Annotations for Speakers: Daniel Hummel

It's a pleasure. Good to be with you, Jeremi.

Oh, wow. Yeah, many reactions. First, on that last point about the Judeo-Christian tradition, it just reminds me of, I believe his name was Arthur Cohen. He was just a writer in the 1970s on religion in America. And he contested the idea that there was such a thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition because, for most of the last 2000 years, Christians have hated Jews. And that tradition was a construct of the, mostly the mid 20th century and Cold War politics and other things. So Zachary, I think your tension is not only felt by you, I guess, I'd say historically.

And then I, you know, on the poem itself, the first thing that came to mind was, as we'll get into dispensationalists, are people traditionally who were very heavenly minded. You could say they were focused in their theology on getting to heaven, and that that was really the purpose of being a Christian was to get to heaven. And so the first part of your poem is very earthy and descriptive and I don't think they'd maybe identify with that directly. And then you, you mentioned Kalamazoo and Chattanooga, I think. Is that Chattanooga? Yes. Yeah. And if you read the book, I do have a geographical sort of thrust to the story or an arc to the story that actually starts in the, what I call the Great Lakes Basin, but basically the Midwest, including parts of Canada, which is really where this theology in the 19th century picks up. And then the, one of the more fascinating subplots that was interesting for me to study was how dispensationalism travels southward. And really by today, it would be to the outsider, it would seem like it's a sort of native southern theology. But that's actually really far from the truth. So just thinking of sort of the way that this set of ideas has traveled over the last 150 years, Kalamazoo and Chattanooga are actually pretty good stand-ins for the breadth of the tradition.

Yeah, well first of all, to the listeners, Jeremi, you're really the reason I'm even in Madison, right? So I came in 2010 to study with you and then stayed here until I finished in 2016, and Upper House was actually founded in 2015 here on, just across the street actually from the old history department building, the humanities building. And we're a Christian study center. So we are overtly Christian in our orientation and we are a study center, which means we really value the life of the mind and we value exploring ideas that are related to questions of faith, questions of identity, questions of philosophy, and how academic disciplines explore those ideas. And so we host speakers, we host sort of groups of students that are going through really dense, difficult books. We're trying to give students who identify as Christian on campus, the ability to supplement all the really good learning that's happening at UW with some equally rigorous, we hope, study in the tradition of Christian thought.

But we also see ourselves as, to borrow an older term, a third space in Madison where people from different backgrounds can come and engage in civic dialogue. And explore the big questions. We call them the questions of meaning, the questions of existence in a way that lets everyone bring their whole selves into the space. So, whether that means you're a Christian or, some other tradition or no tradition at all, we think, a lot of these big questions are relevant to all of us and we really try to steward our reputation and our space as a place where anyone is welcome any time of the year.

Yeah, I think your instincts are pretty accurate. We definitely are exist as part of a larger tradition. There's actually a consortium of Christian study centers that are on many large university campuses. But there is, there's many counter pressures or countervailing pressures that push most Christians, many Christians in the US toward polarization, toward, you know, sitting in tribal camps, toward culture wars type ways of framing the university. And I find it a privilege and a joy even in the difficult times to be someone who's trying to articulate a different vision for how faith and religion can engage with the university. That there's actually a mutual benefit that happens, and that the university, UW in particular, is ultimately better if there are thinking religious people engaged, on campus and around campus, at places like Upper House.

Yeah, dispensationalism is a particular theological tradition that has had a lot of purchase in the white evangelical world for the last 150 years or so, and it's really, in my reading, it really has collapsed as an academic ,intellectual project in the last generation, I date it to the nineties, you could quibble and say maybe it was the two thousands. And so we're living in the wake of a sort of collapse in a lot of evangelical thinking and there's a vacuum. And it's not to say that dispensationalism, which we can get into, isn't, it's not necessarily a theology that I would endorse, but it did give a coherent worldview to many Christians, and we're living in the collapse of that worldview, and there have been many things that have filled that vacuum. This is my reading, including a capitulation to a type of consumer, commercial Christianity, and a type of nationalistic politics. And these are even more influential in the evangelical world because there is such a dearth of theological engagement by millions of evangelicals across the country.

