Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Evangelicalism, History, and What Comes Next (Episode 12)

In the finale of Season One, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra step out of their usual narrative format to reflect directly on the series and on the state of the field they study. They open by sharing what listener feedback has taught them about the value of a historian's “dispassionate” approach to a subject most people experience personally rather than academically.

From there, the conversation turns to future casting — always, they admit, a risky exercise for historians. The hosts trace the demographic rise of religious “nones” and “nonverts,” debate whether “evangelical” and “evangelicalism” remain useful words, and revisit the Bebbington Quadrilateral, Timothy Smith's kaleidoscope theory, and the historiographical legacy of David Bebbington, George Marsden, Joel Carpenter, and Mark Noll.

The back half of the episode moves through evangelicals and political power, the rise of dominionism and reconstructionist thought, the uncertain future of Christian higher education, and the migration of evangelical debate onto podcasts, Substack, and YouTube. They close with a shared case for why a historical — rather than theological or political — lens on evangelicalism still matters, closing out the season with thanks to listeners and a tribute to historian Gordon Wood, who died the week of recording.

PEOPLE & BOOKS MENTIONED

• Stephen Bullivant, Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford University Press, 2022)
• Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994)
• A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso, 2026)
• Henry F. May, “The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Historical Review 70 (October 1964)
• David Bebbington — historian; the “Bebbington Quadrilateral” framework for defining evangelicalism
• George Marsden and Joel Carpenter — historians discussed their role in establishing evangelicalism as a coherent historiographical category
• Nathan Hatch — historian referenced on the “democratization” of American Christianity
• Timothy L. Smith — historian referenced for his “kaleidoscope theory” of evangelicalism
• Vincent Bacote — theologian, Wheaton College, cited as an example of evangelical political-theology scholarship; the hosts recall him as a guest earlier in the season (Episode 4)
• R.J. Rushdoony — referenced in the discussion of Christian reconstructionism
• Paul Weyrich — referenced as a Christian-right organizer connected to the New Congress Foundation
• Lyndon LaRouche — referenced in the discussion of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory's origins
• Tim Mackie — co-founder of The Bible Project, referenced on patron-funded models of Christian content
• Gavin Ortlund — pastor and YouTube creator, cited as an example of digital-first evangelical ministry
• Gordon Wood — historian of the American Revolution, was remembered by the hosts following his death at 92 in June 2026

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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:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour 

Transcript

— Cold Open: Wrapping Up Season One

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to the final episode of Season One of American Evangelicals A History Podcast. When we began this series, our goal wasn't to settle every debate or offer simple answers. It was to explore one of the most influential and most misunderstood movements in American history with the tools of historians, curiosity, nuance, and a commitment to understanding the past on its own terms. We've traced the stories, ideas, controversies, and people who have shaped evangelicalism in America. We've talked about revival and race, politics and theology, institutions and individuals. We've been reminded that history is rarely simple, and that's precisely what makes it so valuable. In this final conversation, the hosts step back from the individual stories to reflect on the series itself. What have we learned? How has the response from listeners shaped our thinking? Where might the study of evangelicalism be headed next? And why does a historical perspective still matter in a culture that often prefers certainty over complexity? Thank you for joining us on this journey. Whether you've listened from the very beginning or found us somewhere along the way, we're grateful you've been part of these conversations.

— Meet the Hosts & Episode Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Here are historians Maggie Capra, Dan Hummel, and John Fia.

SPEAKER_06 1:30

So here we are. We're on the final episode of this podcast series. And we want to do a few things in this episode. We want to start by just talking about some of the feedback we've received and what it's made us think about when we've heard that. And then we'll do a little very dangerous game of talking about contemporary evangelicalism and then do a little future casting, which is always really scary for historians to do. And then we'll end with talking a bit about history and this sort of historian's perspective that we think really helps this podcast run uh as it has so far. So with that, I'll just open it up, uh, John and Maggie.

— Listener Feedback and Surprising Responses

SPEAKER_06 2:08

What are some what's some of the feedback you've gotten?

SPEAKER_05 2:10

I've been really encouraged by the feedback. People seem to like what we're doing uh here. I think there's something to say, which we'll talk a little bit about later, about with three historians in a room, emphasis on historians, right? And you know, how we're gonna approach this subject. My favorite listener, if you're listening, I know she is, is my uh sister-in-law, Thea, who never listens to podcasts. She doesn't even know how to access the podcast. She has to wait till I post it on my blog in order to listen to it. But she grew up in the evangelical community, and uh it's been fun listening to her kind of talk about how, you know, at one point she said, I think you guys are talking about my life here. You're kind of deconstructing, if you will, or interpreting my entire life in a kind of detached way. I think she really liked the episodes. Was it episode four that we had Vincent Corey on? Because they were talking in a much more kind of theological register as evangelicals as opposed to um kind of detached observers in the some ways that we are. Because I think she felt it made her see that the historical approach is, you know, we just approach the material a little bit differently. But uh yeah, shout out to Thea. Thanks for listening, Thea. And um, I hope you're not gonna be too mad at me for raising your your listenership.

SPEAKER_02 3:30

I think it's interesting. I mean, I haven't gotten a lot of feedback because I am a very non-networked person. I'm kind of in my little You have a sister-in-law, right? I mean that's fair. I've got a couple of people, but um, my mom listens and has enjoyed it. But uh similarly, she said almost the same thing. And of course, I've been doing this for about 20 years now, studying evangelicalism and talking to my mother about it ad nauseum. And she was like, you know, finally listening to it, I get what you mean when you talk about being a historian and looking at evangelicals as a historian. And that was both encouraging and discouraging because what have I been doing wrong for the past two decades that she didn't understand it before? But also really helpful that there's something about the way that we've been talking about it that helps her see how a historical perspective is a bit different. There is something that we can offer. Um, so hopefully our listeners are getting that kind of uh benefit as well.

SPEAKER_05 4:24

When I would talk to my sister-in-law about it, it took me back to sort of myself 30 something years ago or like in the late 80s when all of this evangelical right historiography was coming out, you know, Noel Marston, that whole big that whole big thing. And actually thinking, okay, this is my life, right? But this is also something I can think about as a historian in a kind of not this, I mean detached, yes, but not, you know, I mean, I I'm an insider, but also trying to be a historian. It brought me back to that, right? Like the the oh wow, okay, this is a I can actually talk about like growing up in an evangelical church and think about how this affected America or connected with other things that are beyond just my own personal experience. So uh yeah, I get that kind of response to it, especially if you haven't, you know, spent most of your time studying history. It's it's a very different way of thinking, which I think we want to reflect on a little more later in the episode.

