American Evangelicals - A History Podcast

The Politics of Reaction: Evangelicals and the American Nation (Episode 6)

In the late 1790s, a respected minister convinced much of evangelical America that a secret society called the Bavarian Illuminati was conspiring with Thomas Jefferson's allies to destroy Christianity and topple the government. The conspiracy was pure fiction—but the instinct behind it has proven remarkably durable. In this episode, the conversation turns to one of the most enduring and complicated themes in evangelical history: politics.  From the Illuminati scare of the early republic to debates over slavery, abortion, religious liberty, humanitarian aid, and foreign policy, the hosts explore how evangelicals have understood their role in shaping America—and how they have reacted when they believed that role was under threat. At the center of the episode sits a larger question: are evangelicals driven by a coherent political philosophy, or have they historically responded to politics through the lens of theology, morality, and perceived cultural crisis? As always, the answer resists simple labels. The hosts trace a recurring “politics of reaction” while also recovering a surprisingly broad range of evangelical political engagement—including a vibrant evangelical left—that complicates any easy equation of “evangelical” with “conservative.” THE CENTRAL QUESTION Are evangelicals guided by a consistent political philosophy, or by reaction to perceived threats? The hosts argue that across more than two centuries, evangelical politics has rarely produced a positive, sustained agenda—and has instead organized itself again and again around defending a vision of a Christian nation.  IN THIS EPISODE The Illuminati Scare and the Politics of Reaction Jedediah Morse and Yale president Timothy Dwight warned that the Bavarian Illuminati were working with Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans to abolish Christianity and civil government. The conspiracy collapsed under the weight of evidence, but it established a recurring pattern: identifying a foreign or domestic enemy with one's political opponents and framing the threat as a danger to a Christian America. A Christian Nation Under Threat The hosts argue that what distinguishes evangelical conspiracy thinking is its framing—threats are cast not merely as political dangers but as assaults on a divinely favored, exceptional Christian nation, sometimes interpreted through the lens of spiritual warfare and satanic forces. Prophecy, Theology, and Spiritual Warfare Drawing on Nathan Hatch and the prophetic tradition, the conversation connects biblical prophecy to political interpretation, noting how the language of “principalities and powers” has migrated into contemporary partisan rhetoric. The Other Evangelical Politics Against the assumption that evangelical equals Republican, the hosts recover abolition, temperance and suffrage, late-19th-century humanitarianism, the anti-Vietnam evangelical left, the 1973 Chicago Declaration, and figures like William Jennings Bryan, Jimmy Carter, Mark Hatfield, and Jim Wallis. Peaks, Valleys, and the Crisis of the 1960s The episode asks whether evangelical political intensity ebbs and flows, pointing to Carl Henry's mid-century call to re-engage and to the 1960s—school prayer rulings, immigration reform, feminism, abortion, and federal pressure on segregated schools—as a crisis cluster that gave rise to the Christian right. Foreign Policy, Missions, and the “Holy War” Paradigm The hosts close on evangelical engagement abroad—from holy-war framings to the realist arguments of the early Iraq War era and the missionary and humanitarian hopes that accompanied it—underscoring just how diverse and complex evangelical political thought remains. PEOPLE, BOOKS, & TERMS MENTIONED Figures: Jedediah Morse, Timothy Dwight, Thomas Jefferson, Elias Boudinot, John Jay, Jonathan Edwards, William Jennings Bryan, Jimmy Carter, Sen. Mark Hatfield, J. Frank Norris, Al Smith, Carl Henry, Francis Schaeffer, Jim Wallis, Mark Galli, Marvin Olasky, Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, Reinhold Niebuhr, Samuel Huntington. Books & works: Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989); The Sacred Cause of Liberty (Yale University Press, 1977); Heather Curtis, Holy Humanitarians (Harvard University Press, 2018); Gaines Foster, Moral Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2002); David Swartz, Moral Minority (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Jim Wallis, God's Politics (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); James Davison Hunter, To Change the World (Oxford University Press, 2010); Carl Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1947); and Jonathan Den Hartog, Patriotism and Piety (University of Virginia Press, 2015), on evangelical Federalists. Terms & events: Bavarian Illuminati; Second Great Awakening; the “Black Robe Regiment”; the Chicago Declaration (1973); the moral majority and Christian coalition; Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp; the Hart–Celler Immigration Act (1965); the Scopes Trial; the Anti-Saloon League; Christian nationalism. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2610661/fan_mail/new] Hosts: JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.  Find out more about our work: * slbf.org/lumen-center [https://slbf.org/lumen-center] * slbf.org/studio [https://slbf.org/studio] Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour Edited by Dave Conour

