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

by Daniel G. Hummel

Moody was equally passionate about a more immediate problem in the wake of the Civil War: sectional reconciliation. The revivalist faith he fashioned in the 1870s, and which spread throughout his sprawling network, carried with it a powerful call to address the social tensions of the Reconstruction era by suppressing disruptive efforts for racial justice. Rather, it was reconciliation, in Moody’s eyes, that better advanced the goal of Christian unity and global evangelization. New premillennialism, forged in a radical dissenter Brethren community, then appropriated by border-state evangelicals, found its most successful adaptation in this Northern, reconciliationist revivalism of the 1870s. The theology became a critical tool to encourage reconciliation—especially across sections and denominations—in the service of fulfilling the Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). Moody and the network he built moved new premillennialism to the center of Northern evangelical culture, which it would continue to occupy for the next century.