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
Defining the American Evangelical Movement: Spirituality and Practice
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In Episode 1, we explored what it means to become an evangelical — the new birth, the conversion experience that George Whitefield and the First Great Awakening placed at the center of Protestant identity. But Episode 2 presses deeper. Conversion is the beginning, not the destination. So what happens next? What does it actually look like to live the Christian life — to become holy, to grow in faith, to be transformed from the inside out?
To get at that, the hosts dive into a fascinating 19th-century story: the meteoric rise — and spectacular fall — of Robert Piersall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, a husband-and-wife duo from Pennsylvania who became transatlantic religious celebrities in the 1870s by promoting what they called the Higher Christian Life. Their story takes us from an elegant estate in Hampshire, England to the inaugural Keswick Convention, from packed revival halls in Paris and Berlin to a private room, a locked door, and the scandal that would end Robert's ministry overnight.
Hannah's story is even more interesting than her husband's. A Quaker by background who has been called both an "orthodox heretic" and a "rational mystic," she became one of the most widely-read religious writers of the 19th century. Her book, The Christian Secret of a Happy Life (1875), became an international bestseller — and its influence reaches all the way to Sarah Young's Jesus Calling, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 21st century. The Smiths' ideas outlasted their reputations by more than a century.
But this episode is about much more than one couple. Using the Smiths as a lens, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra open up a series of genuinely contested questions about American evangelicalism: What is the real relationship between the Calvinist and Wesleyan traditions? The dominant historiography traces evangelicalism through Reformed theology — Princeton, Warfield, Machen — but historians like Donald Dayton argue that the Wesleyan holiness movement has been systematically underweighted. What role have women played in evangelical life and leadership? The holiness movement created more room for women teachers than most evangelical traditions — not because it was egalitarian, but because charisma and gifts were not, in Wesleyan theology, coded by gender. Yet nearly all these women ministered in the shadow of their husbands. When Robert's scandal broke, Hannah's platform collapsed with it. Why does evangelicalism seem so susceptible to scandal? The hosts identify the structural vulnerabilities: the celebrity preacher model, itinerant ministry far from local accountability, high moral rhetoric, and deep decentralization. And perhaps most intriguingly: how did evangelical spirituality shade into what we now call the self-help genre? Dan Hummel traces the surprising overlap between Higher Life teaching and the positive thought tradition running from Emerson through Dale Carnegie to Oprah.
This is a rich, wide-ranging conversation that reshapes how you might think about evangelical history — and about the millions of people who, across nearly two centuries, have been trying to figure out what it means, in practice, to live a holy life.
Hosts:
JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University
MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College
DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.
Find out more about our work:
Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour
Edited by Dave Conour
In the summer of 1874, in the opulent hills of Hampshire in southern England, a quiet revolution in evangelical Christianity began that would have a profound effect across the Atlantic in the United States. The instigators of this quiet revolution were themselves American, a power couple of American holiness teachings, Robert Purcil Smith and Hannah Whitelesmith. They were invited to the estate of William Cowper Temple, later first Baron Temple Mount, a wealthy Quaker and liberal politician with evangelical leanings. At his Broadlands Park estate, he had planned, with the help of like-minded Anglicans, a week-long gathering on what was being called the higher Christian life. The Smiths had, for a short moment, cornered the market on a certain popular formulation of what it meant to be a higher Christian. The Smiths taught of a divinely intended pairing of joy and piety that called for renewed Christian commitment, resembling what Hannah called the happy carelessness of childhood. Since 1872, the Smiths were touring Great Britain, appealing with a message blending Pennsylvania backwoods religious fervor and New York's burned over district, shaped by anxious confessions and revivals. At Broadlands, these elements merged into a more refined setting. Their son recalled the gathering lacked the wild phenomena of American camp meetings, which my mother didn't support, and I don't remember aristocrats foaming or rolling in ecstasy on those Hampshire lawns. Broadlands aimed to appeal to Victorian sensibilities of a select 100 attendees, with meetings typically held beside the river under beech trees. Activities included reading scriptures, short addresses, prayer, acts of faith, silent waiting, and discussions on personal grace. Deeper talks took place in secluded woods, with participants praying alone, studying the Bible, and discussing their faith passionately with each other. This environment fostered lifelong commitments to this form of holiness. What was this holiness? The Smiths were in their 30s when they first read and then became devotees of William Boardman's The Higher Christian Life, the book whose title coined The Higher Life, 1858. Boardman, an Ohio Valley farmer-turned pastor with interest in faith healing, positive thought, and more radical teachings, wrote his transatlantic bestseller to offer, in his words, knowledge as really reliable and true that there is actually a sunny side of the Christian life. He was distraught that much of the division in Christendom was over doctrines of salvation and sanctification. He countered that they all boiled down to a quest for a higher plane of existence, guided by the Holy Spirit. His summary was that the spiritual experience is the same, even if the theories are different. As enthusiasts of Boardman's basic message, Hannah and Robert were, in their eclectic religious influences, something of Boardman's ideal audience. The Smiths had parents from or had spent stints in, Presbyterian, Quaker, Plymouth Brethren, and Methodist churches. Hannah whose fame and influence was longer lasting than Robert's, has been called an Orthodox heretic by one historian, and a rational mystic by another. The labels point to the core tension at the heart of her spirituality, which by the 1870s had spread rapidly and lacked a formal theological home. She taught that Christian living meant obtaining power through surrender and responding to a free gift, God's grace, through discipline. Happiness would follow. She delivered this message most effectively in her own international bestseller, The Christian Secret of a Happy Life, which would come out in 1875. In the UK, influenced by the Smiths, this teaching blended with British elements and became known as Keswick Holiness, named after the English resort town where an annual gathering was held based on teachings from figures like the Smiths. The message was spreading. In Paris, Switzerland, and Berlin, Robert spoke to thousands about the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Dwight Moody, a leading American revivalist, played a key role among converts to the Smith's higher Christian life. His extensive network popularized higher life teachings across America and continues today. Moody met the Smiths in the UK during his own tour of Britain from 1873 to 1875, where he learned about the Smith's teachings and met with them personally. The timing was fortunate. The teachings were not systematic, yet they contained some core themes. Robert said they started with renunciation of sin, both of evil and doubtful acts. Sin identification involved thorough confession of wickedness, both privately and publicly. This fostered dependence on God and the cross, inspiring a desire to be filled with the Spirit and to be crucified with Christ, so Christ could live in place of the old self, echoing Bible verses in Romans and Galatians. The Smith's European tour, called a triumphant journey by one historian, didn't end in triumph. It ended in disaster. Anticipation was high for the June 1875 inaugural Keswick Convention, which would feature the Smiths. However, public allegations arose that Robert, during his European tour, had met a young American woman, a writer, in his locked room. Both Robert and the woman agreed that they held hands and kissed, but Robert claimed no sexual intent. He