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

by Daniel G. Hummel

The term “conservative” had been used inconsistently before 1930 and the systematization of dispensationalism. It rarely described premillennial theology or politics in nineteenth-century usage. Arthur T. Pierson, in 1903, described teachers of Higher Life holiness as possessing “a conservative spirit, a tenacious clinging to the old truths, with a corresponding suspicion of all new and strange doctrines.”12 Still, no identification of political conservatism appeared until “world system” analysis identified progressivism as an agent of global consolidation. By the 1910s, conservatism had finally come to reflect its more contemporary alignment. William Bell Riley, in organizing fundamentalists in the late 1910s, had called for “true and evangelical conservatives” to unite.13 But Moody and Scofield, to take two prominent examples, did not consistently identify as politically or religiously “conservative,” nor as defenders of a particular political theory. By the time of Pickering’s article in 1964, political realignment had done just this. “Theological liberals tend to be, and to support, political liberals, while theological conservatives tend to be, and to support, political conservatives,” Pickering explained. “As systems of thought and action they go hand in hand.”14 Pickering led the Independent Fundamentalist Churches of America, an organization that balanced separatist fundamentalism and scholastic dispensationalism. On the “hand in hand” relationship between theologi...