So that's sort of my analysis. And I wrote the book in part because I grew up in this world and I actually wanted to take it seriously, but also because I could, sort of from my vantage point, I was pretty sure that part of the way forward for Evangelicals is to understand this history and to sort of consciously undertake the project of building a new theology that can actually address some of the core issues that are troubling the community today.

And I think in popular understanding, what most people would know about dispensationalism is that it has a unique teaching called The Rapture or the Any Moment Rapture, which is this idea that at any moment, including during the recording of this very podcast, all true believers, all true Christians would suddenly disappear and be in heaven with Jesus. And that that would set off a timeline of sort of catastrophic events that would ultimately lead to the rise of an anti-Christ dictator and ultimately lead to the battle of Armageddon. And really the whole world is destroyed. And then, remade anew and this set of teachings has been very popular in movie, in Hollywood movies and other things. That's just one part of the dispensational theological system, and it's a system because it touches on sort of all aspects of Christian theology.

And the key part for the beginning of the story for the post-Civil War era is to understand that dispensationalism offered a very otherworldly understanding of the church, of what it meant to be part of a church. That allowed pastors who adopted the theology to really stay silent on the hot issues of the day. And in the 1860s and 1870s, that was slavery and then reconstruction and racial justice. And for many pastors and I particularly identify pastors who were in states that were in the north, but had a strong southern sympathy. This theory of the church, this way of understanding the church as an entirely heavenly people that should have nothing to do with politics was especially appealing to pastors who were looking for a way to hold their churches together after the Civil War. And that's really the original appeal of the dispensational system.

It wasn't necessarily about decoding the end times, but once you, once they adopted sort of the church part of the theology over the next generation or so, they also strongly adopted the end times part of the theology and many other parts as well. But that's sort of, that was one of the contributions I tried to make is try to understand why this theology becomes popular in America in the 1860s and 1870s, and not, for example, 20 years before that, or 20 years after that. And I think the answer there has a lot to do with reconstruction and racial politics in the US

Yeah. Well, any theology has an implicit politics to it. So that there was, you know, this is part of the interesting thing about the 1870s,n is staying silent on reconstruction really was a politics of reconstruction, right? It was a desire to get past reconstruction. It was a desire to reconcile between northern and southern whites. And there were particular reasons why dispensationalist basically wanted that to happen. And a lot of it had to do with engaging with global missions and finding racial politics to be sort of a speed bump on the way to global missions, and so prioritizing that over race. And so there's an implicit racial politics that is in the the theology of dispensationalism.

And yet at the same time, for most of these early dispensationalists, which is different than later generations, there was a very strong understanding that the church was separate from the state and that really the Christian should not be involved in politics as such. They should not be necessarily politicians. Voting was actually sometimes discouraged because within the theology, the ultimate loyalty of the Christian was to the church. But we see, looking back, and many people understood it at the time, that you can't actually get out of politics. Claiming that you had nothing to say about politics was often a way of endorsing the status quo and over the generations, that's often what Dispensationalist did, particularly when it came to issues of race, is they would endorse the status quo and as largely white Christian community, that would often be a status quo that was beneficial to them. And they weren't, they didn't have a theology or a theory or a sort of social critique that gave them any impetus to be active on working for racial justice or even racial equality.

