End Time Politics

From the 1970s until his death in 2007, Jerry Falwell merged American nationalism with an end-times approach to the Bible known as dispensationalism. In the process, he corrupted both, while creating a novel way for conservative Christians to understand current events as the fulfillment of prophecy. He taught that the events of the Cold War had been divinely foretold in the Bible and that America was God’s chosen nation in these present “end times.” By implementing his conservative economics known as “biblical morality,” the country could be “saved” and would survive the coming wrath of God. This message, which was otherwise on the margins of American public life, found resonance in the backlash to the civil rights movement and especially in Ronald Reagan, a fellow believer in the end-times battle of Armageddon.

In organizing his voting bloc, the Religious Right, along the lines of dispensationalism and nationalism, Falwell claimed that America had to “return” to Protestant fundamentalism as a panacea to the liberal conspiracy, which included talk of climate change, affirmative action, women’s liberation (including abortion), gay rights, and a nuclear freeze. This liberal conspiracy had supposedly been biblically prophesied yet would cripple America as it faced the impending wrath of God. The movement Falwell began found its savior in Donald Trump, God’s man for undoing the conspiracy and restoring unregulated capitalism and an imagined American Christian nation.