Faith and Race: Whose Story Gets Told? (Episode 5)

One of the most complex and contested questions in the study of American religion is the relationship between evangelicalism and race. Episode 5 of American Evangelicals: A History Podcast takes up that question through an unexpected doorway: the story of J. M. Humphrey, a little-known holiness minister who built a ministry in the early twentieth century — and whose race, historian Maggie Capra discovered, was invisible in the sources until a single letter revealed it. That discovery — that Humphrey was Black, and that his racial identity had been effectively unknown from the sources that survived him — opens into a wide-ranging and deeply layered conversation. Maggie Capra, John Fea, and Dan Hummel explore how race has shaped evangelical institutions, archives, and historical memory itself, and they wrestle with some of the sharpest debates among scholars today: Is racism intrinsic to evangelicalism, or does it reflect broader patterns in American culture? What is "colorblind Christianity," where did it come from, and what does it mean for how evangelicals discuss race today? And how do political developments — above all the rise of Donald Trump — change the way historians interpret the evangelical past? From Black fundamentalism to the church growth movement to the sociological insights of Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, this episode offers a nuanced and historically grounded examination of faith, race, and the challenge of telling honest stories about American evangelicalism. Most episodes of American Evangelicals open with a narrative story about the subject. In Episode 5, Maggie Capra reads from J. M. Humphrey's pamphlet "A Word of Warning on Divorce Marriage" — a deeply personal testimony about Humphrey's tormented conscience after remarrying following divorce — and from a letter written by Jenny Jolly, a white evangelist in the holiness movement who knew Humphrey personally. Jolly's letter, appended to a posthumous reprint of Humphrey's pamphlet, contains the sentence that stopped Capra cold: "Colored people couldn't claim him after that. He was too much in demand by the free Methodist whites." Nowhere in Humphrey's published sermons or pamphlets had race appeared. The letter was the only surviving evidence of his racial identity — and its tone, matter-of-fact in its racism, raises hard questions about who gets preserved in the historical record, and why. Who was J. M. Humphrey? Born in 1872 in Tennessee, Jerry Miles Humphrey and his wife moved to Chicago in their early twenties, where both were converted and sanctified in the holiness movement. After his first wife renounced her faith, Humphrey divorced her and eventually — under pressure from church leaders — remarried. He spent the rest of his ministry promoting his belief that his "divorce marriage" was spiritually dangerous, using his own experience as a warning to others. Only one surviving letter, written after his death, reveals that he was Black.  The Whitewashing of the Historical Record Capra's experience with the Humphrey sources illustrates a problem historians increasingly acknowledge: the archives are not neutral. Racist attitudes and exclusionary practices shaped which voices were preserved, which pamphlets were reprinted, and whose papers were collected. As a result, historians working from traditional archives may unintentionally reproduce the racial biases that shaped those archives. The hosts discuss how this dynamic shaped the story of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy — a narrative almost entirely built around white evangelical figures — and note ongoing scholarly work, including Daniel Bare's book on Black fundamentalism, that seeks to recover what was excluded. Is Racism Intrinsic to Evangelicalism? The episode grapples with one of the most contested questions in the field: Is racism essential to evangelicalism as a movement, or is it a historical contingency — present in particular eras and communities, but not definitionally part of what evangelicalism is? The hosts survey both ends of this debate: * Some historians argue that evangelicalism, as it developed in the United States, is inseparable from white supremacy — that pulling racism out of it leaves something unrecognizable. * Others, drawing on the Bebbington Quadrilateral's theological definition, argue that evangelicals held widely divergent positions on race (abolitionists alongside slaveholders) and that racism is better understood as reflecting broader American culture than