Unlike in America, British conservative evangelicalism did not coalesce around premillennialism, and dispensationalism increasingly became an American phenomenon. As living standards improved in England, the working class that was drawn to evangelicalism attended church less, distracted by the many entertainments more spending money could afford.76 British evangelicals were more accommodating of modernism, and the Holiness movement of the 1870s focused many evangelicals on missions instead of eschatology. Dispensationalism’s association with the Brethren along with its lack of support at Bible colleges in England likely further contributed to Darby’s system becoming more American.
Dispensationalism joined two other rallying points—biblical literalism and infallibility as embodied in creationism—for the emerging fundamentalist movement in the United States. Though conservative British evangelicals participated in the fundamentalist movement, helping to pen the foundational essays “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth” (1910–1915), British “efforts to resist modernity lacked the aggressiveness and militancy of US churches,” according to the historian George Marsden. A recent history of toleration and theological flexibility typified British churches at the time.77 The Romantic tradition, which came later to the United States, as well as a British legal tradition that emphasized evolving interpretations predisposed the British to be more accepting of higher criticism emanating from German theologians. The Keswick Convention, meetings of British evangelicals inspired by Moody’s revivals held in Britain as well as in the United States, exemplified a tendency to adapt to new ideas rather than contest them.
Pietsch’s analysis of dispensationalism belies the idea that British evangelicals were more receptive to modernism than Americans, and the growing use of science in American Bible prophecy, as we will see in the next chapter, supports Pietsch’s perspective. Where American evangelicals differed was in “republican perspicuity,” or in believing that anyone, regardless of institutional or professional status, could find religious Truth. This belief helped create a distinctive American religious culture in the nineteenth century, with novelty and dissent as its chief characteristics.78 This predisposition may have been more important in spreading dispensational premillennialism within the United States because people were willing to read and listen to preachers and laymen outside of their own denominations as long as they seemed to preach the Truth.
Ernest Sandeen, a historian of evangelicalism, placed dispensational premillennialism at the center of the nineteenth-century evangelical movement in the United States, an interpretation that Matthew Avery Sutton echoes in American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2015). This is contra Marsden’s interpretation of fundamentalism in books published in the 1980s and 1990s, which characterized dispensational premillennialism as an important component but not the critical ingredient in fundamentalism (as separate from the broader movement of evangelicalism). Sutton defines fundamentalism “as radical apocalyptic evangelicalism,” which he sees as influencing broader evangelicalism despite later efforts of some evangelicals to distance themselves from fundamentalism.79 For our purposes, we should note that conservative evangelicals included not only those who would later be called fundamentalists but also members of the Holiness movement and, later, Pentecostals and charismatics. Not all conservative evangelicals or even premillennialists were dispensationalists, but a vocal majority within both groups became so by World War II. A belief in an inerrant, literal Bible united dispensationalists with other conservative evangelicals, but as dispensationalism came to dominate the conservative evangelical movement, doctrinal differences, such as the Calvinist belief in predestination, continued to be apparent and spurred divisions even within dispensational premillennialist interpretations.
Dispensationalists pioneered the use of engineering techniques and scientific understandings to enhance the authority of the Bible, a practice that other conservative evangelicals would adopt in the twentieth century. Liberal Christians in Americans held no monopoly in the business of modernizing religion, either in the late 1800s or in the 1900s. The Bible spoke as loudly to Americans in the technological era as it had in the pre-industrial age. In the 1870s as evolutionary theory promoted debates among scientists over meaning and purpose in life, Darby’s premillennial eschatology, which encouraged a systematic interpretation of the Bible, provided conservative evangelicals in the United States with answers to the same questions that scientists were asking in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The roots of modern scientific and religious American apocalypticism are in this period of scientific revolution and Protestant Christian realignment.
CHAPTER 2
RACE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE APOCALYPSE
Darwin changed the way humans thought of themselves in the same era that the word “technology” took on a new meaning. Until World War I, most Americans were not familiar with the term “technology” as we use it—to mean the mechanical objects produced by scientific knowledge and engineering techniques.1 In an 1864 plan for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the first notable uses of that term in the United States, its founders described the new school as dedicated to “industrial science,” a place they hoped would spread “the elevating influences of a generous scientific culture.”2 Technology came to be seen as inseparable from scientific progress. At the turn of the twentieth century, some Westerners asked whether humans were all that special and whether the technology transforming their lives might be the means by which the human species, among so many others, might become extinct. Between religion and science, which would provide the answers to these existential questions?
That MIT’s founders were able to write in such glowing phrases in the midst of the world’s first technological war—the Civil War—is a tribute to how the nation outside of the South experienced that conflict. The postmillennialism of Christians outside the Confederacy meant that the repeating carbines and the Gatling guns that generated hundreds of deaths every day of the war were merely tools for a national purification on the eve of the millennium.3 In the long run, however, postmillennialism would not endure, and after the Southern adoption of dispensational premillennialism, pessimism about human nature would be more influential on futurist fantasies than the millennial hopes of prior generations of Americans.
The reaction of white Southerners to the results of the Civil War presaged the emergence of scientific apocalypticism, based on evolutionary racism, by the late nineteenth century. Reconstruction under Congress briefly saw black Southerners voting and running for office; African Americans in the South shared the millennial perspective of Northerners until virulent and violent racism shattered the promise of a better life.4 White Southerners never wavered in their conviction that theirs had been the true holy war, even in defeat. They predicted that black Southerners would simply become extinct, unable to handle life without the civilizing bonds of slavery, especially when competing against white Southerners.5 When that prophecy failed, white Southerners then recast the Civil War as a “lost cause”—worthy but doomed.
In this tale, white Southerners fought for states’ rights, not for slavery, and the war was a tragic disagreement between brothers. “Lost Cause” ideology brokered reconciliation between white Northerners and white Southerners at the cost of black civil rights. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) enshrined that understanding in a celebrated film that portrayed black politicians and soldiers as threatening to white civilization. It was a vision that resonated with Western and Northern urbanites gripped by xenophobia during the second wave of immigration in 1880–1917.
Evolutionary theory, especially in its neo-Lamarckian form, seemed to verify white Western superiority, but Western fears about nonwhite nations overtaking