Ep. 9 / How Evangelicalism Shaped America: From Revival Movements to Political Conservatism ► Mark Noll

Have you ever wondered how evangelicalism shaped American history and continues to influence our society today? Join us on evangelical 360 as esteemed historian Mark Noll takes us on a journey through the evolution of evangelicalism, from its roots in the Protestant Reformation to its role in re-Christianizing post-revolution America. We'll uncover the critical impact of Methodist revival movements and explore the divisive effects of the Civil War on evangelical unity. Plus, we'll examine how the intertwining of evangelicalism with American political conservatism over the last two decades has redefined the term "evangelical."

Our conversation doesn't stop there. We'll tackle the complex balance between advocating for a Christian-influenced society and staying true to the Christian faith itself. Reflecting on historical and theological misconceptions about the United States as a "Christian nation," we highlight the importance of Christian engagement in public life without compromising religious principles. Special guest Mark Noll offers his unique insights on the history and influence of evangelicalism in North America, emphasizing the need for thoughtful Christian participation in societal issues. Tune in for a compelling discussion that challenges conventional wisdom and invites you to rethink the role of faith in the public sphere.

Mark's Book: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

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Transcript

Brian Stiller

Hello and welcome to evangelical 360. My name is Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and host of this new podcast series. On evangelical 360, I interview leaders, writers and influencers about contemporary issues which are impacting Christian life around the world. My hope is that it will not only be a global meeting place where faith is explored from different perspectives, but that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and even inspired.

Today I want you to meet Mark Noll, a foremost historian whose work is seminal to our understanding of the church worldwide, but especially in North America. Why does history matter? We've all come from somewhere your family, your society, your education, your community. Every part of our life today has a past, and understanding that past helps us better understand who we are today, and that's why I'm thrilled to have Mark join us today. Having written many books and taught at both Wheaton College and Notre Dame, I'm confident he'll provide a perspective and depth of understanding of the Christian community like no other historian that I know. Thank you so much, Mark mark, for joining me today on evangelical 360.

Mark Knoll, what an honor to have you here today. We're so grateful for the enormous contribution you make to us all by your historical writings, but I want to begin today with a line that you wrote describing evangelicals in America. And I realize you're talking about American evangelicals, but America is a big sea and that sea washes over our shores in many countries. So let me read this. This is what you write about evangelicals in America: Vital spirit-filled evangelical and evangelical-like movements burgeoning around the globe, plus a full spectrum of gospel-honoring evangelism, disciplining and service in the US. Plus, and here's your plus, demonizing of opponents, over-reliance on popular media, some white Christian nationalism, much conspiracy thinking, fixation on the apocalypse, culture, war mentalities, susceptibility to fake news. Mark, how in the world did we get here?

Mark Noll

Brian, that's a question that people have worked on at great length. I'm going to try to keep things as simple as possible. To begin with, the wide use of the word evangelical comes out of the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, when people like Martin Luther stressed that the Christian faith needed to put greatest emphasis on the gospel, on the evangelical message of God's grace in Christ. In the latter part of the 1600s and then in the 1700s, there were a number of individuals not all clergy, but quite a few church leaders who felt that Protestantism had become too formal, too much indebted to church-state relationships, too much concerned simply about power in the world, and they wanted to see renewal, revival, and that evangelical message was the need for being born again to have a personal encounter with Christ. Most of the traditional Protestant doctrines and trust in the Bible were just taken for granted, but a new evangelical characteristic was willingness to cooperate with other groups, even if they weren't in your same tribe. Now, how did we get from that revival, renewal period to the present? The American story includes some tremendous work by particularly, the Methodists.

After the American Revolution, churches were broken up, interest in Christianity was declining, led by the Methodists with help from the Baptists and eventually the Churches of Christ, and then some renewal in the older Presbyterian Congregational Anglican Church Episcopal denominations. There was a vital period of re-Christianization. Methodists, led by the great Francis Asbury and other itinerants, went out to where the people were and preached the gospel. Hindrance went out to where the people were and preached the gospel, and the American population became more and more Christian. This situation was compromised, more or less upended, by the tragedy of the American Civil War, and the tragedy there was that, although the gospel had been effective in winning people to Christ and leading them to trust in the Bible, whites in the South and many in the North felt that the Bible sanctioned slavery. Many whites in the North and of course the African-American churches, some of whom would become very important as evangelical outreaches, felt that slavery was condemned by the scriptures and that division between the evangelical Protestant churches had long-lasting consequences.

