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
Latest Episodes
The Politics of Reaction: Evangelicals and the American Nation
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 w...
Faith and Race: Whose Story Gets Told?
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: t...
Theology, History, and the Question of Identity
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 t...
Defining the American Evangelical Movement: Doctrine and Denominations
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 broa...
Defining the American Evangelical Movement: Spirituality and Practice
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. Conversi...