How the Dispensationalist Cult Took Over American Christianity and Politics

If you grew up American Protestant, as I did, you probably remember hearing about the Rapture, the End Times, and how Catholics don’t understand “God’s plan.”

If you grew up Catholic, on the other hand, you’ve likely wondered what Evangelical Christians meant by these references.

And if you’ve been on social media at all lately, you’ve almost certainly seen posts alluding to these doctrines in relation to the current Israel/Palestine conflict.

You may be wondering what’s going on here.

Dispensationalism is what’s going on here.

Dispensationalism is the belief that God has created seven different covenants with different groups throughout human history, beginning with the Dispensation of Innocence in the Garden of Eden, and ending with the Millennial Kingdom, in which Jesus Christ will reign on Earth for 1,000 years.

Most American Evangelical Christians would simply call this “Christianity.” Most Christians in other parts of the world would return a look of utter confusion. Your Medium correspondent (who was confused about this for a long time, too) has managed to disentangle most of these threads, and will now do the best he can to explain where dispensationalism comes from, what it teaches, and how it shapes American psychology, policymaking, and geopolitics.

Our story begins in 19th-century Ireland, where a priest revolted against his church, and decided to interpret scripture his own way.

The clergyman who fell from a horse

John Nelson Darby was born in the year 1800, into a well-to-do family seated at Leap Castle in King’s County, Ireland. He graduated with a gold medal in Classics from Trinity College Dublin, but never formally studied theology; he wanted to pursue a career in law. But he found himself drawn increasingly to Christianity, and switched career paths to become a priest in the Church of Ireland.

In his parish of Delgany, the young Darby soon became known for persuading Irish Catholic villagers to convert from Catholicism and join the Church of Ireland, which denied the Pope’s authority. But when the Archbishop of Dublin ruled that converts had to swear allegiance to George IV as the rightful king of Ireland, Darby resigned in protest. He was 27 years old.

That October, Darby fell from a horse and sustained injuries that kept him bedridden for several months. He spent that time intensively reading scripture — that is, developing his own reading of scripture. In Darby’s reading, the “kingdom” described in the Book of Isaiah and elsewhere in the Old Testament was not Israel, as the text itself says. Nor was it the Christian church, as most theologians of his time believed. Instead, Darby became convinced that these passages prophesied a future kingdom, over which Jesus Christ would reign for 1,000 years.

Darby’s reasoning was a bit convoluted, but basically it went like this:

1. God the Father1 (as opposed to the Son or Holy Spirit) entered into a specific covenant (i.e., contract) with Adam when he created the first human being. The period covered under this contract was the Dispensation of Innocence: a sort of probationary period when God walked with Adam in person, to feel out how he’d behave. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, God terminated that contract and expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden, as recounted in Genesis chapter 3.
2. Humankind multiplied and filled the earth during the Dispensation of Conscience.2 This period ended with the Great Flood, when God the Father made a new covenant with Noah in Genesis 9.
3. People repopulated the earth, rebuilt civilization, developed new technologies, and constructed the Tower of Babel3 in the Dispensation of Civil Government. God ended this covenant when he destroyed the Tower of Babel and scattered different language groups across the earth in Genesis 11.
4. God made a new covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12, beginning the Dispensation of Patriarchal Rule.4 This ended when the Israelites escaped from Egypt but refused to enter the land of Canaan, landing themselves a 40-year sentence of wandering around in the Sinai desert.
5. The Israelites finally got their act together when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Tablets of the Law in Exodus 20–22. This began the Dispensation of Law, in which, according to Darby, God gave the Israelite people a set of commandments that were impossible to follow5, setting the stage for…
6. The Dispensation of Grace, which began when Jesus Christ (a.k.a. God the Son) died on the cross. The exact meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection had been a subject of considerable controversy since the very beginning of Christianity, but Darby’s take was that Christ’s blood satisfied God the Father’s wrath at humanity’s sins, which each of us inherit from birth as a sort of divine criminal conviction, due to being descendants of the first sinner, Adam.6
7. Our current Dispensation of Grace will end with an event Darby called the Rapture (a word that does not occur in the Bible), in which all God’s elect will ascend to Heaven in an instant. This event will be followed by seven years of the Great Tribulation, during which the Antichrist will rule as a dictator — ending with an apocalyptic battle in which Jesus will lead a triumphant army down from Heaven, defeat the evildoers, and initiate the Millennial Kingdom: a final dispensation of perfect peace that will last for 1,000 years, and will end with the Last Judgment and the termination of the physical universe.

