American Evangelicals - A History Podcast

Vincent Bacote, theologian at Wheaton College who studies the Holy Spirit and race. Cory Marsh, New Testament professor who focuses on evangelical identity and theological education. They debate Bebbington’s quadrilateral, argue for adding church fellowship, education, or the Spirit, and critique Christian celebrity culture while exploring Black evangelicalism’s ethical emphasis.

Ted Davis, historian of science and religion and Professor Emeritus, traces how American Christianity has engaged scientific ideas from the early republic through the Scopes era into today. He explains the 'two books' framework, reactions to Darwin, postwar shifts that brought evangelicals into science, and the rise of competing responses like Bernard Ramm and young-earth creationism.

A reflective wrap-up that looks at how historians read evangelicalism and what listener feedback taught them. They trace demographic shifts toward religious nones and nonverts and debate whether 'evangelical' still works as a label. The conversation surveys the Bebbington legacy, dominionist strains, threats to Christian higher education, and the migration of debate onto podcasts, Substack, and YouTube.

Stories revisit World Vision’s origins and the hidden Korean leader behind its early work. A conversion of a Kenyan child into a president shows long missionary influence on politics. The conversation traces shifts from cultural superiority to contextualized missiology, global South growth, reverse missionaries, and debates about race, power, and the mixed legacy of humanitarian missions.

The episode traces how the Bible became central to evangelical identity, from 19th-century distribution efforts to modern apps and branded study Bibles. It explores reading methods like common-sense interpretation, tools that democratized study, and the Bible treated as a sacred object. It also covers scripture’s role in politics, slavery debates, translation controversies, and 20th-century fights over inerrancy.

Andrea Turpin, a Baylor history professor who studies women, education, and American religion, discusses how women shaped evangelical life. She highlights figures like Jesse Penn-Lewis and explores women’s roles in spirituality, education, missions, and organization. The conversation traces shifting responses to feminism, how denominational structures shaped influence, and the recovery of women’s hidden labor in evangelical history.

Ted Davis, historian of science and religion at Messiah University, offers a concise tour of how evangelicals and science have intertwined. The conversation traces the 'two books' idea, early evangelical enthusiasm for progress, the emergence of the conflict narrative after Darwin, Scopes-era anxieties, professionalization of science, and modern evangelical scientists and creationist subcultures.

A lively tour of how evangelical faith and the marketplace became entwined. Stories range from Mary Kay’s pink Cadillac and her business-as-spirituality model to how Christian bookstores, mass-market media, and the Sun Belt shaped identity and belonging. The conversation traces roots in early revivalism, Cold War pro-business religion, and the rise of corporate-style ministries and evangelical dynasties.

A historian recounts the Illuminati scare that launched a pattern of evangelical political reaction. They trace recurring crisis-driven mobilization from temperance and abolition to abortion and Cold War activism. The conversation highlights surprising diversity, including an evangelical left, shifting alliances with Catholics, and strong impulses to defend a vision of a Christian nation.

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 RecordCapra'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 ConsequencesDan 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 DebateThe 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" ProblemThe 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 HistoriesThe 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 DivideThe 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 MailHosts:JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah UniversityMAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit CollegeDAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-MadisonThis 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-centerslbf.org/studioProduced by Daniel Johnson and Dave ConourEdited by Dave Conour