as intrinsic to the movement. * A third concern, raised by John Fea, is "race reductionism" — the tendency, accelerated after 2016, to interpret evangelicalism primarily or exclusively through a racial lens, producing historical accounts that are accurate in their particulars but reductive as total explanations. Colorblind Christianity: Origins and Consequences Dan Hummel traces the rise of what scholars call "colorblind Christianity" — the belief, which entered the mainstream of white evangelicalism in the 1970s, that the most Christian approach to race is to ignore racial difference altogether, to see all people as equal before God without acknowledging race. Drawing on Jesse Curtis's book The Myth of Colorblind Christianity, Hummel explains how this ideology took hold and what its consequences have been. Hummel connects colorblind Christianity to the church-growth movement of the same era, particularly Donald McGavran's Homogeneous Unit Principle — the sociological observation that churches grow when they gather people who resemble one another. Applied to American suburbs, this principle reinforced the idea that building a racially homogeneous congregation was not just strategically sound but compatible with Christian identity. The result: millions of evangelicals raised in churches that treated race as a divisive topic, one better left outside the sanctuary door. The Christian Right and the Racial Politics Debate The hosts discuss competing historical interpretations of the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s and the role race played in motivating figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Two contrasting views emerge: * Randall Balmer argues, based in part on a direct conversation with political organizer Paul Weyrich, that the Christian right was primarily mobilized not by abortion but by opposition to the desegregation of private Christian academies — making race the foundational political issue. * Daniel Williams and others offer a multi-causal account: race was certainly present, but so were concerns about abortion, secularism in public education, and other issues. Reducing the Christian right to a single motivating factor, they argue, distorts the history. Evangelicals and Systemic Racism: The "Toolkit" Problem The conversation turns to a landmark study by sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith (2000), which argued that evangelicals possess a limited "cultural toolkit" for thinking about race. Because evangelical theology places such heavy emphasis on individual conversion, free will, and personal accountability, evangelicals tend to frame racism as an individual sin rather than a structural or systemic reality. Fea illustrates this from his own teaching: evangelical students consistently reach for relational or individual responses to racial injustice — volunteer work, cross-racial friendship, personal witness — rather than structural or political engagement. The Promise Keepers movement of the 1990s is discussed as a prominent example of the relational approach to racial reconciliation, along with its limitations. Black Evangelicalism: Parallel Histories The episode also considers the story of Black evangelicalism — a tradition that ran parallel to, and sometimes intersected with, white evangelical institutions — but which has been systematically underrepresented in archives and historiography. The hosts recommend Vince Bacote's documentary on Black evangelicalism and discuss how institutions such as Moody Bible Institute, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and Fuller Seminary both excluded African Americans and eventually opened to their participation. Hummel notes a striking contemporary data point: as of 2026, the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, and Christianity Today — the three flagship institutions of postwar American evangelicalism — are all led by non-white leaders. The "White Evangelical" Label: A Disciplinary Divide The episode closes with a discussion of the term "white evangelical" itself, prompted by a view expressed in an earlier episode by guest Corey Marsh. Marsh objects to the racial modifier, arguing that evangelicalism is a theological category that shouldn't be bounded by race. Hummel agrees in part — using the term as a reflexive political statement can be imprecise — but defends it as analytically necessary for historians studying communities that were, in fact, Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2610661/fan_mail/new] Hosts: JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.  Find out more about our work: * slbf.org/lumen-center [https://slbf.org/lumen-center] * slbf.org/studio [https://slbf.org/studio] Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour Edited by Dave Conour

Theology, History, and the Question of Identity (Episode 4)