Yeah, and people like William Bell Reilly, who's a very famous fundamentalist minister in the Minneapolis city area was key to this. And one of the things that is a through line from the post Civil War period to the post World War II period is that Dispensationalist understood their highest calling to be missions, evangelization, converting people into Christians. And this took on a different implications for sort of national and international politics. By the end of World War ii, and the sort of dawn of the Cold War anti-communism becomes a key way that, or the threat of communism becomes a key way that Dispensationalist understand the world, and particularly as a threat to their highest calling, global missions. And so, in some ways, that is the answer to the question is that, Communism becomes such a threat to the mission's enterprise that many fundamentalists and dispensationalist who were sitting on the sidelines in earlier periods decided that this was such a existential threat that they needed to join the fray.

But someone like Riley, also, William Bell Riley, the person I mentioned before, also is a key to a more, a less defensive or reactive posture, and more of an active posture. In that Riley was also a conspiracy theorist, and a virulent anti-Semite, and someone who, even going back to the 1910s, was looking at the globe and seeing all types of threats and conspiracies that were, in his view, designed to destroy the church. And so he's someone who did not need World War II or even World War I to get politically active. He was someone who embedded a conspiratorial way of seeing the world with his largely apocalyptic theology to basically call Christians to action to combat these conspiracies. And so he was someone who promoted the protocols of the elders of Zion, even though those were widely discredited. He was someone who openly supported Hitler in the 1930s, and then he was someone who was a strong anti-communist in the 1940s before he died, and really embedded that particular set of politics in his theology.

There's certainly a parallel in a shared Christian anti Judaism that runs through both of those personalities. I think a bigger and really interesting parallel is the use of media, in that case radio, before that, mass print media, after that television, and ultimately the internet. Dispensationalists have been just masters at adopting the newest form of media to get their message out. And sometimes they've been at the forefront of these particular types of communications media. Later people, like Jerry Falwell who helped found the Christian right, was very early adopter of computers to help rationalize his communications and his sort of mailing lists. But this has been just a consistent theme in the history of dispensationalism. Is that because of their overriding concern for getting the word out, for spreading the gospel as they understand it, they are eager to adopt media and to use media and exploit media in a sort of mass, popular way. And so some of the most popular radio shows in the 1940s and fifties were dispensationalist inspired radio shows. Often they were basically daily bible commentary shows, but were mixed in with commentary on the daily news. And so the merging of scripture and politics was, you know, a daily affair for many of those radio shows.

Yeah. In some ways Dispensationalist were unremarkable Conservatives. In some ways, the sort of literal meaning of the word conservative, I mentioned they, often endorsed the status quo. Unlike other Christian traditions that have a very strong social critique or critique of culture, dispensationalist tended not to, and that goes back to that division between the church and the world that is at the heart of the theology. But that's not to say that they didn't have a politics, as we've talked about, and also that they weren't very attractive or appealing as a religious subgroup to American politicians. And you see this later in the 20th century where someone like Ronald Reagan, who is often rumored in news media to actually be a dispensationalist. This is sort of a scandal because of the apocalyptic worldview of dispensationalism. What if our, you know, if our president has that worldview, what does that mean for our foreign policy? I don't really think Reagan was a systematic thinker on these things, but he was very strategic in appealing to some of the more pessimistic ways of sort of the direction of the world that would align with dispensationalist beliefs and at various times also reference theologians or writers from the dispensationalist tradition that would be well known to people in that world. The other major president that is often, was rumored to have links to dispensationalism was George W. Bush. I'm again, pretty dubious that Bush himself held to any particular end times theology. He wasn't a theologian on that front, but he certainly invoked images and rhetoric, including the idea of a crusade, which of course he backtracked on, but still used it and had its effect. That would've aligned with a dispensationalist understanding of what was going on in the world. So I think at the highest levels of state leadership, there's definitely a story to tell there. I think the broader story is how dispensationalism actually adapted to become a viable part of the Christian right, as sort of a grassroots movement that gave a lot of the verve to conservative politics in the 1970s and 1980s.