SPEAKER_06 5:28

Yeah, I I've enjoyed uh some of the feedback over email from pastors, you know, in other states who are listening to it and seem to think it somehow helps them be better pastors or at least understand that's great. I mean that that's you know, I far be it from me to have any application, real word application for what we're talking about. So it's it's been fun to to see that and and to hear the way that a number of listeners have liked the story-based way we start the episodes. We of course put some work into that, both in writing and in producing those. And for a podcast that's mostly about conversation, it's it's fun to introduce some drama or at least storytelling into it. So that that feels like something that lets us pull back the curtain a little on the history part, is we're not just talking about stories, we're actually presenting some of them and really get at, you know, what one of the things that draws us all to this is there's just very compelling people, ideas, and stories uh around evangelicalism. So that feels like a a win that we're not only doing good conversation, but um introducing people to the interesting or uh forgotten characters uh in the past.

SPEAKER_05 6:40

And I hope listeners have enjoyed the conversational style. We come in with sort of ideas about what we might want to hit on a particular topic, but sometimes it just everyone just starts riffing and like you know, things come up that we never prepared for. And that's actually I've enjoyed that aspect probably of it the most in terms of just working with both Dan and Maggie and and kind of playing off each other. And people seem to like it. I don't know. Um they they seem to like the dynamic between the three of us.

SPEAKER_06 7:07

So uh speaking of riffing, maybe we can move to the next part of

— Where Is the Field of Evangelical History Headed?

SPEAKER_06 7:11

our conversation, which will be about sort of thinking about we were informally thinking about sort of the future of how to talk about evangelicalism or study it, but also more about the contemporary moment and the future. And one of the ways we we want to think about this is thinking about the field that we're all a part of, the field of of sort of American religious history or the subfield of American evangelical history. And where do we think that conversation is gonna go, scholarly conversation is gonna go what in the next few decades? I don't know. I don't I feel very tentative of projecting out that far. I certainly couldn't have projected exactly where it would have gone, say, from the year 2006 uh to 2026. But yeah, what what do we have thoughts about in terms of where the field's at, where it's going?

SPEAKER_05 7:58

I think we have to use those words historians always like to use, right? Perhaps. Maybe it's possible. I mean, those are all those are all key historical words whenever we talk about the future, because that's not what we what we necessarily do, right?

— The Rise of the “Nones” and “Nonverts”

SPEAKER_05 8:14

I think um one thing just looking at the if you you know you want to think about what's happening in evangelicalism right now and then try to maybe think about it even historically, or you know, maybe think about the way the past informs the present or the future, you know, there's these demographic issues. And I'm thinking of like the rise of the in American religion generally, the sort of rise of the nuns. It strikes me that thinking historically about this, there has never been a time where evangelicals have had to encounter such a large number of unbelievers in the course of I'm talking about the course of the entire history of the United States, right? You know, it'll be interesting to see how evangelicalism or how evangelicals kind of engage with the nuns. And I I don't think the old type of like Josh McDowell evidence that demands a verdict kind of stuff is really gonna work. It doesn't work anymore, you know. So so what what might that look like as we're seeing a huge demographic shift? You know, I think there's also implications here for younger evangelicals, right? What they're how they're gonna respond to that. So that's maybe something to think about.

SPEAKER_06 9:31

Well, I think it's it's it's even a bit more interesting than just the nuns. Uh there's a sociologist named Stephen Bolivant who wrote a book a couple years ago called Nonverts. And he makes the once you hear it, obvious point, that the vast majority of people in the nun category grew up Christian. That that won't always be the case, but right now that is still the case. And so they aren't uh, as you said, John, unbelievers in some type of they've never known what Christianity is, and you know, what what do evangelicals do about that? It's a lot of actually dealing with a much more complicated situation where you have a lot of people who did grow up in some type of Christian context, and overwhelmingly Christian, just given the demographics of the US. Now, some of those so in in the nonverts book, he talks about the distinct ways people disaffiliate from mainline Protestantism, evangelicalism, Mormonism, and Catholicism, and that each of those, you know, ex-evangelical, ex-Catholic practice their nun spirituality differently based on what they're leaving. Interesting. So for example, Catholics will often continue to even if they stop going to church, will continue to baptize and bury their people in the Catholic Church because that's so culturally ingrained. Evangelicals tend to leave because of these political perceptions of political partisanship or scandal. In his take, you know, Mormons have been leaving in larger numbers because of sort of like intellectual questions about the origins of the church and and historical questions. And mainline Protestants, you know, young people have left for decades over those traditions because of a sense of a lack of deep investment or a sense he, as he calls it in the book, that it's basically a social club. So I might as well just join a more interesting social club. Yeah. But you can imagine leaving under all those different terms means you're a different type of nun, N-O-N-E. And that's something that's even more interesting than just saying, oh, there's 30% of Americans who are nuns. It's like, well, there's a lot of subgroups in there that uh evangelicals today and certainly in the future will have to figure out how to coexist with or how to try to reach out to. And we talk a lot about in our current media, ex-vangelicals, so evangelicals who leave. But that's just one type of American that's disaffiliating.

SPEAKER_05 11:42

Either way, though, whether they're nonverts, nuns, whatever they are, again, I I reach I want to stress this again. There's no historical I can't think of any historical precedent for American evangelicals to be in a situation like this where the growing number of kind of whatever you want to call them, unbelievers or something. That's a historical challenge that they, you know, or a challenge rooted in a kind of change over time, right, that's happened.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

Yeah, and I think you see evangelicalism shifting in reaction to some of these deep criticisms, right, that are causing these kinds of rifts, um, gender, sexuality, things like that. On one hand, you have the sort of liberalizing impulse, which we see hit historically, this is what happens, or you have a more conservative sort of inward-looking movement. And I think we see both of those in the contemporary landscape. And so I imagine future historians are going to be able to document that and see what's going

— Evangelicalism's Internal Diversity and the Trouble with Labels

SPEAKER_02 12:38

on and uh look at those trends. One thing that I think is very clear in our past episodes, and just as I think about everything that we've talked about, is that evangelicalism is so profoundly diverse. You can have so many different things within evangelicalism, and it is still legitimately American evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_05 12:58

I'm talking like theologically, ethnically, racially, yeah, everything.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

Yeah. I I mean, uh, really there's certain labels that historians have put on certain groups that make them the core. And I think that that's fair and there's really good arguments for that. But one of the things that I really hope we've done in these episodes is show that you have to be really careful when you read a book or you say evangelicals to be a little more careful on qualifying what you mean by that, that there is going to be some kind of definition or some subcategory that will tell you more about what that topic is, what that perspective is. I think in some ways, like there's been, I think, and legitimately some pushback on talking about white male evangelicalism, for example, right? Because it's always used in a kind of critical way. But I think that's a helpful phrasing for some scholars to use because it tells you exactly which group of evangelicals they're talking about. And for some scholars, I think that is then their definition of evangelicalism. And I would push back on that. Because obviously I think it's it's much more than that. But that's something that I think with my students, for example, or even family members, when they're reading works of history, they can get really defensive because they're like, but this isn't what I mean, or this isn't who I am. And I would just encourage people to be like, well, who are the actual characters that are being discussed? Right? They might be in your tradition. That doesn't necessarily mean it's an attack on you, but also they they might be still qualified as evangelicals, but separate from you. And that doesn't discount their importance to the history.

