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

by Daniel G. Hummel

Among the patchwork of fundamentalist factions that emerged after World War I, two shaped the movement’s early fate. The role of premillennialism in both was instructive to how the tradition of new premillennialism would both advance and suffer renewed scrutiny in the early years of fundamentalism. Laws was a denominational fundamentalist, someone who prioritized denominational institutional power. Among Northern Baptists and Northern Presbyterians, denominational fundamentalists attempted to amass enough followers to unseat the modernist leadership of their churches. A second fundamentalist party eschewed denominations entirely and was animated instead by a Christian nationalist vision of American society. The nationalist fundamentalists were the most popularly identifiable faction in the 1920s, advancing their cause not in denominational meetings but in the most heavily trafficked civic spaces: the antivice crusades of John Roach Straton in New York City, the prohibition politics of Billy Sunday, and the antievolution campaigns of William Jennings Bryan. These nationalist fundamentalists, among whom Philip Mauro counted himself, based their activism on upholding biblical authority as the basis for right religion and right citizenship, and their agitation pioneered a new fusion of Christianity and American civic life that influenced later traditions of Christian nationalism.