claimed he saw her more as a spiritual daughter. Yet this claim only deepened suspicion. Rumor spread that he promoted a controversial holy kisses doctrine, encouraging physical kisses among Christians as a sign of spiritual power, a practice warned against by leading American Christians such as Jonathan Edwards over a century earlier. The Smith's teachings soon came under scrutiny, and a later comment from Robert's son noted the extravagant secret doctrine was prevalent in America, with the close proximity of spiritual and amorous feelings potentially leading to lust. An impromptu tribunal by evangelical ministers connected to Keswick in Britain judged Robert's conduct unbecoming, ending his public ministry in 1875. He returned to the U.S. humiliated and soon disowned his own teachings. Within a couple years, Hannah also rejected her teachings, returning to the Quaker fold and embracing Christian Universalism and even a more spiritualist-inflected Protestantism. She befriended poet Wilt Whitman and psychologist William James. Robert's fall from grace and Hannah's departure from the higher life in 1875 ironically helped their ideas maintain influence internationally. By that year, Dwight Moody and his extensive network of schools, magazines, revival tours, and supportive churches and conferences had become the main channels for the higher life's popularity in the U.S. The swift separation of the popular Higher Life teachings from its original, soon-to-fame promoters made its ideas spread rapidly across British and American circles, without the reputational baggage of the Smiths. The couple's quick rise and subsequent fall sparked widespread interest in higher life teachings. The impact was lasting as it displaced previous beliefs for many Christians who came from more doctrinary Calvinist or Wesleyan backgrounds, and it paved the way for new growth. Around Moody, the next generation of leaders emerged, people like Reuben Torrey and Albert Simpson. These leaders built Bible schools, denominations, missions organizations, and print empires that became the backbone of modern evangelical culture. The Higher Life also included fundamentalists like William Bell Riley and John R. Rice, as well as influential figures like Bill Bright, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell. Sarah Young's Jesus Calling, a devotional that is also the best-selling nonfiction book in the 21st century, with more than 40 million copies sold, acknowledges Keswick influences in its foreword. The teachings of the higher life popularized by the Smiths have played a crucial role in shaping Pentecostal, fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic religious movements. Its origins in the 1970s are an ocean and a world away.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to American Evangelicals, a history podcast, where we explore the complex, often surprising story of evangelicalism in America. In our last episode, we focused on conversion, the new birth, as a defining feature of evangelical identity. But today, we're asking a different question. What happens after that moment? What does it actually look like to live the Christian life? To get at that, we turn to a fascinating 19th-century story: The Rise of the Smiths, a husband-and-wife duo who become transatlantic religious celebrities. Along the way, we'll explore big themes like the Anglo-American roots of evangelicalism, the blurred lines between theology and experience, the role of gender, and even the ever-present reality of scandal. This is a story about spirituality, power, and what it really means to pursue holiness. And it might reshape how you think about evangelicalism altogether. Let's get into the conversation.
SPEAKER_03So, Dan, tell us, why did you choose this story for getting our podcast going?
SPEAKER_02So that yeah, there's a couple uh answers to that. A really sort of mundane one is um I'm working on a book right now, and the Smiths play a role in that book. And so I'm familiar with their story, particularly the part we're talking about here, how they become sort of celebrities for a moment uh in time. Um but to get to the the theme of of these first few episodes and trying to get at something about the definition of evangelicalism, I think there's a few themes that this story pulls out that add on to what we talked about uh in our first episode um around really focusing in on conversion. Um one is is just the way that this story about the Smiths is very Anglo-American. It's it takes place somewhat in Britain, it involves Americans. Last time we talked about Whitfield, who was in the colonies um back in the 18th century. Here we have Americans sort of being celebrities in the UK in the 19th century. So there's something deeper there going on that is just a theme throughout studying American evangelicalism, about the connection to Britain and then to the broader uh European context. I also think this story has a lot of interesting angles into it about the role of uh men and women in evangelicalism. It's notable that Hannah is a woman who is teaching, uh, not necessarily from pulpits, and we can get into the real nuances of that, but she's teaching mixed audiences about the truths of the religion. So I thought there was an interesting angle into there and how spiritual power manifests differently for men and women, but and is also sort of bound up in scandal uh and other things. And then lastly, I was thinking about it's a fuzzy category, spirituality or spiritual practices, but I've come to think that that's a really important part of what distinguishes evangelicals from other Christians, the ways they understand what it means to be holy, to use a theological term, what it means to be sanctified or to be on the process of becoming sanctified, and sort of how how does that happen within the boundaries of the way evangelicals do church and prioritize the Bible and other things. And so if uh you know, this is one of the things I think might get a little short shrift in the Bebington quadrilateral that we talked about last time, where you know conversionism is a really important part, that's sort of how you become a member of the tribe of evangelical of evangelicals. And then we have activism, um which is often focusing on sort of these outward acts that evangelicals do, whether that's social service or missions. But there's this whole other sort of area of evangelical experience, which is more about the individual, what are you called to do as an evangelical, to be a good Christian, to put it maybe crudely. And this the the Keswick movement, the higher life movement are all sort of trying to address those questions. And I thought that would be an interesting thing to put into the mix when we're talking about what we mean by American evangelicals.
SPEAKER_03So in some ways, if last if our last episode was about the kind of conversion and new birth, this is about what happens after the new birth, and that's just as important to evangelical identity, right, you're arguing. And I think I think you're right, then just you know, just the new birth. And then, you know, I think down the road Maggie's gonna talk about doctrine too, right? As a as an important thing. But to start with the the Anglo-American connections, I mean I think it's really interesting that even though our story last time about George Whitfield and the first episode, you know, was in Connecticut, but you know, Whitfield was a transatlantic figure. There's a transatlantic dimension here. Interestingly enough, the entire kind of Bebington quadrilateral is written by in the you know, the Bebington's book was in the context of British evangelicalism. So so you know, I know that there have been others who have written about the British transatlantic context, right? So it's it's interesting that so far we're we're stressing this.
SPEAKER_01Um I think too, the 19th century is really the time to focus on that transatlantic connection. So much that happens at the end of the 19th and early 20th century does kind of divide evangelicals in an American sense that separates them somewhat from the British experience. And I think that if you go into anything with the 19th century, it's uh very much so a web that is much broader than just America. You see that, I think, demonstrated really well in your story of the Smiths. And another thing, too, that I think is a really key component that is something that we emphasized a little bit last time, that's gotten even more complicated since the first Great Awakening is the denominational mix that you have all of these different denominations that are involved, and that evangelicalism has now kind of become a really self-aware pan-evangelical movement that is that's transcending denominations, but in really careful ways. And I think the Smiths can help illustrate that as well. And that the holiness movement in particular, this kind of emphasis on living practice rather than theology kind of facilitated that transdenominational uh impact.
