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

by Daniel G. Hummel

By 1928, Philip Mauro had also concluded that something was wrong with fundamentalism. The movement had fractured, and he had identified one of the chief culprits in its own camp: the spread of “dispensationalism.”15 “The time is fully ripe,” he wrote, “for a thorough examination and frank exposure of this new and subtle form of modernism that has been spreading itself among those who have adopted the name ‘Fundamentalists.’” Mauro wanted to prosecute wrong beliefs within the fundamentalist movement and recapture the optimism of a few years earlier. “Evangelical Christianity must purge itself of this leaven of dispensationalism ere it can display its former power and exert its former influence,” he urged in one of his first uses of the neologism. He alleged that dispensationalism—the theological bundle that included new premillennialism, dispensational time, and the church-Israel distinction—had come “into existence within the memory of persons now living” and was “more recent than Darwinism.” Dispensationalism eroded the very basis of fundamentalism and “the truly ‘fundamental’ truths of Scripture,” which the new “system” had “either completely obliterated or at least greatly obscured.”16 It is noteworthy that “dispensationalism” was coined by a fundamentalist searching for the cause of fundamentalism’s decline as a nationwide movement in the late 1920s. Rather than premillennialism equipping fundamentalists with a shared theology—the original vision of new premillenniali...

None of the original faculty held PhDs, and because Chafer subscribed to the same faith principle as many missions agencies (that there should be no direct solicitation of funds), the early years of the school were mired in financial distress, faculty unrest, and institutional reorganization. In this, the early years of Dallas Theological Seminary mirrored fundamentalism writ large.

Chafer described the school as “denominationally unrelated” rather than interdenominational (which might imply a desire to affiliate with denominations) or undenominational (which might imply hostility to denominations).

As a model for effecting immediate change in the contest against modernism, Chafer’s plan proved to be no more effective than Riley’s. A degree from Dallas Seminary carried hardly any cachet outside of the same fundamentalist circles that prized Bible institute graduates. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the seminary gradually became a magnet for separatist and independent churches (and later megachurches), leaving the fight for denominational power to others. But for stitching together a different Christian identity steeped in the theology of dispensational time and new premillennialism, the founding of Dallas Theological Seminary would turn out to be one of the most consequential events in the history of dispensationalism.

Independent fundamentalists often taught key features of new premillennial eschatology, such as the rapture and the encroaching reign of the antichrist, but just as often they neglected the teachings of dispensational time, the church-Israel distinction, free grace, and the spirituality of the church. In short, they were uninterested in adopting a theological system but preferred to adopt some features of the emerging system of dispensationalism. While independent fundamentalists suffered from acute infighting, they were often eager to bridge North-South sectional differences, giving pre-millennial teachings a powerful conduit into the South.

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.

Neo-evangelicals diagnosed dispensationalists as severed from the evangelical traditions that had guided American Protestant social concern for generations. Some nineteenth-century evangelicals had embraced social reforms such as abolition, temperance, and poverty relief, even as others (or sometimes the very same activists) supported slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Dispensationalism had no comparable record or body of thought, rejecting the very premise that Christians were called to such earthly tasks. A large portion of neo-evangelical writings from the 1940s to the 1970s was focused on forging a comprehensive social theology that bridged the divide between the present and future kingdom that was the cornerstone of dispensational theology. For the most part, evangelical observations about a “great reversal” in social engagement were wrong, at least on the basic measures of organized activism. Fundamentalists never resigned from social or political life. Nationalist fundamentalists continued to wage a culture war for Christian America, even after the defeats of the 1920s. They opposed the teaching of evolution, opposed international entanglements, promoted free markets, preached against urban vices including sex trafficking and prostitution, supported Zionism, and questioned, or actively resisted, racial desegregation. By the time Henry was writing against fundamentalism in 1947, many of those that he decried as world renouncing had been active in politics for decades....

