If Poe’s stories captured the irrationality and turmoil of human nature, Chambers’s stories hinted at malevolence in the world unexplainable by common sense or scientific thinking.
Lovecraft, who has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, wrote what has been called “weird” fiction, works in the 1920s and 1930s that encompassed the horror and mystery of Poe and Chambers but also grasped the unimportance of humanity in a vast universe. Lovecraft “crafted a new gothic, linking it with science fiction, releasing a raw power of despair and disgust,” according to James Goho, an independent scholar.57 Modern atheists have adopted one of Lovecraft’s creations, a monstrous godlike hidden creature called Cthulhu, who in his fiction surreptitiously influences human existence, as a symbol of their unbelief. Though Lovecraft was a materialist, supernatural terror underpins his stories published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. The men and women in his stories suffer from madness and eccentricity brought about by exposure to the inexplicable and nightmarish, and known science hardly limited Lovecraft’s imagination.
Though Lovecraft influenced later American horror writers like Stephen King and modern-day “weird fiction” authors like China Miéville, the scientific apocalyptic derived not from the terrible unknown but from the fearful implications of an evolutionary theory underpinned by natural selection. The despair of Byron and Shelley without a God to guide human history, echoed in the works of Americans like Chambers and Lovecraft, is not a strand followed in early scientific apocalyptic works. Until the nuclear age, most Western writers used science to mitigate the threat of a meaningless existence and purposeless end. After 1945, British apocalyptic works formed a literature of despair that might have pleased Byron and Shelley, but American apocalyptic works remained distinguished in their relative optimism throughout the twentieth century.
At the same time that Byron and Shelley visualized ends of the world without God, British Christians were devising a detailed system of premillennialism that Americans would adopt and revise. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the United States, postmillennialists and premillennialists were not too different from each other. Whether Christ was to return before or after the millennium, both groups felt an urgency: either the millennium or Christ’s return was at hand. By the end of the century, premillennialism had taken on a very distinct form among Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the 1830s in Dublin, John Nelson Darby, a former priest in the Church of Ireland, began to express new views about the premillennial apocalypse that placed prophetic events in the future instead of locating them in the past.58 Known for ministering to the poor, Darby reported a salvation experience in 1827, which led him to seek “the true Church.” His premillennial views came into focus when he began meeting with like-minded separatist evangelicals. Some of Darby’s friends in the group were British Zionists contemplating the treatment of Jews through history and the notion of a restored homeland. By 1833, Darby had begun to discuss the Rapture, the idea that Christ would return for believers separately prior to his Second Coming, at which time he would usher in the millennium.59
Some debate exists on the origins of the concept of the Rapture, with independent critics like Dave MacPherson suggesting that its true origins lay in the charismatic utterances of a Scottish girl named Margaret MacDonald in 1830. Darby himself credited the idea to his rethinking of the fate of Israel as separate from the destiny of the Church, according to the prophetic books of the Bible.60 Treating the Church separately from Israel, Darby introduced a pause into the prophetic timeline laid out in Daniel 9:24–27. According to conservative evangelical interpretation, that outline predicted that 62 weeks (read as 434 years) would mark the period between the building of the second temple and the arrival of the Messiah, after which the Antichrist would deceive humanity before his ultimate defeat at the hands of Christ. In dispensationalism, the last week (or seven years) never came to pass because Jews rejected the Messiah, Jesus Christ. When Christ was crucified, according to this view, God halted the unfolding of the prophetic plan to allow the new message of salvation to spread. At a time of God’s choosing, he will start the clock ticking again on humanity’s time left on Earth. The Rapture will mark the reengagement of God’s timer.
Darby’s system divided human history into “dispensations,” which he determined by the way in which God proffered salvation to humankind in different eras. Most important, there was a dispensation in which the law of Moses applied to the Jews and the current dispensation, the age of the Church, where Christ’s crucifixion was the determinant of salvation. The current dispensation would end after the Rapture when the unbelievers left on earth would undergo a seven-year “Tribulation,” in which the Antichrist would rise to power and then fall at the hands of Christ upon his Second Coming.61 Called dispensational premillennialism, Darby’s doctrine began the articulation of a rather precise pattern of prophetic events that became associated with conservative Protestant eschatology by the end of the century in the United States.62
The same impulses that created the last man genre also generated an idea of Christ that “could readily be pictured by poetic imaginations fascinated by the strange, the awesome, and the supernatural,” as the historian David Bebbington has shown.63 From Darby’s Plymouth Brethren, dispensationalism spread to other premillennialists in Britain as well as to the United States. In England itself, dispensationalism was the sole purview of the Brethren, though other futurist premillennial interpretations grew among evangelicals in late Victorian Britain.
Darby helped spread his views to the United States in a series of visits starting in the early 1860s. Not much is known about these visits, but from his letters we learn that he found people in St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit especially welcoming to his views.64 Encounters with the American evangelists Dwight L. Moody and James Hall Brookes proved especially fruitful; these preachers accepted and spread dispensationalism from their pulpits and on speaking tours. As a result, dispensational premillennialism in the United States was never associated with one particular denomination. Preachers of Darby’s doctrine could be found in Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches.65
Brendan M. Pietsch’s recent Dispensational Modernism (2015) separates the history of dispensationalism from premillennialism, locating the roots of the former in the “popular fascination with applying technological methods—such as quantification and classification—to the interpretation of texts and time.”66 Downplaying the role of Darby, Pietsch argues that dispensationalism grew out of the desire to develop a scientific understanding of the Bible that respected the Bible as an infallible, God-inspired text. He makes too much of the separation between dispensationalism from premillennialism, especially by the turn of the twentieth century; dispensationalism was at its core another way to conduct Bible prophecy. Nevertheless, Pietsch helps explain why this particular interpretation found a home so readily in the United States. Using classification and categorization methods akin to those in engineering and biological sciences, dispensationalists appealed to the creed that an individual could uncover new meaning within the Bible as well as to the American love affair with things new and technological after the Civil War.
The heyday of science as an infallible authority began in the late nineteenth century. As Britons and Americans conducted debates over the origins of humans and the age of the Earth, they drew boundaries between what they considered to be science and religion. Darwin, Huxley, and John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, worked to include only naturalistic descriptions of the world within the realm of science, and increasingly this became the standard way to depict science as opposed to religion in Britain and the United States.67 The professionalization of science led to its elaboration as a body of knowledge that experts build through deductive reasoning and experimentation.68 Societal progress was no longer a moral goal but associated with the increase of knowledge aimed at material improvement.69 Science itself represented progress over religion, while prescientific ages and cultures as so conceived were deemed inferior. The “scientific method” promised to uncover the solutions to all of society’s current and future problems.70
Conservative evangelicals
