Defining the American Evangelical Movement: Born Again

We begin where history often does — with a story. It’s October 23, 1740, and Connecticut farmer Nathan Cole has just heard urgent news: the famous preacher George Whitefield will be in Middletown in a matter of hours. Cole drops his tools, saddles his horse, and races twelve miles through a cloud of dust kicked up by thousands of others doing the same. What he experiences that day — and over the two years that follow — opens a window into one of the most important and contested movements in American history: evangelicalism.

Hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra use Cole’s diary as a launching point for exploring the deceptively simple question at the heart of this series: What is an evangelical?

Topics Covered

• The story of Nathan Cole and his encounter with George Whitefield at Middletown, CT (1740)
• George Whitefield as the first true celebrity of British America
• The Bebbington Quadrilateral — the four theological markers historians use to define evangelicalism: Conversionism, Biblicism, Crucicentrism, and Activism
• Why the “New Birth” is the most distinctive feature of evangelical identity
• The 1976 Gallup poll and Jimmy Carter’s influence on how “born again” entered mainstream American vocabulary
• The trans-denominational character of early evangelicalism — and why Whitefield crossed church lines freely
• The First Great Awakening as a largely Reformed/Calvinist phenomenon, and the difference between “New Lights” and “Old Lights”
• Whitefield’s theatrical preaching style and the role of celebrity in evangelicalism, then and now
• The “parachurch” dimension of evangelicalism — how much of the action happens outside formal church structures
• The question of whether the First Great Awakening contributed to the American Revolution (Alan Heimert’s 1966 thesis and its critics)
• Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity and evangelicalism’s relationship to popular democracy
• How historians have debated whether evangelicalism is the “center” of American religious history

Key People & Works Mentioned

• Nathan Cole — Connecticut farmer; his diary is held at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford
• George Whitefield — Anglican itinerant preacher; subject of Harry Stout’s biography The Divine Dramatist
• Jonathan Edwards — Theologian, pastor at Northampton, MA
• Gilbert Tennant — New Jersey revivalist preacher, trained at the Log College
• David Bebbington — Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Taylor & Francis, 1988)
• D. Bruce Hindmarsh — The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2005)
• Mark Noll — The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (IVP Academic, 2003)
• Nathan Hatch — The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989)
• Alan Heimert — Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1966)
• Harry Stout — The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991)
• Frank Lambert — Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton University Press, 1993)
• John Butler — His

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
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Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:11

In the early 1740s, the British American colonies, and the entire English-speaking world for that matter, experienced a religious phenomenon. An Anglican preacher named George Whitfield traveled from town to town, drawing the largest crowds the colonies had ever witnessed. Whitfield was a sensation, the first true British American celebrity. People claimed he preached as if he had been with Jesus. He had a booming yet elegant voice. Some even joked that women swooned when he said the word Mesopotamia. Whitfield preached without notes, using a dramatic, spontaneous style that was uncommon in the British world at that time. One historian called him the divine dramatist. At the center of his ministry was the new birth, a call for people to experience an instantaneous spiritual conversion. More than anything else, George Whitfield wanted people to be saved. Nathan Cole was nothing like George Whitfield. He was an ordinary farmer, spending his days harvesting grain and tending his livestock somewhere in the Connecticut River Valley. But he knew about the famous preacher. Everyone knew about him. Cole heard from Philadelphia that Whitfield drew huge crowds on Market Street and preached like one of the apostles. He read reports of people being saved in New York and New Jersey. He also knew that Whitfield had followers, spiritual seekers who traveled from town to town to hear him, men and women worried about their souls and desperate for assurance of eternal life. We might call these Whitfield groupies. Cole thus sensed that something powerful was happening in the colonies. He grew restless and wanted to be part of this religious awakening. The latest news and gossip kept coming. Neighbors told Cole that Whitfield had visited Long Island, Boston, and Northampton, Massachusetts, the parish of the renowned theologian Jonathan Edwards. Would Whitfield come to the Connecticut River Valley next? On the morning of October 23, 1740, he did. Cole was working in his field between eight and nine o'clock in the morning when a neighbor arrived with urgent news. Whitfield preached the day before in Hartford and Weathersfield, and later that morning, at 10 o'clock, he would be in nearby Middletown. Cole dropped his tool and ran home. He told his wife to prepare for the 12-mile horse ride to Middletown. He ran to his horse with all his might, fearing he might be late. Cole and his wife jumped on the horse and set off at full speed. When the horse got tired, Cole got off and ran beside his wife as she sat in the saddle. When he needed a break, he climbed back on. They did this repeatedly, determined not to waste a moment. If they kept pushing, they just might make it to Middletown in time. Cole said it felt like they were fleeing for their lives. As they got closer to the road connecting Hartford and Weathersfield to Middletown, Cole's horse surged headlong into a giant fog. At first, Cole thought the fog came from the Connecticut River. Then he heard the thunderous noise of dozens of hooves pounding the dirt road. The horses packed tightly together looked like shadows in the dust. They were covered in sweat, their mouths foaming, their breath bursting from their nostrils, he said. None of the riders stopped. They all strained ahead. Cole said that every horse seemed to go with all his might for the saving of souls. Cole guided his horse into the midst of the dusty stampede. His wife worried their clothes would be ruined. Cole kept urging his horse forward, trembling with excitement and nerves. The riders continued like this for three miles. When they finally reached Middletown's congregational meeting house, a crowd of three or four thousand people had already gathered. Cole looked toward the Connecticut River and saw ferries traveling back and forth, filled with even more people arriving to hear the most famous man in America. Their oars, Cole said, rode nimble and quick. Everything, men, horses, and boats seemed to be struggling for life. Then Whitfield appeared on the scaffolding. He was young and thin, not physically imposing. He was cross-eyed, a facial tick that many in the 18th century world believe gave him spiritual power. Awestruck by his presence, the crowd grew silent. Cole shook with fear as he stood before a man whom he believed was a messenger from God. As Whitfield preached the gospel, Cole felt pangs of conviction, a heart wound, he called it. It was as if Whitfield were speaking directly to him. Cole realized that all his efforts at goodness and righteousness were like dirty rags, and he couldn't save himself by his own good works. He thus grew terrified. What must he do to be saved from the fires of eternal damnation? For nearly two years after this experience, Nathan Cole struggled with his sense of sin and guilt. He tried to hide his misery from family and friends, but his spiritual journey drained all the joy from his life. He couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep. Then one day, as Cole walked out of his house to work in his field, he started to pray. As he walked and prayed, he had an experience that was hard to describe. He felt that God was showing him the way to salvation through Jesus Christ. Suddenly, everything became clear. He experienced God's grace and realized the simplicity of faith. And he was no longer afraid. The encounter was so overwhelming that he lay down in his field until this feeling passed. Later, Nathan Cole went inside his farmhouse and wrote everything down. Today you can find his diary at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford.

