American Evangelicals - A History Podcast
American Evangelicals blends storytelling and free-flowing conversation to explore the varieties, similarities, and significance of evangelical Christians in American history.
Spanning the religious revivals of the 18th century to the cultural and political conflicts of the 21st, each episode is a conversation based on the historical research of its hosts, the deep scholarship on American evangelicals, and the lives of real figures who shaped the movement.
Hosted by three historians of American evangelicalism, discover how evangelicals have shaped and been shaped by the challenges of not just theology and belief, but by the same forces that have contributed to American society, from immigration to war, race, and economics.
American Evangelicals - A History Podcast
Introducing American Evangelicals - A History Podcast
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AMERICAN EVANGELICALS blends storytelling and free-flowing conversation to explore the varieties, similarities, and significance of evangelical Christians in American history.
Spanning the religious revivals of the 18th century to the cultural and political conflicts of the 21st, each episode is a conversation grounded in the historical research of its hosts, deep scholarship on American evangelicals, and the lives of real figures who shaped the movement.
Hosted by three historians of American evangelicalism, discover how evangelicals have shaped and been shaped by the challenges of not just theology and belief, but by the same forces that have contributed to American society.
This twelve-episode podcast mini-series offers a historical viewpoint of American evangelicals on issues like race, economics, politics, celebrity, science, and many more. In the end, we try to define what an American evangelical is and how we got here.
HOSTS
JOHN FEA is a historian who taught for 23 years at Messiah College in central Pennsylvania, where he was Professor of American History. He is currently a Visiting Fellow in History at the Lumen Center, an initiative of the SL Brown Foundation. He is the author of multiple books on American religion and politics, including Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? and Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. John is a widely cited voice on the history of evangelicalism and its relationship to American politics, and his work has appeared in publications ranging from The Washington Post to Christianity Today.
DAN HUMMEL is the Director of the Lumen Center, an initiative of the SL Brown Foundation. He's a historian of American religion, focusing on theology, foreign relations, and evangelical culture. He is the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations and The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Dan brings to the podcast a particular interest in the intellectual and theological life of evangelicals and their international connections.
MAGGIE CAPRA is a visiting instructor in American history at Beloit College. Her research centers on the theological dynamics within evangelical and holiness communities, with a particular focus on questions of marriage, family, divorce, and gender in the 20th century. Her work recovers the stories of lesser-known figures whose lives illuminate the intellectual and spiritual history of the movement — including those marginalized or overlooked in the standard historical record. Maggie brings to the podcast a talent for narrative history and a commitment to telling the full complexity of the evangelical story.
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:
Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour
Edited by Dave Conour
They shaped elections. They built institutions. They argued, split, reunited, and argued again. They are American evangelicals, and their story is far more complex than the headlines suggest.
Speaker 2Hi, I'm Dan Hummel. I'm the director of the Lumen Center. I'm a historian of evangelicals and foreign policy and theology and related topics.
Speaker 3I'm John Fea, I'm a fellow here at the Lumen Center. I have written about American evangelicalism in three centuries over the course of six books: 18th, 19th, and 20th.
Speaker 1I'm Maggie Capra. I'm a teacher, researcher, and I consider myself a forever student of American evangelicalism.
SpeakerWhat exactly is an American evangelical? Where did the movement come from? And how did it become one of the most powerful forces in American life? Each episode, three historians dig into those questions, not through sweeping generalizations, but through the stories of real people whose lives illuminate the larger movement.
Speaker 2It's really important to understand the wider culture within which fundamentalists have operated because they're part of that culture. So it's really important what's happening in economic history and cultural history to understand why fundamentalists sort of reacted the way they did and why they formed.
Speaker 3Your evidence that you're uncovering suggests that in a largely 19th-century patriarchal society, generally, not just even Christianity, but generally, evangelicals are actually kind of progressive on gender issues.
Speaker 1Ask any historian, was it true in other contexts? And we have stories about all people being racist in different time periods. It's not that we're necessarily picking on evangelicals. However, there is something that allows us to hold evangelicals to a higher standard, and that is their claim that their highest priority is the Bible.
SpeakerFrom the revivals of the 18th century to the fundamentalist battles of the 20th century, from questions of doctrine and definition to the harder questions of race, gender, and power, this is the history that shaped a movement and a nation. American Evangelicals, a history podcast.