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...

the overtly antisemitic strain of dispensationalism had more detractors than supporters. J. Frank Norris, the popular preacher Louis Bauman, and most scholastics dissented from this line of thought and were Zionists as well as critics of European antisemitism. They agreed with Riley that Jews were exceptional and occupied “a major place in prophecy,” but they fixed their negative analysis of global events on communists, fascists, progressives, and evolutionists. Rather, the place of Jews in prophecy was linked to Zionism and the “restoration” of national Israel in the Holy Land. Most dispensationalists watched with great interest the geopolitical swings in the Middle East and were attuned to rising antisemitism in Europe earlier than many Americans because of this interest.

For nationalists, on the other hand, prophetic interpretation was all about making sense of the chaotic surface waters of global events.

While Walvoord was a part of a relatively small circle of scholastics based in Dallas and a few other schools working to erect the theological system of dispensationalism, Bauman was one of dozens of nationalists who used prophecy to decode contemporary events in real time. Doing so required no specialized language skills or training. Bauman had none in any case, being ordained into full-time ministry in the German Baptist Brethren church at age eighteen. Rather than exposit dispensational time, Bauman was a popular translator of the signs of the times with columns in the King’s Business and the Sunday School Times, and volumes with titles like Light from Bible Prophecy as Related to the Present Crisis (1936) and “Prepare War!” or Arming for Armageddon (1937). An advertisement for the latter volume reinforced his strengths. This was Bauman’s “latest and most timely prophetic book,” its contents “timely and up-to-date … giving the latest statistics.”9 While ostensibly a commentary on Joel 3, the book spent as much time documenting the arms buildup in Nazi Germany as any other topic. The mix of dispensational categories and populist critiques that Bauman so skillfully combined accomplished something no previous premillennialists had accomplished, or necessarily wanted to. In the long historical arc of premillennialism, there had been no single orientation to politics. Darby had leveled a critique of the British Empire and called for the destruction of the Anglican Church. Ja...

Upwardly mobile white migrants to the Southwest brought their religion with them, and through the mediums of print and radio blended southern sensibilities with the culture and teachings of northern fundamentalism. The blending of sectional identities was illustrated in the free roam of the same radio waves. Talbot (a Presbyterian from Australia), Fuller (a Baptist native of Los Angeles), and McGee (a Presbyterian from Texas) each had followings across the country. The cultural and media recontextualization of dispensationalism in the Sun Belt extended the reach of dispensational influence and produced a cultural resonance that was less mired in fundamentalist factionalism. Where Lewis Sperry Chafer had been rebuffed by southern denominations with his Yankee-sourced dispensationalism, Talbot, Fuller, and McGee were embraced by millions of southern transplants with similar theological teachings. By the mid-twentieth century, the Southwest had replicated in practice many of the racially segregated social patterns of the South. Dispensationalism appealed to white Christians in this setting not because its teachings demanded racial segregation, nor because its teachings advanced racial desegregation, but because it had very little to say on the matter of race at all.

Unsurprisingly, dispensationalism in its systematized form was unappealing to the Black church, even Black fundamentalists who agreed with other doctrines of the movement. A strand of apocalypticism was present in the teachings of Black fundamentalists, most of whom were entirely excluded from white fundamentalist institutions and conversations.

The term “conservative” had been used inconsistently before 1930 and the systematization of dispensationalism. It rarely described premillennial theology or politics in nineteenth-century usage. Arthur T. Pierson, in 1903, described teachers of Higher Life holiness as possessing “a conservative spirit, a tenacious clinging to the old truths, with a corresponding suspicion of all new and strange doctrines.”12 Still, no identification of political conservatism appeared until “world system” analysis identified progressivism as an agent of global consolidation. By the 1910s, conservatism had finally come to reflect its more contemporary alignment. William Bell Riley, in organizing fundamentalists in the late 1910s, had called for “true and evangelical conservatives” to unite.13 But Moody and Scofield, to take two prominent examples, did not consistently identify as politically or religiously “conservative,” nor as defenders of a particular political theory. By the time of Pickering’s article in 1964, political realignment had done just this. “Theological liberals tend to be, and to support, political liberals, while theological conservatives tend to be, and to support, political conservatives,” Pickering explained. “As systems of thought and action they go hand in hand.”14 Pickering led the Independent Fundamentalist Churches of America, an organization that balanced separatist fundamentalism and scholastic dispensationalism. On the “hand in hand” relationship between theologi...

The fundamentalist-modernist controversy had always entailed more than theological difference, but fundamentalists—and especially dispensationalists—had not initially conceived of themselves as propagating a “system.” Yet by the 1940s, they were advancing interlocking commitments that circumscribed the influence of theological ideas outside the system and extrapolated ideas inside the system.

By the 1930s, literal readings of all Scripture, not just prophecy, had become a hallmark of dispensationalism. As David Cooper, a professor at Biola College, described his “Golden Rule of Interpretation” in 1942: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicate clearly otherwise.”18 Slight variations on this definition were offered time and again—in the broadcasts of J. Vernon McGee, in the pamphlets of Louis Talbot, in the devotional advice of Charles Fuller, and in the scholastic tomes of Ryrie, Pentecost, and Walvoord. Dispensational literalism was more than a reflexive flattening of language. It was taught through historical and grammatical analysis of a text that tried to identify the original authorial meaning of the written words. The method stood in contrast to critical source and form analysis favored by modernists, or the addition of allegorical and symbolic interpretations favored by covenantalists. Unlike their forebears, dispensationalists built their identity on a full-throated commitment to consistent literal interpretation across all of Scripture. “If literal interpretation is the only valid hermeneutical principle and if it is consistently applied it will cause one to be a dispensationalist,” Ryrie wrote in 1957.19 By equatin...

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.

Young-earth creationism extended far beyond dispensational circles—especially in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and among independent fundamentalist networks. In 2019, 40 percent of Americans agreed with what Gallup defined as “creationism”: dating the human species to not more than 10,000 years old.

In the years after World War II, the theological differences between dispensationalists and other fundamentalists, including the emerging neo-evangelicals, were obscured by an overarching political conservatism rooted in Cold War anticommunism. No figure better reflected the overlap and tensions within fundamentalism than did the evangelist Billy Graham, at once an agent of fundamentalist and later neo-evangelical theology, and also an international celebrity and constant presence in the halls of American power. Though raised in North Carolina, away from the main currents of dispensationalism, Graham was marked by its teachings throughout his life.

Graham wrote of the rapture in his 1965 best seller, World Aflame. In Graham’s globe-spanning revivals, he, like Dwight Moody fifty years earlier, reiterated time and again that “the Church has been most effective in the world when she has lived in momentary expectancy of the return of Christ.”27 For all his invocations of the rapture, Graham’s understanding of dispensationalism—like Moody’s—remained superficial. Key doctrines, including the church-Israel distinction and the negation of a present kingdom, were hardly taught consistently. At the same 1949 crusade in which he prophesied impending doom for Los Angeles, he also declared that humans could change the future: “If we repent, if we believe, if we turn to Christ in faith and hope, the judgment of God can be stopped.”28 This minor deviation from dispensationalism revealed Graham’s broader project, which included but ultimately superseded the theological system. Rather, Graham shared the neo-evangelical understanding of an “already but not yet” kingdom and was committed to liberate fundamentalism from its intellectual ghetto—a ghetto he believed had been largely erected by dispensationalists and separatists.

Rehearsing standard dispensational teachings, Late Great Planet Earth’s core message was straightforward. Before the rapture and the return of Christ, three prophetic events had to be fulfilled: the return of the Jewish people to their biblical land, their capture of Jerusalem, and the rebuilding of the sacrificial temple destroyed in year 70 by Roman legions. By mid-1967, two of the three steps had improbably reached fulfillment in Lindsey’s estimation. He predicted, based on a typological reading of a parable in Matthew 24, that “within forty years or so of 1948, all these things could take place.”7 The qualifications—“or so,” “could”—allowed Lindsey an escape hatch when 1988 came and went without a rebuilt temple or rapture, but his confidence in the accuracy of biblical prophecy was palpable.

Late Great Planet Earth did not invoke the term “dispensationalism” once, but when it did appear in coverage of the book or in Lindsey’s teachings, it became synonymous with Lindsey’s apocalyptic timeline. Like the invention of the prophecy chart more than a century before, Lindsey initiated the steady process of popularization by thinning out the theology and making it tantamount to its apocalyptic scenario.