Yeah. One interesting fact about Graham is that he was the successor to William Bell Riley in the sense that when Riley died in 1948, he had handpicked Billy Graham, who at that time was a less well known revivalist who was traveling around the country to be his successor at his college in Minneapolis, Northwestern College. So Graham has a direct connection to Riley in that sense. But Graham became, yeah, the most influential evangelical, maybe most influential religious figure in the late second half of the 20th century, and Graham's relationship to Dispensationalism is that he grew up basically a dispensationalist and his early revivals taught. That there would be a rapture at any moment, and that that was one reason why listeners needed to convert was because you didn't wanna be left behind. And this gave an urgency to, not just individual conversion, but to the Cold War because communist societies wouldn't allow missionaries into them.

And so we needed to sort of support the downfall of communism in order to allow more missionaries to enter those countries. So that that was certainly part of his, earlier, his early career, we're talking about the 1940s, 1950s. Graham gradually moves away from that theology and he is a major figure. He's like a planet that everyone orbits in the evangelical world. And so for his entire career there were prominent people around him, and in other parts of the many organizations that he ran, that were dispensationalists and held to those views. But you definitely see a shift in the sixties and seventies and eighties where Graham is moving away from that sort of otherworldly theology, and getting much more invested in a, you could say, this worldly understanding of what the Christian's role is. And so by the, you know, by the 1980s, Graham is visiting the Soviet Union. He's visiting Jewish and Christian communities behind the Iron Curtain. He is a calling for a nuclear freeze. He is concerned about the environment and you just have a much different issue set for someone like Graham, as he develops into a major world leader.

For Hal Lindsay, who's a much different character, largely a media figure, Hal Lindsay went to the key seminary for dispensationalism, Dallas Theological Seminary, right in your neck of the woods, Jeremi.

My dad went to school there. A lot of, it's a very large school, one of the largest seminaries in the country. A lot of people went there. Not everyone who goes there comes out, like any school, believing everything the school teaches, right. But it certainly had been seen as the major intellectual center for dispensationalism and Hal Lindsay went there. He was a tugboat captain turned theologian, and he ended up becoming a campus ministry worker at UCLA where he really honed a message, this is in the sixties, he honed a message to appeal to counterculture students at UCLA and turned that into a book. And he crucially had a co-writer, named Carol Carlson, who really helped him turn, turned his, basically notes of talks into a book and it was called the Late Great Planet Earth. And it basically popularized the very dense, sophisticated, end times theology of dispensationalism into a very accessible vocabulary and presentation. He called the Rapture the ultimate trip. He called the anti-Christ, the future fuhrer, sort of a a pop culture version of the theology.

And this goes on to be the bestselling non-fiction book of the 1970s. It sells over 10 million copies. It's hitting right at the moment that a lot of other sort of negative or pessimistic books about the future are hitting, including, Alvin Tophler's Future Shock and The Population Bomb came out a few years before, so there's a lot in the air about sort of a pessimism about the future. And Lindsay, in that, in the Late Great Planet Earth, isn't explicitly political. He's very much interested in politics and he's talking about Middle East wars and the Cold War and all that kind of stuff. But his real solution, or his real call for Christians is to be faithful and spread the gospel, because he's still in that sort of, traditional dispensationalist mode.

He writes another book in 1980, called the 1980s path to Armageddon or something like that, where he basically represents the exact same popularized end times theology. But he has a very strong call to action for Christians that they need to start voting in Christians into office. And they need to be upholding conservative values like traditional family values as he calls them and lower taxation. And he's basically, switching his mode from 1970 to 1980 into one that is very activist and very political, and he ultimately is a big supporter of Ronald Reagan and the nuclear buildup in the early 1980s. And really sets a lot of the terms. He's not the only one for sure, but he's a very popular figure at that time, who's setting a lot of the terms of more broadly conservative politics, in the early 1980s.

It is a fair connection. It's complicated, of course. So dispensationalist aren't the only types of Christians who are active in the 1970s, getting more politically active on conservative politics. But I think there's an unavoidable, inescapable, dispensationalist flavor to the arguments that are being made within the Christian conservative world in the 1970s and eighties. And these largely revolve around the idea, once again, of threats to the Global Missions project and that communism is still on the horizon. And that's a major threat.