SPEAKER_03 6:52

Welcome to American Evangelicals, a history podcast, where we explore the people, ideas, and movements that have shaped evangelicalism in the United States. Hosted by historians John Fiat, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra, this series takes a deeper look at a movement that is often talked about, but not always well understood. In this opening episode, we begin with a deceptively simple question. What is an evangelical? It's a question that has sparked debate among historians, theologians, and believers for generations. And rather than settling for an easy answer, we're starting where history often does, with a story. From the fields of 18th century New England to the rise of revival culture, we'll explore how ordinary people experienced something they called the new birth, and how those experiences helped shape a movement that would grow far beyond its origins. This episode is one of a three-part introduction to evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Welcome everyone to our discussion of American Evangelicalism. It's a multi-part podcast. And what we want to accomplish in this episode and in the first three episodes, really, is we want to think about evangelicalism broadly. You know, how are we going to be defining evangelicalism in this podcast? You know, what are some of the issues related to that uh definition of evangelicalism? How should we think about uh historical dimensions of this movement, which has plays such a prominent role in uh American history? So, again, for the next three episodes, Dan and Maggie and I will be flying high at the 30,000 uh feet mark, trying to just kind of get some of these definitional issues out of the way. And then in later episodes, we'll dive in a little more deeper into some themes and other things throughout evangelical history.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

So, with that in mind, John, why did you pick the story of Nathan Cole to get us started?

SPEAKER_01 8:46

I guess I'm the 18th century person uh in this group. I've studied the Great Awakening and 18th century American evangelicalism. I've always been fascinated by this Cole diary, not just because it has things in there about conversion and people being saved and, you know, Cole kind of encountering George Whitfield, but it shows you the way in which an ordinary New England farmer can get caught up in this evangelical movement, this first great awakening that's uh pervading the British American colonies in the 18th century. It's such a fascinating piece. I think I I'm trying to remember, I think it was found some some historian, they first published it in the William and Mary Quarterly. They dug it out of uh uh randomly came upon it at the Connecticut Historical Society. And since then, biographers of Whitfield and have have used it and have focused on it. I know the historian Harry Stout uh made it a feature of his biography of uh of George Whitfield. But I think it captures several key elements of the way I think uh we want to talk about evangelicalism in this podcast, right? You have the new birth, right? The born-again experience of Nathan Cole, you have George Whitfield as kind of a celebrity figure, you have um, you know, the crowds and people crying out, what must I do to be saved? Right. You have you have this idea of an evangelicalism that clearly seems to transcend denominations and things and sort of news and the spreading of the word of uh the revivals going around. So I think all of these things are there in this story, at least in the 18th century version, right? I think so. I think the new birth is really central, I think, here. And I think it's central to the way I understand, and maybe we can debate this, right? But but I understand uh the meaning of evangelicalism. The the born-again experience is in many ways a central component.

SPEAKER_04 10:43

And maybe thinking about maybe just asking how central is it, or or what makes the way that evangelicals think about being born again distinct? You know, the the term itself comes from Jesus talking to Nicodemus, or at least that's how a lot of English speakers think of it, where Jesus explains you must be born again. Um so this is something that all Christians to some extent share, at least the that text. What about uh, and maybe this gets into like what evangelicals actually think is happening when being born again happen is taking place, but what's distinct about that for evangelicals, uh maybe different than other Protestants, even and then other Christians?

SPEAKER_01 11:24

You know, there's been a lot of discussion uh in the kind of way historians have been thinking lately about evangelicalism that kind of downplays sort of these theological principles, right? Whether it be, you know, you have the old Bebington quadrilateral, right? Which is I think it's still relevant. Maybe explain that for people. Yeah. Yeah. Um so the Bebington quadrilateral uh is associated with a historian of British evangelicalism. Uh his name is David Bebington, but it has really taken on a kind of life of its own in the States as well, about how to define evangelicals. What is an evangelical? And it's really based on certain theological principles, four of them, thus obviously a quadrilateral. Uh, the first one is uh what Bebington calls conversionism. In other words, evangelicals believe that the central moment of a Christian's life is the born-again experience, the conversion. In order to be truly saved, have eternal life, become a Christian, you must encounter God, believe in his death, burial, and resurrection for your sins, and accept that at some point in your life. You know, literally say a sinner's prayer, maybe, or something to that effect. So evangelicals are defined by conversionism, uh, perhaps in a way that other forms of Christianity are not. Uh, second, uh, in the Bebington quadrilateral is this idea of Biblicism, that the Bible is inspired, it is the word of God, and it has authority over your life. Now, Biblicism, you know, is also a characteristic of other forms of Christianity as well, but put it together with conversionism and the next two isms I'm going to talk about, you have what Bebington calls an evangelical. So, third then would be crucicentrism. Uh, and that's just a big word for saying Jesus' death on the cross paid for the sins of individuals, paid for the sins of the world, right? Jesus died for your sins. What happened on Good Friday was that Jesus took the weight of the world's sins on himself and paid the price of death so that we don't have to, right? Well, obviously we'll physically die, but we'll have eternal life. Add that to conversionism and biblicism. And then the fourth one is activism. And this is Bebington understands this in a couple of ways. One is through evangelism, evangelicals want to share their faith with others. If they have the message of salvation and eternal life, it's only natural that they will want to share that with others so that they can experience eternal life as well. So here would be an example of like Billy Graham, right, preaching the gospel, getting people saved. And then a secondary aspect of activism is just being engaged in dealing with injustice in the world, you know, reforming institutions, trying to bring Christianity to bear on all of the kind of social ills, whether it be everything from abortion to slavery to racism, you know, whatever the case might happen to be as evangelicals understand them, but there's a certain activist impulse within evangelicalism. So when you put those four things together: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism, you have a kind of theological religious definition of an evangelical. So, so, you know, the critique has been that all Christian religions, and I think I even once heard a Catholic, right, making an argument that, you know, we believe in these four things too. But I think, I think if you would pick the most important of the four that really, and in some ways that's true. That critique is true, right? You know, Catholics certainly have an understanding of conversion. But in my, at least in my view, and again, I'd love to get your feedback on this, the new birth seems to be the central component. Uh, or, or as I think I say it, I said it in the opening story, the instantaneous new birth. Now, Cole, it took two years. So, you know, this looks a little more like one of these old 17th-century Puritan conversions where it takes forever to be prepared. You'd have to prepare yourself, you have to understand the depths of your sin and so forth. But I think there's no other brand of Christianity out there that has this kind of point of salvation, you know, this kind of road to Damascus. Now, I'm sure there's other denominations out there and other forms of Christianity that could point to examples where someone saw the light and was converted, but they wouldn't be central to the story. You know, if uh evangelicals can talk about their spiritual birthday, you know, if you've heard that, you know, there's this moment when I was saved, and sometimes it's like I was six years old, or sometimes it was the more driven. I was seven. There you go. Yeah. And it's but some sometimes it's more dramatic than that, right? It's like, you know, I'm thinking of Nicky Cruz and the cross and the switchblade, right? You know, this uh gang member who gets saved under the ministry of David Wilkerson. I don't think that other Christian groups place so much prime, you know, it's it's not as important, that instantaneous new birth in the way that evangelicals think about it. So, you know, I guess that's what makes an evangelical different. You you could identify, like when evangelicals talk about their conversion, right? You know that that's an evangelical by the way they're talking about it. You know, so at least that's the way I see it. I think the Bebington quadrilateral, especially the idea of the new birth, makes evangelicalism, I'm not saying a better or less, you know, but a different form of form of Christian faith.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Well, I mean, uh just going into the root of the word, right? That idea that there's this emphasis on the good news. Good news. Um, and it's so many times when you're looking at the sources, that emphasis on spreading the good news or putting the gospel first, right? And we can look at ways that that has been um really a gift for evangelicalism and sometimes a way of setting aside other major concerns, right? Saying, well, for you know, the sake of the gospel, we won't talk about segregation or we're not going to approach slavery. Things like that um happen. But it is because of that centrality of the good news. So it does make sense that these conversions would be so central to people's stories because that's how they envision and shape their entire religious experiences around that one component. And of course, that is central to any religion. They're going to believe that they have a sense of good news, um, but it is certainly imagined differently within evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_04 18:05

