The Late Great Planet Earth

Hal Lindsey, a Dallas Theological Seminary graduate who had worked with Campus Crusade for Christ, published The Late Great Planet Earth with Carole C. Carlson through the evangelical publisher Zondervan in 1970. The book restates dispensational premillennialism, the reading of biblical prophecy that divides history into distinct ages and expects a future seven year tribulation, a rapture of believers, and Christ's visible return, in the plain, journalistic prose of a current events paperback rather than a theological treatise.

Lindsey treated Israel's founding in 1948 as a prophetic marker, reasoning from the biblical figure of one generation, which he took as roughly forty years, to suggest that climactic events might unfold during the 1980s. He read the Soviet Union as the biblical power from the north poised to invade Israel, interpreted the developing European Economic Community as a revival of the Roman Empire foretold in the book of Daniel, and argued that the United States' absence from end-times prophecy hinted at national decline. The book presents these readings as probable near-term outcomes of specific, nameable current events rather than as one interpretive tradition among several within Christianity, a stronger claim than most professional biblical scholars, including other evangelicals, were willing to make about unfulfilled prophecy.

The Late Great Planet Earth became a publishing phenomenon disproportionate to its origins as a paperback from a religious press. The New York Times called it the best selling nonfiction book of the 1970s in the United States, and reported sales climbed from roughly ten million copies by the end of that decade to more than twenty eight million by 1990 and over thirty five million by the century's end, in more than fifty translated languages. In January 1978 a documentary adaptation narrated by Orson Welles and directed by Rolf Forsberg and Robert Amram brought the book's argument to theaters; the Chicago critic Gene Siskel gave it one star, calling it a chance to pay to be told unconvincingly that the end is near, though the film still grossed nearly twenty million dollars.

The book's specific timetable did not hold. No Soviet invasion of Israel occurred, the 1980s passed without the events Lindsey suggested, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991. The historian Paul Boyer, in When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1992), placed Lindsey alongside other prophecy popularizers as distinct from biblical scholars proper, arguing that reading each new headline, a war, an alliance, a technology, as a fresh fulfillment of ancient prophecy had produced a long history of confident, specific predictions that failed on their own terms without discrediting the broader belief that produced them. Lindsey continued writing and revising his prophetic timetable in later books for decades afterward.