SPEAKER_05 14:32

Or or they might be evangelicals who maybe identify theologically. We just had a conversation about this last month with some people who are here at Lumen, right? You know, and you may not like their politics or their views on gender, or I think some evangelicals, when they really think about it, might have more in common with those people than they do with someone who is does not believe, say, in the four four points of the Ebbington quadrilateral.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

One of the things that I think is relevant for that point is that in social media world, uh, one of the things that I see so much is that people just get siloed. And there's tons of academic work on this, that you get put in these echo chambers and you're gonna hear all these sorts of things. But easy definitions are key to that. You can't have really complicated definitions and nuance if you're trying to go viral. I believe that social media is trying to make money by getting us to hate each other. They're doing it very well. And I think part of this ex-evangelical and the rise of the nuns and all of that is also just a disdain for being lumped in with people that you disagree with on something. And I would just caution people to be a little bit more careful about the way they think about that, because you can be lumped in with people that you disagree with on so many different things. But the question is, what are you being lumped in around? Like what's that center issue? And I think that's just something that I try to get my students, particularly those who are within the evangelical world, to think about kind of carefully. Because I think the impulse is to just reject, like, I'll just I just won't call myself evangelical anymore. And that's a personal decision, but I think that there are always so many things in history that can be redeemed that are actually really important precedents to be thought about and maybe even embraced that if you just jettison everything because of the criticism coming at you can be problematic.

SPEAKER_05 16:32

This leads to

— Is “Evangelical” Still a Useful Word?

SPEAKER_05 16:33

a big question, right? Which you've kind of been working around in your entire comments here, right? I'd love to get to both of your takes on this. So the word evangelical or evangelicalism. I think we've gone 12 episodes now, 11 episodes, without saying much about like is it still a useful word? Is it still something that do we want to think about those who uphold the Bevington quadrilateral with say another word? Or I know you've both thought about this. Like, where are you both at on this?

SPEAKER_06 17:02

Yeah, I I I continue to use the word in a lot of different ways, but I think I probably only to me have particular ways I use it. I mean you can't really just when you're talking explain all all the little nuances, but I definitely think there are evangelicals, and Ebbington's is a really good place to start to define them. I think I I get a little more hung up on evangelicalism, but I think and partly because I think there are many evangelicalisms. And so when you start saying evangelicalism responded this way or something, get into the problem that Maggie has talked about, which is the well, who are we talking about here? So I'm currently in a book project where I'm writing a lot about what we've called the neo-evangelicals or this podcast. I don't like that term for other reasons that are maybe even too academic for this conversation. At this point, it's a little really in the weeds. But what I've ch chosen to call that group, and this would be the Billy Graham, Bill Bright, Fuller Seminary type world, is post-war evangelicalism. And for me, the post-war is doing a lot of work for what I mean by that. But I'm fine using evangelicalism in that sense because I'm I'm I'm really bounding it. Um and I do think the ism part's doing work for me too, because there's a lot of assumptions that that group has about what they're all about, what methods they're gonna use to get their word get the word out, and how they're gonna sort of operate in the world. And so I'm fine using evangelicalism there, but I've become much more skeptical or just frugal, I guess, with using the word to just sort of make a blanket statement about this group of people. I'm still happy to talk about evangelicals as like so-and-so is an evangelical if I think it meets the definition. And that that that's a little trickery or a little way that we all do this with different words where we're really when you spend you know hours, years sort of writing and thinking about this, you end up creating very fine distinctions that sometimes are only in your own notes and head, and then you gotta decide like, am I going to actually introduce this into what I'm writing? And if so, like how am I going to explain this in a way that people who haven't spent all this time are gonna get uh really quickly. So something like even what I just described, I'm not gonna bring a ton of attention to that in a like a published book because that's just too much. But when you're in academic settings or when you're writing for a more academic audience, those can be really helpful distinctions and things we argue uh a lot about. Anyway, that's where I've landed on it. Um so I will use all those terms, but I have a little, you know, sort of particular ways I want to use them.

SPEAKER_05 19:27

It's almost, it's almost uh, you know, as you were talking, Dan, I was thinking of like I was talking to my dad on the phone the other day, and he was in the uh the hospital waiting room waiting for somebody, and uh he tells me on the phone, you know, uh, I'm really having a good time here. I met a couple of born-again Christians and we're talking about, you know, this or that. Like he would never say, like, I met two evangelicals, you know, this is my my uneducated, you know, high school educated father who's a you know carpenter. He would never use the term evangelical, but if he was talking about like support for Trump or something, he'd use it as a political term, but not to describe his own deeply held spiritual convictions.

SPEAKER_02 20:07

I think we do need to be aware that it has become a very politically charged word, especially in the contemporary sense. I'm kind of in the camp that it's like, I don't want just people of a certain political bent to own the term. I think that's unfair to all of those who have come before us. I do call myself an evangelical, and in my own work, I certainly try my very best. I, you know, take a shot at it to define evangelicalism using the work of others. I also think that Bebington's theological commitments are a good starting place. I think I've mentioned this before. I'm really a big fan of Tim Smith's kaleidoscope theory. And I just, it works because it changes over time and that there are different impulses that sweep through the evangelical world. And I think I use that phrase more than evangelicalism, is like the evangelical landscape, the evangelical world, because there's variety within it. And you're going to be attracted to certain teachings or theologies or charismatic leaders in a generation. And that is going to change the shape of things. That's sort of my view of it, is there's core theological commitments, but there's going to be room for a lot of disagreement. And I think that's still true in today's world. But that there's a lot of incentive to just make it a political term and then to use it as a way to turn people against each other in a lot of ways. And I try to combat that, but I also understand it.

