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In the 1970s, a preacher named Hal Lindsey became famous for predicting the end of the world. He wrote a best-selling book about it titled "The Late Great Planet Earth." Hal Lindsey died November 25 at the age of 95. His views on Israel and other geopolitical issues are still influential among American evangelicals. NPR's Sarah Ventre reports on his legacy.
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HAL LINDSEY: The Bible has the only great body of prophecy in the history of mankind that has proven itself to be 100% accurate.
SARAH VENTRE, BYLINE: Hal Lindsey rose to prominence on that message. But he started out as a tugboat captain turned preacher.
MOLLY WORTHEN: When he first became famous, I mean, he was a blue-jeans-wearing, you know, tank-topped sort of gritty guy who was incredibly popular among the Jesus people.
VENTRE: This is Molly Worthen. She's a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Jesus people were West Coast evangelicals, and Lindsey's message resonated with many of them.
WORTHEN: His book, "The Late Great Planet Earth," I mean, along with the Bible - those were the two books that reporters who visited the, you know, hippie Jesus-freak communes in southern California found on, you know, every stained couch they spotted.
VENTRE: Worthen says it wasn't just Lindsey's message but the way it was delivered that made him appealing to so many.
WORTHEN: That all these terrible things happening in the world are not a coincidence - the world actually is hurtling toward ruin, and this is all part of God's plan.
VENTRE: This was particularly meaningful to evangelicals.
RANDALL BALMER: They would look for clues in the unfolding of daily events, trying to understand them in light of these prophetic passages.
VENTRE: Randall Balmer is a professor at Dartmouth College. He says one of the reasons why Lindsey's book was so influential has to do with when it came out - in 1970, during a period of global unrest. For evangelicals in particular, the book was a way to make sense of all that was happening.
BALMER: The phrase at the time was, you would read the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other hand and try to reconcile the two.
VENTRE: This meant thinking about not just what happened at home but also across the globe.
BALMER: Lindsey made a big deal out of the formation of the state of Israel in May of 1948 because he saw that as a direct fulfillment of prophecies from the Bible.
VENTRE: Because of this, Lindsey was a vocal proponent of Christian Zionism, the idea that Christians have a religious imperative to support the state of Israel. He was also vocally anti-Muslim.
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LINDSEY: God has charged me to give a message of warning when I see danger on the horizon. Islam is one of the truly great dangers facing the world today.
VENTRE: Balmer says his teachings advocated a kind of detachment from the world that has had lasting implications on evangelicals.
BALMER: Why worry about making the world a better place if Jesus is going to come back imminently and collect the faithful out of this world?
VENTRE: What no one disputes is that how Lindsey's influence shaped generations of Christians. Molly Worthen says Lindsey's popularity...
WORTHEN: ...Points to the enduring mysteries of Christian scripture and the compulsion that believers have to turn to scripture to make sense of an inscrutable world.
VENTRE: Sarah Ventre, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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