In the United States after World War II there was important developments in civil rights. White evangelicals in the South used to vote all the time Democratic, white evangelicals in the North mostly Republican. When the Civil Rights Movement succeeded, then white Democrats in the South became Republicans and eventually there developed, as we have to this day, a kind of ecclesiastical political alliance, of ecclesiastical political alliance, white evangelicals drawn to the Republican Party, black evangelicals, strongly Democratic, protestants of different varieties, some very, very liberal, some quite evangelical, still Democrats. And particularly over the last maybe 20 years, there's been a stronger intermingling of political loyalties and Christian expressions and that has led to the situation that my little paragraph tried to describe, where, in a world now of social media and where everybody who wants to can get online and say whatever they want, there's been a lot of confusion about what this term evangelical means, because I've been caught up in particularly in American political partisanship. That's a very hasty effort to cover a lot of complicated history, but I hope it is helpful, brian.

Brian Stiller

How did that evangelical community become almost trapped by a social political right, along with the personalities that emerged out of that? But the conservatism seems to be such a common descriptor of evangelicals that the two words almost become synonymous.

Mark Noll

Right. This poses quite a problem because there are, I would say, a lot of us, and a lot of us spread really quite across the political spectrum, some politically a devotional, an outreach, a missionary history is taken over as a political term. What I think helps explain that is the very real developments in American society that have moved away from what had been just a taken for granted, more or less Christian expectations about public life. So in the 1960s the American Supreme Court ruled that in public schooling you could not begin the day with prayer and that the Bible could be studied as an academic historical book, but it couldn't be used devotionally to open the day with a scripture reading. Eventually, on matters of sexuality, the American Supreme Court and then states would eventually recognize same-sex marriage as something really quite dramatically different and violating what had been accepted. The liberalization of abortion laws and abortion judicial decisions was not immediately a cause of political mobilization, but eventually it did become. One of the interesting developments of what became the anti-abortion movement is the process by which Protestants who are against abortion and Catholics who are against abortion sort of ended up backing into each other and realized that they had an alliance which led, just incidentally, to quite a bit of good, positive religious exchange, christian exchange between Catholics and Protestants. But as these developments in society took place, there was more and more concern in the white Protestant world that things that had once been taken for granted were no longer being taken for granted and there was some adept political maneuvering to mobilize the white evangelical population into a political force.

And then in the 21st century, we have the dramatic rise of cable news, the social media, which means that there is no longer any real control over what's being presented, and very skillful people, some outside the churches, some inside the churches, were able to focus on what was being lost in the Christian background of the United States and to mobilize concerned people to bring it back, to restore it. Mobilize concerned people to bring it back, to restore it. So we get the term Christian nationalism, meaning not just Christian patriotism, which is certainly an acceptable trait, certainly an acceptable characteristic. But patriotism is usually an attitude to defend your own particular part of the political world, whereas nationalism means that you're going to aggressively promote what you think should be the case. And the term Christian nationalism has been used by those who have some connection to the churches, who want to see a political restoration of what had once been taken for granted.

In American public life there are lots of people and I would certainly include myself who are concerned about the secularization of American society, who are worried about the drift of public morals and public attitudes and what's accepted now as simply common behavior and common legal practice in the United States, but who think that mobilizing to fight for what you once had and think have lost is dangerous because of how it undermines primary loyalty to the Christian faith itself, minds, primary loyalty to the Christian faith itself. So Christian believers, in my view I'm a Presbyterian, a Reformed tradition, and so Reformed people have always had an interest in society. But that interest in society needs always to remember Christian teaching, jesus teaching about, for example, the Sermon on the Mount Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, and there's not a lot of meekness in political partisanship, mark there's this natural aspiration that people have that their country be Christian.

Brian Stiller

Many of the Americans that I talk to tend to assume that their country was Christian and therefore they have a right to insist that the country today be Christian in its policies and in its laws. Now, as a historian, how do you read that and what do you say to those who would want to affirm that the country has a responsibility to be what they thought it already was or always was?

