The Road to Armageddon: American Culture and Politics during the Late Cold War, 1970-1991

Bible prophecy has long engaged the American mind. By the late Cold War, Biblical prophecy increasingly shaped the political beliefs of millions of Americans within the evangelical community. The group most impacted were dispensationalist Christians who interpreted the Atomic Age through the lens of end-time prophecies. Dating as far back as the seventeenth-century, American colonists living on the frontier of the British empire in North America embraced millennialism and, at times, interpreted current events through the lens of Bible prophecy while anticipating the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the Battle of Armageddon. Through the centuries, Bible prophecy became a reoccurring theme that culminated in the late 1800s under the eschatological teachings of John Nelson Darby. Following Darby, a string of ministers, evangelists, and, by the mid-twentieth century, televangelists merged Cold War foreign policy with premillennial dispensational teachings that the end of the world was near. No other figure in the twentieth century shaped Bible prophecy more than Hal Lindsey whose prophetic teachings in The Late Great Planet Earth provided the common language evangelicals needed to establish a widely held view of current events in the late Cold War. This dissertation will argue that dispensationalists increasingly influenced American culture and politics throughout the Cold War, culminating in the 1970s and 1980s. First within evangelical culture then spreading into popular culture through influential artists such as Larry Norman and filmmakers Donald W. Thompson and Russell Doughten, premillennial dispensationalism emerged as a distinguished religious ideology during the late Cold War. As dispensationalism gained popularity throughout the second half of the twentieth century, public political discourse about the end times increased, culminating during the Ronald Reagan administration