SPEAKER_05 21:32

Yeah, I agree with both of you. I I'm not too big on the word evangelicalism anymore. Um, I I like I like the idea of evangelical as an adjective. You used it several times as an adjective. I don't know if you noticed that when you were talking about evangelical this or that. I think there's a particular type of Christian that would privilege certain things that come under the Bemington quadrilateral or something. That that is an evangelical Christian. I guess I would use. The term as a noun, too, in some cases, but I prefer the adjective. But I'm like you, Maggie. I I don't know the good news, right? It's evangelical, the good news of the gospel. Like I guess I I often I want that word back. You know, it's been taken away and I I want it back. I want it so I call myself an evangelical. In terms of the whole debate about like nuancing it and giving 150 different caveats whenever you say the word evangelical. Well, I'm this, I'm that. I get that. And I've thought a lot about that. And this is unique to me, but as someone who does a lot of speaking about evangelicals or identifying as evangelicals in public life, I just say I'm an evangelical Christian. And then, you know, let's talk about religion and the founders or something else. And and and usually people are be like, oh, but you're still an evangelical Christian, right? You don't believe America was founded as a Christian nation. So, you know, for people I think who are out there speaking about this as evangelicals, you know, I just identify as an evangelical and then I say, let's have a discussion about whatever, and I'm going to tell you how I see it historically, and then you can decide. And then usually people will say later, like, oh, that wasn't MAGA, or, you know, and their stereotype is immediately busted by simply being true to, in my case, the historical record, or, you know, whatever, whatever happens to be. Because that's that's the way I've always approached it, as opposed to like saying, like, I'm an evangelical Christian, but I'm this, I'm not this, I'm this, I'm this, you know, constantly kind of explaining away.

SPEAKER_06 23:32

But I think your your distinction there that I mean, I think it would be different. It's different to say I'm an evangelical Christian and something like I am a subscriber to evangelicalism, or I'm a follower of evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_05 23:45

Yeah, I don't know if I've ever said that. Right, right.

SPEAKER_06 23:48

It's an awkward thing to say. But if you did say that, you would be signaling, I think something a bit different. People might hear it differently. Again, maybe I'm making the new option. I think only scholars would hear it differently, though, right? Because I have a high bar for isms. Um,

— Bebbington, the Kaleidoscope Theory, and Defining an “Ism”

SPEAKER_06 24:00

and maybe that's because I'm an intellectual historian, but like you don't just go around and say everything is an ism. An ism has sort of a continuity, a set of ideas that are animating it. And this is where I think I wonder, I mean, we've all expressed our appreciation repeatedly for the scholarship, starting with Bedmington himself, but people like Joel Carpenter and George Mars and Mark Knoll. But in the stronger version of their project, their historiographical project, they were really asserting, I think, an evangelicalism that was at the heart of what American Christianity was about since the colonial period. And again, I want to commend a lot of their work. But I think I'm I I've been affected by the conversations in the last couple decades enough to say I don't know if I believe in the strong version of that story, where there is this sort of more amorphous ism, this evangelical ethos or whatever other way we're going to talk about a more robust thing, than a very diverse set of groups that have you know loose affiliation and commitments sort of at the center of the story of American Christianity. And that's where a lot of the nuance comes in, is because I don't want to entirely get rid of that entire framework. But a kind of through line, right? That you still would have. There is a through line, but it's maybe not as thick and bold and obvious as the work if we ended 25 years ago would have made you think. And some of that is the political moment we're in and the way the scholarship has talked about it. I think some of it is also just there's been a development in the research and conceptualization of American Christianity to say that it's a little more complicated. And I came at this writing about dispensationalism, something that in that older generation of historiography was pretty marginal. It was seen as an extreme expression or an apocalypticism that was sort of part of the scandal of the evangelical mind, as as Mark Knoll talked about in that book of dis about dispensationalism. And I've I just became convinced, like, that's not actually true. It's actually part of the center, or it's actually for at least one big chunk of it, but that actually doesn't counter what Mark Knoll was writing about. So, you know, those things exist side by side, and so that's where something like the evangelical world maggie or or something that's a little looser, and ism to me, again, I'm I'm holding this up to like communism or fascism, like things that we can really precisely define in the dictionary. That's not what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with something a little more diffuse than that, and so for that reason, I'm a little more hesitant to use that stronger sense of evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_05 26:39

Would you say though that that through line though is defined by the Bebington?

SPEAKER_06 26:42

You would argue and debates around it. So this is why I like like Molly Worthing's book, Apostles of Reason, from what, 10 years ago now, more. She really wants to center question or a perennial set of debates around these questions, as really at the heart of what it means to be an evangelical. And so for her, it's sort of the head versus the heart, the crisis of authority, um, which is in her subtitle. So, you know, there's people who take different positions on those questions, but the fact that they're all debating it and seeing that the stakes that's what makes them.

SPEAKER_05 27:12

I think that's a historical, that's also a historical way of thinking about it, right? You know, you're you're you're seeing it as you it's development, right? It's change over time. It's the you know, you're this is not just some fixed thing that, you know, evangelicalism was born in the first great awakening and it's always the same or whatever. It's a you know, it's like the country, you know, it's constantly there's a set of ideals or values, I mean then quadrilateral, you know, or whatever, and we're always debating them and discussing them and what they mean, but I'm not necessarily sure we're ever rejecting them. To reject them means You're sort of leaving the movement.

SPEAKER_06 27:49

Yeah, you're leaving the movement, right? Yeah, and again, I I'm I when I I want to qualify this as like the strong version of that. So, you know, I think Nathan Hatch would be very nuanced in how he'd he wouldn't just insist, well, it we democratized in the early 19th century and then it hasn't changed since then or something. But there is a so I'm sort of caricaturing the strong version of that, but that that's all just to say, like I think there are ways that I've nuanced how I think about it beyond where that scholarship is sort of developed when I got into grad school, frankly.

SPEAKER_05 28:18

Um I think I think Noel would probably at this point agree with you. I mean, I know he wrote these books on like the 18th century, calling it the Age of Evangelicalism, where he's talking about John Wesley and so forth. I think if yeah, I don't want to speak for Mark Knoll, but I think some of the things he's written lately might suggest that he's in agreement with you on that. Yeah.

— A Thank-You Button Giveaway

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Before we get back to it, a quick thank you to everyone who's been listening along with us this season. We've got a little something to give back. We're offering a free three-pack of American Evangelicals buttons. No cost, no catch. Just our way of saying thank you for being part of these conversations. If you'd like a set, the link is right there in the show notes. Click through and we'll get them shipped out to you. We're able to ship anywhere in the continental United States free of charge. That's a free three-pack of buttons, shipping included. Links in the show notes. Grab a set while they last. Now, back to the episode.

— Evangelicals, Politics, and the Pursuit of Power

SPEAKER_06 29:20

Well, one other topic that we can get in trouble with by talking about a little is politics, which of course is at the heart of some of the things we've been talking about around the definition of evangelicalism. How much is it just a political definition now? But John, I'll throw it to you since this is something you think a lot about and write a lot about. How do you think the field's gonna talk about evangelicals and politics?

