Of all the places to wait for the apocalypse, one could do worse than the Texas Hill Country. In rustic Bandera, inside one of five ranch-style houses sprawled across acres of waving golden grasses, Houston-born evangelical author Hal Lindsey seemed to have sequestered himself while doing just that. The self-appointed “father of modern-day Bible prophecy,” who died on November 25 at the age of 95, spent a half century accruing fame and fortune by predicting the end of the world.
I made the trek to the Cowboy Capital of the World in March 2022 hoping to speak to the man. Because I could not get the operator who answered the phone for Hal Lindsey Ministries to help coordinate an interview (aptly, the number is 1-888-RAPTURE), I found myself standing outside the estate, which public records indicated was his place of residence. There was little sign of life. An imposing eight-foot fence blocked access to the enigmatic prophet. Multiple “No Trespassing” signs adorned the gate, and there was no doorbell or call button to alert anyone of my presence.
A couple of houses down, 72-year-old Monte Parks stood on the porch of his modest home, leaning on his walker. The retired construction worker wore a five-o’clock shadow and spoke with a raspy twang. “That’s Hal Lindsey’s place,” Parks said, pointing to the compound beyond the gate. Lindsey’s health was in steep decline, Parks offered. His then 92-year-old neighbor hadn’t been the same since a gallbladder surgery some time ago. “He’s a great guy as far as I’m concerned.” I never did reach Lindsey. After his death I asked to interview a surviving family member or someone in charge at Hal Lindsey Ministries, but the request was declined in an unsigned email. (The announcement of the death from Hal Lindsey Ministries did not say where he died. An obituary in The Washington Post said it was at his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.)
Lindsey published his groundbreaking book The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970. It sold more than 35 million copies and brought Christian eschatology—a branch of theology concerned with the end times—into the mainstream. Lindsey’s doomsday writings cleverly tied the geopolitical events of his time with biblical prophecy to create a timeline for the apocalypse, which he originally said would occur sometime in the 1980s.
Lindsey’s influence on modern Christian evangelicalism is inescapable. He was crucial to making concepts such as the Rapture, the Antichrist, and an impending one-world government tenets of the evangelical faith. Lindsey wrote more than twenty books over the course of his life, promoting the notion that Christ would return within our lifetime. Lindsey helped plant the seeds of modern-day conspiracy theory movements such as QAnon, which baselessly claims that a secret satanic cabal of child-molesting elites controls global events. QAnon has adapted hallmarks of Lindsey’s work—including a contention that an impending historical event will serve as a day of judgment—to promote political action and distrust of institutions. By co-opting evangelical language and imagery, QAnon effectively integrates its conspiracy theories into a religious framework that feels familiar and compelling to many evangelicals and reinforces support for Donald Trump’s campaign against the liberal establishment and the institutions they’ve created.
When I first became interested in Lindsey’s legacy more than two years ago, I made contact with a few believers and former believers who were shaped by his work. To some, Lindsey’s doomsday writings have helped mold their unwavering faith amid an uncertain world. His books responded to fears of the Cold War and the cultural revolution of the sixties, and religious leaders adopted his ideas. By extension, Lindsey’s worldview has influenced the political persuasions of millions, given that voters who identify as evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly vote Republican.
But to others, Lindsey’s teachings have crippled them with a lifetime of fear, and they serve as powerful examples of the lasting trauma that disinformation and paranoia can inflict upon vulnerable souls.
It’s the End of the World as We Know It
Megan, a 32-year-old civil servant working for a Child Protective Services agency in the Pacific Northwest, was only seven years old and was living in Florida when she first had the haunting thought that she might not reach adulthood. She described her parents as ardent premillennial dispensationalists who believed a seven-year Great Tribulation was imminent, during which the Antichrist would rule the world, followed by the Second Coming of Christ lasting a thousand years. “There was really no escaping it,” said Megan, who asked to be identified by her first name only, citing privacy concerns. “It was just more and more of this Rapture theology. And it got worse after 9/11.”
