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After surveying previous attempts to classify Edwards's History of Redemption, this chapter moves beyond Goen and Heimert by arguing that Edwards's view of history cannot simply be identified as optimistic and progressive. The pattern is more complex than that. Satan and Antichrist are responsible for decline, and yet God's work continues to move forward. Even the millennium arrives in progressive stages, thus blurring the boundaries between the well-defined premillennial and postmillennial viewpoints. Characterized by a contrast motif, Edwards's redemptive history contains both cyclic and linear dimensions. Although scripture contains clues, the full pattern of history is discernable only from God's perspective. Only God and the departed saints can view the larger pattern traced out by the “river” of divine providence.

This chapter introduces the themes, concepts and questions which frame this study. The popular religion of Southcottianism is defined, and existing interpretations of its relationship to radical politics surveyed – including the work of E.P. Thompson, J.F.C. Harrison, James Hopkins, Barbara Taylor, Iain McCalman and others. The alternative approaches adopted in this study are described. These comprise both the use of new archive evidence and an interpretative perspective combining techniques from theology with social and cultural history. Recent scholarly debates over religion and agency are next gauged, before the theories of Phyllis Mack are introduced as a useful tool for understanding the social and political implications of millenarian religion and its practices. The chapter then stresses the limitations of existing heuristic categories of millennial beliefs – particularly pre- and postmillennialist distinctions – before introducing the new categories adopted in this study. Finally, the chronological scope and structure of the book are outlined.

This chapter explores the conflict between Pentecostal premillennialism—the pervasive conception of eschatology in Pentecostal churches—and black racial consciousness and suggests that the former is not sufficiently compatible with black liberation theology. It first provides an overview of eschatology in black religion before discussing the shift from postmillennialism to premillennialism that accompanied the emergence of Pentecostalism from the Holiness movement. It then examines the compatibility/incompatibility of Pentecostal premillennialism with eschatology in black religion and argues that Afro-Pentecostalism falls short of restoring primitive Christianity and of renewing the Black Church by not articulating a sound eschatology. In order to reconcile Pentecostal premillennialism and black liberation theology, the chapter calls for a shift in Afro-Pentecostal theological discourse toward a conception of eschatology rooted in black folk sources and black millennialism.

Anxious that God was preparing them for Christ’s second coming, Euro-Americans experienced an unprecedented revival known as the First Great Awakening—an intercolonial phenomenon that infused Protestantism in America with extraordinary heights of millenarianism and apocalypticism. The Awakening was a watershed event in the formation of a distinctive Anglo-American identity. While this identity was not always deeply pious, as economic and political concerns occasionally eclipsed religious matters, there is no doubt that the “vital piety” that had defined radical Protestantism in Europe found new and vibrant expression in America, particularly in its eschatological aspects. These came into sharpest focus when the Seven Years’ War broke out between Britain and France in 1754. Usually considered only in military and geopolitical terms, this war was also a war of religion in which the Anglo-Americans cast themselves in the heroic role of God’s chosen people striving against the forces of the Catholic Antichrist.

Contrary to the espoused rationalism of the leaders of the American Revolution, popular perceptions of the violent detachment from Great Britain and the creation of a new republic filled the public with apocalyptic anxiety and millenarian expectation. For some, the rapidly unfolding drama heralded the dawn of a new nation preordained by God and populated by his chosen people. For others, the recent wars and accompanying social upheaval confirmed the irretrievably depraved nature of humanity, and when compared to contemporaneous supernatural occurrences, displayed terrifying symptoms of the tribulation foretold in the biblical Books of Daniel and the Revelation of John.

This chapter presents the author's account of events in February 1988, namely preparations for the Iowa caucuses and the first primary of the presidential campaign in New Hampshire. He describes evangelicals's opposition to abortion and how this spurs their political activism. He also observes anomalies in the moral crusade being waged in the precincts of lowa and the purlieus of New Hampshire. He singles out the mood of triumphalism surrounding Pat Robertson's campaign, which is curious in that most of Robertson's evangelical followers still claim to be premillennialists—that is, they expect the imminent return of Christ and the judgment of a sinful world—but they are acting increasingly like postmillennialists who have taken it upon themselves to usher in Christ's millennial kingdom.

Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.

Prior to the Civil War, postmillennialism had been more common among most American evangelical Protestants than had premillennialism. Both were taught, however. After the Civil War, more progressive or liberal Protestants turned postmillennialism into a doctrine emphasizing the progress of modern civilization as evidence of the coming of Christ’s Kingdom on earth. William Newton Clark and A. C. McGiffert illustrate that approach. By contrast, the dispensational premillennialists developed a literalist reading of biblical prophecies. They divided world history into seven dispensations, each ending in human failure and divine judgment. At the end of our own last dispensation would be the “secret rapture” of the saints, a brief era of tribulation, and the return of Christ to set up a kingdom on earth for one thousand years.

The migration to the Pacific Northwest is driven by hope. This hope is controversial because eschatology, insofar as it imagines a better world, involves critique of the present. Recognizing that dispensational premillennialism continues to dominate American evangelical rhetoric and institutions, this chapter describes the reification and recasting of evangelical eschatological narratives in the 1970s. Tracing the emergence, evolution, and effect of a new and radically political postmillennialism, which now circulates widely in north Idaho, this chapter will consider the formulation of the new eschatological style that characterizes the social engagement and political disengagement of a growing number of American evangelicals, explaining their aspiration to survive and resist an impending crisis in society and culture, and to build community in the Pacific Northwest in order to rescue the world beyond. This chapter describes the varieties of hope that sustain strategies of survival and resistance in evangelical America.

The Introduction lays out the basic argument that the New Christian Right is not new and that it can be traced to the Old Christian Right and the rise of fundamentalism at the turn of the twentieth century. The introduction shows how Rushdoony and the Christian Reconstructionists played an important role in laying out a framework that helped the religious right take root in the conservative Protestant subculture, leading to what we now know as the culture wars. It introduces and explains the key theological categories: presuppositionalism, postmillennialism, theonomy and dominion. Finally, the introduction situates the Reconstructionists’ engagement with politics in the context of American history and explores the ways in which their goals are much wider than the narrowly “political.”

This chapter outlines the theology of the Christian Reconstructionists, highlighting Calvinism, postmillennialism, presuppositionalism, and theonomy taking these technical theological systems and explaining them in ways accessible to nonspecialists, placing them in historical context, and showing the distinctive Reconstructionist developments and uses of them. The chapter explores the revitalization of proslavery, pre-Civil War Presbyterian theology in the work of R. L. Dabney and offers a resolution to the seeming contradiction between premillennialist pessimism that dominates conservative Protestantism on the one hand, and the efforts to “rebuild Christian America” in the form of dominion theology on the other.

Chapter 5 examines dispensational ideas about the nature of time in late-nineteenth-century America. They fashioned a time concept that was thoroughly polyvalent: at once linear, teleological, progressive, disjunctive, and divinely structured and dispensed according to a redemptive plan. “Dispensations” became the word they adopted to embody this concept of time. Borrowing from millennial pasts, experiences of temporal rupture, and popular faith in progress, dispensational time proved powerfully adaptive to polyvalent experiences of time in the twentieth century. Time had an external purpose, and that purpose was given to it by God. Meaning, then, was not evenly distributed through the endless, homogenous continuity of natural history, but interjected into time’s ruptures, and interpreted through the Bible.