A fascinating history of dispensationalism and its influence on popular culture, politics, and religion 
 
In The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, Daniel G. Hummel illuminates how dispensationalism, despite often being dismissed as a fringe apocalyptic movement, shaped Anglo-American evangelicalism and the larger American cultural imagination.
 
Hummel locates dispensationalism’s origin in the writings of the nineteenth-century Protestant John Nelson Darby, who established many of the hallmarks of the theology, such as premillennialism and belief in the rapture. Though it consistently faced criticism, dispensationalism held populist, and briefly scholarly, appeal—visible in everything from turn-of-the-century revivalism to apocalyptic bestsellers of the 1970s to current internet conspiracy theories.
 
Measured and irenic, Hummel objectively evaluates evangelicalism’s most resilient (and contentious) popular theology. As the first comprehensive intellectual-cultural history of its kind, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is a must-read for students and scholars of American religion.

Table of Contents

Preface 
Introduction 
Part I: The New Premillennialists, 1830–1900 
          1. Across an Ocean 
          2. American Mission Field 
          3. Border-State Conversions 
          4. Numbers and Structures 
          5. Revival 
          6. The Premillennial Complex 
Part II: The Dispensationalists, 1900–1960 
          7. Sprawl 
          8. Standard Text 
          9. The “World System” and War 
          10. Factions 
          11. Scholastic Dispensationalism 
          12. The Great Rift 
          13. Dispensational Politics 
Part III: The Pop-Dispensationalists, 1960–2020 
          14. Pop-Dispensationalism 
          15. The Great Rupture 
          16. The “Humanist Tribulation” 
          17. Saturation and Its Limits 
          18. Collapse 
          19. Surveying the Aftermath
Epilogue: Maranatha  
Glossary 
Bibliographic Essay