Her family’s bent toward apocalyptic thinking kicked in when her father began reading Hal Lindsey. “My dad and my mom had been gifting The Late Great Planet Earth to all of my relatives, especially the Catholic relatives, and saying, ‘This man predicted this, and you have to come to Christ, or else you’re going to get left behind.’ ” These extremist views alarmed relatives and created friction within the family.
Recurring nightmares plagued Megan’s childhood. In her dreams, Jesus Christ returned and raptured her relatives to heaven, but she was left behind. Alone on earth, she was attacked by monsters and tortured by demons as she suffered through the Great Tribulation. “I would just stay up in the middle of the night, waiting for the Rapture, because I would get paranoid it was going to happen that night,” Megan said. She would repeat the Sinner’s Prayer, in which a believer repents and accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
But for Cindy Gutierrez, now a retired empty nester in Atwater, California, Lindsey’s apocalyptic predictions were a source of comfort. Gutierrez was 47 years old when she gave her life to Jesus. She had just started a new job working as an accounts payable clerk at a local cheese plant and was struggling to deal with what she called “mean girls” at work.
One day, as she sobbed on a bench outside the lunchroom, Mark, the personal chef to the company’s CEO, stopped and asked if he could pray with her. They bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and recited the Sinner’s Prayer. Gutierrez said she felt the Holy Spirit come alive inside her. “It was such a revelation,” Gutierrez told me, choking up as she relived the story. “The veil was torn, and after that prayer, I was like a sponge wanting to learn all I could. I was especially curious about Bible prophecy.” Gutierrez had read The Late Great Planet Earth as a teenager but longed to know more.
Six months after her religious conversion, she planned to attend a Bible prophecy conference in Modesto, where Lindsey was to speak. Before she left, Mark prayed with her in the lunchroom and underlined a passage inside her Bible. Gutierrez didn’t read it. She closed the book, left work early, and drove north for about an hour.
At the conference, Gutierrez bought a new book by Lindsey called Apocalypse Code. Spotting Lindsey in the crowd, she asked if he would sign the book. Without looking at Gutierrez, he asked for her name and signed, “To Cindy, Bless you, Hal Lindsey.” As Lindsey gave the book back to Gutierrez, he stopped to look at her for the first time. He stared intently into Gutierrez’s eyes before taking the book back and scribbling something else down. Gutierrez thanked him and went to sit in the auditorium. She opened the book and saw Lindsey had added a Bible citation, “Isaiah 41:10.” When Gutierrez flipped through her Bible to read the verse, she was stunned to discover it was the same passage Mark had underlined earlier that morning.
So do not fear, for I am with you;
do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you;
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
“I became overwhelmed and began sobbing,” Gutierrez said. “All I know is I felt like I was being told I was on the right path and to keep going with my relationship with Jesus. Isaiah 41:10 has always been my personal Scripture that I turn to in times of trouble.”
“The Jeremiah of His Generation”
Harold Lee Lindsey was born in Houston on November 23, 1929, to a family that did not attend church regularly. He enrolled in the University of Houston but flunked out after two years of partying. Lindsey enlisted in the Coast Guard for a two-year stint to avoid being sent to serve in the Korean War. He then worked as a tugboat captain on the Mississippi River for four years, “giving myself devoutly to wine, women, and song,” he said, during his weeks off in New Orleans.
Then one night, amid a thick fog, Lindsey had to navigate the Mississippi with only a stopwatch and a compass. As the loud roar of a steamship bore down on him, Lindsey jerked the wheel of his tugboat and narrowly avoided a collision. “Had we been hit broadside, it would have cut our craft in two and sent it to the bottom within seconds,” Lindsey recounted in his book Liberation of Planet Earth. The near-death experience put the fear of God in him. Within months, he converted to Christianity.
Lindsey was accepted into the Dallas Theological Seminary in 1958. It was here that Lindsey began developing his ideas of how current events could connect to apocalyptic prophecy. (When I contacted the seminary in 2022, executive director of marketing and communications Kraig McNutt told me the institution was “not interested in ‘giving legs’ ” to a story about Lindsey. “His season of influence and visibility as a DTS graduate has passed several decades ago and though we are honored to have him part of the DTS family, we see no contemporary reason to revisit that season,” he wrote. After Lindsey’s death, McNutt told me to contact a senior history professor at the seminary, who did not respond to an interview request.)