By 1831, Darby had formally broken from the Church of Ireland, and was vocally proclaiming his new doctrine of dispensationalism throughout the British Isles. He managed to win a few converts among the upper classes, but was largely ignored by the mainstream. He died in 1882, leaving a small sect of Darbyite Bretheren to continue the good work.

Little did he know that he’d planted the seeds for a revolutionary movement in Christianity, half a world away.

The soldier with a drinking problem

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield loved books. Born in 1843 in Michigan, this son of English Puritans spent his childhood devouring Shakespeare, Homer, and every other author he could get his hands on. His mother died three months after his birth, and his father remarried twice during his childhood — driving Scofield to leave home and settle with relatives in Tennessee until age 17, when he enlisted in the Confederate Army. He fought in the battles of Cheat Mountain, Seven Pines, and Antietam; suffered wounds that landed him in the hospital for a month; petitioned for a discharge and then got re-conscripted into Confederate service; and finally deserted and escaped behind Union Army lines. He defected to the Union side and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he married Leontine LeBeau Cerrè.

Like Darby before him, Scofield wanted to be a lawyer. He started as an apprentice in his brother-in-law’s legal office, and worked his way up to a job with the St. Louis city assessor. A few years later, he campaigned and got elected to the Kansas House of Representatives, then got appointed as Federal District Attorney for Kansas — making him the youngest D.A. in the entire country. He was 29 years old.

But C.I. Scofield had a problem with alcohol. Or rather, alcohol was one of his many problems. To fuel his bouts of heavy drinking, he stole campaign funds, accepted bribes from railroad companies, and forged signatures on promissory notes. Forced to resign “under a cloud of scandal,” he was divorced by his wife Leontine — ostensibly because of his military desertion, but probably because of all the above — and abandoned his children for the bottle.

Little is known of Scofield’s life during these years, but by 1879 he’d had enough. He converted to Evangelical Christianity, worked in Dwight L. Moody’s big Midwestern revival campaign, and came under the mentorship of James H. Brooks, a Presbyterian minister who believed that John Nelson Darby had discovered the secret key to interpreting scripture. Scofield was ordained as a minister in 1883, and began publishing Darbyist pamphlets with titles like “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth.”

As the 1900s dawned, Scofield began work on his magnum opus: a brand-new version of the Bible, heavily annotated with his own footnotes and commentary — which connected verses throughout the Old and New Testaments into a web of unusual interpretations: “Israel” was actually code for the modern church. Old-Testament prophecies about the falls of Assyria and Rome were really coded references to modern-day Germany, or Russia, or China. And on one particular day in the near future, all the Christian elect will vanish “in the twinkling of an eye,” setting the end of the world in motion.

The Scofield Reference Bible was published in 1909, to cheers and applause from Evangelical Christians. It’s still the standard reference Bible in many American churches and Bible colleges today — where it’s presented simply as “The Bible,” rather than as scripture heavily annotated by a lawyer and politician with no formal training in hermeneutics, who interpreted thousands of verses through the lens of his own unorthodox Darbyist beliefs.