SPEAKER_05 29:40

I've always sort of thought about evangelicals and politics and maybe a second topic, evangelical intellectual life, right? I mean, you know, Noel wrote this book in '94, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. And I think the scandal of the evangelical mind shows up perhaps more in any other place than the failure of evangelicals to develop any kind of political theology. You know, there are some really good evangelicals who borrow from other traditions. Catholic social teaching, uh, the Dutch Reformed tradition, um, you know, so forth. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And and they're, I think, doing really, really good work. But over the last decade or so, or even earlier than that, maybe the last 50 years, conservative evangelicals especially have really failed to think deeply about what a Christian view of politics is. And I think they've drawn heavily from others have said this, it's not new what I'm about to say, but they've drawn heavily from sort of American values or nationalistic ideas and so forth. And I think as we look at the political landscape right now, without getting into specifics, I do think the question is, how long will American politics, especially over the last 50 years, be driven by a kind of pursuit of power as a way to change the world, so to speak, to quote, you know, Hunter. You know, how long are we going to look at politics? Are evangelicals going to look at the pursuit of power? Um, and when I say power, I mean winning elections, getting the right candidates in office, getting the right people on the Supreme Court, you know, so forth as the way to do politics. And then of course, very little has changed in terms of the issues that many can, especially conservative evangelicals, and we can point to more moderate and more progressive evangelicals. I get that, right? But, you know, when 81% of evangelical voters, you know, are voting a particular way, and it's not just Trump. I mean, this goes back to like George W. Bush, right? It was the same numbers. There's no significant change. You want to start asking questions about to what extent have we been defined by power. And we have been for a long time. Don't get me wrong, right? America, the fate of the church and the fate of the nation have always been tied together since the beginning of the Republic. I think it's a long-standing problem. But I think when we look at future historians writing about this period, I think there's something really unique about the Trump era and the way evangelicals have turned to him. I wrote a book about this a few years ago. But I do think that this is just the logical extension of what's been happening since like the 1970s, late 1970s. Yeah, there's a there's a continuity. I think there's change that has happened in the last 10 years, you know, with the way evangelicals have flocked to Trump and have found themselves in positions of power, especially people who've never been in power before, like new apostolic reformation people or prosperity gospel type people. I know there's an overlap between those two, those two groups. There's also been continuity. I think after the 1960s, you know, evangelicals no longer control the culture, uh, or at least Christians no longer control the culture broadly defined. So we're in we're in a really interesting place right now in terms of that.

— Dominionism, Reconstructionism, and Political Theology

SPEAKER_06 33:03

I think you're right that evangelicals don't have a very defining political theology. That would actually be surprising, I think, to some outsiders, to the historical profession. Because there's a number of books, you know, and there's a new one coming out really soon, on either Dominionism or Reconstructionism. These are two different forms of very Christian dominant theonomy type views of how a Christian should engage with politics. And those are political theologies in a sense.

SPEAKER_05 33:32

Well, I'm tipping my hand here, right? You know, I'm I'm basically saying, you know, the kind of political theology I'd like to see. Right, right. Okay. So that's a different question. To be fair, right? You're you're thinking about this rightly so historically. I followed Noel on this, who who does see the way in which evangelicals engage politically as a kind of scandal, but that's not a historical argument. So yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_06 33:55

I think but you I think you can critique that and say, I've certainly felt this, that those books do the thing that Maggie said is not good to do. Sometimes not intentionally, sometimes intentionally, which is to say, and this is evangelicalism. Like I'm gonna write a book about RJ Rashdooney and his reconstructionist views, and then suddenly if you're an evangelical, that's now who you're sort of linked up to. And you know, for I mean, we know from this from studying this, that is a significant but very minority group that would even recognize that name. I mean, if you asked a hundred evangelicals who is RJ Rushdone, uh maybe one of them would know who that is. So that's a question to me is right now, partly because of the political moment, there's a lot of research on these types of I don't want to say extreme because that gives away my perspective too, but these types of very clear and organized, small groups that have political theology as a way to say, you know, this is where the evangelicalism is about politics. I think you're right that actually most evangelicals don't subscribe to those either by knowing or not knowing what they are, and are a lot more they're casting about for exactly how to engage with politics. But I wonder if there will be historians, hopefully, you know, you'll be part of that too, John. Who actually like you're writing stuff right now. Um, who actually unpack that in a significant way that like actually a lot of the evangelics who've gotten into politics don't really have a a master plan in in the sense that if you are a dominionist or something, like there is this real big robust sense of what you're doing. And it's much been much more reactive or much more as a culture war type thing where you feel like you're losing something, so you're gonna jump in. I hope that's where the scholarship goes, is we get a little more of those types of studies than yet more exposes on Dominionism.

SPEAKER_05 35:46

I'm reading a book right now. Um it's by a socialist press verso books. It's written by a guy named A.J. A. Woods, who there'd be no reason any of us would know who he was. But it's called The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, why the right blames the Frankfurt School for the decline of the West. And it is fascinating, and this gets to your point about thinking historically about this. It shows the way in which the Christian right embraced the new right, the political rights, kind of critique of what they call cultural Marxism. Now you hear that term everywhere, but it's it's people like Lyndon LaRouche, uh, who ran for president several times. He was a former communist, turned libertarian. It's uh the New Congress Foundation, which was run by a guy named Paul Weirich, who was very involved in the Christian right. But it is uh, you know, back to the anti-intellectual question. I mean, they are making like very deep intellectual arguments. Again, we could we could debate whether they're good ones, you know, and that's I have my opinions on that. It is an in a political theology, at least as it's embraced by, you know, the sh though he shows the way in which the Christian right leaders embrace these kinds of kind of new rape. So yeah, so fair enough. I mean, I think there are Christian attempts to create a political theology. This then would lead to a debate outside of the historical discipline of this is why we have political scientists. Uh so fair enough. Yeah, I I like the way you I like the way you came back at me on that, Dan. I agree with it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 37:24

Any thoughts about politics, Maggie?

