The greatest Evangelical hustler in history bites the dust

Hal Lindsey, the man who sold the “Rapture,” has died

He was one of the most successful writers in history, and never on a bestseller list. Hal Lindsey published kook books saying the world was ending. The dates kept changing. It was always soon.

Back in the 1970s, his book The Late Great Planet Earth alone sold a reported 35 million copies. There was no hustle like it.

He just died at age 95. I’m reflecting on his horrible life.

Hal Lindsey (2018; screen capture)

He was born in Houston on November 23, 1929.

There’s no biography of him. Over the years he’d give a ‘testimony’ of his faith and drop details. His parents weren’t Christian, he said, but he wanted to be! He was baptized three times, then kept sliding back into ‘sin’.

He writes: “I started in big with booze and sex, and although my conscience did bother me at first, I finally got to where I could do these things with no conscious sense of guilt at all.”

To be Evangelical is to imagine a noxious pollutant called ‘sin’ around the planet.