American Evangelicals - A History Podcast

It's easy to imagine American evangelicalism as a story that happens entirely inside the United States. In this episode, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra push past that bubble to explore evangelicals' long, tangled relationship with the rest of the world. The episode opens with two stories drawn from recent scholarship. The first, from David Swartz's Facing West , complicates...

For many evangelicals, no object is more central to faith and practice than the Bible—preached, memorized, carried, gifted, and treated as the ultimate authority. But how did it come to occupy that place, and what happens when readers of the same text reach opposite conclusions? In this episode, historians John Fea , Dan Hummel , and Maggie Capra trace the Bible across American evangelical history...

When we tell the story of evangelicalism, we usually reach for famous pastors, theologians, and institutions. But what happens when we turn our attention to the women who taught, organized, wrote, fundraised, evangelized, and sustained evangelical life across generations? In this episode, hosts John Fea , Dan Hummel , and Maggie Capra are joined in the studio by historian Andrea Turpin for a wide-...

When most people imagine evangelical Christianity and science in America, they picture conflict: the Scopes Trial, school-board fights over evolution, faith retreating before modern science. But that picture is largely a product of the twentieth century. For much of American history, evangelicals understood faith and scientific inquiry as deeply compatible — even mutually reinforcing. In this epis...

From the iconic pink Cadillac of Mary Kay Ash to the aisles of the Christian bookstore, this episode traces one of the most tangled relationships in American religious history: the bond between evangelical faith and the marketplace. Hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra use the rise of Mary Kay Cosmetics as a launching point to explore how evangelicals have understood work, wealth, success,...

In the late 1790s, a respected minister convinced much of evangelical America that a secret society called the Bavarian Illuminati was conspiring with Thomas Jefferson's allies to destroy Christianity and topple the government. The conspiracy was pure fiction—but the instinct behind it has proven remarkably durable. In this episode, the conversation turns to one of the most enduring and compl...

One of the most complex and contested questions in the study of American religion is the relationship between evangelicalism and race. Episode 5 of American Evangelicals: A History Podcast takes up that question through an unexpected doorway: the story of J. M. Humphrey, a little-known holiness minister who built a ministry in the early twentieth century — and whose race, historian Maggie Capra di...

It is the summer of 1976. A Gallup poll asks Americans a deceptively simple question: "Have you been born again?" Thirty-four percent say yes. Overnight, a single survey question gives a name to a movement that has existed in America for over two centuries. In Episode 4, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra invite two theologians into the conversation — scholars who have spent th...

In January 1953, the Reverend Donald Gray Barnhouse published a striking New Year's resolution in his magazine Eternity . After 25 years of building a ministerial empire — through Bible conferences, books, a widely syndicated radio broadcast, and a national magazine — Barnhouse confessed that he had fallen short in one significant area: unity. Long known for his willingness to call out anyone...

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 fait...

We begin where history often does — with a story. It’s October 23, 1740, and Connecticut farmer Nathan Cole has just heard urgent news: the famous preacher George Whitefield will be in Middletown in a matter of hours. Cole drops his tools, saddles his horse, and races twelve miles through a cloud of dust kicked up by thousands of others doing the same. What he experiences that day — and over the t...

AMERICAN EVANGELICALS blends storytelling and free-flowing conversation to explore the varieties, similarities, and significance of evangelical Christians in American history. Spanning the religious revivals of the 18th century to the cultural and political conflicts of the 21st, each episode is a conversation grounded in the historical research of its hosts, deep scholarship on American evangelic...