— Culture Wars, Polarization, and the Corrupting Force of Power

SPEAKER_02 37:26

I teach on culture wars, and so I think because of that, I have a tendency to view our current moment as a very culture war moment. We're so extremely polarized uh and divided. And again, like I've already said, I think social media and technology has so much to do with that that it's really stripped away people's attention spans to pay attention to nuance, but even the opportunity to present nuance. I also grew up in a much more separatist world that was very cautious of any kind of political involvement whatsoever, right? Um, I was home churched, I was homeschooled. We at one point went to a church where you were not allowed to say the pledge of allegiance kind of thing. And so, you know, that's also part of evangelicalism, those that uh think that we need to say completely out of politics. I think that's shifted somewhat in our current political moment as well, even from the people I know from those groups. But it still is, I think, relevant to keep in mind that you're going to have, and this is just maybe I'll become the skeptical one on this episode, John. Cynical. Cynical. Okay, the cynical one. I'll be the case. It doesn't bother me at all. Okay, all right. I can't remember the exact words. It's cynical. I'll be the I'll be the cynical one in this episode. I think politics and power is a corruptive force. And I think it makes a lot of sense that it would be problematic or evangelicals when they try to use politics for sway. Doesn't mean that I think it's wrong for a believer to get involved in politics, but I I do think that it is something to be done with a lot of care and caution. There's a a faculty member here at UW Madison. We were talking once about teaching logic and reasoning to students, particularly the importance of that in kind of framing really controversial topics, because you need something on which to like gauge a discussion that isn't opinion, because otherwise you can't talk about anything difficult. What he said to me was that sometimes I worry that by teaching students how to reason well, I'm talking them out of politics as a career. And that worries me. And that has nothing to do with evangelicalism, that just has to do with our current political moment. But that's that's my commentary on politics.

SPEAKER_05 39:53

I don't bring politics into the classroom. I never have. I refuse to, you know, unless there's some kind of way it merges with the discipline of history. But this I had a student who came up to me and afterwards and said, like, in light of all of your saying all of what you're saying, he was a first-year student. I'm a politics major. I wanted to go into politics, but you know, if America is not a Christian nation, like what's the point? I said, What do you want to go into politics for? And he said, Well, I want to fight for pro-life issues, I want to fight for traditional values, I want to blah, blah, blah. I go, you can still do that. America doesn't have to be founded as a Christian nation for you to do that. It was, it was like a light bulb went off. You know, so I think this gets to another point about politics and evangelical politics. It's so wed to a particular understanding of of American history. You can fight for pro-life issues, whether we're a Christian nation or not, right? So it that just struck me when you said that. You almost convinced the student not to go into politics.

SPEAKER_02 40:55

I mean, it is one of those things. But it's also, I think, and again, this is just a commentary on the status of where we're at right now. But we also have a pretty fragile perspective of what it means to do something, right? Like if you're not going to succeed in a career. So for that student, perhaps, if I can't succeed as a pro-life politician because it's not a Christian nation, right? Like I'll lose elections on that, then maybe it's not worth it for me. There's also that I see it a lot, that idea that having something they have to work very, very hard and very long for and perhaps not actually thrive or flourish. That that seems to be, and I mean, it makes sense. We have a very leisure-focused society where that wouldn't be particularly attractive to young people, but I think that's part of that dynamic as well.

— The Uncertain Future of Evangelical Higher Education

SPEAKER_06 41:51

Well, maybe these last couple comments, they've been on education. Uh, maybe the last sort of topic we can talk about in terms of where it's at and where it might go, is thinking about evangelical institutions, particularly institutions of higher education, seminaries, uh, colleges. And one way I think about that is sort of this is meta to us as historians, but think about where is the scholarship going to come from in future generations about American evangelicalism. And including up to this point, a lot of it has been produced by faculty at Christian colleges and universities, including you, John, for most of your career. And that sector has fallen on tougher times in recent decades, and it, you know, who knows where it'll go, but it doesn't seem like it'll return to the heyday of the 70s and 80s or 90s or whenever um there was a lot of growth in that area. And one of the effects of that is there's just less historians working than there were in previous decades on some of these questions. Now, of course, there's R1 universities like UW Madison, but we know in general the humanities are in decline, and so it's certainly looking like this whole part of the academy is getting smaller rather than bigger. So I don't know if either of you have thoughts on how that larger there's a sort of a larger higher ed problem. There's a problem that's particular to the evangelical world within that, and then there's this question of scholarship and how that is going to be even produced and adjudicated in the future.

SPEAKER_05 43:18

Yeah, I could spend multiple episodes of a podcast talking about this question. It is clear to me that there are no longer if there ever were, but there at least I I think there were at times, sort of at least centers where the intellectual life and I'm talking here about the liberal arts, humanities, these kinds of things, the Christian intellectual life, Christian humanism seems to be a topic people like to talk about these days. Where those things were deeply valued by Christian colleges, by evangelical educational institutions. And I'm not talking here about Bible colleges, you know, they have another whole set of different kind of mission or even seminaries to that matter. But I mean the Christian, the Christian college, I think they were valued a little bit more because it was in these disciplines like philosophy, like literature, like history, where the central questions of what made a college Christian were to be found, right? This is, you know, ethics or, you know, moral, moral philosophy or whatever. But most evangelical Christians do not attend Christian colleges. They attend places like UW Madison, right? Or they they go to big universities or regional universities or community colleges, right? Places they can afford, especially as Christian colleges, their tuitions go higher and higher through the roof. So in order to keep these Christian colleges open, you have to cater to the consumer demand, which is mostly they become kind of advanced professional schools, you know, where you get a little smattering of liberal arts. So I've said this publicly before, but I'm not convinced that the future of evangelical thinking and evangelical, maybe even scholarship to some extent, can come from the Christian colleges anymore, because the questions that keep this kind of scholarship alive are no longer being valued and invested in by evangelical institutions. There's exceptions. I think of like a Wheaton College, for example, which has kind of held the line. But even if you talk to Wheaton Profs, they would say this is happening, probably to a different level. So that raises like all kinds of questions. It's what's the future of like evangelical scholarship, evangelical intellectual life, and and where are the physical spaces, if they even are physical spaces, where that will be housed, right? Where will this happen? You know, I think we're sitting here in a Christian study center. I mean, one of the reasons I moved here to be part of this work, especially the Lumen Center, is I I truly believe that evangelical scholarship, evangelical thinking is going to be fostered in much more effective ways in places like this than in the traditional Christian college. So again, like I said, I could go on a soapbox forever about this topic. Um I'm actually thinking of if I ever get a chance of writing a book about it, but I'll stop there.

SPEAKER_02 46:08

I mean, I think pretty similar. I'm at a different point, but like looking at just, for example, the the job field that's out there, like the potential for jobs if you want to study evangelical history, it's pretty dire out there.

SPEAKER_04 46:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

There's the Christian world where people are losing jobs more than I think getting them, and you are in competition with people that are actually extraordinarily experienced because they're coming out of schools that are closing down. And so that's not great. And then when you look at the world of just research universities, for example, and Dan, you know this, UW Madison doesn't really have anyone who studies American religion. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_05 46:48

It always baffled me that, like, you know, universities, 25% at a high estimate of the population. Forget about just a professor teaching. It should be like an endowed chair in uh 25% of the population, and you don't have anybody on the staff on the department in the department studying it. You would never say that about like, I don't know, Muslim studies or Jewish studies. And I'm not, you know, I'm just trying to, I'm speaking purely academic terms here. Uh it it is, it is, it is shocking at times, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:20

I think that's is one of the reasons why we see scholars trying to justify their work so much with the political focus, is because that does get people's attention. Like suddenly evangelicals are politically powerful, and then it's like, oh, we need to pay attention to them because we don't understand that. They can't explain the Trump election suddenly, it matters where evangelicals are coming from. And so there is that kind of relationship between political power and scholarship and the academic world that I think explains in some small way all of the works that we have on evangelicals and political power versus other topics that I think evangelicals themselves are like, why doesn't anyone write about X, Y, and Z?