I think of two things here. One is there's a really good book, it's probably 20 years old now by Bruce Heinmarsh, the historian of of early British evangelicalism. And the the title of that book is The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. And his point there is not only is the conversion usually the high point of someone's telling about their own life, but it's actually the way they interpret their whole life. It's sort of like if you think of the you know, the classic hymn Amazing Grace, I once was lost, but now and found. And there's sort of like a switch that happens. You were in the state of being lost, and now you're in the state of being found. That is very important how you tell your story, but it's also sort of how you interpret other people. Are they lost or are they found? And how you interpret society and culture and other things. So that was one thing I thought about is it's it's it's really important in the way that evangelicals understand their own lives, but also how they just interpret the world as pre or post-conversion. Um, and then the other thing, and and this this will we'll be talking about this over and over again, is because of the way that uh evangelicals and evangelicalism have been shaped by American culture and and even like popular political culture, you know, you can't get away from talking about born again without thinking about the 1970s and the polling that came out in 1976 in particular around who in America says they're born again. Um there was not a death, this was Gallup uh polling at the time. And this was during the campaign of Jimmy Carter, who was, you know, called himself an evangelical and talked about being born again. And that poll, the the polling in 1976 said that about a third of Americans claim they were born again, which is a huge, you know, it was sort of a shocking number to a lot of people. And since then we've we've sort of used that shorthand to even describe what are evangelicals. Well, they're the people who say they're born again. Uh, without defining that in any more specific way, it's sort of a self-identification. And you can imagine there's a hundred different, a thousand different ways people would actually define that if you ask them. But that's a big part of what it means to be an evangelical in contemporary culture is to identify with that born-again word, even though there's not a lot, um, perhaps for some people at least, there's not a lot of heft to that word. There's not a lot under that term, but it's still so closely associated with what we think of as evangelicals today.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Thinking back to the 18th century, one thing that strikes me, I mean, and you see this with Whitfield, you see this with the Wesley brothers, is also a separation through their conversion experience with their past religious experiences. Like they all were raised to be very religious. Um, both the Wesleys were missionaries in Georgia before their conversion experiences, right? And so you have men of the cloth, if you want to put it that way, like they're they're ministers, and yet they have not yet come to that conversion experience. And so I think that's also another part of the early evangelical story in 18th century, well, the Atlantic world, right? Because it wasn't just the American colonies that are going through this. This is a very British phenomenon as well, that they are changing their relationship between themselves and their spiritual selves, right? Like that, that there's a fundamental shift there. And that's going to cause a lot of friction with the established churches who thought they were doing just fine. Thank you very much. Uh, and uh the people that are are starting to take some of the same theological ideas that existed before, but applying them in new ways. And so I think that's also one of the things that makes evangelicalism murky is that um to your point, John, when you said that like the the Nathan Cole story shows this like ecumenicalism, like there's an interdenominational component to it, right? Whitfield, he was always a member of the Church of England, right? He never left. Uh, and that yet he's here, you know, he's at a Congregationalist thing, but like there's all these other like he refused to go by denominational lines. He would preach at where they invited him. Uh and so it wasn't a new shift to a brand new, this is the evangelical denomination, right? Which when people ask, you know, students are always asking, why is it so hard to define evangelicalism? And it's because it's kind of everywhere all at once and yet not anything too specific. Uh and then you look at, and this is why we're doing three different episodes on this, right? Because there's different ways of even defining it. So you can see the quadrilateral's usefulness, right? We need some kind of boundary, we need something to kind of judge. Yet at the same time, it does appear in very different places. Um, Dan, you brought the rise of evangelicalism by Mark Knoll. Uh, and in that, like he talks about the fact that in the series that they're laying out, they're gonna start with certain groups, but Catholic and Quakers are gonna align with evangelicals at later points. They're not really part of it in the 18th century. They'll become part of evangelicalism and sort of enter the fold and exit the fold and things. And so that's part of what makes this so difficult is that there are these very diverse ways of looking at evangelicalism. And that's kind of the fun of these first three episodes, is that we get to look at the different inlets into it.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Your point about the 18th century evangelicals, Maggie, is is really a really good one in the way in which there clearly was a distinct way of thinking about Christianity. You know, or else why would you have like the new light, old light, new side, old side debates? I mean, clearly you have people like Gilbert Tennant, this mid-Atlantic New Jersey uh preacher who's trained by his father in the log college, off the grid, if you will, from the major colleges at the time. You know, he's traveling around. He's calling out. I mean, Whitfield does some of this too, calling out unconverted ministers. Now, when he walks into these churches or these, usually he's in a field and he's because he's not allowed in the churches, Gilbert Tennant is suggesting that they're not saved. And I think the local minister is saying, like, I've been, I've been the pastor of this church for 30 years. I'm a Christian, I give the sacraments, I'm, you know, I believe one needs to have a conversion experience, but it has to happen within the bounds of the local congregation under my leadership. And suddenly this guy's coming in and saying, I'm not saved. Like, forget about all the social implications of that in 18 in an 18th-century village where the entire community is then divided between the pro-awakening and anti pro-evangelical, anti-evangelical, they probably wouldn't have called them by those terms. But there clearly is some kind of new birth movement defined by the new birth that separates these different forms of mostly reformed, in some ways, Christians. I mean, you can't say that, you know, Charles Chauncey in this Boston minister and Jonathan Edwards both embrace the sort of Bebington quadrilateral in the same way. There's a clear difference there, you know, in the 18th century context. So I've never bought into the argument that I hear certain historians making about the Bebington quadrilateral is not helpful because it defines any Christian group, right? Anyone who knows the 18th century knows it's not a historical, verifiable kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

So um just to kind of clarify for folks, because I know we fall into definitions and use our terminology, but what do you mean specifically by it being mostly reformed at this time?

