"The Roots of Evangelical Nephilim Conspiracies "

Searching the term “Nephilim” on YouTube will produce results that may surprise most scholars of religion and historians of American evangelical Christianity. The past two decades have witnessed the proliferation of self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers,” who increasingly argue that the myth of the Nephilim in Gen 6:1–4 contains the key for understanding the entire Bible and the coming eschatological age. In books, documentary films, podcasts, and sermons, these self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers” blend elements of fundamentalist Christian eschatology (e.g., dispensational premillennialism) with conspiracy and fringe theories about alien abductions, megalithic architecture, the New World Order, cryptozoology, transhumanism, etc. In this paper, I will describe the basic contours of this “evangelical Nephilim conspiracy theory,” as reflected in the foundational writings of figures like I.D.E. Thomas, Chuck Missler, Thomas Horn, Stephen Quayle, and L.A. Marzulli, before situating this conspiracy and its proponents within the broader intellectual and institutional history of American evangelicalism.