SPEAKER_05 48:00

When it is written about in certain sectors, you could have someone who studies American evangelicalism. And, you know, I've said this before, evangelicalism becomes merely they're not studying it to try to fully understand the movement, but rather evangelicalism becomes a topic to better explain. It can't be true faith or religion or that these people actually believe this. It must be race or patriarchy or class. You know, I was brought up at a time where we were taught to teach, you know, this I think this was Henry May's essay, he wrote it back in 1964, right? Taking religion as a serious category of analysis in scholarship, as opposed to just the, you know, old Marxian kind of like, you know, it's the opiate of the masses or something like that. But to take it very seriously as a subject of discussion. So I think there's a lot, I, you know, not to disagree with you, Dan, but I think there's a lot of work being written about evangelicalism, but not as a kind of actual religious movement. It's more about evangelicalism is this. It's really this. So, you know, uh, the person who studies gender history will write a book about evangelicalism because they're really interested in patriarchy. Or right. So uh I think that's a real issue here, the way it's being thought about.

SPEAKER_06 49:18

Yeah, and just to give my two cents, this is possibly self-interested reasoning because it justifies things like where I work, but I do think we're in a moment where there are there's declining and then new experimentation around institution types, and certainly not the first time in evangel American evangelical history that that's happened. All the Christian colleges that are now seem really old and established were all quite new a hundred years ago. Many of them didn't even exist a hundred years ago. And that was, I would put you know, put sort of the turn of the century as another of these experimental moments where because of the Industrial Revolution, there were a lot of new rethinking of what does education mean? There were, you know, desires to do global missions, and so they create Bible institutes and all that. So we're in a much different moment in terms of what we care about than in 1900. But in another sense, there's a lot of continuity in this idea that this is a part of the evangelical world, is there's a lot of institution building and declining all the time as it's so decentered, and there's massive downsides to that too, personality-based and all that kind of stuff as well. But I do think that's you know, something we'll be looking at in the next 20, 30 years is will there be new successful institutional types that emerge that fill the gap of whatever's being lost in the curriculum of these Christian colleges or in their just disappearance for some of them. And you know, I was just reminded that we had an event last night and uh we were with Tim Mackey from the Bible Project, and he talked about that's a donor-based, you know, YouTube content production studio. And he talked about how it's a patron-based thing he does. Now it's a bunch of patrons. And here we're patron-based too. We're we're funded by a foundation that's named after somebody, the Stephen Lowell Brown Foundation. And one of Tim's points was that for the vast majority of Christian history, patronage-based scholarship was the norm. The actual oddity is the last few hundred years when we've created these universities, and and you know, there's so much good that's come from that, and we wouldn't even have our discipline without that development. But there's also something about like, well, Christians thought deeply about the past before there were universities, and they will continue if all the universities go away. Now, we here tend to do a different type of history than most Christian historians have done. We don't do church history or or sort of um, well, that would be what it used to be called, which is sort of like almost apologetic history for your version of Christianity. But we do do history, and that's something that's been around for a very long time, and and you know, Christians have cared about history for a very long time. And I'm I'm just interested to see will there be sort of new patron models that emerge in in the near future that in some ways will be worse in certain ways than a university where you have academic freedom and uh all these other things, but it might be in other ways we allow Christians to ask or scholars to ask new questions about Christianity, about evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_01 52:20

I mean that's sort of what Substack is. In a weird way, right? You're crowdsourcing your own scholarship.

SPEAKER_06 52:27

Yeah, and that's a lot of our media culture now is is sort of moving to that model.

SPEAKER_05 52:31

Well, this is moving away from the educational stuff. But as I listen to you talk, Dan, I was thinking institutions are under attack right now. They're always under attack when a kind of populism is sort of dominating the political landscape.

— Digital Media and the Future of Evangelical Institutions

SPEAKER_05 52:46

But then tying this into, you know, one thing we haven't talked about here is like tech, digital media, podcasting, Substack, you just mentioned Maggie, AI. To what extent is evangelicalism or evangelical, to what extent does it no longer exist in institutions, but it exists like online? Like literally, you have like Gavin Ortland, who is a staff member of his church doing YouTube videos. That's he's a YouTuber, and that's a position on the church staff. The debates that we have over complementarianism or politics or things are all happening on social media platforms or they're on they're on podcasts, right? So so what does this also mean for like the future of like the actual institution of the church? What is evangelicalism? It seems like now just an array of uh that's too strong, but it seems like a lot of evangelicalism is an array of digital media.

SPEAKER_06 53:48

Yeah, well, that that's been one of these definitions we've played around is yeah, it's largely a pattern of consumption, right? Yes, yes, mm defines evangelicals.

— Why a Historical Approach Still Matters

SPEAKER_06 54:00

Well, maybe we'll end with a couple reflections on history and the way a historical approach can benefit us. One of the things we've all noticed from the comments that we've received from listeners is people love the substance, they love you know the facts and learning about the past, but they've also given us very kind compliments on just the way we talk about evangelical history. Meggie, you mentioned this with people in your family finally understanding what what you what you're inter why you're interested in this, I guess, and and how you do it. What are our sort of concluding thoughts on why, you know, with our case for why a historical approach to evangelicalism or evangelicals is useful for today when there are many, many people weighing in on this, what can history bring that other ways of talking about evangelicals can't?

SPEAKER_05 54:49

Well, I think we all struggled with this episode because it's a very it these producers asked us to talk about the future or you know where the where the movement's going, which is a great exercise, don't get me wrong. But I think we all put kind of our cards a little bit on the table today. If you haven't figured it out already, we are evangelicals, we're thinking about our own movement, but we're not thinking about it theologically, we're not thinking about it politically, we're thinking about it historically, and that requires a certain degree of detachment, which some of our viewers and people who sent us comments have mentioned. We talked about a little bit about this at the beginning of the episode. You know, why aren't you weighing in? But I think history is a sort of bedrock, bedrock way of thinking, right? You can't really weigh in, you can't really offer opinions, you can't really offer kind of, you know, right or wrong kind of things until you really understand the movement and all its nuances and all its complexities, right? You know, I'm sure, I hope, I would love it if people listen to our podcast and then like met in a small group and like debated the points, like and had knocked down, drag out arguments over this, you know, these kinds of things.