SPEAKER_02And I think one way to, you know, when we talk about something like spirituality or holiness, we we can start leaving the historical context behind. It feels a little like it's out of time and place. But really part of the interesting part of this story is that we're hitting evangelicals, Anglo-American evangelicals at a certain moment, the 1870s, when there is a massive sea change. We mentioned this last um uh episode for a minute, uh maybe a couple times we mentioned it uh offhand, that we have a growth of a different type of way of thinking about the Christian life, which is it comes out of the holiness movement, which is deeply influenced by uh John and Charles Wesley and their and the Methodist movement, which is very different than in some key ways from the more Calvinist Puritan tradition that Whitfield was a part of, or at least expressing uh parts of it. And so in the 1870s, the the Wesleyan holiness tradition is the dominant tradition. And you see that in the stories of the Smiths, the role of Quakerism and other sort of uh radical Protestants in the holiness movement. And so there's a particular way that that you know, there's a reason why that way of thinking about being a Christian is popular in an era where there's a lot of in the American side, a lot of popular democracy talk. There's this idea of a of a strong sense of individualism, and there's an idea that that there's actually things individuals can do to sort of better their circumstances in all areas of life, including their spiritual life. And the Wesleyan way of thinking about spirituality, one term that comes a lot in the Smiths and in people like them is empowerment by the Spirit or the endowment of the Spirit, the sense that the Holy Spirit is not just something it's not just uh to use some theological, it's not just a forensic thing, it's not just something that sort of on in legal terms, okay, now you're a Christian. It's that you've actually been given power by God to actually better yourself and better the world around you. And that comes out of this this holiness movement in a very strong way. Uh starts really with the second great awakening in the early 19th century, uh, but then just sort of builds momentum throughout the 19th century. So when we get to people like the Smiths, you know, they grew up in a culture that was really about how Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, was a way to empower yourself in society. And some people still today would portray Christianity that way, but back then that was a more novel way that was hitting an American culture that was industrializing, that was sort of spreading across the continental United States, in a national sense was was turning pretty quickly to foreign wars by the end of the 19th century. And this type of spirituality was sort of in that mix as well, and and in some cases justifying those types of moves in a collective sense.
SPEAKER_03The historiography on this is really, really interesting. I know Dan, we've talked about this before, uh, you know, off the podcast. You know, you have Hatch, Nathan Hatch's democratization, which is all about this challenge to the Calvinist understanding, right? This individualism, which kind of maps nicely on the holiness stuff, you know, it's not the Calvinist stuff. But then when you get like after the Civil War, much of the, you know, at least till recently, the prevailing historiography, and you know, let's name some names here, people like Mark Knoll and George Marston and these people, um, it was really the story was really traced through a reformed lens. So when when they're writing about the late 19th century, yeah, Marsden's writing about Keswick in fundamentalism and American culture. But the real through line is like Princeton, Princeton Theological Seminary, right? Uh this Calvinist bastion, bastion of Calvinism, B.B. Warfield, Charles Briggs and the Battle for the Presbyterian Church, Mach J. Gresham Machin, and then even through post-World War II, it's very Calvinist, right? And you know, back in the day, there was this challenge to that historiography, which really didn't gain a lot of ground. I think it was largely because the man making it, Donald Dayton and others, did not have kind of the my take at least, let's just put it crudely, he didn't have the financial resources. He wasn't getting tons of pew money to advance the more Wesleyan holiness, you know, stuff that you're talking about. I see your work, Dan, and I think you agree, as almost uh sort of phase two of the, you know, what if we give Dayton another shot here and he was on to something, right? In a way that Nolan Marson and the reformed historiography of evangelicalism never quite embraced or accepted. The fair way to put it is to make this make it central to the story of what evangelicalism is.
SPEAKER_02And there's some newer historians that I think maybe to get beyond the debate on is the sort of soul of American evangelicalism Calvinist or Wesleyan. It's sort of showing how it's both and neither at the same time. Like there's a there's a real and that's part of what makes evangelical interesting, also confusing, is there's no clear, there's no clearinghouse for this stuff. It it's it's just sort of worked out with different prominent figures and institutions. So I think of someone like Michael Hamilton, who's a a historian who's been writing for some years now, really focuses in on the role of Dwight Moody, um, which I mention in the story. And Moody is this figure, he's sort of the Billy Graham of his era. If you want to be anyone in in sort of the evangelical world of the 1870s or 1880s, you're probably not too far from a connection to Dwight Moody and his institutions. And Moody himself was someone who had tendencies both in the reformed direction, at least in certain of his theology, but then was also really attracted to the higher life and ended up becoming one of the major promoters of it. For the systematic theologian, it's quite frustrating to try to understand exactly where the consistency in his thinking was, but he wasn't a theologian. He was uh someone who deployed certain teachings in certain moments because he thought that's what would move people to, you know, respond to the met the gospel message. And because of his prominence, that type of, you could say, unsystematic thinking just sort of became quite common among evangelicals. And that unsystematic thinking is one that's it has a lot of tendencies toward Wesleyan spirituality, even if some of the views on predestination or or the these other sort of theological questions that Calvinists are known for, uh biblical inerrancy is another one that's really a strong one within the Calvinist tradition, those sort sort of can sit side by side for many millions of lay evangelicals, even if the academics don't understand, it sort of think those are contradictory. And that's part of the interest for me, at least on the theological level of evangelicalism, is that that's sort of the run of that's sort of the state of affairs most of the time, is you have these different sort of formal ways of thinking about the Christian tradition. And in the practice of it, it's something in the middle. And in the history, in the historiography and the way historians talk about this, I think there can be a tendency, particularly if the historians are ones that are bent toward intellectual history or or bent toward studying the more systematic thinkers, to privilege those views when that those are there, certainly, and they're important, but they're probably not representative of the of the mass of middle people who are actually call themselves evangelicals, who are not systematic or very experience-oriented and probably don't even understand a lot of the theology. They they care much more about how to live as a Christian and less about the the sort of abstract concepts that go into that.
SPEAKER_01I think one of my favorite descriptions of evangelicalism and kind of thinking about is it more reformed, is it more holiness, is it more this or that, was the kaleidoscope theory. And I think it was Timothy Smith. Yeah. Who put that out there? And I remember reading that like a long time ago, early in my graduate studies, and being like, oh, that makes sense, because you can you can shift a kaleidoscope and it changes, you know, what's neighboring each other shifts. And it depends on whether you're looking at it from the lens of theology. Are you looking at it from the lens of doctrine? Are you looking at it from the lens of institutions? Like the kaleidoscope shifts and who is going to be really centralized in that picture is going to change. And I just I always thought that was to me the most effective image of what evangelicalism looks like.
SPEAKER_03I forgot about that article. There was another book in that same genre of varieties of American evangelicalism. I think it was Dan help me here, Robert Johnston, is that ring of that? It was edited by, which had a similar, you know, drew on this. Uh just a just a quick story about what you were saying, Dan, about Moody and um, you know, how intellectual historians tend to gravitate towards the Calvinists. So when I was at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the early 1990s, I took a course with Thomas Nettles, who was a Southern Baptist historian who came up to the north and taught for a few years on 19th-century evangelicalism. And the assignment was you were assigned a figure and you had to, in the for the final exam, you had to speak as if you were that figure for for like 10 minutes or something and they and dialogue with the others. So the others were, you know, Charles Hodge, Charles Finney, um B.B. Warfield, some Southern Baptist figures. So I had Moody. I was just, it became hilarious because they're all debating predestination and inerrancy. And I'm just like, you know, surrender your life to God and the world's going to hell. Here's the life, right? What was the famous line? Here's the here's the life vest or the the life roast. The the the what the life raft? The life raft, get on it and be saved. And you know, afterwards I would chime in with this, and everyone would just, you know, be like, you got the easy assignment, you know, you don't have to really, you know, and and it was it was a fun, you know, Nettles loved it. I got an A, but but I said, hey, I'm trying to, you know, I know this sounds like I didn't do my homework, but this was moody, right?
