Abstract: Conservative evangelicals in the early Cold War were the forbearers of the New Christian Right of the 1980s. In the postwar United States, the evangelical subculture, which had become marginalized after the turn of the 20th century, mixed its own eschatology with the apocalyptic context of the beginning of the Cold War and the nuclear age. The atomic bomb, the new Israeli state, and the Cuban Missile Crisis all confirmed for evangelicals their belief that biblical prophecy about the end-times was being fulfilled. Evangelicals who utilized religious practices like prayer and missions work in light of these events simultaneously responded politically within a Cold War context. Furthermore, Cold War secular apocalypticism helped to justify evangelical prophecy. These developments, alongside conservative evangelicalism's embrace of anticommunism, created a less-marginalized subculture that fit comfortably into a dominant American political culture defined in dichotomous Cold War terms. Ironically, it was this earlier integration into the mainstream that paved the way for the rise of the religious right in the last decade of the Cold War. While the New Christian Right stormed onto the political scene, they did so by separating themselves from secular America. At the same time, a burgeoning evangelical left was advocating a different prophetic message—a call for social justice.

Keywords: apocalypticism, Cold War, end-times, eschatology, evangelical, New Christian Right