Mark Noll

The first part of the question has to do with was the United States at one time a truly Christian nation? The way I answer that question is to say yes. There were many generally Christian attitudes, presuppositions, trust in institutions that would mark out the United States as a whole as strongly influenced by the Christian heritage of the Western world. I would hasten on to say, however, that any claim that the United States was mostly, entirely or uniquely Christian is just flat out historically and theologically wrong. As the prime example, the United States into the 1960s was a nation that tolerated legalized slavery, or then judicial segregation, then judicial segregation. It was a system that led African American evangelical Christians to worry about the place they were living, and there's a long black Christian tradition of thinking no, the United States is not the new Israel, it's the new Egypt that actually works against, persecutes Christian believers. So were there Christian elements? Definitely. Was the United States uniquely Christian? Was it God's new Israel? Definitely not.

Now, in the present, is it appropriate for Christian believers to speak out publicly on behalf of what they think are moral guidelines that would make for a healthy society? Yes, definitely.

But for those who think that the evangelical message is always more than what happens in any one country, and always, more than protecting my own tradition, then we have to say that militants, the use of forceful arguments and sometimes even to promote Christian values is wrong.

The understanding of Christian life from many, many places around the world shows us that it's possible to have faithful Christian believers, active Christian churches, where the broader political landscape is anything but favorable to Christianity. One of the reasons I've enjoyed beginning to learn a little bit about the world Christian experience and, through Brian, newsletters like you posted from around the world, is to see how active and useful and effective Christian believers can be in places like the People's Republic of China, where the regime is hostile to Christian faith. And I think if American believers knew more about the current state of Christianity in the world today, we would be in a better position, yes, to keep a public presence orienting to defending what we consider properly moral stances in public life, but to do that without subordinating our allegiance to Christianity to an allegiance to a political movement.

Brian Stiller

Mark, a few years ago, you threw a bombshell out called the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. What were you trying to say to us then? And I want to follow that up with another question as to whether you think your words were prophetic or whether they were just historical?

Mark Noll

Yes, the point of that book, which came out in the early 1990s, was to say the evangelical traditions in the United States, particularly the white evangelical traditions, had a lot of positive things happening, a lot of things going for them. They were active in public service different kinds of public service active in missionary work, but were not so active in thinking through their own situations and in responding to what you could characterize as a modern university. What I try to suggest is that, for people who really want to follow the Bible and people who really want to follow in the train of centuries of serious Christian engagement with intellectual life, american evangelicals needed to do more with that serious engagement. And it wasn't that book, certainly, but I think from the 1980s and 90s and into the 21st century, what we've seen in the United States is quite a bit more serious engagement by Christian people, many of them evangelical Protestants, with questions of science, the history of science, political thought, economic reasoning, world conditions, and that in some ways, has been very heartening.

The difficulty, I think, has been that when I wrote that book, I assumed there was a kind of unity by all the people who would use the evangelical terms, and I was mistaken, I think what I should have seen is that there was an element among particularly white evangelicals in the United States that simply distrusted whatever came from university-level reasoning, whether it came from university level reasoning, whether it was came from people who call themselves Christians or not. And that element in the broader evangelical world has gotten stronger, even as the academic work of Christian believers, many of them evangelical, has also gotten stronger. So my own sense of the present is that there probably has never been a time in American history when there's more faithful believers in academic life carrying out their academic ties with some genuine faith foundation in their Christian faith, and there maybe has never been a time when there's as much disconnect, as much unrelationship between that kind of activity and the broader world that shows up on television and the social media day by day. In the political world.

Brian Stiller

So are you suggesting that there is less a scandal, in the broader sense, of cultural engagement with evangelicals who are trained and positioned on one side? And yet I would suggest that there's a scandalous message out there today as to evangelicals who seem to set aside the call of Christ to fight their own cultural wars.

Mark Noll

And you're Canadian, brian, and you know that the Canadian situation compared to the United States is always one that you could say is tamer or more boring, depending upon your point of view, or more boring, depending upon your point of view, and by comparison to the United States. I look up northern Canada and see a smaller evangelical population, but an evangelical population that sponsors organizations like CARDIS or the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, that's maintaining a political presence and trying to speak to the powers on the basis of Christian reasoning, but is doing so without the kind of subordinating the Christian message itself to any particular partisan organization. And I think that's a good kind of example of how evangelicals can be engaged in public life but not necessarily being dominated by the partisanship that is so rampant in American public life.

