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

by Daniel G. Hummel

The implications of Lindsey’s analysis mirrored a wider pop-dispensational synthesis with Christian nationalism that saw the United States as a decisive actor in the prophetic timeline. The centrality of the United States to God’s purposes was a basic Christian nationalist conceit that was centuries old, but in the 1970s it was newly fused with dispensational eschatology that had up to this point been allergic to making prophecy fulfillment conditional on Republican partisan politics. In many ways pop dispensationalists were indistinguishable from other conservative Christians, but in this sense they were instrumental for creating nationalist cooperation across fundamentalist factions for the first time since the 1920s.