In the same way, famines, earthquakes and wars in the Third World for a certain audience confirmed Lindsey's warnings of increased disasters all over the world as signs of the coming Apocalypse. Lindsey predicated in "The Late, Great Planet Earth" that the 1970s and 1980s would see America would go into a rapid political and economic decline, which would set the stage for the Antichrist to take over the world. The fact that the events of 1970s such as the Watergate scandal and the recession caused by the Arab oil shock seemed to superficially conform with Lindsey's dire predications made "The Late, Great Planet Earth" one of the most popular books of the 1970s and led to fears on the part of some of its readers that the Antichrist might had already arrived on the earth. In 1973, Lindsey's book was re-published by a secular publisher, Bantam, which was most unusual for a tract by a fundamentalist minister, and in that year and in the next "The Late, Great Planet Earth" sold more copies than "The Joy of Sex" by Alex Comfort, despite the apparent greater "sex appeal" of Comfort's book compared to Lindsey's. Lindsey did not provide a particular date for when the Apocalypse would occur, but hinted that it might happen around about 1988. Lindsey wrote "The Late, Great Plant Earth" in 1969 and today his book seems very dated as he referenced contemporary events now long past as evidence for the coming Apocalypse, but at the time for many "it seemed he was onto something". Lindsey's belief system was part of a theology known as Premillennial Dispensationalism that had created by an Anglo-Irish cleric John Nelson Darby who had founded the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s. Afterwards, Darby's ideas became very popular with American fundamentalist Protestants in the 19th century and remain so. Darby argued that the Apocalypse was going to occur within the foreseeable future and the Antichrist, far from being a metaphor for evil as traditionally believed, would be an actual man who rule the entire world as its dictator for seven years before being overthrown by Christ in the ultimate battle between evil vs. good.