In particular, Darby and Scofield reinterpreted the following passages of scripture:

1. Ezekiel 38–39 — These chapters describe the war of Gog and Magog. They were traditionally interpreted as either historical, relating to past enemies of Israel, or symbolic of the ongoing struggle between God’s people and their adversaries. Darby and Scofield reinterpreted them as a prophecy about a great End-Times battle involving Israel, which would precede or coincide with the Millennium.
2. Isaiah 11:11–12 and Ezekiel 37:21–22 — These verses, which speak of the gathering of Israel, had long been seen as prophecies concerning the return of the Hebrew people from the Babylonian exile, and the restoration of Israel in 538 BCE. Darby and Scofield reinterpreted these passages as prophecies about the re-establishment of Israel as a nation.
3. Daniel 9:24–27 — This passage, often referred to as the “Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks,” is crucial in dispensationalism. Traditionally, it had been interpreted in an allegorical or symbolic sense, with the “seventy weeks” understood as a metaphor for a complete period designated by God. Darby and Scofield saw it as a timeline for God’s plan for Israel, including the End Times. They reinterpreted the “seventy weeks” as literal years, and believed that the prophecy foretold key events in Jewish history and the eventual return of Christ.
4. Matthew 24:3–31 — This passage, often called the “Olivet Discourse,” includes Jesus’ teachings about the signs of the End Times. Traditionally, this was often seen as a prophecy about the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. Dispensationalists like Darby and Scofield reinterpreted it as a detailed prophecy about the events leading up to the Second Coming of Christ at the end of the Great Tribulation, which (in their interpretation) was a completely different event from the Rapture, which would happen at the beginning of the Tribulation.
5. 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 — This passage was commonly interpreted as referring to the Second Coming of Christ at the end of time. Scofield and Darby reinterpreted it to refer to the Rapture as a separate event from the Second Coming; an event that could happen at any moment.
6. 2 Thessalonians 2:1–12 — This passage talks about a “Man of Sin.” It had traditionally been interpreted as a symbol of ongoing evil and apostasy throughout the Church Age, but Darby and Scofield reinterpreted it as a reference to the Antichrist, who would be a key figure in the Tribulation.
7. Revelation 20:1–6 — The Millennium had long been understood allegorically, referring to the reign of Christ in the hearts of believers, or the Church Age in general. Darby and Scofield reinterpreted this passage as describing a future period of peace and righteousness before the Last Judgment.

Christian leaders have long been skeptical of claims like these:

• Thomas Aquinas said God would end the world “at some time” in the distant future, but advised readers to wait it out with patience.
• Martin Luther called the Book of Revelation “neither apostolic nor prophetic” in the preface to his translation of the New Testament.
• John Calvin explicitly stated that the prophecies in the Book of Daniel referred to events in the past, and not to some future apocalypse.

But Darby and Scofield presented these doctrines as if they were simply “what the Bible says” — and today, many American people continue to read scripture through the lenses these men forged.

The politicians bent on apocalypse

When Al Qaeda operatives crashed two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers on September 11th, 2001, voices around the world cried out for justice. For a certain sect of American policymakers, this anguish and rage represented an opportunity to transform American foreign policy in the Middle East — to set in motion a series of events that would, if all went according to plan, bring about the end of the world.

Ever since the 1960s, a “silent majority” of right-wing American Evangelicals had been responding to the rise of hippy counterculture with their own grassroots counter-revolution. Where hippies foresaw the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, their Christian counterparts looked forward to the establishment of the Christ’s Millennial Kingdom on Earth. The 1960s and 70s saw the peace symbol, derived from the semaphore signals for N and D (standing for nuclear disarmament), becoming an emblem of the counterculture movement. In a parallel development, the Christian Right adopted a fish symbol, known as the “Ichthys,” from the Greek word for fish.

This symbol dates back to the early Christian church. It was a covert sign for Christians under Roman persecution, with the letters of “Ichthys” standing for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” As counterculture movements brandished the peace symbol in protests and on tie-dyed shirts, the fish emblem began appearing on bumper stickers, business cards, and storefronts, embodying a declaration of faith and a rallying cry for dispensationalism. This adoption and widespread use of the Ichthys symbol by the Christian Right was not just a mark of religious identity; it was a strategic response to what they perceived as the moral and spiritual challenges posed by the progressive movements of the time. The fish symbol, therefore, became an emblem of a counter-revolution, representing a desire to return to traditional values and a dispensationalist lens on America’s future.

