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

by Daniel G. Hummel

This diffusion of the rapture and Armageddon through print, film, and music introduced millions of Americans to the imagery of dispensationalism. But mass exposure through diverse media only hastened the incoherence of dispensational theology. Popularizers failed to ask how the media through which they articulated their faith shaped the meanings they conveyed. Like scholastic dispensationalists, who disregarded critical perspectives on their own hermeneutic assumptions, the producers and consumers of popular dispensationalism were oblivious to Marshall McLuhan’s diagnosis, “the medium is the message.”13 They were either ignorant of or simply ignored the internal logics of commercialization—the method through which dispensationalism achieved its popularization—that decoupled the rapture, the antichrist, and the tribulation from dispensationalism’s theological system. The result was haphazard engagement with dispensationalism among a broad swath of Americans—an engagement that was as much an emotive cry of alienation from postsixties American culture as it was a grappling with the ultimate truth of dispensational teachings.