It is the summer of 1976. A Gallup poll asks Americans a deceptively simple question: "Have you been born again?" Thirty-four percent say yes. Overnight, a single survey question gives a name to a movement that has existed in America for over two centuries. In Episode 4, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra invite two theologians into the conversation — scholars who have spent their careers thinking carefully about what evangelicalism actually is, not just what it has historically looked like. Their perspectives challenge, sharpen, and enrich the historical framework the hosts have relied on since Episode 1: the Bebbington Quadrilateral. The result is a wide-ranging, genuinely probing conversation about definition, identity, behavior, celebrity, race, and the limits of both history and theology as disciplines. What emerges is not a tidy answer — but a more honest picture of why this question matters and why it resists easy resolution. ABOUT OUR GUESTS Vincent Bacote has been a professor of theology at Wheaton College in Illinois since 2000, where he also serves as director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics. His scholarship lives at the intersection of Christian conviction and public life, with published work on the Holy Spirit, Abraham Kuyper, and the relationship between race and the evangelical tradition. Cory Marsh is a professor of New Testament and director of the Master of Theology program at Southern California Seminary (SCS), a small, confessional institution committed to dispensational theology and the authority of Scripture. He holds four degrees from SCS and a Ph.D. in Biblical Theology from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He co-hosts The Pastor-Scholar Podcast and serves as scholar-in-residence at Revolved Bible Church in San Juan Capistrano. The Bebbington Quadrilateral Revisited The episode opens with host John Fea reminding listeners of the framework that has structured the podcast since its first episode: the Bebbington Quadrilateral, proposed by British historian David Bebbington in his landmark 1989 study of evangelicalism. Both guests affirm the Quadrilateral as a helpful foundation — but both also push beyond it. What Bacote Adds: The Holy Spirit and a "Bible-Centric Ecumenism" Bacote frames his definition of evangelicalism as a "conservative Protestant ecumenism" — people from different denominational backgrounds united by a shared commitment to scripture. He endorses a fifth element to the Quadrilateral: something explicitly addressing the work of the Holy Spirit. As global Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity grows, he argues, pneumatology (the doctrine of the Spirit) can no longer be assumed as a background feature — it must be named. Bacote also raises a deeper challenge. For Black evangelicals, the entailments of the Quadrilateral go further than many White evangelicals have been willing to follow. If biblicism is genuine, it demands engagement with the full scope of scripture's social vision — including the radical claim of Revelation 5:9, that Christ purchased a people from every tribe and tongue. Survival, Bacote argues, has always required Black evangelicals to take that seriously in a way that comfort has sometimes allowed others to avoid. What Marsh Adds: The "Vintage Faith" Quintilateral Marsh builds on and extends the Bebbington Quadrilateral, arguing that evangelicalism must be defined not only by beliefs but also by the behaviors those beliefs produce. His model — which he calls "vintage faith" — consists of five pillars: 1. Supremacy of Scripture — The Bible as the inerrant, final authority for faith and practice 2. Exclusivity of Jesus — Salvation found only through faith in Christ's substitutionary death and resurrection 3. Zealous Evangelism — A Spirit-empowered mandate to proclaim the gospel and make disciples, rooted in the conviction that personal redemption is the true catalyst for social change 4. Theological Education — A commitment to growing in knowledge of God and Scripture through formal and informal study 5. Local Church Fellowship — Consistent physical assembly with other believers for worship, accountability, mutual encouragement, and faithful exposition of Scripture  Marsh introduces what he calls the "crucial X factor": local church fellowship as a non-negotiable fundamental. He argues that without physical accountability structures — elders, deacons, community — evangelical identity becomes unmoored. This shapes his sharp critique of Christian celebrityism. On Christian Celebrityism One of the most pointed exchanges in the episode involves the question of celebrity culture within evangelicalism. Marsh draws a clear distinction between the two categories: 1. Christian Celebrity: Social power without proximity. Influence exercised at a remove, without genuine accountability, grounded in platform rather than person. 2. Public Minister: Social influence within proximity. A minister whose wide reach is rooted in the local church — accountable to elders, known in community, not merely a persona.  Marsh draws on Katelyn Beaty's definition of Christian celebrity from her book Celebrities for Jesus (Brazos Press, 2022) — "social power without proximity" — to name what he sees as one of evangelicalism's most corrosive tendencies. When platform substitutes for accountability, he argues, moral failure becomes structurally predictable. His prescription is blunt: "We need to kill Christian celebrityism." The hosts engage this critique with some complexity. Dan Hummel notes that historically, evangelicalism has often cohered through major personalities — Whitfield, Moody, Billy Graham, Falwell — and that celebrity and structural necessity have been harder to separate than Marsh's framework suggests. Historians and Theologians: Different Questions, Different Methods After the guest interviews, the hosts reflect on the methodological tensions the conversations exposed. The discussion turns on a key distinction: * Historians tend to ask: What IS evangelicalism — who has claimed the label, what did they believe, what did they do? Definitions are drawn from the data. * Theologians tend to ask: What OUGHT evangelicalism to be — what core convictions define it, what behaviors must flow from those convictions? Definitions are normative.  Dan Hummel observes that Bebbington's Quadrilateral appeals to theologians precisely because it is "trans-historical" — it describes categories that feel eternal rather than historically contingent. Historians, trained to situate ideas in time and place, find this both useful and insufficient. The hosts also raise a third category — orthopathy, or "right affection" — alongside orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice). How an evangelical feels toward neighbors, enemies, and fellow believers rarely appears in formal definitions, and yet it keeps surfacing in contemporary debates about evangelical public life. BOOKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED * David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (Unwin Hyman, 1989) * Vincent Bacote, Reckoning with Race and Performing the Good News (2020) * Cory Marsh, Recovering a Vintage Faith: Five Fundamentals of Evangelical Identity (Mentor, 2026) * Katelyn Beaty, Celebrities for Jesus (Brazos Press, 2022) * Thomas Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (Yale University Press, 2019) * John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011) * Isaac Sharp [referenced in discussion of self-identifying evangelicals] * Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1947) * Tim Larson [Wheaton College colleague of Bacote, advocate for adding the Holy Spirit to the Quadrilateral] Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2610661/fan_mail/new] Hosts: JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.  Find out more about our work: * slbf.org/lumen-center [https://slbf.org/lumen-center] * slbf.org/studio [https://slbf.org/studio] Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour Edited by Dave Conour

Defining the American Evangelical Movement: Doctrine and Denominations (Episode 3)

In January 1953, the Reverend Donald Gray Barnhouse published a striking New Year's resolution in his magazine Eternity. After 25 years of building a ministerial empire — through Bible conferences, books, a widely syndicated radio broadcast, and a national magazine — Barnhouse confessed that he had fallen short in one significant area: unity. Long known for his willingness to call out anyone he disagreed with, even on minor points, Barnhouse declared that he wanted to widen his "circle of Christian fellowship" — defined not by doctrinal alignment, but by a simple question: Is this person going to be in heaven with me? It was a remarkable resolution for a man forged in the fires of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. And as historians Maggie Capra, Dan Hummel, and John Fea discuss, it offers a revealing window into the dynamics of American fundamentalism — a movement defined as much by its internal fractures as by its battles with modernism. This episode dives deep into one of the most defining and contested threads in American evangelical history: fundamentalism. What does it actually mean to be a fundamentalist? Where did the term come from? How did the movement evolve — and fracture — across the twentieth century? And what does it have to do with debates still raging today? The conversation traces fundamentalism from its origins in The Fundamentals pamphlets of the early twentieth century, through the cultural watershed of the Scopes Trial, to its complex relationship with the neo-evangelical movement and Billy Graham. Along the way, the historians examine: * The three core characteristics of fundamentalism: Protestant militancy, doctrinal orthodoxy, and a deep sense of certainty * Why fundamentalism was originally a Northern movement centered in Baptist and Presbyterian denominations — not the Southern, rural phenomenon it later became associated with in popular memory * The crucial divide between premillennialist and amillennialist eschatology, and how it fractured the movement and gave rise to rival institutions like Dallas Theological Seminary and Westminster Seminary * The Scopes Trial of 1925 — what