Dispensational Economics

Sit tight, Jesus is coming back.

I went to theology school as a young man. I was enamored with the church and saw my future housed within its four walls. I am unapologetically a believer in Christ and the redemptive nature of that story. I spent a great deal of time volunteering, working, and serving the evangelical church. I still play music often there and enjoy the emotional and spiritual connection I feel to the community of believers and the Christ I know. For the non-believer reading this, stick with me for a moment because I am going to try and break down some things that have happened both in the church and in culture that have massive impacts on our daily lives in the economy and in our politics. This won’t be a proselytizing piece for your conversion so you are safe to read on.

In school, we learned about dispensationalism. This brand of theology was first popularized in the 1800’s and was created by John Nelson Darby and promoted through the Bible Conference movement. It has connections to the Scofield Reference Bible, a version first printed in 1909. That version of the bible includes notes about dispensational theology and the ideas of tribulation, rapture, and a new reign of Christ on earth.

From an article by Keith Mathison in the Ligonier:

“Dispensationalist theology is perhaps best known for its distinctive eschatological doctrines, particularly the doctrine of the pre-tribulation rapture of the church. According to this doctrine, this present church age will be followed by a seven-year period of tribulation. Before the tribulation begins (thus “pre-tribulation”), the church will be caught up to heaven where believers will be with Christ until the second coming, which occurs at the end of the tribulation. At that time, they will return with Christ, who will then inaugurate His millennial kingdom (dispensationalists are thus also premillennialists).

Although dispensationalism is best known for its eschatological doctrines, at its heart is the distinction between Israel and the church. Every other distinctively dispensationalist doctrine rests on this idea. What this distinction means for dispensationalists is that there are two peoples of God. Israel is one of these and consists of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The church is the other, and it consists of all those and only those (whether Jew or gentile) who are saved between the Day of Pentecost and the rapture. Part of the reason for the pre-tribulation rapture is to remove the church from the earth so that God can begin dealing with national Israel again.”

This version of theology is probably the most embraced doctrine of the end times in American Christianity. The books that have been written about what this will all be like are plethoric. The wildly popular “Left Behind” series is a fictional projection of what might come when Jesus leaves Heaven and heads on back down to Earth again.

The idea, in a nutshell, is that before Jesus finally decides to ride the cloud down from his afternoon pickleball match in the sky, he snaps his fingers and all of the believing Christians are raptured into Heaven. Airplanes with Christian pilots will drop from the sky, cars will become driverless, critical infrastructure manned by Christians will fail and society will collapse. That will lead to a seven-year tribulation where those who had not believed before will have the chance to repent and become a part of the folks who vanished earlier. Then Jesus will come back and initiate a thousand-year reign before God creates a new Heaven and a new Earth. Is it possible that this is how it all will go down? Sure. Is it how the Bible discusses it? Not particularly. Jesus speaks of his own return in the book of Matthew. “For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.” He talks about how it all goes down in the end too: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

Dispensational theology doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to understand how it might have been formulated, and while this has not been the teaching within the church for most of its existence, it gained a full head of steam in evangelicalism because of the fear factor embedded in the story. The evangelical person rationalized it this way: “If Jesus is coming back and there’s going to be this terrible time for those who don’t believe, it would be better to get ahead of that wouldn’t it?”

So why is this relevant to economics or politics or America? Christians are crazy people who believe in Jesus as the son of God, a crazy starting place for any rationality from the modern sophisticate’s perspective, so it’s all rather dismissable.

But hang on, because the entire American enterprise of the twentieth century is built on this theology.

America is covered in evangelicalism. It’s imbibed in its documents, its founders, and its leaders. For most people who consider themselves evangelical Christians, dispensationalism is at their core belief too. They are waiting for Jesus and have high hopes that his descension on the cloud is imminent.

“In the long run, we are all dead.” - John Maynard Keynes

One of the architects of our modern economic system was John Maynard Keynes. A British economist whose basic beliefs about the economy could be summarized in his most famous quote: “In the long run, we are all dead.” Keynes argued that “aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment.” For the neoclassical economist, this was usually refuted by asking a simple question: “Where do you get the money for all that spending?” Keynes said that the present is all that matters and that if we don’t address the needs of the moment and only work to preserve the future, there would be no future to protect. He felt that solving today’s economic issues was more important than what “might happen” and any problems that would be left by recklessness today would be a future generation’s problem.

What a nice guy.

