excluded theology, based on inductive reasoning, from science. Evangelical exegesis relied foremost on the Bible; the extent to which evangelicals incorporated science into their theology depended on how well it fit the biblical verses under interpretation.71 This was consistent with an earlier conception of science as natural philosophy, which assumed scientific findings could not conflict with religious understandings. Scottish commonsense realism was an influence on American evangelicals, who believed any individual armed with reason and godly inspiration could interpret the Bible accurately.72
Conservative evangelicals who used science to explain particular biblical passages or to support a literal interpretation of the Bible had, as a starting point, the infallibility and literality of the Bible. As science became an authority independent of religion, using the insights of modern science to explain the Bible was likely attractive to preachers struggling to add flair to their sermons. Dispensationalism provided such a framework for incorporating science and current events.
Dispensationalism was not popular among the faculty of American Protestant seminaries, but its prominent advocates among popular ministers were enough to convert budding evangelical preachers. The historian Timothy P. Weber, in his 1979 history of premillennialism, cites a survey made in 1919 of 236 theological professors from twenty-eight seminaries in eight denominations that discovered only seven premillennialists. Nevertheless, Weber emphasizes that premillennialism still had a strong following: “Premillennialists may not have had a majority of seminary professors on their side, but they could point to a number of respected and prominent evangelicals in their movement who were known neither for their eccentricities nor for their tendencies to follow after foolishness.”73
The doctrine did not spread from seminary professor to student but through the teachings of leaders of missions and prominent pastors from their pulpits. Weber concludes that after Moody promoted Darby’s system, “nearly every major evangelist … adopted his eschatology.”74 Moody’s followers at the Chicago seminary bearing his name and one of Brookes’s congregants, Cyrus Scofield, were further instrumental in spreading dispensationalism even after Darby’s death in 1882.
A growing rift within U.S. Protestantism because of German criticism and historicism aided the growing acceptance of dispensational premillennialism. These trends cast doubt on the authenticity of certain parts of the Bible. When read scientifically, biblical dilemmas appeared: for instance, whether Jesus was supposed to return as quickly as his disciples seemed to expect. In response, liberal Protestants distanced themselves from the more mystical aspects of millennialism, which suggested an ongoing struggle between God and Satan in which good would ultimately triumph. Protestants in mainline denominations began to read the Bible more symbolically while conservative Protestants subjected the Bible to an ever more rigorous and literal reading.75
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