Toward the end of his junior year in seminary, Lindsey met Jan Houghton, who worked for Campus Crusade for Christ, an interdenominational Christian organization now known as Cru, and two months later they were married. (This was Lindsey’s second of four marriages.) After Lindsey graduated, he joined his new bride at Campus Crusade for Christ, and they relocated to Southern California. The lectures Lindsey gave to students at the University of California, Los Angeles, on biblical prophecy during this time laid the foundation for what would become The Late Great Planet Earth. The New York Times named it the best-selling nonfiction book of the seventies. Time magazine hailed Lindsey as “the Jeremiah of his generation.”
“The unusual thing about The Late Great Planet Earth is its crossover success. It moved out of the subculture into mainstream culture,” said Mark Sweetnam, assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. “It’s designed to be accessible.”
Published just three years after the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, The Late Great Planet Earth claimed that the end of the world was tied to the establishment of Israel as an independent state in 1948. According to Lindsey’s interpretation of Matthew 24:32–34, the end of times will occur within one generation from the founding of Israel. A biblical generation is defined as forty years, so Lindsey predicted the apocalypse would occur in the late 1980s.
That is not a view shared by the majority of biblical scholars. “I do not think that there is anything in Matthew 24:32–34 that is connected to the establishment of the state of Israel,” said Martyn Whittock, author of the book The End Times, Again? and a licensed lay minister in the Church of England. “In my opinion, Lindsey’s interpretation of the previous verses as referring to this is clearly wrong.”
Nevertheless, The Late Great Planet Earth propelled biblical apocalyptic imagery into the cultural zeitgeist and revolutionized evangelicalism. In 1978 acclaimed filmmaker Orson Welles narrated a documentary adaptation of Lindsey’s seminal work, which was released in movie theaters.
The breakthrough success of The Late Great Planet Earth, along with later books written by Lindsey, spawned many influential variations, most notably the best-selling Left Behind book series, whose first volume was published in 1995 and followed characters who are left behind after the Rapture. (Kirk Cameron, the evangelical Christian actor best known for his role as Mike Seavers in the TV series Growing Pains, starred in three film adaptations of the Left Behind book series. Academy Award–winning actor Nicolas Cage starred in a 2014 reboot.)
Lindsey started hosting a biblical prophecy and current events show called International Intelligence Briefing in 1994 on the Christian television channel Trinity Broadcasting Network. Lindsey left the network in 2006 and renamed the show The Hal Lindsey Report. It was broadcast on the Christian network Daystar Television, which continues to air reruns.
The Trinity Foundation, a Dallas-based watchdog that investigates financial misconduct and ethical abuses within religious organizations, reported that Lindsey was one of the highest-paid nonprofit religious executives in America when he died. According to public tax documents, Lindsey and his fourth wife, JoLyn, received $18.5 million in compensation from 2013 to 2023. (Unlike most tax-exempt organizations, churches, synagogues, and mosques are not required to make tax filings public.)
Apocalypse Now
Paul Crouch Jr., the son of televangelists Paul and Jan Crouch, had mixed feelings when he learned that Lindsey had died. On the one hand, Crouch, who directed some of Lindsey’s shows in the nineties at TBN, was saddened to hear the news. “My dad had very few people that were on TBN that he could call a true friend, and Hal was one of them,” Crouch said.
But Crouch believes Rapture theology, while an effective fear-based recruitment tool, is a misinterpretation of Scripture. “Fear has been a part of the Christian faith my whole life. The fear of not wanting to go to hell, the fear of not wanting to miss the Rapture,” Crouch said. “Fear is not part of [God’s] makeup, and unfortunately, it has been a part of the makeup of the church.”
Crouch is not alone in his skepticism. Critics are quick to point out that the Rapture did not occur when Lindsey initially predicted. “Lindsey got it wrong,” Whittock said. But there was a shift after the year 2000, with a renewed focus on the European Union as the place where the Antichrist would emerge. The turbulence in the Middle East dashed any hopes of peace. An increasingly fractious Russia and the rise of communist China also contributed to an unstable global order, Whittock argued.
