Born in 1929, Lindsey converted to evangelical Christianity in the 1950s while working as a Mississippi River tugboat captain. He went to Dallas Theological Seminary in the early 1960s, where he learned the nuances of premillennial eschatology (a particular branch of end times theology). Theologians had resurrected and revived premillennialism in the late 19th century, and it shaped the fundamentalist movement as well as its postwar manifestation known as “evangelicalism.”
Lindsey and his fellow students determined that the world was careening rapidly toward a series of cataclysmic events described in biblical prophecy. They believed the Holy Spirit would soon turn this world over to the Antichrist, a diabolical world leader who would preside over an awful holocaust in which those true believers who had not already been raptured to heaven would suffer interminable tribulations.
But just when all hope seems lost for those still on earth, premillennialists taught that Jesus would return with an army of saints to defeat the Antichrist at the literal Battle of Armageddon. Jesus’ victory will pave the way for God to establish a millennium of peace and prosperity, a new heaven and a new earth.
In the first part of the 20th century, premillennialism spread slowly among Protestants. But World War II, the detonation of atomic bombs and a Cold War nuclear arms race made Americans like Lindsey all the more aware that the world could end in an instant.
After graduating from seminary in the 1960s, Lindsey moved to California, where he joined the ministry Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) and began working with students at UCLA. He lived in a communal home called the JC Light & Power House (JC for Jesus Christ) and was immersed in the Jesus people movement, the born-again version of the counterculture in which Jesus was celebrated as the first hippie. He also began writing a book with co-author Carole Carlson on the second coming of Jesus.
In 1970, Lindsey and Carlson published “The Late Great Planet Earth.” Filling the text with silly puns for chapter titles and subtitles, including “Russia is A Gog,” “Scarlet O’Harlot” and “Sheik to Sheik,” they applied biblical prophecy to current events, emphasizing the global influence of the USSR and China, the increasing power of Arab nations and the creation of the European Common Market. But more than anything else, Israel occupied the center of Lindsey’s analysis. He believed the creation of the state of Israel and Israel’s capture of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War represented clear signs of the fast-approaching end of days. He expected to next witness the reconstruction of the Jewish temple, probably on the land currently occupied by the Dome of the Rock.