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

by Daniel G. Hummel

At Moody’s own Chicago Avenue Church, Amzi Clarence Dixon, a Southern Baptist born in North Carolina, ascended to the pulpit in 1906. An opponent of the new theology, biblical higher criticism, and the Social Gospel movement, Dixon viewed racial difference through the lens of his Southern roots. He was no zealous segregationist like his brother, Thomas Dixon, who was one of the South’s most popular novelists. Thomas’s The Clansmen (1905), about the victimhood of the South at the hands of the North during Reconstruction, was adapted into The Birth of a Nation (1915), the first American blockbuster film and a cornerstone of white supremacy in the twentieth century. While Thomas proudly promoted Jim Crow segregation, his brother (who preferred to be called Clarence) conveyed a more paternalistic attitude toward nonwhites in a Northern evangelical culture committed to global missions.