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
BONUS: Evangelicals, Science, & Ted Davis
Episode 8 of American Evangelicals only had room for excerpts of our conversation with historian of science Ted Davis. This bonus episode gives you the entire, unedited interview. Davis, a leading historian of science and religion, traces the r...
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...
Accidental Diplomats: Missionaries, Money, and the World (Episode 11)
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 r...
The Bible: A People of the Book (Episode 10)
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 sa...
"Can a Woman Preach?": Rethinking Gender in Evangelical History (Episode 9)
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 evangeli...
Fan Mail
John, I also want to thank you for this series of podcasts because I recognized my life in it. It was like watching Forest Gump the first time. I grew up in a Conservative Baptist church that was fundamentalist for the most part. However, my folks attended a Sunday morning adult class at Montebello First Baptist Church in Southern California which was taught by none other than Edward John Carnell. His popularity supposedly grated on the senior pastor because there were more people in the adult Sunday school than the church service. My parents raved about his teaching. What I deduced from their experience was that he was intellectually stimulating. I found that very interesting. He was the president of Fuller Seminary so that drew my imagination also. For a brief period we had a young man who graduated from Fuller as our substitute preacher. I really liked him and the way he presented his sermons. One of the things that Dr. Carnell got in trouble for was his support for the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. So I bought one. The first book I read in it was Hebrews because I really didn’t understand the KJV of it. I found it a wonder. This was probably my first rejection of Fundamentalism because so many of the fundamentalism’s voices condemned the RSV to hell. I attended Biola College from the fall of 1961 to the spring of 1963. I believe that Biola wanted to cement its students in fundamentalism and dispensationalism along with antipathy towards evolution. It failed me there. I got more questions about these issues than they would wish.
Los Angeles, California