SPEAKER_01And the Pearsol Smiths were not options, I assume, for no, I don't remember them being that so thinking about the way that the Pearsol Smiths are situated in the 19th century, and also just thinking about the way that the holiness movement has other prominent figures, I'm thinking of Phoebe Palmer, that are female, right? Women play a really central role. Um, and you know, setting aside the question of like, is that one of the reasons they've been decentered from the story, which is possible, like historians have a tendency to not focus on women um as much in past historiographies. How do you see gender as being really a central part of the holiness tradition writ-large, or more specifically, the Pearsall Smith story?
SPEAKER_02It's obviously central just from a uh how you tell the story or documentary way. There's you mentioned Phoebe Palmer, sort of one of the key holiness teachers of the middle of the 19th century. Hannah Pearsall Smith's important. I uh I I spent a lot of time um researching Jesse Penn Lewis, who's uh a British Keswick speaker uh that comes just a little while after the Smiths. They're really important in part because they're supplying some of the core theology of at least the Higher Life. And what I mean by the Higher Life is it's a particular working out of the holiness movement, which is a very broad movement that includes all types of new denominations and traditions. The higher life becomes the version that becomes quite popular among the moody circles, and just the content of the higher life is really indebted to Hannah Smith's uh 1875 book, The Christian Secret to a Happy Life, uh, among other documents. So they're just important in telling the story. I think there's an interesting way where you know these are women who would not have are don't have the opportunity to be ordained pastors and teachers, because there's a there's there's a a norm and in many uh denominations just a rule against uh women having those roles. And they're working in these what we call parachurch or just non-eclesial settings where those rules don't apply, and it's much more, you could say, a free market of charisma is what is getting you a hearing or not. And these are very charismatic people, and so they find ways to basically play the role, in some cases you could argue, are playing more of a significant role than a local pastor for some people, through their their teaching and then through the writing uh that they're doing. I'll say as a historian, though sort of an intellectual historian who prizes texts as the way I engage. I mean, one of the key things about these particular women, and there were many other women that we could talk about, that are probably maybe just as important, but they didn't leave behind as much of a written record. Even if they spoke a lot, were those taken down, were they compiled in some way that would be accessible uh today? And so we do privilege, uh certainly intellectual historians do, privilege historical figures who have a lot of words attached to their name, and that tends to be men. Certainly in the 19th century it does. I think the question you have to ask is when women do appear in the historical record that have a lot of words uh attached to them, are they representing a broader friend that we're just not seeing, or were they truly unique, uh unique people? I would say the ones we're talking about were unique in the sense that they amassed a lot of followers, sold a lot of books, and became charismatic figures themselves. But uh that's sort of one of the conclusions I'm coming to as I'm working through this is I think it's actually really hard to tell the central story of American evangelicalism without mentioning these figures in a way that most uh up to now at least, most traditional histories of American evangelicalism have been able to sort of jump between major male pastors and major theologians, who tend to m mostly be male as well, as sort of encompassing the tradition. I think these figures, if we're if we're looking sort of at the spirituality and including that in into the broader story, make a case that that they're you know just as important to actually understand evangelical experience and practice during this period and after.
SPEAKER_03How Dan then would you connect your work to say, you know, a certain kind of historiography that's in vogue right now that would suggest that then evangelicals patriarchy, for example, is a telling sign or telling a piece of the identity of evangelicals? If you're doing it from a reformed, you know, the reformed historians we mentioned before, we're interested in very educated Calvinists, right? But if if you center the people you're centering, does that then challenge the prevailing notion of you know evangelicals being it there's really two things going on here, right? Because one is the the argument by Kristen Dumay and others that evangelicalism is a sort of patriarchal form of religion. And then there's also, I hear you saying a lot of historians are not talking about women at the center of evangelicalism. Dumais seems to take it in a negative way, right? There's no women, so it must be patriarchal, or it is patriarch I mean it's there's also a positive argument for patriarchy in her in her work as well. But you're you're suggesting these women are are central in a changes the narrative, which might, I don't know, does that weaken the argument about patriarchy? I see what you're saying. Right, you see what I'm saying? Like, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, I wouldn't want to uh underplay gender dynamics of the late 19th century for any any women. It's still a patriarchal world, but I think the these you know a lot of it's into the details of the subcultures, and that's where it actually matters a bit about the reformed and Wesleyan uh sides, like the Wesleyan holiness movement. There's there was an emphasis on to go back to spiritual power, and that spiritual power wasn't gender-coded. Um it it it manifested in women just as much as men. You can see this emerge also in in Pentecostalism uh in the early 20th century, which is very closely tied to the holiness movement, where you know in Joel II it's it's the daughters and sons will prophesy type um view, like like women and men will be manifesting the gifts of the spirit. And uh the holiness movement tended to take that more seriously than you could say um other Christian tradition, other Protestants uh did at the time. And so there was an ability for women who were claiming gifts or were charismatic to um vie for a space in the public square. They had sort of the tool, the theological tools to make the case for that. That if you just focus on other parts of Protestantism, that's just not there, that they don't have the same view of the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit falls on different people. So they're still operating within a patriarchal system in the sense that there are very strong norms against women pastors in particular, but there is a little more movement or ability to maneuver. And one other thing I'll say that there's another book by Donald Dayton that goes all the way, is it one of an earlier book from the 70s? And I'm gonna forget the name, and maybe one of you can help me. Something about evangelical heritage.
SPEAKER_03Was it the discovery of an evangelical heritage or discovery or rediscovery?
SPEAKER_02I don't remember what the term is. And and he's making an argument there that in line with what we've been talking about, that the sort of true history of evangelicalism is this reform, this sort of radical egalitarian tradition that goes all the way back to the abolitionists. And you know, that that's a certain, he's got an agenda that he's pushing with that. Um, so you could you could quibble with uh it's his short book too, so he's making sweeping claims and then moving on. But one of the things he he points out is that in the 19th century, there was a just a lot of different politics around women leading in religious spaces than in the early 20th century, when you have fundamentalism and sort of you could say a conservatism fall. And we tend to, in the after that period, norm normalize the early 20th century and say sort of that's the departure point. And he wanted to say, actually, if you go back to the 19th century, it's actually a little more messy. And I've done a little research on on denominations like the Evangelical Free Church, which had its origins in the Danish Free Church and the Norwegian Free Church, which are around in the 19th century. And it's true that there were itinerant women preachers in those settings that by you know the 1920s would have never been allowed. So I don't want to overstate that, but just to say that this isn't just a linear story of the further back you go, more patriarchy, and the further closer you go, there's less. It's just really complicated. And it has a lot to do with theology, but also with immigration and norms in different parts of the country based on where immigrants are coming from, that means it's just a it's a complicated story when when we think about how would we summarize all that into a general assessment of the R.