Lindsey offered no mentions of Scofield or Chafer or of his many teachers at Dallas. Late Great Planet Earth was intended as much as an evasion of the scholastic tradition as it was indebted to it. The torrent of pop-dispensational works that followed Lindsey exhibited even fewer references to scholastic thought, further widening the breach in the community. Late Great Planet Earth’s success instead prompted new, less theologically grounded questions for writers: Why did prophecy commentary need any connection to the scholastics or to formal religious thought of any kind? Why did it need to be limited to the genre of nonfiction? Why did it need to be confined to the medium of print? Lindsey paved the way for dispensational diffusion into all types of media and popular culture in the 1970s, including fiction, film, and music.

This diffusion of the rapture and Armageddon through print, film, and music introduced millions of Americans to the imagery of dispensationalism. But mass exposure through diverse media only hastened the incoherence of dispensational theology. Popularizers failed to ask how the media through which they articulated their faith shaped the meanings they conveyed. Like scholastic dispensationalists, who disregarded critical perspectives on their own hermeneutic assumptions, the producers and consumers of popular dispensationalism were oblivious to Marshall McLuhan’s diagnosis, “the medium is the message.”13 They were either ignorant of or simply ignored the internal logics of commercialization—the method through which dispensationalism achieved its popularization—that decoupled the rapture, the antichrist, and the tribulation from dispensationalism’s theological system. The result was haphazard engagement with dispensationalism among a broad swath of Americans—an engagement that was as much an emotive cry of alienation from postsixties American culture as it was a grappling with the ultimate truth of dispensational teachings.

The Jesus People movement originated in the Bay Area and was centered in Southern California, in Lindsey’s backyard. This was no accident, growing as it did in the same California soil tilled by premillennialists, dispensationalists, and Pentecostals for more than half a century.

Pop dispensationalism and the Jesus People flourished in Southern California and beyond for much of the 1970s. The movement was soon a national phenomenon, visible in cities and college campuses from Seattle to Washington, DC. Billy Graham grew out his hair a little and capitalized on the youthful energy in his crusades. Explo ’72, a massive eighty-thousand-person rally organized by Campus Crusade for Christ in Dallas, attracted Graham, Johnny Cash, and Larry Norman, among others. The movement inspired most of the first generation of Christian rock musicians and roused some of the first planned megachurches in suburban America. Once the embers of impending rapture cooled in the 1980s, the Jesus People left a complicated legacy for thousands of middle-aged boomers that informed both the smaller evangelical Left and the gathering New Christian Right.

In one sense this was a story as old as new premillennialism, harkening to the efforts of James Brookes, Joseph Seiss, and Dwight Moody in the nineteenth century. But in another sense, the Jesus People’s embrace of apocalyptic theology helped to undermine the legacy and future of dispensationalism on scholastic terms. The same cultural logic that extended pop dispensationalism’s reach made it vulnerable to the whims of culture and commerce. When cultural trends shifted and consumer tastes changed, pop dispensationalism would be forced to further adapt or die.

In the 1970s, even as pop dispensationalism reached millions of Americans, the project of scholastic dispensationalism began to crumble and the leadership of dispensational theology soon slipped beyond the control of its scholastic stewards. The cultural authority accrued by Dallas Seminary and others slowly drained away to the media empires of pop dispensationalists.

Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East was only the most successful of a rash of similar outputs by scholastic dispensationalists. In each case, writers presented a more accessible writing style, vocabulary, and fluency with contemporary affairs. The books ignored systematic doctrine, lending credence to the popular image of dispensationalism as little more than an end-times scenario. Other scholarly popularizations included retired Dallas Seminary archaeologist Merrill Unger’s Beyond the Crystal Ball (1973), Western Seminary biblical scholar Stanley A. Ellison’s Biography of a Great Planet (1975), and Charles Ryrie’s The Living End (1976). All these contributions hinted at how the center of dispensational thinking was shifting definitively from the seminary to the sales chart, influencing not just who defined dispensational content but who shaped its future. Lindsey had shed the scholasticism of his teachers. As those same teachers worked to emulate Lindsey, they were unable to grasp just how thin was the barrier separating the old scholastic and the new pop dispensationalism.

