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

by Daniel G. Hummel

The Left Behind series was the most visible sign of this success, and in many other forms of media—nonfiction books, films, music—the American appetite for “rapture culture” seemed insatiable. At the same time, the fate of dispensationalism as a living theological tradition had never been more under threat. The sales success of Left Behind—and the broader success of pop dispensationalism—was a minor consolation. In 2004, dispensationalism was a movement with no vested national leaders, a scholastic tradition with no young scholars, a commercial behemoth with no internal cohesion. Frykholm’s study had made this abundantly clear. She concluded that the Left Behind series, far from a “monolithic force” that taught its readers dispensational theology, was a “multiple, dynamic, contradictory system” with “cracks and fissures” that illustrated “just how broad and diffuse evangelicalism is in American culture.”4 The series had most likely introduced more readers to the concept of the rapture than had any writing since Late Great Planet Earth, but to what end? The authors LaHaye and Jenkins had done little more than toss a fictional account of dispensational eschatology into the ocean of American popular culture.