SPEAKER_03There is a sense, Dan, in which your work, your 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. They're doing things in their denominations and in their public spaces that a lot of people aren't doing in this patriarchal society, right? I mean, it's I mean it's countercultural. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, right. Well, I don't know if I would you go that far? Yeah, I don't know if I'd go as far as say progressive. I think what one thing this is how I would think about some of that, is that women, evangelicals, are able to participate in say commercial culture and celebrity culture that allow them some agency, at least a few of them, some agency that we might look at as progressive because we see progressive being more of that equals progress in sort of the status of women in society. But what it what it might actually be is just that evangelicalism is much more attuned to commercial and uh sort of consumer um uh forces that are that mean that people in that world have a easier way of accessing uh those things.
SPEAKER_03I don't know if they would have ever thought about it as progressive or even probably maybe maybe maybe Maggie can help on this too, uh feminist. It really wasn't that, but you know, you have to consider what was available at the time, and they were doing things, they were making available roles for women that a larger culture and certainly larger Christianity was not. I don't know if that's a a fair way to sort of get the nuance.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's interesting that Hannah Pearsell Smith is coming from Quaker, a Quaker background, right? Which is definitely more radically egalitarian than any of the other groups affiliated with evangelicalism, and Quakers stand outside of that fold, but adjacent enough when it comes to uh the holiness movement that she was able to kind of move back and forth, really. Right because she returns to Quakerism after the scandal. And another thing, too, I don't know this period as well, but it does seem to me that the women that are mentioned are almost always coupled with husbands, right? So Hannah is coupled with her husband. Uh Phoebe Palmer was talked about with her husband Walter, I think was his name. And we can now see who was the real mind behind it, but that was a necessary component of their ministry, I think. And I don't know of any that stand apart from that. And another thing, too, and this is something um Margaret Bendroth talks in in her gender and fundamentalism book, which is an older book, but I think a really good one, is that you also have this shift in the 19th century, there's there's this belief that women are morally superior, which actually further ingrained the patriarchal like system of women should stay in the home and not the public sphere and things like that, but enabled them to have some kind of moral authority in certain reform movements and perhaps in the holiness movement. I'm not aware of that. But when it comes to fundamentalism and this kind of shift that happens in the 1920s that Dan, you're bringing up with women in ministry, women are seen as equally sinful, if not more sinful, and the kind of story of like the woman as the seductress and things like that becomes so much more a part of the discussion of women in the public sphere. And so you have that theological shift in evangelicalism as well, that kind of comes with that crystallization of the fundamentalist-modernist split. And we could talk about that in in future episodes. But I do see those also as components of what's going on here that would sort of limit a progressive view of what's going on with women in the holiness movement.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I'm I yeah, I just threw progressive out, you know, as just to try to suggest that it was there was some pushback, I guess. Probably progressive is not the right word. There was some pushback against the the traditional. Whatever that looks like in the 19th century, here this is the historian to me, right? Whatever that looks like in the 19th century context context, it was still pushback.
SPEAKER_01And I think the second great awakening is also good evidence of that, right? Like there you do have more, and we can just see, like zooming out, looking at the bigger picture, women were way more involved. The second great awakening, like there's an individualism there that you do have at least a couple of ordained women coming out of um the Baptist movement.
SPEAKER_03It's also really interesting, sort of the way you think about history. And this is a big, big question, but Dan's mentioning of how it's all messy, right? It's hard to really nail down. You know, you have this kind of Whiggish view of the way history is moving, where it's just getting better and better and better and better and better and better for, say, women, right? I think Laura Ulrich in her book Goodwives makes the case that like women had more agency in 17th century New England than in the separate spheres era of the early 19th century, and women may have had more of a role to play in in in our case in 19th century evangelicalism than they did in post-fundamentalist uh evangelicalism. So it's you know, you're always trying to teach students about the way history moves, is it cyclical, is it a straight line or whatever? And it's it's a messy line, right, in this sense. So maybe you're going back to the 19th century, and then you have to still explain that things change in post-fundamentalist evangelicalism, if you want to call it that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and there's a you know, there's a way that it's also about what we just assume progress looks like. Meg, I think you're right on that a lot of these women who did achieve levels of leadership were tied to their husbands. Jesse Penn Lewis, who I mentioned before, she also was married. I I honestly can't remember his name, so maybe that that's a win for her or something in this moment. But but I remember that that was actually a part of her public ministry, was sort of like showing she was part of a healthy marriage. There's an exception to that, which are which actually come out of the Keswick movement as well, which are uh women missionaries who tended to be uh single for life. Uh sort of a version of a sort of an evangelical version of a nun or something like that, like wedded to the church or wedded to the gospel. And so here you have people like um, maybe less well known, but but certainly has her fans, Lilias Trotter, who was ultimately wrote the hymn that's Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus. Um one way she's known now, or like Amy Carmichael, who was a very significant devotional writer. Uh we talk a lot about Oswald Chambers, the the writer of My Utmost to His Highest, which is a very famous devotional. Chambers died early. His wife, Biddy Chambers, was actually the one that produced most of his writings, or at least edited them. So she was a widow, but but still a missionary for her whole life. So anyway, that there's but that's a norm that's a norm of womanhood, this sort of single woman who's off in a foreign country serving a pop, you know, a population that is just not part of the progress narrative of womanhood in the 20th century American uh context. And so it sort of is exceptional or put off to the side. But that was another way that in the 19th century at least, women did play a significant role. They were often creating these mission organizations, doing most of the fundraising, actually building someone like Trotter built dozens of missionary outposts in Algeria and so forth, and managed you know hundreds of people. But it was in a way that's sort of off main stage of what we talk about when we talk about evangelicalism.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and yeah, it's such a good point.
