particle of matter builded into the earth.”150
Townsend wrote as the Christian fundamentalist movement consolidated around a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915, with American and British ministers as contributors. Amid fears of modernism gone amuck in American churches, the authors sought to emphasize the one principle they believed fundamental to Protestant Christianity: a literal and infallible Bible, which included literal interpretations of miracles, a Virgin birth, Christ’s death as a sacrifice that could grant salvation to those who accepted it, and finally Christ’s resurrection. The original fundamentalist movement was broad in its denominational scope, but increasingly the label itself became associated with conservative Baptists and Presbyterians in the United States in particular, though Methodists, Anglicans, and Lutherans helped write the movement’s foundational essays. Fundamentalism remained a fringe movement in Britain, and many conservative heirs to the Wesleyan tradition became involved in the emerging Pentecostal movement.151 In the United States, however, all remained under the banner of conservative evangelicalism, which tended to include dispensational premillennial beliefs.
Cyrus Scofield helped unite these conservative evangelicals through his annotated version of the King James Bible, which was published in 1909 and revised in 1917. Scofield was a follower of James Brookes, whose St. Louis ministry inspired John Nelson Darby’s praise in 1872. The Scofield Bible’s annotations included commentary based on Darby’s system, and it was instrumental in spreading dispensationalist ideas. Most people who bought the Scofield Bible did so because of its reputation for instructing its readers in how to conduct their own textual analysis. The Scofield edition of the Bible likely helped spread dispensational premillennialism as well as the democratic approach toward analyzing biblical text.152
Scofield’s second edition in 1917 in particular stoked apocalyptic fervor in the United States. Events during the war dovetailed dispensationalist interpretations. The publication of the Balfour Declaration (1917), a letter written by Britain’s Foreign Secretary that said Britain wanted to see the formation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, excited dispensationalists who believed the Jewish people would reestablish Israel. The Russian Revolution prompted fears in the United States in general over the spread of radicalism, but for dispensationalists who identified Russia as Gog, the transition of Gog into a godless adversary merely energized apocalyptic expectation.
By the time of the war, the British largely associated dispensational premillennialism with the Plymouth Brethren, whose separatism doomed dispensationalism to a minority viewpoint in the isles. The project of exploring Bible prophecy along Darby’s lines was left to Americans. A strong tradition of revivalism in the United States may have made a difference in the fate of American dispensationalism, which offered the same binary outlook of good versus evil as popular revivalists did. An American Calvinist preoccupation with the classification and delineation of theological viewpoints also left its mark on dispensationalism, as fundamentalists embraced the doctrine.153
A 1918 book on dispensational premillennialism by the Baptist pastor Clarence Larkin, with its famous diagrams explaining dispensationalism, is an example of this desire to systematize and logically order prophetic ideas. A businessman, Larkin had no difficulty imagining that science and a rational thought process could support biblical accounts of creation and the End. Larkin told his readers that “the ‘Word of God’ and the ‘Works of God’ must harmonize. There can be no conflict between the Bible and Science.”154 In discussing the creation of the world, he analyzed the astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace’s 1796 “nebular hypothesis” that “the sun, planets and moons of our Solar System were once one vast spherical mass of nebulous of gaseous matter, out of which they have developed.”155 Though Laplace himself saw a creator deity as needless in the order of the universe, Larkin had no trouble marrying his Christianity and Laplace’s ideas and concluding that Laplace’s theory is likely and explains, for instance, the nearly circular orbits of the planets.
Unlike mainstream and liberal Protestants who were making their peace with evolution, Larkin believed that any science that contradicted the Bible must itself be wrong. Combined with an older Christian belief that nature could be read like scripture to find Truth, Larkin’s conclusion that Laplace had insight to offer was unexceptional.156 According to Larkin, Genesis does not allow for an interpretation of God working through evolution. For instance, the repeated phrase of a species being created “after his kind” suggests that God created separate species. Larkin insisted that there are no “intermediate links” in the fossil record of the development of animals and plants nor evidence of any clear ongoing evolutionary processes; the same is true for humans.157 On this last point, conservative evangelicals would demur in the future, seeking instead to explain such evidence rather than deny its existence.
Larkin’s willingness to consider scientific arguments in his biblical analysis also appeared in his discussion of the apocalypse but was less profound than in his discussion of creation. He was willing to attribute some of the plagues described to natural causes. The blast of the third trumpet in Revelation 8:10–11 “sounds a ‘great burning star,’ called ‘Wormwood’” and may very well be in the form of a meteor “that in exploding will fill the atmosphere with ‘noxious gases,’ that will be absorbed by the rivers and fountains of water, and poison them, so as to cause the death of all who drink of them.”158 He repeated the correlation of natural events with Bible prophecy when alluding to Peter’s prophecy that “the Heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”159 Larkin argued that Peter used the Greek word “cosmos,” which suggested that not the Earth but the atmosphere will burn up: “the intense heat will cause the gases in the atmosphere to explode, which the Apostle describes as the ‘heavens (the atmosphere) passing away with a great noise.’”160
Similar to scientific apocalypticists who supposed it was possible for humans to colonize other planets, Larkin even speculated that God intended for humanity to inhabit other planets: “it seems clear from the presence of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, that God intended the human race to populate the earth, and when it became too thickly populated, to use the surplus population to colonize other spheres.”161 That argument embodies the way conservative evangelicals could support national scientific and technological enterprises within a literalist biblical framework. Larkin’s speculation about space travel, however, would remain unusual among conservative evangelicals who never dreamed on a cosmological time scale, despite seeing God as infinite. While bound to a strict understanding of the Earth as being six thousand years old, the sophistication of other scientific arguments in Bible prophecy grew during the twentieth century.
Bible prophecy writers would also spend more time detailing social and cultural trends within the United States that they felt threatened the moral fabric of society. World War I had the effect of making premillennialists pay attention to their surrounding culture. They had never held out hope for civilization, seeing it as destined for destruction, and this was no less true when Europeans rushed off to war in 1914. When premillennialists had to defend themselves against charges of being unpatriotic, they responded by transforming themselves from pacifists into supporters of the war effort. The war against Germany became a conflict between Christian civilization and German rationalism. By the end of the war, premillennialists had committed themselves to protecting the United States as a Christian society, and their denunciations of modernism came to encompass cultural trends that belied the United States as a God-fearing nation.162 Premillennialism became the most important guiding force within fundamentalism after this shift in emphasis.163
Fundamentalists’ new preoccupation with saving civilization may have encouraged them to rescue America by promoting anti-evolution laws during the 1920s in states like Tennessee, Florida, and Oklahoma.164 The ensuing controversy in Dayton, Tennessee, featured William Jennings Bryan as representative for the prosecution pitted against Clarence Darrow, the defense lawyer for John Scopes. Scopes coached football and occasionally taught biology,
