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

by Daniel G. Hummel

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...