SPEAKER_03So I think there's a certain kind of person in whether it be the American media or you know, critics of evangelicals who like to talk about evangelicalism and scandal. And there's plenty of examples, right, uh, of this, especially in the world of televelism and so forth. We have a scandal in your story. I don't know. Is there something about evangelicalism that is more susceptible to scandal because they set just a high moral bar for themselves and speak publicly about themselves being exemplars, moral exemplars? Why so many scandals in evangelicalism? Is that part of how we should be thinking about the movement? Is it more open to this than say other forms of religion? If you look at contemporary, you know, religion right now, certainly not. You know, you see similar things in the Catholic Church. Um, yeah, how does how does this whole scandal kind of play into the larger story that we're trying to define, you know, evangelicalism here in these first three episodes?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I really want to hear what both of you think, because I don't I don't know if I have a ton of deep insight onto this, but I I do think of um the the religion scholar Robert Orsi. I heard him give a talk on the Catholic uh sex abuse crisis, uh, which he's done a lot of really sort of painstaking work in reconstructing particular episodes in that. And he had a line where he said something like the scandal is written throughout like all religion has scandal, yeah, but every religion, every religious tradition has their own type of scandal, and it it's conducive to the theology and the structure, institutional structure. And so the Catholic abuse crisis couldn't have happened the way it did in Baptist churches. It had to have the certain structure of the priests and how the you moved around the priest and all the case. And there's another sort of famous, uh infamous scandal of an Anabaptist theologian named John Howard Yoder, very well respected during his life, and I don't remember if it was right before he died or right after, but it came out that he was systematically abusing women under his care. But he had a particular theology that he would use to justify that and to keep people quiet. Um, that was very conducive to in that his Anabaptist is a theology of love, sort of perverted theology of love type thing. And that type of way of having a scandal would not have worked in a Presbyterian setting. So that's all to say, like every subculture has their own way of having a scandal. The thing that I was just noted about Robert Pearsall Smith is there's this celebrity part that we've already talked about as being part of evangelicalism. And then there's the itinerancy part. I mean, it's not an accident, I don't think, that this scandal happens when he's traveling in in Europe. And it's such a weird scandal. I mean, uh, as far as I understand, there's still not clarity, however many decades were hereafter, on exactly what happened, and there probably never will be because there's not like the evidence to to actually definitively come down on that. But it happened in you know a traveling situation a hotel or or similar type setting where there was not a lot of structure and you could say oversight of someone like Smith. And so that seems to me to be part of the evangelical culture as well, is like this is how celebrity functions. You end up traveling a lot, you end up having situations where you're able to do things in private if you so choose. And There aren't the same institutional checks you could say that might be there in other religious traditions. So those are the things that came to mind when I was thinking about like, oh yeah, those seem like things that we could still see today in a lot of the scandals. Um, but I'm curious if if you think of other things that sort of would make the phenomenon of scandal that seems to be so prevalent in evangelicalism like something that that is that common.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I I think just kind of going off of what you're saying, Dan, I think that does kind of bolster the argument for the patriarchy of evangelicalism, because one thing that most evangelical scandals have in common are men behaving badly and that kind of cult of personality around really charismatic men and their downfalls, usually being um some kind of sexual vice. Uh not always, but usually. Uh so I think that there's an interesting thing that could be talked about there. I think in just my work and kind of what I see, because I research divorce, that's kind of inherently a bit of a scandal, and uh discussions of it often are centered around scandal. But one thing that I've noticed in 20th century evangelicalism is that there is a very conscious, intentional, we must protect the gospel from scandal mentality in evangelicalism. And that you see it manifest itself in in like why people will distance themselves from certain things, even if they kind of question whether or not something is a gray area or actually wrong. So you can see kind of some lack of justice there. But you can also see it in the way that there's self-policing, particularly in the conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist movement, that this idea that we're gonna make sure that no one drags us down with them. We're not going down with the ship kind of thing. So we're gonna cut you off if you make this choice or that. Um, although at the same kind of level as that, you can see sometimes where people protect their underlings from scandal in order to kind of protect the broader ministry. So like you get this kind of like self-protectionism from it as well. So, I mean, that's not a easy answer in the sense that I think in every institution you're gonna have problems. You're gonna have people that are not doing things well, and reactions to that are complicated by theology, right? So you do have the misuse of sort of like we're supposed to be for a forgiving people. And then does that mean a return to power or not? That's a huge debate right now. I've seen that all over Substack talking about the Philippiance recent scandal. But you also have the sort of utilitarian, if we get rid of this person, and I'm thinking of um, I forget his name, but Carl McIntyre's um one of his uh andreens who was often tied with um rumors of homosexuality. Am I remembering that?
SPEAKER_02Billy James Hargis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, and there's another one too. I don't think it was just Hargis. I think there was uh someone else. But anyway, McIntyre was seen as protecting him. And on one hand, it was because he's like, we're supposed to forgive, he's confessed, like all these sorts of things. Um, but there's also a utilitarian, like he needed the work of this man in his ministry. So it's a complicated thing. I don't have like an easy, yeah, I think that this is central, but I do think that the way that evangelicalism centers around cults of personality or media empires, particularly in the 20th century, like as a parachurch thing, like singular individuals will build their media empires. We'll talk about that more in the next episode. And with that comes a sort of elevation of that personality to uh they can do no wrong. And then when they fall, they fall hard.
SPEAKER_03Clearly, there's something within evangelicalism, whether it be the high moral standards that they place upon themselves, that makes them an sort of self-protective or or makes them not they know scandal is real, like they feel it, you know. I'm thinking like the Billy Graham rule, right? Or or he's always traveling, right? Keep the door ajar, these kinds of things. So there's there's whether or not the scandals occur or not, the actual scandal, scandal is always on the mind of evangelicals. And I think it's largely too, if you think about the 19th century as a kind of you know, a century, an evangelical century, right? We can debate that. You know, they're at the front of all, they're front of public life, right? The reform movements and you know, they're the it's largely an evangelical culture. It was definitely before the Civil War. I think we talked about this last time. You know, you have this kind of period of quietism, you know, where evangelicals aren't saying much in the 20th century after the Scopes trial, but then you have, you know, the 70s and 80s, suddenly now they're they're the moral majority and so forth, you know, and and they set such a high bar, you know, they they preach at people. And so whenever you preach at people, the scandals become that much greater when you fall or contradict what you're telling everyone else to do. I think you see some of that in the 19th century, too. I don't I don't know if I call Henry Ward Beecher a uh an evangelical, but his scandal, right? And Amy Sumple McPherson, you know, these kinds of people, which is really when you said it was mostly men. I agree with you, Maggie. The one woman I could think of was Amy Sumple McPherson. I can't, I'm sure there's others. So I think this is part of the story. I'm not sure it rises to the level of a point in the, you know, an additional point we want to add to the Ebbington quadrilateral, but it's certainly in the mix, right? And it becomes more, these scandals become more, I don't want to know if I want to use celebrated, but more publicized simply because of the nature of the way evangelicals tend to approach public life as kind of the, you know, wagging their finger at everybody else that may have something to do with it as well.
SPEAKER_02And if there on the um maybe it's a little side to scandal, but on the role of sex in scandal, it's also just I think important to remember that if we zoom out to the holiness movement, you know, there's a lot of experimentation with free love and I think of the Oneida community and and other things that are happening. You know, we we tend to segment those out of evangelicalism because of the theology and other things. But you know, at the time, these were all coming out of the same sort of revivalist Wesleyan sort of stew. Uh, and so there there is also part of evangelicalism that is experimenting with gender roles and rethinking marriage. I mean, that's part of, at least for some evangelicals, part of the appeal is that you get to rethink tradition very broadly. And, you know, inter we talked about this last time, sort of interpret the Bible in in your own way and sort of follow that that way. And so I mentioned in the story that this sort of doctrine of um poly kisses as sort of this somewhat prevalent um teaching that was scandalous, certainly for culture society, but was also really popular, where um, as the quote I had from the Smith's son, you know, sort of the amorous and the uh the the spiritual are like right next to each other, sort of in in terms of the emotions they tap into, the energy it taps into. And so that's actually part of the appeal for a lot of evangelicals, at least some. I mean, you could put the Robert Piercell Smith in that camp. That's part of evangelicalism as well. It's it's not the part that tends to be the finger wagging part, but often it's part of the experience of evangelicalism. It might be the scandal part, uh, but it's still a consistent part.
