Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Evangelicalism, History, and What Comes Next (Episode 12)

Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Evangelicalism, History, and What Comes Next (Episode 12)

In the finale of Season One, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra step out of their usual narrative format to reflect directly on the series and on the state of the field they study. They open by sharing what listener feedback has taught them about the value of a historian's “dispassionate” approach to a subject most people experience personally rather than academically. From there, the conversation turns to future casting — always, they admit, a risky exercise for historians. The hosts trace the demographic rise of religious “nones” and “nonverts,” debate whether “evangelical” and “evangelicalism” remain useful words, and revisit the Bebbington Quadrilateral, Timothy Smith's kaleidoscope theory, and the historiographical legacy of David Bebbington, George Marsden, Joel Carpenter, and Mark Noll. The back half of the episode moves through evangelicals and political power, the rise of dominionism and reconstructionist thought, the uncertain future of Christian higher education, and the migration of evangelical debate onto podcasts, Substack, and YouTube. They close with a shared case for why a historical — rather than theological or political — lens on evangelicalism still matters, closing out the season with thanks to listeners and a tribute to historian Gordon Wood, who died the week of recording. PEOPLE & BOOKS MENTIONED * Stephen Bullivant, Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford University Press, 2022) * Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013) * Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994) * A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso, 2026) * Henry F. May, “The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Historical Review 70 (October 1964) * David Bebbington — historian; the “Bebbington Quadrilateral” framework for defining evangelicalism * George Marsden and Joel Carpenter — historians discussed their role in establishing evangelicalism as a coherent historiographical category * Nathan Hatch — historian referenced on the “democratization” of American Christianity * Timothy L. Smith — historian referenced for his “kaleidoscope theory” of evangelicalism * Vincent Bacote — theologian, Wheaton College, cited as an example of evangelical political-theology scholarship; the hosts recall him as a guest earlier in the season (Episode 4) * R.J. Rushdoony — referenced in the discussion of Christian reconstructionism * Paul Weyrich — referenced as a Christian-right organizer connected to the New Congress Foundation * Lyndon LaRouche — referenced in the discussion of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory's origins * Tim Mackie — co-founder of The Bible Project, referenced on patron-funded models of Christian content * Gavin Ortlund — pastor and YouTube creator, cited as an example of digital-first evangelical ministry * Gordon Wood — historian of the American Revolution, was remembered by the hosts following his death at 92 in June 2026 🔗 LINK to our button form 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

Accidental Diplomats: Missionaries, Money, and the World (Episode 11)

It's easy to imagine American evangelicalism as a story that happens entirely inside the United States. In this episode, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra push past that bubble to explore evangelicals' long, tangled relationship with the rest of the world. The episode opens with two stories drawn from recent scholarship. The first, from David Swartz's Facing West, complicates the founding myth of World Vision: American evangelist Bob Pierce is remembered as the organization's sole founder, but the humanitarian network he built on was already running under Korean pastor Kyung Chik Han. The second, from Philip Dow's Accidental Diplomats, follows Daniel Arap Moi from a ten-year-old convert at a Kenyan mission station to Kenya's second president, guided for decades by his missionary mentor and confidant, Earl Anderson. From there, the hosts trace how American evangelicals have understood missions, humanitarianism, and their own place in the world across two centuries: the shift from cultural superiority to contextualized missiology, the 1974 Lausanne Congress and its Global South critiques of Western evangelicalism, the astonishing 20th-century demographic shift of Christianity from the global North to the global South, and the increasingly contested question of what — if anything — the word "white" is still doing in front of "evangelical." They close by reckoning honestly with the missionary movement's mixed legacy: real colonial entanglements alongside real cross-cultural courage, and a complicated set of missionary heroes evangelicals still look to for inspiration. PEOPLE & TERMS MENTIONED * Bob Pierce: Evangelist and founder of World Vision (1950), following a 1947 trip to China that inspired his humanitarian ministry. * Kyung Chik Han: Korean pastor and refugee relief leader who built the orphanage and humanitarian network in Seoul that became the operational core of World Vision. * Daniel Arap Moi: Kenya's second president (1978–2002), mentored in his youth by American missionary Earl Anderson. * Earl Anderson: American missionary and government school inspector in colonial Kenya; longtime mentor and confidant to Daniel Arap Moi. * René Padilla & Samuel Escobar: Latin American evangelical theologians whose critiques of Western missions at the 1974 Lausanne Congress challenged American evangelical assumptions. * John Stott: British evangelical leader who helped mediate the global-north/global-south tensions at the Lausanne Congress. * William Ernest Hocking: Harvard philosopher who chaired the 1932 “Re-Thinking Missions” laymen's inquiry, questioning the traditional conversion-focused model of missions. * Bebbington's Quadrilateral: Historian David Bebbington's four-part definition of evangelicalism: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. * 1040 Window: Cold War-era missions term for the band of the globe (10° to 40° north latitude) considered least reached by Christianity. * Carl McIntire: Fundamentalist radio preacher associated with balloon-borne Bible airdrops into communist territory during the Cold War. * Paul Hiebert: Missiologist (Fuller Theological Seminary, later Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) known for bringing anthropological method into evangelical missions training. * Walter Kim: President of the National Association of Evangelicals, cited as an example of the organization's non-white leadership. * New Apostolic Reformation: Term used to describe an influential, loosely organized network of independent charismatic and Pentecostal leaders. BOOKS MENTIONED * David R. Swartz, Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2020). * Philip Dow, Accidental Diplomats: American Missionaries and the Cold War in Africa (William Carey Publishing, 2024). * David P. King, God's Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). * David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017). * Gina A. Zurlo, How Many Evangelicals in the World? A New Assessment from the World Christian Database, Review of Religious Research (open access). 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

The Bible: A People of the Book (Episode 10)

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

"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

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