But the other threat that is looming even larger is what, Tim LaHaye, who's one of the major activists at the time, calls secular humanism. And this is an amalgamation of sort of all the bad people. For this group, which include outright secularists, people who reject religion, who they find troublesome. All different types of progressives, and political liberals who they find to be sort of eroding the foundations of American values. It also includes communists, it also includes, you know, Hollywood actors, and others that they would all find as sort of degrading, and LaHaye made extensive lists of everyone who would be involved. Many government officials, the education system. A lot of the things that we would, it's not too far from some rhetoric you can hear today. And so that whole framing of the problem and then the solution being a sort of concerted Christian action, organized action in the political realm. That comes out of a particular theological argument that is rooted in dispensationalism.

And again, it's not the only argument that Christians are making, but for people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, who I mentioned, and Hal Lindsay, this is the way they decide to try to activate the broader Christian community. And it's so striking that no more than 15 years before that in the 1960s, you can get quotes from people like Jerry Falwell who are making the exact opposite argument when it comes to the civil rights movement, which is that, he has a famous sermon called, what is it called? Ministers and Marchers. And he basically makes the call that no pastor should ever be found in a civil rights march. Because it goes back to that separation of the church and the world. And yet 15 years later, he's making the opposite argument, which is, you better find the pastors in the pro-life march, because of this threat of secular humanism.

Yes. That's one way to think of the decline is that for many millions of evangelicals, what counts as theological engagement becomes largely political engagement and these arguments around politics and culture, and commercialization. That's another strand I follow is just the, the massive commercial appeal of this theology. There's another story about the fall that is probably less interesting to those not in the evangelical world, which is about the collapse of intellectual credibility of dispensationalism within the seminary world. And this is happening at the same time, the 1980s, 1990s, that there's a concerted effort by other evangelicals who aren't dispensationalist, but are still pretty conservative theologically. They find dispensational to be problematic on sort of the merits of the system. And they sort of institutionally and intellectually outmaneuver, dispensationalism to the point that today, popular dispensationalism is very widespread, particularly in the white evangelical world. Many people don't even know the term dispensationalism, but they sort of, if you ask them about their beliefs, they would reflect the influence of dispensationalism. And so you have that, you have that situation while at the very same time in the more, the seminary halls and the sort of lecture halls of Christian colleges. This is a basically dead theological system. And that was a fascinating contrast that I tried to connect and unpack in the book as well.

That's right. And there's different levels to think about that. One is that there are decisions being made by particular thinkers, writers, theologians. To basically go popular, or you could even say to sort of sell out to the popularity. And so some of the credibility is lost as scholars who were considered sort of serious scholars end up trying to capitalize on the commercial potential of dispensationalism, in the 1980s and nineties, and actually try to sort of replicate the success of people like Hal Lindsay. And so that's one way that those things are connected. A broader one would be that, I don't want to, I don't wanna overstate a previous era where you might think, you know, oh, evangelicals were just influenced by their theology or something like that's never been the case. But there have definitely been eras where theological arguments have been more influential than others. And what you see over the late 20th century is that a community that was largely structured around theological distinctives, particular beliefs about God or about the world or about the church, becomes more and more shaped and formed by arguments about the culture and about politics.

And those things can't really, they either have to go together really tightly, or one is gonna lose out to the other. And you see over the late 20th century and into the 21st century that for millions of evangelicals, what defines their evangelicalism is a set of cultural positions in the culture war. Or a set of political positions, and you could even say a voting habit. And that's a significant shift. It's again, not to idealize the previous era, but to show that there is a significant change over a 50 year period on how evangelicals themselves are defining themselves.

