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

by Daniel G. Hummel

Conspiratorial thinking had always accompanied premillennialists to some extent, dating to Darby’s suspicions of the Church of Ireland and extending to speculations about the reign of Napoleon III and trends of consolidation in the early twentieth century. Riley began to theorize in earnest in the wake of his foiled antievolution activism, though he, too, had a long history of writing about elites (modernists, leftists) he thought possessed too much power. In attacking his political opponents in the 1920s, Riley repeatedly described the conspirators as “Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist.”3 His identification of “Darwinists” was obvious enough, as was “Bolsheviks”—this Marxist movement being the newest iteration of materialist-oriented socialism that premillennialists had been railing against since the 1860s. But what about “Jewish”? In his antisemitism, Riley participated in a much broader American discourse of the period that included industrialist Henry Ford, radio preacher Father Coughlin, and America First Committee spokesman Charles Lindbergh. Yet Riley trafficked in dispensational antisemitism, a unique form that combined racial antisemitism with a prophetic lens on world events centered on the Jewish people. “As a Fundamentalist and a Premillennialist,” Riley preached in 1936, “I accord to the Jew not only a great place in past history, but also a major place in prophecy, or history to come.”4 This line was Riley’s preamble to a firehose of antisemitic slurs that ended wit...