Climate change has heightened anxieties about mankind’s survival, but it is often met with denial and resistance to government intervention from the right. Many evangelicals dismiss the issue as irrelevant because of the anticipated Second Coming or, if they do acknowledge it, interpret it as a sign of end-time judgment. “The evangelical right captured the Republican Party,” said Whittock. “The internet age galvanized ideas about international conspiracies and control of narratives in the culture wars and provided a platform for spreading these views.”
The COVID-19 pandemic fueled end-time and populist responses. “The scene for the rise of Antichrist—as outlined by Lindsey but hard to envisage in the Cold War seventies—has been radically reimagined,” Whittock said. This reimagining has provided the framework for more radical conspiracy theories to surface and get a foothold in the cultural consciousness. The connection between radicalized end-time ideology and QAnon is particularly unsurprising, considering QAnon’s focus on an imminent judgment day to be followed by a reordering of U.S. society.
“You get this sort of anti–United Nations, anti-peace efforts, anti-everything that gets woven into this expectation that things need to get worse as the end times approach and unfold because that’s what has been predicted,” said James McGrath, professor of religion at Butler University in Indiana.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war have revived apocalyptic fears in some circles. Articles posted this year on Lindsey’s website carry titles such as “Is Ukraine in the Ezekiel 38 Bible Prophecy?” and “Who Really Is the Antichrist?” accompanied by a photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin. On July 7, in one of his final newsletters, titled “Global Upheaval,” Lindsey wrote: “And Israel, like the rest of the world, will be in distress. I believe the present wave of global desperation will grow to a point of global anguish. And that anguish will call forth the most terrible villain of human history. . . . Before the brief time of Antichrist’s reign, Jesus will snatch His people away from this world at the rapture. So, keep looking up!”
Down the Rabbit Hole
Megan received what she regarded as a bizarre series of text messages from her father in July 2021. He instructed her to stay indoors because the Democrats were planning to shut down the internet to stop Donald Trump from coming back into power. But nothing, he said, would stop Trump. If Megan hadn’t heard from her parents in a few days, they were fine, her father insisted. Later that month, her parents sent her $400 and urged her to use it to buy nonperishable foods. The Democrats were going to shut down the grocery supply, they said. Megan laments that her parents’ belief in conspiracy theories has put a strain on their relationship. Since Trump’s reelection in November, she told me, they have not been on speaking terms.
Megan has changed a lot since shedding her childhood faith. She describes herself as an “exvangelical” who has left evangelical Christianity. She divorced her Trump-supporting husband and came to terms with her bisexuality. “I’m really good at denial,” Megan said. “That was, unfortunately, one of the evangelical things that I really picked up on was how to be in denial about things, especially myself.”
Gutierrez eventually succeeded in getting her husband to attend church with her. But her workplace evangelism brought her into conflict with her employer’s HR manager, she said. First her friend Mark was let go, and not long after, she was also fired. After her conversion, her politics changed as well. “The abortion issue changed a lot for me,” she said. “I’m a conservative. I voted for Trump.”
Gutierrez said she still believes in Lindsey’s teachings, even if his predictions haven’t come true. “He’s just a man, you know. He’s a man trying to interpret the Scriptures as well as he could.” After he died, Gutierrez contacted Hal Lindsey Ministries because she wanted to attend a public memorial service. A representative told her that Hal did not wish to have one because he didn’t want to take anything away from God. “I look forward to seeing him in heaven,” said Gutierrez.
The Not-So-Pearly Gates
Expensive horses once roamed Hal Lindsey’s property, said his neighbor Monte Parks, but they’re no longer there. Even his wife’s beagles have “all died off,” Parks recalled when I met him in 2022. He told me that Lindsey at one point received death threats from people claiming to be Muslims. The Lindseys took them seriously. “Hal started packing a pistol all the time. It looked like the Wild West was going to break out any minute,” Parks said. “I wouldn’t let them damn Muslims scare me.”
The Lindsey family took additional security precautions as well. Crosses and signs that once decorated the fence line have been removed. I saw no identifying markers showing that behind those gates lived a man who influenced millions of lives, giving profound comfort to some and causing existential anguish to others.
