RIP: Hal Lindsey, evangelizing tugboat captain who gripped 1970s America with predictions of apocalypse.

Hal Lindsey, who has died aged 95, was a former Mississippi tugboat captain who took the end of the world off sandwich boards and brought it into mainstream culture; his book The Late Great Planet Earth was the bestselling non-fiction title of the 1970s in America and popularised such apocalyptic notions as “the rapture” and “the mark of the Beast”.

Hailed by Time Out magazine as “the Jeremiah of his generation”, Lindsey did not present himself as a prophet along the lines of Nostradamus so much as an interpreter of eschatological predictions in the Bible. He belonged to the dispensationalist tradition of Christianity, which believes in literal readings of the scripture and in the return of the Messiah before the Millennium.

Stemming from the Plymouth Brethren in the early 19th century, these ideas had in America previously been confined to non-denominational evangelical churches. What was novel about Lindsey was that he saw in passages in Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation descriptions of events in his time that suggested the world was, in the title of one of his later books, on a countdown to Armageddon.

To be fair, many got rich with their own countdown to Armageddon in the 1970s: