American Evangelicals - A History Podcast

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

1 h 25 min · 21. maj 2026
episode Theology, History, and the Question of Identity (Episode 4) cover

Description

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

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11 episodes

episode The Bible: A People of the Book artwork

The Bible: A People of the Book

For many evangelicals, no object is more central to faith and practice than the Bible—preached, memorized, carried, gifted, and treated as the ultimate authority. But how did it come to occupy that place, and what happens when readers of the same text reach opposite conclusions? In this episode, historians John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra trace the Bible across American evangelical history: from the founding of the American Bible Society in 1816 and its mission to put a Bible in every hand, through common-sense interpretation, study Bibles, and an enormous publishing and translation industry, to the political uses of Scripture, the slavery debates, and the 20th-century battles over biblical inerrancy. IN THIS EPISODE * “The Bible is doing its work.” Two American Bible Society Record stories—a young Catholic convert named Mary and a college skeptic—frame the belief that Scripture, “without note or comment,” could convert readers on its own. * Sola scriptura and a people of the book. Why a commitment to Scripture as supreme (or sole) authority made evangelicals Protestants—and shaped a distinctly anti-Catholic, anti-traditional posture. * Common-sense reading and its tools. Concordances, cross-references, and the perspicuity of Scripture: “helps” that let lay readers interpret for themselves—while multiplying interpretations. * Helps to study the Bible. Scofield (1909), Ryrie, MacArthur, and the commercial engine of Bible publishing—plus journaling Bibles, translations, and digital tools like Logos and YouVersion. * Reverence for the object itself. The family altar, soldiers’ pocket Testaments, and the Museum of the Bible—the Bible as sacred artifact, not just text. * Scripture, slavery, and politics. How the Bible was marshaled on both sides of slavery, woven into civil religion and nationalism, and invoked in times of war. * The battle for the Bible. Higher criticism, neo-orthodoxy, Fuller Seminary, Harold Lindsell, the ICBI, and the inerrancy debates that reshaped evangelical identity—and the Southern Baptist Convention. BOOKS MENTIONED * The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society, by John Fea (Oxford University Press, 2016) * America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911, by Mark Noll (Oxford University Press, 2022) * The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, by Mark Noll (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) * The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell (Zondervan, 1976) * Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, by George Marsden (Eerdmans, 1987) * Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America, by Daniel Vaca (Harvard University Press, 2019) PEOPLE MENTIONED * Cyrus Scofield — author of the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford), a landmark dispensationalist study Bible. * Mark Noll — leading historian of American religion, cited on the Bible, slavery, and the Civil War. * Harold Lindsell — editor of Christianity Today; his Battle for the Bible made inerrancy a litmus test. * Carl F. H. Henry — founding editor of Christianity Today; author of the five-volume God, Revelation and Authority. * Kenneth Kantzer — shaped Trinity Evangelical Divinity School as a counterweight to Fuller in the inerrancy debates. * John Woodbridge — historian who critiqued the Rogers–McKim thesis on biblical authority. * Donald Dayton — historian who challenged Lindsell’s framing of inerrancy. * Eugene Peterson — translator of The Message, a single-author paraphrase of the Bible. * Daniel Vaca — historian who argues evangelicalism is, in part, a commercial religion. * Elias Boudinot, Francis Scott Key, John Jay — politically influential founders/supporters of the American Bible Society. *  Robert Lewis Dabney & James Henley Thornwell — Southern theologians who built biblical defenses of slavery. GET YOUR PODCAST BUTTONS https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/AmerEvanPodButtons [https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/AmerEvanPodButtons] 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

2. juli 20261 h 14 min
episode "Can a Woman Preach?": Rethinking Gender in Evangelical History (Episode 9) artwork

"Can a Woman Preach?": Rethinking Gender in Evangelical History (Episode 9)

When we tell the story of evangelicalism, we usually reach for famous pastors, theologians, and institutions. But what happens when we turn our attention to the women who taught, organized, wrote, fundraised, evangelized, and sustained evangelical life across generations? In this episode, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra are joined in the studio by historian Andrea Turpin for a wide-ranging conversation about women as co-creators of evangelicalism at every level. Beginning with the story of Welsh evangelist Jesse Penn-Lewis—who built a transatlantic preaching career through evangelical institutions even as those institutions remained led by men—the conversation explores how women shaped evangelical spirituality, education, missions, and ministry, often precisely because formal leadership roles were closed to them. Along the way the group examines the relationship between evangelicalism and feminism, the history of women’s education, the rise of women’s missionary organizations, and how historians are rethinking who belongs in the story of American evangelicalism. It’s a conversation about power, influence, faith, and why some of the most consequential figures in evangelical history have so often remained in the background. ABOUT OUR GUEST Andrea Turpin is a professor of history at Baylor University, specializing in women’s history, the history of education, and American religion. She is the author of a study of gender and the founding of American higher education, and is currently at work on a project on women in the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, focused on the era’s women’s missionary organizations.  IN THIS EPISODE * Jesse Penn-Lewis and the paradox of a woman building a preaching career through male-led institutions—and why her central concerns were the Holy Spirit and spiritual warfare, not chiefly “women’s issues.” * “Progressive” as a historical category: why 19th-century evangelicals often pushed furthest on women’s education—and what “progressive compared to the wider culture” does and doesn’t mean. * Evangelical pragmatism and women’s education: Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, and the coeducational (and biracial) founding of Oberlin under Charles Finney. * The waves of feminism, from the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments through second- and third-wave feminism—and the surprisingly loose correlation between religious affiliation and support for suffrage. * Teaching as women’s sanctioned space: Sunday school, Henrietta Mears, the “deputy husband” and Republican motherhood, and the long argument over 1 Timothy 2:12. * Egalitarian vs. complementarian: how two categories hardened in the early 1990s, and Turpin’s case for a lost middle—“complementarity without hierarchy.” * Women’s missionary organizations and church polity: how women held evangelism and social service together as the fundamentalist–modernist split tore them apart—and why polity determined whether anyone listened. * Recovering hidden labor: Biddy Chambers and the making of My Utmost for His Highest, and a call for women in evangelicalism to donate their papers to the archives. PEOPLE, PLACES, and TERMS * Jesse Penn-Lewis — Welsh evangelist; author of The Magna Carta of Woman and War on the Saints. * Mary Lyon (Mount Holyoke) and Charles Finney / Oberlin College. * Phoebe Palmer, Hannah Whitall Smith, Henrietta Mears, Helen Barrett Montgomery, Biddy Chambers. * Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, Elisabeth Elliot; the Equal Rights Amendment. * Evangelical feminists: Nancy Hardesty, Letha Dawson Scanzoni, Sharon Gallagher. * Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and the “deputy husband”; Anne Hutchinson; the Grimké sisters and Christabel Pankhurst. Key terms: evangelical pragmatism, postmillennialism, separate spheres, egalitarian and complementarian, “women’s work for women.” BOOKS MENTIONED * Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (Knopf, 1982). * Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020). * Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press, 2021). * Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (Yale University Press, 1993). * Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (Harper & Row, 1976). * David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). * Brantley W. Gasaway, Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 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

25. juni 20261 h 6 min
episode More Complicated Than the Scopes Trial: A History of Evangelicals and Science (Episode 8) artwork

More Complicated Than the Scopes Trial: A History of Evangelicals and Science (Episode 8)

When most people imagine evangelical Christianity and science in America, they picture conflict: the Scopes Trial, school-board fights over evolution, faith retreating before modern science. But that picture is largely a product of the twentieth century. For much of American history, evangelicals understood faith and scientific inquiry as deeply compatible — even mutually reinforcing. In this episode, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra trace that longer, more complicated story with historian Ted Davis of Messiah University, one of the leading scholars of science and religion in American Protestant history. Beginning with the seventeenth-century idea that God authored “two books” — Scripture and nature — the conversation follows the relationship between evangelical faith and science through the early Republic, the arrival of Darwinism, the culture wars of the 1920s, and into the complex evangelical landscape of today. Along the way, the hosts and Ted Davis explore why the “conflict” between evangelicals and science is both older and newer than we tend to assume — and why the real story resists the tidy narratives offered by both sides. BONUS: The Full Interview on YouTube John Fea sat down with Ted Davis for an extended conversation that ranges well beyond what we could fit into this episode. Watch the complete interview on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/OHTG1yY-6bY [https://youtu.be/OHTG1yY-6bY]  KEY THEMES The “Two Books” Framework For more than two centuries, educated Christians assumed God had authored two books — Scripture and nature — and that reading either carefully was an act of worship. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605), evangelicals embraced the pursuit of knowledge as a moral obligation oriented toward charity and human benefit rather than power or self-aggrandizement. Progress, Postmillennialism, and the Antebellum Fusion Early American Protestants fused Enlightenment ideas of progress with a postmillennial confidence that the Kingdom of God was advancing through human effort. Scientific and technological advances were understood as part of a divine plan — an outlook that made faith and science natural partners well into the nineteenth century. The Rise of the “Conflict Thesis” The idea that science and religion have always been at war is itself a historical product, popularized after the Civil War by writers like John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Notably, these were liberal or modernist Protestants; the original conflict was less science-versus-faith than a struggle over which “book” would define Christianity. Defining “True Science” By the 1920s, fundamentalists were not anti-science by their own lights — they held a “common sense” view of science rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment, in which only what could be directly observed counted as fact. Evolution, unfolding too slowly to observe, was therefore dismissed as conjecture. The same logic shaped resistance to higher criticism of the Bible. Evolution, Germany, and World War I The anti-evolution movement was politically entangled, not merely scientific. Evolution became linked in the American imagination with German militarism, a connection amplified by Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights (1917). For William Jennings Bryan, that link supplied a powerful political rationale for driving evolution out of public schools. Faith and Science After World War II The GI Bill, the neo-evangelical movement, and organizations like the American Scientific Affiliation opened space for devout Christians to pursue eminent scientific careers — Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Katharine Hayhoe, and others. At the same time, a well-organized Young Earth Creationist subculture emerged, producing parallel institutions and a lasting polarization within the broader evangelical “tent.” PEOPLE * Ted Davis — historian of science and religion, Messiah University; episode guest * Francis Bacon — 17th-century English philosopher; The Advancement of Learning (1605) * Jonathan Edwards — colonial theologian; counter-Enlightenment strain of evangelical thought * John Witherspoon — president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton); Scottish Enlightenment influence * Samuel Miller — New York City Presbyterian minister and early Princeton Seminary professor * James Ussher — 17th-century Church of Ireland bishop who calculated a creation date of 4004 BC * John William Draper & Andrew Dickson White — popularizers of the “conflict thesis” after the Civil War * William Jennings Bryan — populist politician, three-time presidential nominee, anti-evolution campaigner * Asa Gray — Harvard botanist, Darwin’s first American champion, and a devout Presbyterian * Vernon Kellogg — Stanford biologist and pacifist; author of Headquarters Nights (1917) * B. B. Warfield — conservative Calvinist theologian at Princeton Seminary who engaged evolution * Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Katharine Hayhoe, Joan Centrella — prominent contemporary scientists of faith * Bernard Ramm — neo-evangelical author of The Christian View of Science and Scripture BOOKS * The Advancement of Learning, by Francis Bacon (Henrie Tomes, 1605) * A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, by Samuel Miller (T. and J. Swords, 1803) * Headquarters Nights, by Vernon Kellogg (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1917) * The Genesis Flood, by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961) * The Creationists, by Ronald L. Numbers (Harvard University Press, 2006) * The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die, edited by Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) * Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition, by James C. Ungureanu (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) * Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845–1929, by Bradley J. Gundlach (Eerdmans, 2013) * Fundamentalism and American Culture, by George M. Marsden (Oxford University Press, 1980) * The Christian View of Science and Scripture, by Bernard Ramm (Eerdmans, 1954) * The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell (Zondervan, 1976) 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

18. juni 20261 h 21 min
episode God, the Pink Cadillac, and Commerce: Evangelicals connection with Business & Consumerism (Episode 7) artwork

God, the Pink Cadillac, and Commerce: Evangelicals connection with Business & Consumerism (Episode 7)

From the iconic pink Cadillac of Mary Kay Ash to the aisles of the Christian bookstore, this episode traces one of the most tangled relationships in American religious history: the bond between evangelical faith and the marketplace. Hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra use the rise of Mary Kay Cosmetics as a launching point to explore how evangelicals have understood work, wealth, success, and consumption — and why prosperity has so often been read as a sign of divine blessing. Along the way, the conversation reaches back to the early republic, where revivalism, democracy, and the market economy grew up together, and forward through the postwar boom, the Cold War, the Sun Belt, and the Jesus People movement. The result is a wide-ranging discussion of faith, money, identity, and whether evangelicalism and capitalism have become so intertwined that they can no longer be easily separated. KEY THEMES & TOPICS * Mary Kay Ash and “golden rule leadership”: How a Southern Baptist saleswoman built a cosmetics empire infused with the motto “God first, family second, career third” — reworking Sunday school hymns into business jingles. * Faith and feminism in tension: Mary Kay as both a product of and a conservative critique of second-wave feminism, offering women economic flourishing without challenging family norms. * Prosperity, agency, and the prosperity gospel: From Weber’s Protestant work ethic to self-help figures like Zig Ziglar and Robert Schuller, and where Mary Kay sits near — but not squarely within — the prosperity gospel stream. * A deeper history: Revivalism, democracy, and the market economy emerging together in the early 19th century, all centered on the empowered, choosing individual. * The “business turn” in scholarship: How historians now study company records and business dynasties — the Cathy family (Chick-fil-A), the Green family (Hobby Lobby, Museum of the Bible), and earlier funders of Moody Bible Institute. * The rarity of systemic critique: Why sustained evangelical critiques of capitalism are hard to find — with the unusual dispensationalist exception of Philip Mauro. * Cold War capitalism and the Sun Belt: Consumer culture and business interests sold as ways to be a good American, a good Christian, and an anti-communist, fueling the postwar rise of Southern evangelicalism. * Consumerism as belonging: Christian bookstores, CCM, the Amish romance genre, the faith principle vs. business principles, and the scaling of ministries from Billy Graham to the megachurch. PEOPLE MENTIONED  Mary Kay Ash, Morley Safer, Phyllis Schlafly, Marabel Morgan, Zig Ziglar, Robert Schuller, Dwight L. Moody, George Rapp, Josiah Bissell, Philip Mauro, Cyrus Scofield, Hal Lindsey, Carl McIntire, Bill Bright, Billy Graham, Donald Grey Barnhouse, Lewis Sperry Chafer. BOOKS REFERENCED * The Mary Kay Way by Mary Kay Ash (Harper & Row, 1984) * The Total Woman by Marabel Morgan (Fleming H. Revell, 1973) * The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber (originally published 1905; widely read in the Talcott Parsons translation, Scribner, 1930) * Wanamaker's Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store by Nicole C. Kirk (NYU Press, 2018) * Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism by Timothy E. W. Gloege (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) * Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic by Joseph P. Slaughter (Columbia University Press, 2023) * The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism by Thomas Frank (University of Chicago Press, 1997) * Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith by Daniel Silliman (Eerdmans, 2021) * The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey (Zondervan, 1970) * The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity by Darren E. Grem (Oxford University Press, 2016) * One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse (Basic Books, 2015) * From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism by Darren Dochuk (W. W. Norton, 2011) 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

11. juni 20261 h 8 min
episode The Politics of Reaction: Evangelicals and the American Nation (Episode 6) artwork

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

4. juni 20261 h 1 min