Underlying this self-serving complaint was a nugget of truth: dispensational theology as a whole, if it could still be called a whole, was awash in money but shallow in rigor. For whatever reason, younger evangelicals and fundamentalists lacked the interest to ponder the depths of scholastic dispensationalism. From Couch’s perspective, the most galling failures were unforced errors by dispensational seminaries, Bible schools, and pastors. “[A] de-emphasis on the teaching of the rapture and Bible prophecy in general” among once-strong churches signaled an alarming “paradigm shift,” he warned. “Prophecy was out, and psychology was in. The teaching of doctrine was replaced by sermons on current social issues and the emotional life of the believer”—and, it could be added, political commentary masquerading as prophecy analysis.8 Mirroring a therapeutic turn in American society that privileged individual self-expression and psychological categories of meaning, evangelical culture after the mid-1970s also became dominated by social and psychological concerns. Self-help books and family values—two sides of the new interest in personal fulfillment—had replaced grand cosmic reflections on the return of Jesus with concerns closer to, and inside, the home. This was the scholastics’ theory of decline, at least. In fact, Couch failed to see how much the tendencies he abhorred had manifested themselves within scholastic circles. One dispensational pioneer of the move to “social” and “emo...

It was not until 1966 that Dallas Seminary accepted its first Black student. A few years later, with still only a handful of Black students on campus, one of them asked John Walvoord, the president, why there was not more concerted effort at recruiting eager Black would-be seminarians. That student was Tony Evans, who would become the seminary’s first Black PhD recipient and a nationally known pastor and author. Writing years later, Evans recalled Walvoord responding, “Tony, I’m not a fighter. I kind of go with the law—the protocol.” Into the 1970s, the institutional leadership of scholastic dispensationalism writ large displayed the same lack of vision and imagination, perpetuating, in Evans’s words, “a culture of self-segregation without the overt rejection” that concretized the limited appeal of dispensationalism beyond white circles.15

A rising movement of Christian political activism and a new strain of nationalism—gathering steam in the 1970s and bursting forth in the New Christian Right at the end of the decade—was, like the commercial popularizers, animated not by strict theological purity but by galvanized interests in society, politics, and culture. Pop dispensationalism’s emphasis on eschatology gave it special cachet in both commercial and political spaces. Meanwhile, the external and internal blows to the scholastic project left dispensationalism-as-a-theological-system in tatters.

The implications of Lindsey’s analysis mirrored a wider pop-dispensational synthesis with Christian nationalism that saw the United States as a decisive actor in the prophetic timeline. The centrality of the United States to God’s purposes was a basic Christian nationalist conceit that was centuries old, but in the 1970s it was newly fused with dispensational eschatology that had up to this point been allergic to making prophecy fulfillment conditional on Republican partisan politics. In many ways pop dispensationalists were indistinguishable from other conservative Christians, but in this sense they were instrumental for creating nationalist cooperation across fundamentalist factions for the first time since the 1920s.

To paraphrase Neil Postman one more time, what happened in the 1980s was not that pop dispensationalism became the dominant content of television, but that television shows became one of the dominant purveyors of a reduced version of dispensationalism.

The leaders of New Calvinism were predominantly megachurch pastors, including John Piper, Tim Keller, and Kevin DeYoung, all members of the Presbyterian Church in America, as well as nondenominational Reformed teachers Charles Joseph (C. J.) Mahaney and Mark Driscoll.

Piper is baptist and Maheney started his own denomination.

Gentry’s conversion story from dispensationalism was shared by other leaders of the movement. North gladly admitted: “I was an ultradispensationalist in the early spring of 1964” while Ray Sutton, pastor of the reconstructionist hot spot of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tyler, Texas, had trained at Dallas Seminary.4 The shared fundamentalist heritage intensified the rivalry that followed. At the heart of their criticism of fellow fundamentalists, reconstructionists blamed the failure of the church to assert its God-ordained authority over society on dispensationalist teachings that encouraged social quietism until the rapture. Their movement’s name was inspired by the project to “reconstruct” the American church to carry out this agenda, and especially to rescue rank-and-file fundamentalists from their captivity to dispensationalism. As North wrote in 1989, reconstructionists had worked for nearly a decade “to flush into the open some dispensational scholar—not just a Hal Lindsey … but a true academic spokesman of the movement”—in order to provoke a confrontation.

