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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 shared this faith in science with the rest of Americans, even as scientists 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

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