Fundamentalists believed that signs, prophesied long ago in the Bible to signal the approaching apocalypse, were beginning to appear. At the conference and in the years that followed, they matched up biblical prophecy with world events. Perhaps the most significant sign was the world war. In the New Testament, Jesus had told his disciples that “wars and rumors of wars” would presage the end times. The horrific conflict that had torn Europe apart seemed to fulfill this prophecy, and fundamentalists predicted that an even greater war loomed on the horizon. While President Woodrow Wilson was in Paris working on the peace treaty, he received a telegram from the fundamentalist William Blackstone. “Do not forget the prophetic word of God,” Blackstone admonished, “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them.”

The reshaping of Palestine served as another warning that the end was near. Fundamentalists believed that the return of Jews to the Holy Land must precede the second coming of Christ, and the war seemed to make this a real possibility. “Soon the Turk will make his last stand at Jerusalem,” a fundamentalist explained, “the day of salvation will end, the great day of the Lord will begin, the time of trouble such as never was will suddenly break upon the world, the King of glory will appear, and the great conflict so long waged with sin will forever end.” That the British captured Jerusalem in 1917 and declared Palestine a homeland for Jews seemed indisputable proof to fundamentalists that prophecy was being fulfilled.

Fundamentalists viewed the proposed League of Nations as another potential landmark on the road to Armageddon. They were sure that as humans moved toward the end times, governments around the world would cede their independence to a charismatic world leader who would actually be the Antichrist. As the Senate debated the league, fundamentalists made their views clear. One predicted that the leader of the League of Nations would likely be “the Politico-Beast described in Daniel, and in the Book of Revelation … the Anti-Christ!” Their beliefs drove them to support the Senate’s “irreconcilables,” those who fought the president’s efforts to join the league.

Fundamentalists believed that in the end times, oppressive governments would clamp down on Christians’ rights and liberties. As a result, they opposed any expansion of the power of the federal government and became highly suspicious of anything that seemed to undermine their religious freedoms and longstanding privileges. The federal government’s wartime Committee on Public Information validated their fears. “The demand of the State will leave no room for freedom of thought, or independence of action in any direction whatsoever,” the evangelist W.W. Fereday wrote. “The circumstances of the War have already furnished the machinery for this.” “Practically everything and everybody,” he worried, would soon be under government control.

The growing prominence of Darwinian evolution was another problem. Although fundamentalists differed on how to understand the account of creation in Genesis, they agreed that God was the author of creation and that humans were distinct creatures, separate from animals, and made in the image of God. Some believed than an old earth could be reconciled with the Bible, and others were comfortable teaching some forms of God-directed evolution. Riley and the more strident fundamentalists, however, associated evolution with last-days atheism, and they made it their mission to purge it from the schoolroom.

What fundamentalists viewed as declining morals served as yet additional evidence that the Bible’s prophets had accurately forecast the modern age. Jesus had said that just before his return, humans would be acting as they had in the days of Noah and of Lot. In those Old Testament stories, God had punished humankind for engaging in sexual sins. Fundamentalists in turn saw sin in the destabilization of gender roles by the war, which led Americans to compromise their morals. They criticized the ways in which the fight for women’s suffrage was driving women out of the home, and they worried that birth control was undermining the family.