This is yet another example of people that are basically in a cult like position moving to a new cult like position and not moving towards traditional Christian orthodoxy.

The dispensationalist Thomas Ice wrote around the same time of his undaunted confidence that his was the superior theology, “since the Bible teaches only a single viewpoint on any issue, amillennialism and postmillennialism are nowhere to be found, but premillennialism is found on every page of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.”

“Dispensationalism is a popular, and populist, movement,” one of the editors wrote. “Dispensational teaching is so widespread that a lot of people read the Bible this way, even if they are unaware that their position is dispensational. For many of them, it is all they know.”35 Indeed, a general premillennial orientation toward world events and church apostasy could be found across evangelicalism, as could more specific teachings on the rapture and the special eschatological role of the State of Israel. In many cases, pastors trained at dispensational schools continued to teach the theology long after the schools themselves had moved on. In other cases, the confluence of media, culture, and pastoral influence reinforced pop-dispensational eschatology. Pastors often drew from the deep historical wells of dispensational-influenced hymnody and visual culture, which kept at least some expressions of the tradition afloat. Yet, all this popular interest drew on rapidly depleting stores of historical resources. With little institutional support, the prospects for their replenishment were bleak. Pop-dispensational culture, which is what overwhelmingly shaped evangelical churches and media, was poor sustenance for anything but populist and commercial folk religion. With the crack-up of fundamentalist theology after the 1970s, dispensationalism was the clear loser. Forged in a moment of heightened introspection about the failures of fundamentalist activism in the 1920s, dispensationa...

The Left Behind series was the most visible sign of this success, and in many other forms of media—nonfiction books, films, music—the American appetite for “rapture culture” seemed insatiable. At the same time, the fate of dispensationalism as a living theological tradition had never been more under threat. The sales success of Left Behind—and the broader success of pop dispensationalism—was a minor consolation. In 2004, dispensationalism was a movement with no vested national leaders, a scholastic tradition with no young scholars, a commercial behemoth with no internal cohesion. Frykholm’s study had made this abundantly clear. She concluded that the Left Behind series, far from a “monolithic force” that taught its readers dispensational theology, was a “multiple, dynamic, contradictory system” with “cracks and fissures” that illustrated “just how broad and diffuse evangelicalism is in American culture.”4 The series had most likely introduced more readers to the concept of the rapture than had any writing since Late Great Planet Earth, but to what end? The authors LaHaye and Jenkins had done little more than toss a fictional account of dispensational eschatology into the ocean of American popular culture.

Whether cognizant of the reality or not, twenty-first-century American evangelicals lived in a religious culture deeply imprinted by the dispensational system, whose ideas did not vanish, as Frykholm perceptively documented, but whose theological integrity was laid low. The parts of dispensationalism had been scattered, no longer organized in the service of a seemingly broken “system” but pulled into powerful currents of popular culture and politics where they continued to shape and form Christians in powerful ways.

Like sports commentators picking winners for the upcoming season, or movie buffs predicting next year’s Oscar awards, the appeal of pop-dispensational prophecy analysis did not hinge on accuracy. Neither did its appeal wane as predictions shifted. As Lindsey’s ceaseless sales proved, what mattered was that the exploration of relevant data was entertaining, that the predictions reinforced existing political and cultural commitments, and that the host was authentic in the conviction of the rightness of his predictions.

The political rather than theological core of these sites indicated what united pop dispensationalists after 2010: a shared loathing of liberalism, progressivism, and modernism.

Evangelicals, and Americans more broadly, have only multiplied doomsday speculation since the collapse of dispensational theology in the 1990s. Its remnants in pop dispensationalism have been thrust into an ocean of raging American apocalypticisms that includes doomsayers of the Anthropocene, Replacement Theory extremists, QAnon trolls, techno pessimists, and neo-Malthusians. For all the problems that theological apocalypticism posed in the twentieth century, it is likely that irreligious apocalypticism in the twenty-first century will prove to be even more disruptive.