Christian Zionist Dispensationalists are sort of like Christian Creationists. They are reviled and mocked by cultural elites as dangerous and retrograde often without deep explanation. Their very existence is portrayed as an offense to all right thinking and sophistication.
As a Mainline Protestant and Methodist, I'm not a Dispensationalist. That school of thought descends from 19th century English theologian John Darby, who outlined a particular apocalyptic end-times scenario. This scenario includes the rebuilding of the Hebrew temple, a rapture, a tribulation, and an Armageddon, among other dramatic events. American Evangelicalism has popularized and globalized Dispensationalism.
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