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

by Daniel G. Hummel

For example, dispensational educator G. Douglas Young, from his American Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem, spearheaded evangelical Christian Zionism by calling for “Bible-believing Christians” to find a “practical outlet for their pre-millennial faith” informed by literal interpretations of prophecy.20 In little more than two decades, Young and his allies managed to vault evangelical Christians ahead of mainline Protestants as the staunchest Christian supporters of the State of Israel in American politics. Another, and perhaps less obvious, area where the dispensational embrace of literalism coincided with changing “conservative” cultural attitudes was young-earth creationism. Though existing in the 1920s, young-earth creationism remained a minority position among fundamentalists until the 1960s, when a book by two followers of George McCready Price accelerated its adoption. The Genesis Flood was published in 1961 by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, two dispensationalists who spent the 1950s modifying Price’s geological dating to align with consistent literal hermeneutics. Their theory of “flood geology” reconciled the earth’s natural history with the global flood narrative in Genesis and fixed the age of the earth at between six thousand and ten thousand years. When released, The Genesis Flood standardized and popularized a literal interpretation of Genesis 1–11 for fundamentalists of all types.