Problem was, according to Darby and Scofield, that future wouldn’t arrive until after the Rapture and the Great Tribulation. The good news was that the whole shebang could kick off at any moment,7 as Hal Lindsey’s bestselling 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth made clear. Drawing heavily on Darby and Scofield8, Lindsey’s book served as a rallying call and manifesto for the American Evangelical movement, proclaiming an End-Times gospel that sold 17 million copies, spawned a primetime TV special, and even got adapted into a 1978 film narrated by Orson Welles.

Dispensationalism was far more than just a pop-culture fad. Televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell pulled in millions of weekly viewers with their conspiracy theories about “Jews and the New World Order” — and both these men were frequent guests at the White House during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. Across many levels and branches of government, dispensationalist eschatology began to shape American policy at home and abroad during the 1980s.

This narrative dovetailed neatly with the foreign policy of the American neoconservative movement. In 1997, neoconservative leaders William Kristol and Robert Kagan formed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which lobbied the Clinton administration to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy, especially in regard to Israel and Iraq. Declaring that overseas American military intervention “is good both for America and the world,” the PNAC’s manifesto advocated for significant increases in defense spending in order to “confront regimes hostile to American interests abroad” — in particular, the regime of Saddam Hussein.

In the wake of the September 11th attacks, President George W. Bush cemented the alliance between neoconservatives and dispensationalist Christians, “deliberately invoking ‘double-coded’ language with overtly religious overtones” in speeches such as his October 7, 2001 address to the nation — in which he described Al Qaeda as a group of “barbaric criminals who profane a great religion.9”

But in order to satisfy both the dispensationalist and neoconservative wings, Bush needed a broader objective than just direct retaliation against Al Qaeda. His solution was a “Global War on Terrorism (GWOT),” in which the United States would invade Iraq in search of nuclear weapons (which were never found), capture Saddam Hussein, battle the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (which they now rule), fight Islamic fundamentalists in the Philippines (where they were fairly successful), contend with Al Qaeda cells throughout northern Africa (where they have achieved relatively little), slug it out with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — and, yes, kill Osama bin Laden (who was no longer the leader of Al Qaeda by the time the CIA found him in 2011). All in all, this cost 8 trillion dollars and 906,000 human lives, an estimated 30 percent of which were unarmed civilians.

It’s important to emphasize that this was never just about foreign policy; or, more specifically, that foreign policy was always a means to a larger end. This is about clearing the way for Christ’s return to Earth — or accelerating it, if possible. People who believe in dispensationalism do not expect to remain on this planet much longer, nor do they want to. As Fox News host Sean Hannity quipped in 2022, “If [the world] really [is] gonna end in 12 years, to hell with it all! Let’s have one big party for the last 10 years, and then we’ll all go home and see Jesus.”

To hell with it all, indeed. Why worry that human-caused climate change is melting the Arctic and Antarctic icecaps, raising sea levels and flooding cities like Venice? Why worry about the outcome of a conflict between Israel and Hamas, when you already know the ending? Spoiler alert: Israel wins, Jesus returns, and after a few years of Tribulation, all Earth’s problems will be fixed.

In fact, what if there’s a way to speed things up? If Ezekiel 38 and 39 refer to a war between Israel and Palestine, as Darby and Scofield claimed, then wouldn’t such a war be a good sign? Floods, famines, earthquakes, pandemics — they’re all prophesied as heralds that the Rapture is nigh. What if, by catalyzing events like these, Christians could actually help prepare the way for the Millennial Kingdom?

To a person raised on dispensationalism, verses like Isaiah 11:11–12, Daniel 9:24–27, Matthew 24:3–31, and 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 all clearly describe events of the End Times. Through this lens, that’s simply “what the Bible says.” All that’s left is to put those words into action.