SPEAKER_03A lot of it hasn't really been explored. Like, who knows what's going on in these like communal evangelical, you know, we've seen some examples of this where we find out that uh Lonnie Frisbee was gay, you know, in the Jesus people movement, you know, but but we just don't know, you know, camp meetings, right? I mean, you get you get a bunch of men and women camping out for a week, right? I mean, I don't know. I guess I have a robust enough view of sin that I was suggesting stuff might happen. There's a sense in which this kind of loving of your brothers and sisters, you know, this kind of uh not free love, but you know, the holy kiss, right? I mean, I just I still don't think we know a whole lot about it, except for the big people that get into trouble, right?
SPEAKER_01And I mean, there definitely are, as Dan pointed out, these groups that take that and run with it. Like sometimes it goes the other direction and you get experiments into celibacy, yeah, right. And those groups don't last very long. That's right. Not shocking, or perhaps shocking to some people. I don't know. Yeah, you have a lot of um experimentation with like what is marriage? What ought it to be if we are truly changed by the spirit.
SPEAKER_03And so that that's kind of or or spiritual friendship with the opposite sex, right? You know, that's such an evangelical thing, you know, like we're brothers and sisters in Christ, you know, we're we're hanging out, we're you know, so yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's you know, I'm probably given some historian listening to this some idea for the next crazy book that's gonna attack to undermine evangelicalism.
SPEAKER_02And just to bring it up to the present, maybe we can move on after that. But we will talk about things later on in the series about like purity culture in the in the 1990s and 2000s. That comes from a history, like that that's not just suddenly a a sort of panic that happened because of the 60s, even yet, which is often how a lot of that is framed. It's like this is an ongoing theme that goes back, you know, really as far as evangelicalism goes back, about monitoring the relationship between men and women, what is marriage, what is appropriate inside and outside of marriage. Yeah, these are not just uh things that happened in the past or things that are from the 90s or 2000s, it's it's the whole is the whole uh span.
SPEAKER_01And I think too, um, just I again with that variety of American evangelicalism, just the fact that there are so many different ways of arranging authority and hierarchy also just leaves some people open to uh scandal in ways that just don't exist. I'm thinking of uh Tim Keller made a comment on the Mars Hill podcast that it's done a few years ago, and I just remember them like talking about, and he goes, Well, this could never happen in the Presbyterian church. He was just like pointing out that like I see how you're like making a correlation, but that could never happen because I am always under the authority of others because of the hierarchy within my denomination. And so it's interesting too the way that the variety of denominations within evangelicalism can really change what is even possible or what's checked and what isn't.
SPEAKER_03But back to Dan's work, if you center these holiness peaks where evangelicalism is a spiritual passion, they're feeling a common sympathy with one another in the spirit kind of thing, as opposed to like the Reformed, right? Where, you know, they're debating theology and there's there's no really emotion, right? It's it's right belief. This kind of sexual stuff might play more of a role in in this in the story, right? Although I'm sure, you know, there's certainly examples of you know, austere Calvinist dons or whatever, you know, probably doing these things too. I don't know, there just seems to be something about the holiness model that opens this more up.
SPEAKER_01So, Dan, I'm curious in that you're talking about your work and what you're exploring right now. How are you looking for the holiness movement and just kind of the impact of particularly self-help? That's the one that I find very interesting. Like, what do you look for in being like, ah, there it is?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so it's a complicated question because we're talking about things that that aren't uh systematic. And so it's sort of how how would you track any sort of pop culture phenomenon? It's sort of like memes and and reference points. I think what I'm interested in is there's a particular style of holiness that becomes very popular among evangelicals, and it is a lot about self-surrender or words to that effect. That is what is needs to happen on the inside of the Christian, and that this self-surrender will iron or paradoxically lead to empowerment through the Holy Spirit. Some people take that really in a certain direction and and are Pentecostal about it and say, actually, you will manifest spiritual gifts. Others will say you will just you will enter a state of happiness, of joy that you couldn't imagine except that you've surrendered your life to Christ. And then what are you to do with that? Whether it's spiritual gifts or happiness or or peace. And there's all types of suggestions by evangelicals about what you should do with that. Some people really point toward a life of piety and holiness, is really the thing you should strive for. Um, others point to uh a service. You you should be an evangelist or you should help the poor. That that's the evangelical conversation. What's interesting to me is how similar that conversation is and how there's actually influences that go back and forth with what we call just sort of secular self-help work. That is probably the thing that Americans just consume the most of, of anything, which is how do I live a better life? You know, you have the subtopics of how do I lose weight or how do I look better or how do I do more with the time I have. But then you have sort of more general, sort of just how can I be happier? How can I make a difference in the world? All that kind of stuff. I see those conversations as in part indebted to a secularized version of what evangelicals have cared about for a long time. It's not the only thing. And the other sort of big tradition that is really the main tradition that self-help comes out of is the positive thought movement of the 19th century. Sometimes this is called metaphysical religion. Uh the historian that's done so much on this is Catherine Albanese. She's written multiple books on this. But it sort of starts with like the transcendentalists, like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Um, if you read Emerson, it's a very sort of it's a lot of aphorisms like if you do this, then this will happen, type things. And it's very much about summoning the strength within you to be a better person and to actually deify yourself, you could say, to become everything that Christians say God is. And this works its way through the 19th and 20th century into the main ways we think about um, you know, getting rich, getting healthy, sort of important books like How to Win Friends and Influence People. You can think of the positive thoughts of the sort of the opera style of spirituality. That's different than evangelicalism, obviously, but what's interesting to me is just how much overlap there is in someone like Billy Graham, who graphic in both of these in certain moments, or someone that we don't really call an evangelical, though we hung out with a lot of the evangelicals, someone like Norm Norman Vincent Peale or Robert Scholler, the pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, which was a big deal in the 80s and 90s in particular. These are people that, depending on who's talking, get counted as evangelicals. But if you look at their work, they're actually like as indebted to these sort of positive thought uh mind cure type traditions as uh as they are to strict reform theology or something like that. And that gets back to where we started, which is evangelicalism interesting in part because those things blend in ways that really no one has the gatekeeping capacity to stop them from blending, particularly in the popular conversation. And so what most evangelicals sort of experience on the ground is a mix of those things. And I think this is particularly true in devotionals. If you just go through like the history of the devotionals that sell tens of millions of copies, you see both of these types of evangelical spirituality and positive thought alongside each other mixed together. Uh, you see it in other places as well, televangelism and so forth. But that to me is the interesting story that for historians at least of evangelicalism, we haven't focused enough on positive thought as like an actual vibrant tradition that evangelicalism is engaging with. We haven't appreciated that. But um, it seems to me that when we talk about, particularly American evangelicals, how do they think about spirituality? You have to talk about Oprah, um, at least for the last few decades. And going back, you have to talk about people like Dale Carnegie, in part because the sources so show it. They show that there's this actual borrowing, but also you can just see how the ideas from one make their way over uh into the other pretty seamlessly.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I've been saying this all through this whole episode, but it's when historians study American evangelicalism, there is this natural propensity, American evangelicalism, right? There's this natural propensity to kind of how is evangelicalism being shaped by the larger culture or by intellectual trends or something that may or may not map on very well with Christianity. So, you know, the the old historiography, now old Mike Marsden Knoll and these guys, they were always talking, because they were focusing on the Calvinists, they were always talking about the way in which evangelicalism was related to these more rational intellectual ideas, right? That was the part of American culture, common sense and common sense realism and rational things, and this is how they got inerrancy, right? They embraced Baconianism and these this kind of stuff. But what you're trying to suggest, Dan, I think is that if you focus on the holiness people and put them central, then there's a different set of kind of American uh ideas or American a different different American culture that evangelicalism engaging with, that's I think a new contribution uh in this. I mean, everyone knows about it in like the present, you know, there's people who write about you know consumerism and all that, but but to historicize that I think is is a contribution.