Right, and that can be traced to a broader, if we wanna use that word again, flavor of the way that dispensationalist tend to understand history and time. And largely that it's the longer time passes, the more chaotic and fallen the world will be. Until this immediate rupture point when the end times will occur. And so when Dispensationalists tend to look out on the culture and in politics, they tend to see narratives of decline and in some cases, a sense of faithfulness or hopelessness in what's happening. You see in the Christian right, with the Falwells, and the Tim LaHayes, that they developed a sense that they could do something about it. And that was to get politically active. But that was only gonna be a stop gap anyway. The world was still careening toward chaos until Jesus returned.

And so in a lot of the rhetoric, you can see today in different pockets of our politics, you can see a same sort of defensive posture and a sense of just assumed worsening of the situation and from that and sort of working out of that position, what one's politics should be. And I think that leads to conspiratorial thinking among other things, being at sort of the core of your politics. And so when I made the connection with Q-Anon, it was not to say at all that there's a easy straight line from some dispensationalist thinker to Q-Anon. It was to show that the pattern of Q-Anon's sort of understanding of history or of what's gonna happen in the future, based on the Q drops, and all the stuff that was being dropped out there, had an interesting resonance to the way that Christian right leaders 40 years before that, were talking about what would happen in American society, and that pattern of thinking develops certain habits of mind and certain predispositions towards politics that I think are the continuity that connects the two.

Well, you know, who comes to mind is someone who just passed away this last week, Tim Keller, who was a major figure for a lot of Christians. He was a pastor in New York City, very influential. And he talked a lot about, he was not a dispensationalist by the way. He was a pretty widely respected pastor and figure. He often talked about Christians should follow a third way, what he said in politics. And that was to, attempt to, ground Christian thinking around culture and politics in biblical categories as opposed to categories that might dominate our current political debate. And those categories would often transcend or cut across some of the traditional lines that we draw in our politics. But they would be rooted in a sense of the dignity of each person, and in a sort of faith in the ability for humans to cooperate and reason together. And this got Keller a lot of flack from basically every side. He was considered too liberal by many Christians. He was considered far too conservative on some of his views by many liberals.

But he had his own following and he influenced people like me to really think critically about the tradition. One, including myself, grew up in, not to discard it in some type of act of just adolescent rebellion or something, but to think about what are the categories that, I inherited, that I grew up with. And how do those categories, you know, what parts of those categories do I affirm and what parts of them do I need to discard, to be at, you know, as I understand it, authentic to my faith, and I think if there can be more encouragement of third ways in our political discourse in our cultural discourse, ways that may not feel if we're very partisan on one side or the other in our polarization. They may not feel comfortable, but they may actually open up space for conversation that doesn't just evolve into the power politics that seem to define most of our, most of our conversations now, but that open up different ways of thinking about the intersection of, faith or transcendent values or religion with our society. And different ways of protecting the shared values that, I think, most Americans have. Including around sort of democratic representation human dignity, and other things that I think most Americans can still affirm. So that's the work we're trying to do here. It's not overtly political work, but it's work about trying to reframe a lot of the conversations that seem so concretized or solid in their polarizations right now. Yeah. And to try to think about new creative ways to engage those debates.

No, that is, I think Zachary and I are landing here at around, at the same point. I think these big questions and, you know, whether it's, what does it mean to be a human being? Or, you know, what is the point of it all? I mean, that's a common perennial question, right? Right. I mean, these transcend any particular religious tradition. These are questions that possibly every single human who's ever lived has contemplated. And, you know, if we can't talk about those and bring, to go back to what we do here at Upper House, bring our whole selves into those conversations, whatever that means, whatever, commitments, one has. If we can't do that, I'm not excited about where society is going, but it does seem, it does seem like it's harder and harder to do that. And so, that's where I'm holding out hope and, you know, working in my own little way to try to carve out spaces like that. Even in places like a university where that's part of the stated aim of a university is to be an institution like that. I think we need as many spaces as possible to engage in those types of conversations.

It's been a pleasure to be with both of you, thanks