Brian Stiller

Let me introduce our listeners to a name they've never heard before, but a friend of ours, George Rawlick. George was a historian at Queens University. He died far too young, but he is an anomaly among evangelicals. He would not be what most people, I'm sure in America, would see as an evangelical. He was a former football player, he was an academic. He was a member of the New Democratic Party, which is on the socialist side of the Canadian political spectrum. You knew him well. What is there about George? As an evangelical who doesn't fit the mainstream but in terms of evangelical theology and commitment is center stream.

Mark Noll

Yes, George Rollick was one of the primary reasons why I got interested in Canadian history. He sought out several of the historians that I was privileged to be associated with who were studying religious life in the United States. He did so because his academic work focused on primarily the maritime provinces in the 18th and early 19th century when there were very active revival movements. In fact he was fascinated with an individual named Henry Allen who was kind of a radical evangelical revivalist. But George did not fully grasp how you could write sympathetically about such figures and do it also in historical terms. That could work in the modern university world. And he found people like George Marsden in the United States who were doing that. And so he became acquainted and through George we began to learn a little about Canadian history.

But what was particularly fascinating are the kind of things that you mentioned. So here is this Canadian deeply interested in the history of evangelical movements, but also himself at his different universities and at Queens the sponsor of student Christian groups like InterVarsity Fellowship, someone very active in Christian outreach to provide for refugees, interested also in not backing away when there was any work to discredit Christian faith. So he was someone who we immediately recognized. Well, he's an evangelical and he's finding help from us about how to write concerning Canadian evangelicals in the past in ways that are faithful to what those evangelicals thought, but then also in the university world.

And from him we learn, as you indicate, that to be a real strong evangelical you didn't have to be a right. You could be someone who thought the Canadian medical system, even with its flaws, was vastly superior to the kind of medical system we have in the United States, and someone who was instructive. In that way. And speaking personally, I'm just grateful to this day to George to introduce me to how interesting Canadian political life and Canadian religious life is, although we'd have to say, in the now quarter century or so after George Rollick passed away, developments in Canada have secularized probably more rapidly in the United States, and it's not clear to me how he would have responded to what's happened in his own native country.

Brian Stiller

As we talk, we're in the middle of a major political season in your country, and so I will make no predictions here, but what I'd like you to reflect, as a historian, on the witness of the gospel in post-election America and what we, as part of the rest of the world, might learn from what you're going through and what you would hope for as we look beyond your current political malaise.

Mark Noll

Well, it's a history of evangelical movements. It's not a history that always looks good for the evangelicals. I mentioned earlier the way in which debates over slavery tore apart the United States Christian population. There's a lot of things in the evangelical past that really are very disturbing, but there are also many things that are very encouraging. I think a connection to the rest of the world can always be seen in the missionary movements that have come from North America, and particularly since World War II, American missionaries have moved to the position of saying our job is to help believers around the world to become stronger believers in the countries and the cultures where they are. Our job is not to export American conditions, American ways of doing things to the rest of the world. And that's at a time when we have which, as you've described, the situation where so many people and it actually happens on the political left, although most of the publicity, comes to the political right.

We have this really sad situation in the American realm where the word evangelical is taken to be a sign of partisan, political allegiance, Whereas historically considered and in terms of the meaning of the term, as evangelical, as the good news, the gospel story, there is no partisanship, political partisanship in the Christian gospel. The Christian gospel is to all people. It honors the image of God in all people. It holds out the grace of God in Christ to all people. So I think people looking at the United States and worrying about the way in which evangelical allegiance has been compromised by political allegiance hopefully there can be some memory of the good parts of evangelical history and then particularly the focus on what does the word evangelical mean? It means an understanding of good news, because God in Christ wants sinners to repent and to trust in him and to live lives led by the Holy Spirit, and that's a message that has been powerful and can be powerful again in any political setting.

Brian Stiller

Mark, it's been an honor having you here today. Thanks so much for your insights and for your continued writing, enabling us to understand not just the past but particularly the present. Thanks again.

Mark Noll

Well, it's been my privilege, Brian, and every blessing to the work of the World Evangelical Alliance.

Brian Stiller

Thanks so much for joining us today. If you have found this valuable, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a like. We would appreciate it if you would share it with your friends and colleagues as well. You'll find links in the show notes of this episode for anything we've discussed today. If you haven't signed up yet to receive my free Dispatches from the Global Village, it's an opportunity to join me and meet leaders in many different countries around the world. It's also a wonderful way to stay in touch with upcoming episodes and guests. Just go to brianstiller.com. Thank you for listening. Until next time.

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