and their agitation pioneered a new fusion of Christianity and American civic life that influenced later traditions of Christian nationalism.

Nationalist fundamentalists sometimes policed doctrinal purity, but they cared more about defending Christian culture. They frequently redrew the boundaries of their movement to make allies on that quality alone. The inclusion of Seventh-day Adventists on the basis of shared antievolutionary beliefs was a case in point. By the early twentieth century, Adventists had developed a sophisticated literal interpretation of Genesis that posited an earth only thousands of years old.