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Yeah, I you know, I probably took some liberties uh by saying that, but I think the Great Awakening, the evangelical movement in the colonies is largely going to be among congregational, Presbyterian, traditional Calvinist denominations. Now, that's in the colonies. I think you mentioned Maggie the Wesleys before, who clearly reject Calvinism. And this is one of the divisions between Whitfield and Wesley, who the Wesleys, who they're good friends, right? But one is more free will, one is um Calvinist, Whitfield being the Calvinist. But I don't think you find prior to, say, 1760, a kind of Wesleyan movement until you get kind of Francis Asbury kind of starting to move through the colonies. You don't really get in the late colonial period, you don't really have a lot of kind of Wesleyan types. They're mostly like the descendants of the Puritans in New England, and they're the descendants of the Scottish, Scots-Irish Presbyterians who settle in the middle colonies, you know, for the most part. And then in the South, right, you have some Anglicans, you know, who come on board, but most of the awakening takes place among these minority groups of what the English would call dissenters, right? So you have like Samuel Davies, who's, you know, was one of the presidents of Princeton at one point, who was really the big evangelist. The Whitfield of the South was, you know, a Presbyterian who was mostly preaching to these reformed congregations. So that's what I mean by that. I don't want to, I don't want to be too strong on that, you know, but but it's I think that's just kind of true of the landscape.

SPEAKER_04 27:13

I think it's an interesting, from the perspective of today, it can seem confusing to recognize that that's the history of the first great awakening. And so we're talking like 1730s through the 17, whatever, 50s or 60s. Yeah. Um, that a lot of it is the people that are descended from Calvin and Calvinism, because we often associate today revivals and dramatic conversion stories with non-Calvinists, with Pentecostals, with uh what we'd call the holiness movement, or with like Methodists and Wesleyan branches. And those definitely come, but but when we get to the first Great Awakening, it's it's really a debate within the Reformed or Calvinist world about these questions of conversion, of predestination, of these things that are sort of like issues within within that um group. So yeah, it's a it's a it's a different world where we mentioned a few minutes ago the old lights and the new lights. And so these are like the two camps that are interpreting the revivals, the old lights being more skeptical of them and the new lights being more embracing of them. And both of those camps are largely coming out of the same theological tradition. That's part of the the story of evangelicalism as we track it through is sort of how these influences that go all the way back to the Reformation, some even before, play out in in in different sort of streams of what we still all call evangelical.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

There's so many things there, Dan. Well, first of all, just a plug, uh the the the Wesleyan holiness crowd is coming, right? Stay tuned for future episodes.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

I mean, that I hear that from my students a lot. This real confusion over the first Great Awakening, then what becomes the second great awakening, because they're both known for their like immense emotionalism. And students who hear congregationalists and know that connection to Puritans can't imagine Puritans being emotional. Like it just there's like this block there that was like, oh no, no, these are the the churches that we don't affiliate with this kind of emotionalism. Baptists and Methodists with the second great awakening makes a little bit more sense. We can get into that. That seems to be a easier line to pull through. But when you look at what's going on with Whitfield, that's what the Cole story does so well, right? Is you see this intense emotion. And it was astonishing. I mean, just for those who don't know much about Whitfield, I mean, he pulled in crowds of thousands upon thousands of people, so much so that Benjamin Franklin did his little experiment because he didn't believe the claims, right? Because Whitfield gets really good at advertising and he publicizes how many people show up to his provider.

SPEAKER_01 29:31

Just a quick thing on that. Yeah. There was you can you can Google this somewhere. Um, but there was like an NYU uh modern day, like 21st century NYU audiology class study that went to Market Street in Philadelphia, where Franklin did that experiment and used like, I don't know, some kind of sound technology and concluded that Franklin was almost exactly right in the amount in the crowd that he estimated being there in Philadelphia that day. They estimated how, you know, I don't know how they figured out how loud Whitfield's voice was, but it's a legitimate academic study, you know. Oh, that's pretty fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

Yeah, because I mean Franklin, you know, he's he's that scientist, scientific-minded person. He talks about how many steps he walked, you know, and he's like, all right, I'm you know, I looked at and I mapped it out using I always I always picture him going like that that commercial, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Can you hear me now? Exactly, right? Can you hear me now?

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Is this possible? Um, yeah, so I think Franklin's estimate was 30,000. He's like, Yeah, he could talk to 30,000 people in this space. I mean, that's mind-blowing, right? And when you you know about colonial America, and I think that's also what this Cole story shows, is it took effort to really show up to a Whitfield event. It really is an astounding cultural moment when you have the difficulty of travel, the fact that you had so much work to do at home. Um, these weren't towns of 30,000 people, right? They came from afar. The impact that the Great Awakening had culturally on America is also, I think, very profound. Um, you can't read a book on the American Revolution without someone mentioning, you know, oh yes, uh, was it Herman Husband of the North Carolina regulators? Like he was changed by the Great Awakening and left his elite background to join the common people in North Carolina. Um, it changed so much. And so I think another thing that a lot of students that I've taught in kind of general survey classes struggle with is that evangelicalism is so mainstream here, they can't imagine it changing culture. But it truly did in this moment. And so I think that's another reason that the Cole story works so well and kind of getting us off the ground talking to everything about that.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Also, gets at Dan, your point about the Calvinist revival, right? Because this is clearly a reformed Calvinist experience he has, right? It takes him two years after he's moved at the event to kind of wrestle with his sin, right? Come to the fact of how depraved he finally is before the spirit, you know, the old Puritans had this kind of morphology of conversion. It was associated with this theologian named Perkins, I think it was William Perkins, who said, you know, there's five steps. And a lot of what Cole goes through, at least as he describes it over those two years, is a very Calvinist way of thinking about a conversion. There is still some of that old Puritan conversion narrative that may not be as instantaneous as, say, the 19th century, where it's like, you know, you're at a Charles Finney event and it's like, come forward, you're saved, right? You know, so it is a kind of transition period. But the other thing you brought up, Maggie, is celebrity, right? You know, I think I called him a rock star in the story. I can't remember that if I did. Now, again, we're moving beyond the kind of theological definition here, which is which is fine. I think there are these other factors, these cultural factors involved, right, with evangelicalism that, you know, I would in no way, by embracing the Bebington quadrilateral, like reject or say it's just theology, right? So, you know, there's this long history, as I think we'll see in this podcast series of um evangelicals being taken in by powerful, charismatic figures, you know, like Whitfield. I mentioned in the story, you know, he had a facial tick. He was, you know, what today we would say cross-eyed, which gave in the 18th century world, a larger religious kind of world, people with physical disabilities or or strange appearances have spiritual power because God doesn't use the handsome or the beautiful, right? God uses the lowly, right? So he must, God must be with Whitfield. The spirit must be with him because he looks that way. And, you know, all these kinds of things that are attached to the person of Whitfield, his theater training. Harry Stout, the historian, calls him the divine dramatist. I see this as a thread, you know, moving through televangelists, you know, all this kind of stuff, moving through evangelicalism, which I think this Cole story also captures, as you pointed out, Maggie.