Bibliography

1. Wilkinson, PR. (2006). John Nelson Darby and the Origins of Christian Zionism.
2. Mangum, RT & Sweetnam, MS. (2009). The Scofield Bible: Its history and impact on the evangelical church.
3. Flesher, L. S. (2009). The Historical Development of Premillennial Dispensationalism. Review & Expositor, 106(1), 35–45.
4. Saiya, N. (2012). Onward christian soldiers: American dispensationalists, George W. Bush and the Middle East. Holy Land Studies, 11(2), 175–204.
5. Pitkin, B. (2012). Prophecy and History in Calvin’s Lectures on Daniel.

Footnotes

1. In the Hebrew text of this first chapter of Genesis, the word translated as “God” is Elohim. El was the name of an ancient (at least 4th mil. BCE) Canaanite sky god, and the word El appears to have later become a more general word for “male deity” around Mesopotamia. The word Elohim is the Hebrew pluralization of this same word, and its lack of a definite article in the Hebrew makes its precise meaning unclear; it may mean “God,” or “the god we call Elohim,” or “the gods.” Genesis 2:4 starts a second creation story, which runs until verse 2:25. In this second narrative, God creates the world in a different way, and he’s now known by the personal name of Yahweh.
2. This epic age forms the backdrop for the marvelous Book of Legends (Sefer Ha-Aggadah), where immortal patriarchs battle Nephilim and other supernatural creatures, and converse with Old-Testament angels. Your Medium correspondent would very much like to see more big-budget adventure movies set in this universe, but so far the only one is Darron Aronofksy’s Noah (2014), which is, sad to say, kind of a snooze swashbucklingly speaking.
3. The Tower of Babel, in Hebrew Migdol Bavel, “the Tower of Babylon,” is not a name used in the actual text, Genesis 11:1–9. The pun on this word was probably conceived during the Babylonian captivity (circa 597 BCE), as the Hebrew pronunciation of that city’s name, Bavel, is only one Hebrew letter away from the verb balal, “to jumble.”
4. Although, to be fair, almost every society has been a Dispensation of Patriarchal Rule.
5. The Jewish take on the commandments (mitzvot) is that these are a set of behavioral rules designed to set Jewish people apart from all other peoples, and God never expected everyone to follow all of them to the letter.
6. Darby’s reasons for believing this were complex, and were rooted in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination often summed up under the acronym TULIP:

• Total depravity of humankind: human nature is innately sinful, and bent toward evil from the moment of every person’s birth.
• Unconditional election: God picks who gets to go to Heaven.
• Limited atonement: Jesus did not die for everyone’s sins, but only for the sins of the people God has pre-elected to go to Heaven.
• Irresistible grace: If you’re among the elect, God will save you whether you want to be saved or not. You don’t get a say.
• Perseverance of the saints: Once “saved,” (i.e., elected to go to Heaven) you cannot lose your salvation — even if you are a serial killer, a pedophile, a terrorist, or a person who talks loudly in movie theaters, God’s got a mansion reserved for you in eternal Paradise, and you can’t lose your spot no matter what you do.

7. American Evangelicals weren’t the first to believe the world was about to end. In the years 899, 999 and 1199, Christians flocked to monasteries, “hysterically bearing jewels, coins and earthly possessions by the oxcartful, hoping to cadge a little last-minute grace before Judgment Day.” In 1843, Baptist minister William Miller foretold that Christ would return in 1844 — and when that failed to happen, the resulting “Great Disappoinment” gave rise to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The Jehovah’s Witnesses (who called themselves the Watchtower Society at the time) predicted that the world was going to end in 1914, then in 1918, then in 1925. It really never stops.

8. Another big influence here was Lewis Sperry Chafer’s 1947 book Systematic Theology (not to be confused with Wayne Grudem’s 1994 book of the same title). Chafer’s text provides in-depth discussions of many alleged symbols and codes in “The Bible” — that is, the Scofield Reference Bible, which Chafer regarded as the gold standard.

9. A 2002 “Letter to America,” allegedly authored by Osama bin Laden (though its actual authorship remains disputed to this day), stated that Al Qaeda’s anger was not targeted at Christianity, but at American military intervention against Muslim groups in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and Lebanon, economic sanctions against Iraq, the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, and America’s ongoing support of Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the Gaza Strip.