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

by Daniel G. Hummel

“Dispensationalism is a popular, and populist, movement,” one of the editors wrote. “Dispensational teaching is so widespread that a lot of people read the Bible this way, even if they are unaware that their position is dispensational. For many of them, it is all they know.”35 Indeed, a general premillennial orientation toward world events and church apostasy could be found across evangelicalism, as could more specific teachings on the rapture and the special eschatological role of the State of Israel. In many cases, pastors trained at dispensational schools continued to teach the theology long after the schools themselves had moved on. In other cases, the confluence of media, culture, and pastoral influence reinforced pop-dispensational eschatology. Pastors often drew from the deep historical wells of dispensational-influenced hymnody and visual culture, which kept at least some expressions of the tradition afloat. Yet, all this popular interest drew on rapidly depleting stores of historical resources. With little institutional support, the prospects for their replenishment were bleak. Pop-dispensational culture, which is what overwhelmingly shaped evangelical churches and media, was poor sustenance for anything but populist and commercial folk religion. With the crack-up of fundamentalist theology after the 1970s, dispensationalism was the clear loser. Forged in a moment of heightened introspection about the failures of fundamentalist activism in the 1920s, dispensationa...