When President Nixon was confronted with the crisis at the foreign gold desk, and he decoupled the dollar from the reserves of gold supposedly held by the United States, he was famously quoted as saying about the drastic change in policy, “We’re all Keynesians now.” He wasn’t wrong. Our money system, which was fundamentally changed in 1913 with the advent of the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax had allowed governments to test and utilize the Keynesian philosophy for the better part of 60 years when we arrive at the Nixon moment at the gold desk. The bankers, politicians, and Reservists had funded two World Wars, a multitude of skirmishes like Korea and Vietnam, and had bloated the monetary system with fake money and inflated assets. The generations that Keynes had spoken of were thrust into the fixing and did what they could to correct course.

The 70s was the Ektachrome moment of all that spending. Stagflation, inflation, gas lines, price controls, and misery indices, all were the snapshots of what 60 years of careless affluent Keynsianism had wrought. Nixon was gone, replaced by a clumsy, Warren Commission payoff in Gerald Ford, and a peanut farmer who was over his head: Jimmy Carter. The Baby Boomers, the largest generation in American history, were baby-busts. They assessed their economic situation and decidedly abandoned having children at the rates their parents had. They were the first American generation to deal with what Keynes’ philosophy had left and they looked to make their moment satisfactory and sustainable for themselves. The future was rather irrelevant. They were going to get what they could from what was in the system and create a world centered around their own benefit.

I hardly blame them. If my parents had left me with the monetary mess that they inherited, the philosophical leap to nihilism would have been an easy one. So they pushed into the 80s and bought their real estate, their Porche 911s, and their stocks. It was easy to see how that system would benefit them in the end and the Reagan years were a boom. Cheaper money through interest rate reductions, looser and easier ways to participate in the stock market, and the first federal deficit of one trillion dollars made money accessible and easy to spend. They buried it in assets. The higher performing the better. They built strip malls - aesthetically awful buildings that had a huge CAP rate and ROI. They dumbed down the design of the family home and created the McMansion. Everything in their economy became about today. What can be returned to me…now?

By the time my generation and my kid’s generation arrived at the same moment that our parents and their grandparents had, everything was on Keynsian steroids. Houses, instead of being $50,000 were $250,000 and $500,000 respectively. A tenfold devaluation in just two generations. Tomorrow’s generations would be left a world void of the ability to join in the fake money party. In the long run, we are all dead, except our children.

So what does that have to do with that long-winded theological explanation at the start of this piece? I have come to understand in this world that what you focus on expands. If your theology in your church is one that says, Jesus is coming back soon, everything becomes about your present moment. You abandon the future because it is probably irrelevant. Why build anything beautiful if it all is going to burn in a thousand-year correction? Why save money up or build a future for your children if it’s all going away anyway? Why not spend money on myself now? If I kick the can of disastrous consequences down the road, in the long run, we’re all dead anyway.

We live in a dispensational economic system. One that has put our needs for now above the future of our communities, our country, and our children. A look down the streets of any American big city and the sidewalks tell the story; ruined lives residing in tents for the gain of presentism. Boarded-up buildings for cheap, foreign goods that help make us feel affluent at the expense of our now-unemployed neighbors. Our children who are filled with discouragement and fatalism are looked over for the chance to fly to Saint-Tropez for one more time on the beach. It’s dispensational economics - because, in the long run, we’re all dead.

Say what you will about tariffs and their impact on a system, but the screaming is about an economic system addicted to dispensationalism. If we do not have the patience to realign the world to one that places our work and efforts on the people of the future, we are a lost civilization. Demographics would say we have already had our rapture moment as a society and that our “give-a-crap meter” is already broken. Why build beautiful buildings or businesses or churches that will outlast us when in the long run, we’re all dead anyway? President Trump seems to be trying something fundamental with this shift. He says publicly that this is about bringing life back to America. That is a far cry from the wizards of economic smarts from the last 100 years who said that spending money now is the only way to succeed. I want a future for my children. It motivates everything about me. I want them to live in an America that isn’t a wing of a global corporation. I want them to have the ability to live a life filled with expectations of positivity and prosperity. I don’t want to live in this dispensational hell any longer. I will take the new conversations that are being forced by the tariffs. I will gladly dismantle the long-held presuppositions that the only way to live is to live for myself. We can do this better. We can elevate the individual within the economic system and stop hoping that the inevitable consequences of irresponsibility and self-gratification can be dealt with by future generations. Yes, we all will die, but we can do so in a way that is remembered for its legacy of generosity and thoughtful enterprise instead of one that is waiting for Jesus to come and rescue us from the disaster.