Hal Lindsey, a onetime Mississippi Delta tugboat captain who became a campus preacher and improbably vaulted to fame and riches by writing that the world would soon end with natural catastrophes and ruinous wars, followed by the return of Jesus Christ, died on Monday at his home. He was 95.
His death was announced on his website. The announcement did not specify where he lived.
Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.
An editor at Bantam Books thought the book, Mr. Lindsey’s first, had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold around 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages.
If you are reading this, Mr. Lindsey’s doomsday predictions have not come true, and his prophesies of imminent end-of-the-world events seem less credible with each passing day. Yet Mr. Lindsey was indeed a harbinger — of a movement he helped create.
“Hal Lindsey is one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of contemporary prophecy belief,” Paul S. Boyer, a historian who specialized in the role of religion in American life, wrote several years before his own death in 2012. While Mr. Boyer saw the book as neither profound nor truly avant-garde, he wrote that its author “represents another one of those moments of breakthrough, when interest in Bible prophecy spills out beyond just the ranks of the true believers and becomes a broader cultural phenomenon.”
The Middle East, and Israel in particular, were central to Mr. Lindsey’s predictions. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” was published just three years after Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Mr. Lindsey was on safe ground in predicting that Israel’s victory would not bring peace, but he envisioned events far worse than the violence and tensions that plague the region.
The book forecast a war that would end all wars, with a huge Russian army invading Israel by land and sea. The Russians were in turn expected to battle a horde of soldiers, led by the Chinese. Naturally, a conflict of this magnitude could not be contained.
World leaders would send armies to the Middle East to fight under the command of a Rome-based Antichrist against “the kings of the east.”
“Western Europe, the United States, Canada, South America and Australia will undoubtedly be represented,” Mr. Lindsey predicted, and the conflict would not be confined to the Middle East. Hundreds of millions of people would perish in the ashes of New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and other metropolises. Then, finally, the return of Jesus Christ would bring everlasting joy to the faithful and eternal dismay to those who refused to be saved, Mr. Lindsey wrote.
Melani McAlister, a professor of American studies at George Washington University who has followed Mr. Lindsey’s career for years, said in an interview that she found Mr. Lindsey’s tone “weirdly gleeful” considering its central notion “that there are going to be rivers of blood everywhere.”
After “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” which was adapted for a movie narrated by Orson Welles in 1978, Mr. Lindsey wrote several other books dealing with the presence of Satan and the impending end of the world. They, too, were big sellers, although none matched the commercial success of his first book.
Mr. Lindsey spoke in a smooth Southwestern accent reflecting his upbringing in Houston, where he was born Harold Lee Lindsey on Nov. 23, 1929. He left the University of Houston to serve in the Korean War and, upon returning stateside, became a tugboat skipper. In the mid-1950s, he began to read the Bible intently.
He studied at the Dallas Theological Seminary, whose doctrines include a belief that “the period of great tribulation in the earth will be climaxed by the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to the earth as He went, in person on the clouds of heaven,” according to its website.
Before his first book became a sensation, he preached on college campuses in California.
In recent years, Mr. Lindsey’s ministry, featuring a website that offered links to various news organizations, commentary on the spiritual state of the world by Mr. Lindsey and solicitations for tax-deductible donations, has been based in Tulsa, Okla.
Unlike some modern preachers, Mr. Lindsey did not try to portray himself as the very model of a Christian family man. Several sources said he was married four times. Survivors include his wife, three daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Mr. Lindsey did not shy from controversy. Several years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he came under fire for suggesting that some roots of radical Islam spring from the Quran, which he said has numerous passages encouraging violence. And he was contemptuous of Pope Francis’s praise in 2015 of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, as “an angel of peace.”
Mr. Lindsey was not a sermonizer who automatically condemned everything about modern America. To mark Memorial Day in 2015, for instance, he urged Americans to “give thanks for the hundreds of thousands who sacrificed their lives to safeguard our way of life. We are truly a blessed nation.”
“What Hal Lindsey forged with his foray into modernized prophecy talk,” Ms. McAlister of George Washington wrote in 2001, “was a new kind of evangelicalism in which cultural conservatism, political worldliness and spiritualist enthusiasm would not only coexist but would revitalize and reinforce each other. In that sense, his vision was prophetic indeed.”
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