IF YOU WANTED TO UNDERSTAND American evangelicalism in the late twentieth century, premillennialism and the Rapture are pretty good places to start. These are core features of the theological environment in which I was raised. When I was preschool-aged in the early 1980s, my family moved to join a premillennial Christian commune in Washington state to live off the grid and wait out the Rapture with a few other families on a farm. Because it’s premised on the world getting worse and worse, radicalized premillennialism encourages believers to retreat from society into enclaves.
But the dispensational premillennialist framework, once foundational to the political and theological imaginations of so many evangelicals, might be losing its pride of place in popular evangelical eschatology. I’ve spent the past three and a half years researching the theological ideas and Christian leaders who were central to instigating the January 6th Capitol riot, and what I’ve found has shaken all of my assumptions about American evangelicalism—a world I thought I knew intimately.
Since the advent of the Trump era, the evangelical landscape has undergone rapid shifts, often in turbulent and dangerous directions. To be sure, there are still plenty of evangelical premillennialists out there faithfully waiting on the Rapture. But their sequestering, defensive posture is becoming outmoded. Remarkably, the most prominent and powerful new leaders—the ones dedicated to fully recentering evangelical politics on Donald Trump, and who have grown their power and influence through their association with him—are overwhelmingly anti-Rapture. They believe Christians have a more active and forceful role to play in the end of the world.
The front-line captains of the American religious right today are overwhelmingly nondenominational, which means they are not accountable to larger organizations of churches or held to historic creeds or confessions of faith, and they are also charismatic, meaning they embrace miracles and prophecy and see the supernatural ethos of early Christianity as a model for current-day believers. They have also embraced a far grander vision for transforming American culture than any Rapture-waiter could imagine.
This up-and-coming eschatology is not as cohesive or systematic as dispensational premillennialism. It’s not as patiently optimistic or as content with gradual social reform as the postmillennialism of old. Instead, the predominant new charismatic eschatology hopes for a dramatic, militant Christian end-times revival to sweep the globe dramatically battling back the kingdom of darkness. If we could capture this theological vision of the future in a phrase, it would be “victorious eschatology.”