SPEAKER_04 33:55

I think the celebrity, uh, I mean, there's just the fact of the celebrity that's important to trace all the way up to today.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:02

There's also, though, celebrity um is a part of, I think, evangelicalism that also includes the open air preaching that uh Whitfield was known for, which is that there's a lot of um extra church activity in evangelicalism. Yes. If you think that uh parachurch, parachurch or extra ecclesial, if you want to use a bigger word, that is really, in some ways, at least in certain times and places, as actually where the main action's happening. It's actually not in the church as proper. It's in the parachurch, it's in the revival circuits, it's in the print world. No religious tradition, no Christian tradition has everything right within the church. I think evangelicalism is is sort of known for this. Um sometimes that's in in theological terms, uh, evangelicals are criticized for having what we call like a low, a low view of the church or a low ecclesiology, meaning it's pretty informal. There's things that other Christian traditions have that really have to happen in the church, like the Eucharist or something like that. Evangelicals are the ones that are a little more squishy on that stuff, but there's also this sense that the church is just part of a much bigger ecosystem or infrastructure of how the religion is practiced. And I think there's sort of novelties happening in the 18th century around open air preaching. I know Wesley was sort of controversial in in the UK as well for introducing open air preaching because it seemed like this is a different power center from the pastor or the priest in the church. Suddenly your your congregants are now going to this open air thing where this guy's saying something that's a little different than what you're saying in your church, and it it's not just an interesting new practice, it's actually like a another way of being a Christian. Um, and then the celebrity is another part of this, which is disconnected from church proper. And it's much more about advertising, about print, about coming to see this, you know, amazing attraction that is a form of entertainment, you could say, at some level. Anyway, that's all to say that that that's a really interesting, really rich part of evangelicalism is actually the stuff happening outside of the formal church structures.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

And I think too, that's one of the reasons why it flourished so much in the American colonies, is that there wasn't necessarily the structures built to have established churches in a lot of places. I mean, this is a little bit more second-grade awakening stuff. The fact that, like, that push westward, there simply weren't enough seminaries to actually get preachers in pulpits. And so you did have to have itinerant kind of circuits. And that fits so well with this evangelical model that people like would go to it, right? And you would trap, you'd be a traveling pastor. And now some historians have linked that with an anti-intellectual component to American evangelicalism, which is also something that we can kind of talk about, and I'm sure we will talk about in future episodes. This idea that there's a sometimes suspicious attitude towards seminaries or people with too many credentials. It's like, oh, you've spent too much time thinking about this and not enough time doing it, or you're not really listening to the spirit, you're listening to books, right? I definitely grew up hearing some sermons that said, you know, the best thing that could ever happen to American Christianity is if every Christian bookstore burned down.

unknown 37:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Right? Like that kind of sentiment that all you need is the Bible and you hear it from someone, but you know, it is about that personal uh relationship.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

This was the whole the whole debate among old light, new light, and old side, new side, right? I I talked about the law college before, kind of unincredited unaccredited little Bible school, right? Run by William Tennant. Or you had this thing in New London, Connecticut called the Shepherd's Tent. It was where the radical evangelist in the 18th century, James Davenport, studied. And it was a complete rejection of the kind of intellectualism of the Harvard-trained or Yale-trained minister. So I think part of that bucking of the kind of trained preacher, right? You just need the Holy Spirit, right? And this, again, like you said, Maggie, this blossoms in the in the 19th century, right? But it's even present in the 18th century with these alternative ways of training, if you can call it that. And it also suggests that a lot of people might be listening to this. Or I'm also, you know, you brought up your students, Maggie. I think of my students too. The new lights, the evangelicals, actually in the 18th century were, for lack of, I hate to throw this term out because it's a loaded term today, but they were progressives, right? They were the ones who were challenging the tradition. They were challenging the authority of the minister. They were saying there's something more than what you're doing. I know this is the way we've done it for 50 years or 100 years here in America or in the British Atlantic world, but now we're offering a new way of thinking about religion. You know, progressive, I mean then in the sense that they're they're challenging every part of the traditional, not only congregation, congregational life, but also communities, right? You know, I used to travel to Philadelphia a lot when I lived in Pennsylvania. And there's this little town there called Noshaminy, Pennsylvania. It's outside of Philadelphia, it's in Bucks County. And there's still literally two churches almost across the street from each other that go back to the 18th century. One is the new light, one is the old light. And you know, you just imagine what that community, which was just a you know, village of probably at the most a thousand, two thousand, you know, how that divided that to quote a 1960 civil rights thing, right? The outside agitators were the evangelicals kind of coming in and disrupting things.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

And they were giving new opportunities to certain groups too. I mean, I more so in the second great awakening, but the first great awakening also women were more involved. They were more outspoken, more um able to show like an emotional connection to spirituality. It's one of the things the old lights criticized about the new lights was the fact that like the women were too vocal and too involved in this.

