Abstract

American evangelicalism during the Cold War has, because of its clear social and political influence, garnered immense scrutiny from scholars. The image that prevails of the Cold War evangelical is that of the firm believer in rebirth, being born again, as the means to eternal life, and of a varied religious group waiting, with bated breath, the imminent return of Christ and the end of the world. Yet, a closer examination of Cold War conservative evangelicals challenges this image and reveals that these Christians had crafted for themselves a new belief: the belief in world-salvation, where evangelicalism, rebirth, and Christ, were conceived and reformulated not only as the way to the soul’s salvation but as means by which to effect a victory over communism and save the United States as a nation. This article pursues this this-worldly belief in the context of the evangelical identity as spreader of the Gospel and vis-à-vis the evangelical theology of premillennial apocalypticism.