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

by Daniel G. Hummel

Led by evangelist Billy Graham, the neo-evangelicals (sometimes called “new evangelicals”) claimed to represent a halfway point between fundamentalists and modernists. Their stated objective was to be a big tent and, through the renovated label of “evangelical,” to draw together as many Christians across the spectrum of denominations and creeds that could agree to work together on the basis of a minimal shared doctrinal commitment. In this period the term “evangelical” was basically an endeavor to broker agreement between fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and conservative mainline Protestants to return attention to a broader confrontation with modernism and liberal Protestantism. Understood in this way, neo-evangelicals aimed to achieve in the religious space something akin to the more famous “fusionism” that conservatives were forging in the political arena. In the 1940s, neo-evangelicalism would be far more accurately described as “fusing” the eschatological vision of premillennialism with the covenantal theology of the Reformed tradition.