SPEAKER_01 39:45

Yeah, and and you know, you could talk about Whitfield too. I think we'll get to this in a future episode, right? But you had many of these evangelicals, their progressivism was limited in the sense that they, you know, they were the first people to preach to the enslaved populations in the South. But, you know, if you take Whitfield as an example, he clearly he owned slaves, right? They weren't abolitionists by any means. I mean, really, there's no one really who's much of an abolitionist except a handful of Quakers in 1730, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:15

Thinking about um, John, what you were just saying about the the way that in this period, sort of the evangelicals were the, if progressive is the right term, I think of someone that I know a little more about in the 20th century. Um, he was the founder of the Evangelical Free Church. He was the first president of the Evangelical Free Church, named Arnold Olson.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:33

Evangelical Free Church is a is a as its name. It it's a it's a church that broke away from the state churches in in Scandinavian countries, and then the immigrants uh left to North America. And so he he would often talk about how uh the free churches were on the what he called the left wing of the Reformation. And what he wanted to do by that is differentiate between what is often called the magisterial Protestant tradition. So this would be like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and the churches that directly come, Lutherans, Presbyterians, so forth. And then the left wing to the left of that are the ones who are even uh sort of gonna go more radical. And they often, someone like Olson would say, like, the the original reformers didn't go far enough. Like they kept too much of the tradition. Some of that's the theology, some of that's the state church collaboration, some of it's the politics. And so the people to the further, you know, further left, you can think of real further left, sort of like the Anabaptists or someone. That's where Olson placed himself. I think he'd be a pretty typical 20th century, you know, evangelical who would put himself like that. But you can think of there's a in a weird way that doesn't sort of comport to how we talk about evangelicals in the politics today, but there's a there's a left-wing uh radicalism to the way that a lot of revivalist type Christians approach their religion. They want to rethink things, they want to get rid of what they consider sort of the accretions of the centuries, um dead orthodoxy. Yeah, and often that's directly the Catholics, so there's a strong anti-Catholicism in in evangelicalism for most, you know, most of the last 250 years. And then there's uh also an unwillingness, though as Whitfield's an example, it doesn't always go there and even even mostly go there, to question some basic social conventions as well, whether it's around gender or race. Many of the sort of abolitionists during uh early 19th century, so we're talking in the lead up to the Civil War, would have come out of the same sort of tradition. Now that's not everybody, that's not even most people, but that is a source of it, is this willingness to question uh received tradition. And it's also what other Christians don't like about the evangelicals is they seem to be um using their their own sort of authority um to question things that have or others seem to be settled uh settled issues. So it's an interesting dynamic that plays with some of the ways we talk about conservative and liberal in contemporary politics, but don't necessarily map on to the history as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

And again, I think that does go back to one of the things that's in Beppington's quadrilateral, which is that biblicism, right? That idea that like if the if the Bible is the final authority, that is an authority that you can draw from as an individual and take a stance that is pretty radical.

SPEAKER_02 43:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

Right. And you have a confidence in it that can withstand a lot of the social pressure that under older systems tradition like would collapse, right? So yeah, there's a link there for sure.

SPEAKER_01 43:24

The idea of Biblicism, though, it's I mean, I know we're talking about it in a kind of, because I brought this up, a kind of progressive radical way, right? But it's it's a a sort of Protestant biblicism, right? Where you know you could have evangelicals in the early 19th century South who are also reading the Bible, right, individualistically and coming up with the idea that you know slavery is okay, or you know, they're using it to defend the status quo. Right. So, I mean, that's much more of a 19th century thing. I think if his there's again, Harry Stout, if he's right in the subtitle. Of his book on Whitfield, where he says the first great awakening is the, I'm not going to get it exactly right, but I think it the the birth of modern evangelicalism, right? I think it is fair to say that it's it is born out of a kind of very for the 18th century, progressive, radical, challenging the status quo kind of thing. Now, again, if we want to sort of be ahistorical about it, and I don't want to, I don't wanna um I don't want to use that as a bad thing, but if you want to say, you know, well, Whitfield had slaves or whatever, that's something we have to point out. But the question would be, would be like abolition even be an option for him in the 18th century? That doesn't take him off the hook by any means. But, you know, actually preaching to slaves was as progressive as you could get back then. The the that's more of a historical claim than an ethical or or theological claim.

SPEAKER_04 44:51

Aaron Powell There's one debate among historians at least that spills out into the broader conversation sometimes around what we're talking about, which is the connection of the revivals in the 1730s uh to the 1750s and then the American Revolution. Um get me started on this thing. Well, I want to get you started a little. Um, but it's an interesting question. I think it gets it to the heart of a lot of the ways Americans have thought about the relationship of religion and politics ever since. Yeah, John, if you if you can just sketch the sort of how have under how have historians understood that relationship. I know there have been promoters and skeptics, but then and then where do you land on that?

SPEAKER_01 45:28

It really started in in in 1966 when a a uh I want to say it was at Harvard, um actually English professor, uh Alan Hymer Heemer, wrote, wrote a book called Religion in the American Mind. And what he argued was that the new lights, new sides, the evangelicals, as we're calling them, that were involved in the first great awakening, they were the ones who were in 1770, 1760, late 1760s and up to 1776, were the revolutionaries. And the old sides, because of their tradition, their conservatism, this is a nice fit with what we were just talking about, they did not support the American Revolution. And that was his argument. He drew a through line between the revivals and um and 1776. And and you see Hemert's influence in a lot of contemporary historians. You know, there's a biography of George Whitfield that's titled Spiritual Founding Father, right? Which seems to have Heimert's thesis written all over it. Uh Harry Stat, who I've now mentioned a couple of times, has completely bought into Heimert's thesis. But in the 80s, it came under severe attack by a historian named John Butler who suggested that, you know, there was no real connection whatsoever. And another Princeton historian named John Murrin, who suggested that there was no real connection whatsoever between the two events. Uh, Murrin has this famous piece in reviews of American history where he says um it's called No Revolution, No Awakening question mark, in which it's a really compelling case that Heemert was very, you know. I mean, Charles Chauncey, an old side, was a, you know, a revolutionary. I mean, you know, he points out how all of these old siders were revolutionaries. There was no connection particularly between evangelical, the new side born-again crowd, and this. So it was, I want to say largely debunked, but there's still people, very good historians who still kind of subtly, even people like Noel and Marsden who have subtly, uh subtly kind of embraced this idea, although not as overtly, right? They they realize that Hemer got a lot of things wrong. You know, I don't know how much you want to, how much we should go into this, uh, but but you hear now, I wrote a piece in Commonwealth a few years ago. You see now many modern day conservative evangelicals, what I call MAGA evangelicals, who are calling for, you know, the only way to save this country is through a spiritual revival. Look what happened in the Great Awakening. They're invoking this historiography. They don't even, I don't think they even know that they've never read any of these people, right? But they're invoking this idea that somewhere along the way, and I have a hunch who who led them to this, they believe that the Great Awakening caused the revolution. And thus, if we have a Great Awakening today, we will have another freedom will be restored, or you know, free, you know, it's all politically charged. But they're tapping into that.

