Apocalypse Lost: Evangelicals, Environmentalism, and the End of the World

Since the 1980s, academics and activists attempting to explain why American evangelicals have supported politicians with controversial environmental track records—from James Watt to James Inhofe—have framed such believers as apocalyptic fatalists content to pillage Creation until Jesus raptures them to safety and destroys the Earth. Today evangelicals maintain higher levels of climate skepticism and lower levels of support for environmental legislation than other religious groups—seemingly confirming the “End Times Apathy Hypothesis.” However, the history of such Rapture-believing, premillennial evangelicals reveals surprisingly sensitive attitudes toward science, nature, and the environmental crisis that stand in stark contrast to popular depictions. Far from promoting anti-science and anti-environmental attitudes, premillennialism has historically encouraged a this-worldly interest in empirical science as believers saw the natural world as a source of revelation and sought to discern the “signs of the times.” It has also offered a flexible theological framework capable of assimilating the most dire findings by environmental scientists and meeting them with hope. Prophecy popularizers such as Billy Graham and Hal Lindsay wrote books which sold in the millions and carried with them the latest findings and predictions by environmental scientists—making them, in effect, some of the most effective science communicators of the twentieth century. Where environmental skepticism has entered evangelicalism, it has been through postmillennial Christian Reconstructionism—a movement deeply opposed to premillennialism—and its promotion of economic cornucopianism, Young Earth Creationism, Christian America historical revisionism, and organizations like the Cornwall Alliance. To make evangelicals into anti-environmentalists, these Reconstructionists first had to unmake them as premillennialists. This interdisciplinary dissertation demonstrates how history and theology can explain evangelicals’ shifting attitudes toward environmentalism. From their early concerns over nuclear testing through their participation in the first Earth Day and up to the eve of the millennium, premillennialism drove evangelicals to take seriously the growing concerns for Creation’s condition and their present attitudes of skepticism and antagonism represent a divergence from this hitherto untold story of apocalyptic environmentalism.