SPEAKER_01So in your work, do you see this as kind of fitting in with the argument that David Bebington has made that along with like common sense realism and the impact of the Enlightenment on evangelicalism, there's also the impact of romanticism from the early 19th century.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I really indebted to Bebington for that. And it gets into the larger Victorian sort of culture that Anglo-American evangelicalism is stewing in in the late 19th century. The way I see that paying out later on, I mean, you could say there's a romantic, uh even mystical sort of strand of evangelicalism. I I think if you listen to a lot of contemporary worship music, it's bordering on the mystical in the way that the spirit is communing with the individual uh person. Um, but I also think there's this larger arc over the 20th century in American culture of um of the therapeutic. And it's something that that has resonances with the romantic in the 19th century. And that's something I'm interested in too, is how the romantic and the therapeutic and these certain ways of thinking about the individual's relationship to society and the centering of the individual subjective experience are really at core of what uh evangelicals care about and what they write a lot about and spend a lot of time having sermons about. And it's uh I don't know if romanticism is the first place you could find that, because you could go, I think you go back and you could you could also say there's there's something about the mystical tradition that, even though we tend to separate that entirely from evangelicalism, actually has some impact on it. But certainly by the 19th century, the major sort of influences are romanticism and even the Keswick Convention is in Keswick, England, which is in the what's called the Lake District, which is where a number of romantic poets in British culture, uh, Wordsworth and others, sort of emerged. It's not exactly as clean as they picked that place because they wanted to, you know, sort of acknowledge the romantic influences. But there was even something about the Keswick Convention. There was an appeal to say, let's get into nature, let's um sort of get away from civilization, let's have these encounters with the divine that are very romantic in the in it's not hard to connect the dots there. And it was also this sort of you got to commune with these great poets, or the or the you didn't commune with them, but with their area that was very appealing to in the 1870s, 1880s to American evangelic or certain American evangelicals who wanted to make that trip. So even in the location of the Keswick Convention, you have that sort of ode to the romantic influence.
SPEAKER_01I think this is so interesting, and it's something I see looking around the kind of church that people are very interested in the connections between kind of historic evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, and then before that the holiness movement, because they are now in our day and age very much so seen as part and parcel of the same thing, but historically speaking, not so much. And you have historians that are kind of pushing back against that. Um, I've been making my way through it's Douglas Weaver's book, Baptists and the Holy Spirit, right? Have you write that at all? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Giant.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's huge.
SPEAKER_01It's a huge book. It's just interesting, right? Because he's he talks about Bapticostals. Right. And I was like, that's just a word I want to use a lot. Um, but also is an interesting trend that I've seen personally, but I can't say that I've seen it in the historical work. Um, so I do think that there's a lot that's really rich for scholarship and exploration and what you're doing, and I think it's going to be really very interesting.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, just to list one more historian, uh, there's a really good book from a few years ago by Neil J. Young, uh, not to be confused with the singer, called We Gather Together, and I don't remember the subtitle, but it was about these subgroups within evangelicalism, particularly charismatics and calls cessationists or whatever, you know, sort of Baptists who don't believe in the gifts are, and then Catholics, and how they had to really mediate these doctrinal differences in order to create a unified political front in the in the 70s and 80s. And it's it's just sort of surprising how much of their discussion at that time was not actually about politics, which they all agreed you're more conservative. It was actually like, can I as a Baptist work with you as an assemblies of God person? And I think today we take for granted, like, that's not as important as these political issues, but that was that's a historical development that in the 70s and 80s was just on the forefront. It was actually this they they actually were the ones who had to create that mentality that says actually it's more important to unify with people who are different from you denominationally, but share the same view on abortion or these other cultural issues. Robert Wethnow, the sociologist, called. Calls this the restructuring of American religion from a denominational one to one that's basically a traditionalist versus progressive sort of spectrum. And again, we we're on the other side of that, so we just assume this is how religion has been. Like you'd you'd sort of naturally be more interested if you're a Methodist, a conservative Methodist, you'd be more interested in working with a conservative Presbyterian than a liberal Methodist. But that's very new thinking. And that gets at some of these deeper theological differences that if you're not careful, you won't realize how new the situation we're in is versus a hundred years ago or when these Pentecostals and when it emerged, how disruptive it was to the whole scene.
SPEAKER_01Lots for us to talk about in future episodes, then.
SPEAKER_02I introduced us to Robert and Hannah Purcell Smith. They were a 19th-century evangelical couple who became transatlantic celebrities in the 1870s through promoting a type of higher life holiness that was also embodied in the Keswick movement in Great Britain. And this type of holiness was more indebted to Wesleyan theology from John Wesley and the Wesleyan-inflected vision of Christian empowerment through the Holy Spirit than previous ways of Christian living in America that were more on the Reformed side. And we also talked about how that holiness tradition that was rooted more in Wesley than in Calvin shaped and informed an experiential individualist evangelicalism that would, for some, later blur into the modern self-help culture that is so dominant in America. And we also probed the role of women in the movement with Anna Purcell Smith as a key case study. She was a female teacher with public authority, but also one whose platform was tied to her husband's reputation and when he ultimately had a scandal that also ended her ministry as well. Before we wrap up, Maggie, do you want to give us a peek into the story for next week?
SPEAKER_01We are diving into one of the most contentious, well-discussed, yet sometimes still misunderstood chapters in American evangelical history, the history of fundamentalism. So we're going to start with the minister whose name was Donald Gray Barnhouse. He built this massive radio empire, was really very well known, very influential. His magazine Eternity was really popular. And very late in life, uh, he made a pretty remarkable resolution to stop fighting everyone he disagreed with. So that's where we're going to start with our episode, and from there we'll unpack where the term fundamentalism actually comes from, uh the regional components to it, as well as the internal divisions that really shaped the movement. If you've ever wondered why a fundamentalist is, in historian George Marston's words, an evangelical who's mad about something, and you're curious about what exactly they were mad about, this is the episode for you.
SPEAKER_00Thanks 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.