SPEAKER_04 48:21

So can we can we separate because that that's a specific connection between the first Great Awakening and the revolution, that you could or you know, depending on how you read the evidence, you could agree or not. Is there a deeper or wider, I'm not sure which metaphor is better, um, sense of the relationship between evangelicalism and popular democracy? And and not in a I don't mean it in a pro or anti-democracy way necessarily. I'm just because I'm thinking also about like, you know, when we get to the second weight awakening, uh, there's the famous book by Nathan Hatch about the democratization of American Christianity. And there he's talking about this sense of there's a more, there's a stronger egalitarian spirit in the Second Great Awakening that you can see connecting to arguments for, you know, women's rights and and in some cases abolition, uh abolition of slavery and things. So he's making a connection of sorts there between the way evangelicals practice their religion and sort of democratizing uh movements. So I know if you say that too much in certain settings, then you get roped up into politics about today and stuff. But is that something we I don't know, what do people think about that that connection?

SPEAKER_01 49:26

Well, I think one thing you have to be careful with when you talk the way you're you just explained this, and I'm not rejecting what you said, because I think there's a lot of truth to it, and I think Hatch is right, but uh there's a danger when you try to connect the the Great Awakening or evangelicalism to some political movement. Not that you shouldn't do it, but the danger is you start then to perceive, and this gets back to our whole definitional question about the Bebing to quadrilateral and theology, right? And the theological definition, you start taking what was meant to be, and this is my beef with the with the Great Awakening to the revolution argument, you take what was meant to be a spiritual movement, and suddenly now its only significant purpose was not that it changed people's lives or that they got saved or that they're converted and their life has now become better. It turns these revivals into little more than a political movement. Now, having said that, I think there's a certain egalitarianism within the, you know, if you can if you make the argument that the American Revolution was sort of, as certain kinds of historians that we often call neo-progressives say, are like, you know, was all about egalitarianism and equality, like the French Revolution, right? Uh I'm not sure I buy that argument that the egalitarianism, like I don't see the American Revolution as a particularly egalitarian revolution. So now when you move to the early 19th century, I think times have changed, right? And America's becoming more democratic, as Hatch argues in the democratization of American evangelicalism. And there, I think evangelicalism, democracy, consumer culture, market economies, all these things, they're all of a mix. It's sometimes hard to pull them all apart. Right. You know, like you have Lawrence Moore's book, Selling Religion, you know, and you have mark the marketplace of religion, the consumer, you know, you see church shopping for the first time. You see people making choices in the ballot booth, you see people making choices to free will to get saved. Right. You know, I'm gonna go forward, right? As opposed to I'm just sitting here and the spirit's gonna hit me. That's a different era, which I hope we'll have time to explore in this series. Right.

SPEAKER_00 51:36

I do think, like, in just thinking about connections, like they do come up, but I wouldn't say it's this wide sweeping, we can explain patriots and loyalists by looking at the Great Awakening. Like it's just things don't get divided that easily. But we can look at things that the Great Awakening facilitated, willingness to challenge authority, for example, or willingness to set aside elitism for some folks. Like I brought up the North Carolina regulators, like uh that movement was all about pushing back against the royal governor's pressures on not moving westward, right? And there was a, you know, a a more, I don't know, they were more acculturated to those kinds of challenges because of the Great Awakening. Um, and another thing, too, that we've been talking about is just the changing Atlantic world and the way that, in a way, the Great Awakening did somewhat bring the colonies together. We talk a lot about uh the French and Indian War. I like to call it the Great War for Empire. Can't remember which historian made that case, but I buy it. Like that brought the colonies together, but so did things like the Great Awakening and reading the same sermons and the advertisement, like um Whitfield, I'm pretty sure it's the phrases um peddler and divinity.

SPEAKER_01 52:45

Peddler, yeah, it's Frank Lambert, the title of Frank Lambert's biography.

SPEAKER_00 52:49

Yeah, um, and I think it comes from an actual like legislative uh component where they're like, do we actually challenge the fact that they're peddling religion um and during the Great Awakening? And and the fact that there's and it's not mass culture to the way that we think of it at all, right? Like this is still colonial America. You're getting around on a horse, right? You're not leaving your town. Like all of these things that we really have to be careful with with talking about. But the fact that they can get sermons from Whitfield before Whitfield is there, and that people in Britain have read Edwards, um, all of those are parts of the dynamics that certainly led to revolutionary sentiment spreading. Um, and so there are links there that are much more cultural than religious. And I would say the spiritually revived were the ones that were willing to stand up against Parliament.

SPEAKER_01 53:39

I guess the way I would see it, Maggie, is you're definitely right. I think Whitfield's a product of a consumer revolution, right? Of goods. You know, just like people are getting like Wedgewood China for the first time in the 1740s. Like Whitfield is using what today we would call the media. He's got advancement. He takes out ads in the newspaper, like this this network of communications and so forth. The question, I guess, is and maybe you agree or disagree with this. I'm I'm thinking in the in your framing of the Atlantic world here, right? To me, this is a transatlantic revival because Whitfield is not just in the 13 colonies, you so-called uniting them. He's uniting, he's he's shrinking and metaphorically shrinking the Atlantic, making the colonies much more ensconced within this transatlantic revivalist movement. That's where the unity for me is, rather than in looking back from the revolution and saying this is what got them all together. You can compare the unity around Whitfield's sermons and so forth, which I don't deny. It's certainly true in the colonies. You know, Ben Franklin tried to unite the colonies in 1754 at the Albany Congress, and it just was it was a disaster. I would look at it more transatlantic. That would be at least my critique of this kind of Heimart thesis as it's employed today. I do think, though, you're right in the sense that um Noel and Marsden and others who are writing who who embrace Heimart, they would talk about it in terms of the cultural, you know. I think they would agree with you on that sense. And I think they're probably a little bit right too.