SPEAKER_06 55:58

But email us if you do.

SPEAKER_05 56:00

That would be Yeah, we'd love to hear about it. But you know, that's not what we're doing here. We're trying to lay a foundation. And I think that's why, uh, that's why some people, who are these people? Why are they are they evangelicals themselves? Why are they talking in such a detached way? And and it's not that we're, you know, we all go to church, we all are, you know, we're working at a Christian study center. It's not like we're trying to shy away from it. It's just like we are we have a particular discipline, and that is a way of thinking about the past and the present. We could debate about the future, which we tried to do a little bit today, but that's a way of thinking. It's a way of of being in the world, of understanding the world. And it's it's not better than other ways of thinking, but it's it's a unique discipline, I think, that we bring. So I think it's important that this is a history podcast, right? It's not a podcast about sort of evangelicalism broadly.

SPEAKER_06 56:51

I like saying dispassionate more than detached.

SPEAKER_05 56:53

All right, detach- yeah, dispassionate.

SPEAKER_06 56:55

I'm very attached. Um, I'm very, but dispassion is sort of like a purposeful attempt to remove the passion or the emotion from the discussion. Or the opinion, yeah. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 57:06

It's an interesting perspective. And I think the reason I was drawn to history was that I don't love having debates over things that I don't know enough about. And I think that's relatable to most people. And in history, your goal is to know a lot about it. Yeah. Right. Like that's in and of itself the goal. And not necessarily to have a like, and this is right, this is wrong, but to know a lot about it. And I think people are looking for that. Um, and history is at least ostensibly a field where you should make bias clear, but also try to eliminate it as much as possible because we are trying to be ethical and responsible in the way that we present the past. And that's something that I just don't think comes from a lot of corners right now. And it is very important because I mean, we can go out there and try and shape people's minds and opinions to mimic our own, but that's disingenuous. And it also isn't going to be long-lived. There's not a strong foundation there. And I think that this is true of churches and religion as much as anything else. Like you want faith to be real, and I want people's opinions to be real and therefore based on a reality that's not going to change when they go and look something up themselves. And so having this kind of conversation where we're clear on this might be my bias, or this is what I've seen with my kind of research, et cetera, that is very relevant. And I think something that is what I look for when I'm looking into podcasts or books and things like that, because I want to be well informed and I don't just want someone to tell me that I should feel guilty about thinking one way versus another, or that I have to feel this way, or I'm not a good enough Christian, et cetera. And so that I think is something that the field of history can very easily offer. Now, importantly, not all historians think that. Some historians think that history is a very politically active, like you are an activist if you are a historian. So just know that. I think all three of us come from the kind of other school of thought, that it's not necessarily political activism that is inherent to the field of history, but just so people know that does exist out there. There are people who think that history is political.

SPEAKER_05 59:21

I think it's an issue oftentimes of integrity. You know, we've been tasked with trying to understand the past. I would feel very uncomfortable if we spent 12 episodes either praising how great evangelicalism has been, and or if we spent 12 episodes like trashing it. Oh, it gets theological here since this is the last episode. Take my history hat off. You know, if you if you do believe that human sin is a real thing, if you do believe that all human beings are created in the image of God and have dignity and worth, you're gonna get a messy story. Right? You're gonna have people doing heroic things, people doing villainous things, your heroes are gonna suddenly fall, your villains are gonna be redeemed. Right? You know, and so so again, that's a theological spin, but it's about the nuance, the complexity, and so forth. And then thinking about the complex stories that we tell when we speak about the past as it relates to the present, I think is so important because there's such a great danger to kind of cherry pick just the things we want to advance whatever agenda we want to advance in the present. And uh I don't think we tried to do that in this. I think we try to do it the best we can, right, with our biases, right? With integrity, try to understand this movement that I think we have all affiliated with, maybe even love, but also are very much aware of its flaws too.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:44

The the the dispassionate mode for me also it does what Maggie mentioned, which is try to get out of a what others have called presentism mindset, the a sense of you're really trying to sort of move people to do something with your history, which makes you tell your history in a certain way. I also think that I mean this may be a not a good way to to end the podcast, but I also think the stakes are pretty low in what we're doing here, in a way that means we can talk a little more dispassionately. There's a famous quote I attributed to Henry Kissinger among others that the debates in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so low. So you can get, you know, really radical and it's like it doesn't cost you anything. And I've always I've always agreed with the second half of that, which is the stakes are pretty low in terms of real-world effects for a podcast, right? Like that I think things go off the rails when you start thinking that your podcast or your article is going to be the spearhead of the revolution. And so you need to, you know, pour all your your zealous energy into it. And so that dispassionate approach is a tend to try to calm that and say when it does come time to do things, it's gonna you're gonna be better equipped, you're gonna be better prepared if you have clear thinking and clear understanding. And that is only gonna come in a moment when you're not like that. Like you can't be worked up. It's very hard for humans or probably any creature to assess a situation clearly if they are worked up in the moment that they're trying to assess it. So I think that is something like the dispassion is like an intentional way of moving into a topic, whether it's history or something else, to say the stakes are pretty low right here. Like right here, we can just play with ideas, learn from each other, rethink things, actually change our minds, because there's nothing truly at stake in the sense that there's no winning or losing this conversation. There's no great crowd to inspire or something like that. I mean, that that's sort of a weird way to think about your work is it's it's actually not that important or not that stakes are high. I think it's important. I just don't think the stakes are very high for these types of conversations, which lets us talk about them in a way where we can talk about pretty horrible things that have happened in the past, but but with an eye toward understanding. And same with really good things without getting into that trap of praising or just trashing in sort of blanket ways.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:05

We're recording this at a week or so after the death of uh one of the greatest, I think, American historians of all time, Gordon Wood, died at the age of 92. And he has a famous quote: You'll see it on memes sometimes. He'll say, Um, if there's one thing you learn about from studying history, it's humility. I hope we were able to reflect that over the course of these 12 episodes.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:31

As

— Closing Thanks and a Season One Send-Off

SPEAKER_00 1:03:32

we close this final episode of season one of American Evangelicals a History Podcast, we want to say thank you. Thank you for listening, for sharing the podcast, for sending thoughtful questions and comments, and for joining us in taking history seriously. Your engagement has reminded us that these conversations matter, not because they provide easy conclusions, but because they help us better understand ourselves, our communities, and our past. While this is the end of this 12-part series, we hope it isn't the end of the conversations that is inspired. History has a way of reminding us that every ending is also part of a much larger story. On behalf of all of us at the Lumen Center and SLBF Studio, keep asking good questions, keep listening well, and never stop learning from the past. To find other podcast offerings, visit SLBF.orgslash studio.