it actually meant, how it was misrepresented by journalists like H.L. Mencken and later by films like Inherit the Wind, and why the fear about children and Nietzschean philosophy was central to William Jennings Bryan's case * How fundamentalists didn't disappear after Scopes, but built a thriving parallel subculture of Bible institutes, radio broadcasts, Christian schools, and media empires * The surprising ways fundamentalism was thoroughly modern — embracing new technology, print culture, and a rationalist, inductive approach to Scripture — even while opposing certain hallmarks of modernity * The relationship between fundamentalism and politics, from Frank Norris's anti-Catholic crusade to Karl McIntyre's anti-communism to the emergence of the Christian Right The episode closes by reflecting on what fundamentalism teaches us about evangelicalism more broadly: that the movement's most significant tensions have often been internal, and that to understand fundamentalists, we must take seriously their own sense of what they were doing — and why. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2610661/fan_mail/new] Hosts: JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.  Find out more about our work: * slbf.org/lumen-center [https://slbf.org/lumen-center] * slbf.org/studio [https://slbf.org/studio] Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour Edited by Dave Conour

Defining the American Evangelical Movement: Spirituality and Practice (Episode 2)

In Episode 1, we explored what it means to become an evangelical — the new birth, the conversion experience that George Whitefield and the First Great Awakening placed at the center of Protestant identity. But Episode 2 presses deeper. Conversion is the beginning, not the destination. So what happens next? What does it actually look like to live the Christian life — to become holy, to grow in faith, to be transformed from the inside out? To get at that, the hosts dive into a fascinating 19th-century story: the meteoric rise — and spectacular fall — of Robert Piersall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, a husband-and-wife duo from Pennsylvania who became transatlantic religious celebrities in the 1870s by promoting what they called the Higher Christian Life. Their story takes us from an elegant estate in Hampshire, England to the inaugural Keswick Convention, from packed revival halls in Paris and Berlin to a private room, a locked door, and the scandal that would end Robert's ministry overnight. Hannah's story is even more interesting than her husband's. A Quaker by background who has been called both an "orthodox heretic" and a "rational mystic," she became one of the most widely-read religious writers of the 19th century. Her book, The Christian Secret of a Happy Life (1875), became an international bestseller — and its influence reaches all the way to Sarah Young's Jesus Calling, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 21st century. The Smiths' ideas outlasted their reputations by more than a century. But this episode is about much more than one couple. Using the Smiths as a lens, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra open up a series of genuinely contested questions about American evangelicalism: What is the real relationship between the Calvinist and Wesleyan traditions? The dominant historiography traces evangelicalism through Reformed theology — Princeton, Warfield, Machen — but historians like Donald Dayton argue that the Wesleyan holiness movement has been systematically underweighted. What role have women played in evangelical life and leadership? The holiness movement created more room for women teachers than most evangelical traditions — not because it was egalitarian, but because charisma and gifts were not, in Wesleyan theology, coded by gender. Yet nearly all these women ministered in the shadow of their husbands. When Robert's scandal broke, Hannah's platform collapsed with it. Why does evangelicalism seem so susceptible to scandal? The hosts identify the structural vulnerabilities: the celebrity preacher model, itinerant ministry far from local accountability, high moral rhetoric, and deep decentralization. And perhaps most intriguingly: how did evangelical spirituality shade into what we now call the self-help genre? Dan Hummel traces the surprising overlap between Higher Life teaching and the positive thought tradition running from Emerson through Dale Carnegie to Oprah. This is a rich, wide-ranging conversation that reshapes how you might think about evangelical history — and about the millions of people who, across nearly two centuries, have been trying to figure out what it means, in practice, to live a holy life. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2610661/fan_mail/new] Hosts: JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.  Find out more about our work: * slbf.org/lumen-center [https://slbf.org/lumen-center] * slbf.org/studio [https://slbf.org/studio] Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour Edited by Dave Conour