SPEAKER_04 55:19

One thing we can talk about, and Maggie mentioned it early on with her students and how they have a hard time imagining how evangelicalism could be disruptive or sort of not the mainstream version, is actually how uh historians have thought about evangelicalism in relation to American Christianity. And for those not in the know of the historiography, uh, which is most people, uh, that's actually been an ongoing conversation, is how central to American religion is evangelicalism versus how much of it should we think of it as more of a fringe? And sort of what do you put at the center of the story? Is it the denominations that we now call the mainline uh denominations? Even that term implies something about them being central. Is it actually there is no center, it's just a lot of pluralism and diversity? Or as uh a bunch of historians have sort of argued or assumed in the last few generations, it's actually revivalistic Christianity, Protestant Christianity that we call evangelicalism. And I was in preparing for this, I was going back and I looked at one of these key essays you get assigned in grad school uh still by the historian Henry May, and it's from 1964 in the American Historical Review, which is sort of like the most important journal in the field of American history. So uh not American history, I guess like history, because it's it's just called the American Historical Review, it's all history. It was called the recovery of American Religious History in 1964. And what he was saying in all the way back then was that the that there had been a move in his lifetime, you know, in his career to make religion much more central to how we talk about all of American history, but then within religious history, that the type of religion that be that was central was basically from the Puritans to the revivalists type religion. And you can think of he mentions people like Perry Miller, who in the 1930s is sort of pulling up the Puritans from the dustbin and and in some ways making, you know, oh we'll take it way too far, probably, than what Miller would intend, but sort of making the Puritans as like the core of what it means to be American. They're the original, you know, the pilgrims in Plymouth Rock and so forth. But there's there are a lot of other scholars, um, Timothy Timothy Smith would be one that was looking at revivalism in the 50s, and basically saying, no, this is like the main story. The main story are basic, you know, white evangel what we call evangelical revivalist type people. May saying that in the 60s, and by the 70s and 80s, we have the people we've mentioned a lot here, Mark Knoll and Nathan Hatch and George Marsden really making that claim, saying, like, this is actually, if you want to study American religious history, you have to study. You have to at least know about evangelicals. There's a lot of other groups that we don't say that about, and we'd see them as more of as um not central. I don't want to say marginal, but just not central to the story. Um, I wonder what we make of that move. I mean, we all study evangelicals, so we might be predisposed to say, yeah, of course, like you know, we're we're on center stage. But I know that's been a controversial view, certainly in more recent years, where uh a lot of historians, even some trained by the Mark Noel and George Marson and others, have said, actually, that's you know, that that's a blinkered reading uh of the past. It's almost self-serving in some ways. It makes evangelicals get to be the center of attention, whether for good or ill. But uh anyway, that that's a debate now. I I wonder if either you have thoughts about that.

SPEAKER_00 58:44

I mean, I think it really depends on what type of story you're telling. If you're looking at the relationship between religion and politics, um, evangelicals are often ones that either are demanding a seat at the table or have the central seat at the table. But if you're looking at um like grassroots activism in the civil rights movement, evangelicals aren't necessarily going to be the center of that story. And so it does depend on the perspective and the time as well, like where you're looking at, because the mainline churches that we would identify today, a lot of them had active evangelical components in the 18th and early 19th century. So it again, this is where we get into the this is why historians love to fight about how we define evangelicalism. And if you find someone who's an 18th century historian versus a 20th century historian, we might choose different definitions to serve our purposes because it's like we also have to justify who's part of our story. And so we have to come up with our own kind of boundaries around that, and that's part of what is the fun of trying to define evangelicalism. I think that there is something to making the claim that evangelicals like ourselves, right, who are somewhat within the fold studying our own traditions. Um, we like to put the evangelicals we identify with at as the center of the story, right? There's a self-identification there that I think is helpful. I don't know necessarily whether that's like problematic in the sense that it is good to have people who are the so-called insiders telling these stories because there's stuff we'll pick up on. But I do like that in this field we do have now more people that are coming in and starting to like point out the ways that that has put shadows, another part of history, right? There's a writer whose name escapes me right now, but she once said that every strength has a shadow. I think that's so true in the writing of history, right? Like you can have really strong histories that tell amazing stories, but they have overshadowed something else. I think that might be true when we look at religious history and the emphasis on evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:55

I think there have been non-evangelical historians who do not claim evangelical faith, who have made this exact same point. You know, um you know, uh uh I mentioned John Butler before. There was this there was this I don't think he ever published it. It was an uncirculated paper that went around to everybody everybody read it called Born Again History, right? And he took on this idea that you know the evangelicals are in a position Mars to Noll, these kinds of historians are in a position of power, they're well funded, and thus they get to they they get to shape the narratives. The point about the point about time, back to the original question, the point about time that you mentioned, I think is important, right? I have a hard time arguing that against the idea. There's been some who push back, but I have a hard time arguing you know, the early 19th century, during the period of the so-called Second Great Awakening, or the from 1800 to say the Civil War, evangelicals are the dominant form of Christianity. You know, there's been people like Amanda Porterfield and uh I can't remember his first name, uh what is it? Modern John Modern. You know, and others who have challenged this notion. There's others who pointed to like there's been good work uh by Chris Grasso and others on like deism and skepticism and all of this in the early 19th century. But they I think they're friend its fringe in that period. I think after the Civil War, right, with you know the fundamentalist modernist controversy, the mod, you know, I think it gets much more the story gets much more complicated. I don't know if I would and immigration and other immigration, urbanization, yeah. I wouldn't even know how to answer those questions in the present. Well, this was a great discussion. So many things to think about. This is only episode one. We, you know, have many more to come. Stay with us. But I think the some of the big takeaways, at least as I'm hearing the discussion, um, I think we we are all in agreement that, you know, we don't want to throw out the theological Bebington quadrilateral kind of definition of evangelicalism. We may want to nuance it. We may want to put it alongside other ways of thinking about evangelicalism, but but I think uh, you know, the new births is central as the Nathan Cole story kind of plays out with the new birth being central, but also a lot of good discussion, kind of, I think, about evangelical celebrity, about evangelical uh the way they turn to these uh charismatic figures, the transdenominational dimension, if that's the word, of evangelicalism, right? It's not bound. Uh, I really like the discussion about, you know, the sort of radical or progressive nature of evangelicalism, challenging, always challenging, at least in the 18th century, right? Challenging sort of tradition. So um, again, a lot to think about. And again, what really excites me is a lot of these themes will be coming back and we'll dig a lot deeper into them into uh future episodes. But uh again, these this is the first of three episodes in which uh before we dig deep, we want to kind of just talk about together about the definition of evangelicalism. How are we defining it? How are we thinking about it? Just get some things out on the table, right, through some through some stories here. Speaking of stories, in episode two, uh, we're gonna hear a story from Dan Hummel. Dan, tell us, give us a teaser.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:28

Right. So we're we're gonna jump ahead uh over a century into the 1870s, and we're gonna look at a power couple, going back to the celebrity theme, of Robert Pearsol Smith and Hannah Whitelesmith, who for just a few years became household names. Um, and they represent both a some of the themes we've talked about. You'll see those themes picking up in their personal stories and what they're talking about as they become these sort of celebrity preachers that go around Europe and the U.S. talking about a new type of holiness uh called the higher life. But we'll also see those same themes in their own personal stories as well. So that'll open up a whole another conversation, moving away a bit from focusing in on born again or conversion and more to questions of holiness and living and how central those are, what we mean by evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:17

Thanks for listening to American Evangelicals, a history podcast. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's next. And if this episode sparked your curiosity, consider sharing it with someone who wants a deeper, more nuanced understanding of evangelical history. Until next time, thanks for listening.