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: 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 discovered, was invisible in the sources until a single letter revealed it.

That discovery — that Humphrey was Black, and that his racial identity had been effectively unknown from the sources that survived him — opens into a wide-ranging and deeply layered conversation. Maggie Capra, John Fea, and Dan Hummel explore how race has shaped evangelical institutions, archives, and historical memory itself, and they wrestle with some of the sharpest debates among scholars today: Is racism intrinsic to evangelicalism, or does it reflect broader patterns in American culture? What is "colorblind Christianity," where did it come from, and what does it mean for how evangelicals discuss race today? And how do political developments — above all the rise of Donald Trump — change the way historians interpret the evangelical past?

From Black fundamentalism to the church growth movement to the sociological insights of Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, this episode offers a nuanced and historically grounded examination of faith, race, and the challenge of telling honest stories about American evangelicalism.

Most episodes of American Evangelicals open with a narrative story about the subject. In Episode 5, Maggie Capra reads from J. M. Humphrey's pamphlet "A Word of Warning on Divorce Marriage" — a deeply personal testimony about Humphrey's tormented conscience after remarrying following divorce — and from a letter written by Jenny Jolly, a white evangelist in the holiness movement who knew Humphrey personally.

Jolly's letter, appended to a posthumous reprint of Humphrey's pamphlet, contains the sentence that stopped Capra cold: "Colored people couldn't claim him after that. He was too much in demand by the free Methodist whites." Nowhere in Humphrey's published sermons or pamphlets had race appeared. The letter was the only surviving evidence of his racial identity — and its tone, matter-of-fact in its racism, raises hard questions about who gets preserved in the historical record, and why.

Who was J. M. Humphrey? Born in 1872 in Tennessee, Jerry Miles Humphrey and his wife moved to Chicago in their early twenties, where both were converted and sanctified in the holiness movement. After his first wife renounced her faith, Humphrey divorced her and eventually — under pressure from church leaders — remarried. He spent the rest of his ministry promoting his belief that his "divorce marriage" was spiritually dangerous, using his own experience as a warning to others. Only one surviving letter, written after his death, reveals that he was Black. 

The Whitewashing of the Historical Record

Capra's experience with the Humphrey sources illustrates a problem historians increasingly acknowledge: the archives are not neutral. Racist attitudes and exclusionary practices shaped which voices were preserved, which pamphlets were reprinted, and whose papers were collected. As a result, historians working from traditional archives may unintentionally reproduce the racial biases that shaped those archives.

The hosts discuss how this dynamic shaped the story of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy — a narrative almost entirely built around white evangelical figures — and note ongoing scholarly work, including Daniel Bare's book on Black fundamentalism, that seeks to recover what was excluded.

Is Racism Intrinsic to Evangelicalism?

The episode grapples with one of the most contested questions in the field: Is racism essential to evangelicalism as a movement, or is it a historical contingency — present in particular eras and communities, but not definitionally part of what evangelicalism is? The hosts survey both ends of this debate:

• Some historians argue that evangelicalism, as it developed in the United States, is inseparable from white supremacy — that pulling racism out of it leaves something unrecognizable.
• Others, drawing on the Bebbington Quadrilateral's theological definition, argue that evangelicals held widely divergent positions on race (abolitionists alongside slaveholders) and that racism is better understood as reflecting broader American culture than as intrinsic to the movement.
• A third concern, raised by John Fea, is "race reductionism" — the tendency, accelerated after 2016, to interpret evangelicalism primarily or exclusively through a racial lens, producing historical accounts that are accurate in their particulars but reductive as total explanations.

Colorblind Christianity: Origins and Consequences

Dan Hummel traces the rise of what scholars call "colorblind Christianity" — the belief, which entered the mainstream of white evangelicalism in the 1970s, that the most Christian approach to race is to ignore racial difference altogether, to see all people as equal before God without acknowledging race. Drawing on Jesse Curtis's book The Myth of Colorblind Christianity, Hummel explains how this ideology took hold and what its consequences have been.

Hummel connects colorblind Christianity to the church-growth movement of the same era, particularly Donald McGavran's Homogeneous Unit Principle — the sociological observation that churches grow when they gather people who resemble one another. Applied to American suburbs, this principle reinforced the idea that building a racially homogeneous congregation was not just strategically sound but compatible with Christian identity. The result: millions of evangelicals raised in churches that treated race as a divisive topic, one better left outside the sanctuary door.

The Christian Right and the Racial Politics Debate

The hosts discuss competing historical interpretations of the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s and the role race played in motivating figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Two contrasting views emerge:

• Randall Balmer argues, based in part on a direct conversation with political organizer Paul Weyrich, that the Christian right was primarily mobilized not by abortion but by opposition to the desegregation of private Christian academies — making race the foundational political issue.
• Daniel Williams and others offer a multi-causal account: race was certainly present, but so were concerns about abortion, secularism in public education, and other issues. Reducing the Christian right to a single motivating factor, they argue, distorts the history.

Evangelicals and Systemic Racism: The "Toolkit" Problem

The conversation turns to a landmark study by sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith (2000), which argued that evangelicals possess a limited "cultural toolkit" for thinking about race. Because evangelical theology places such heavy emphasis on individual conversion, free will, and personal accountability, evangelicals tend to frame racism as an individual sin rather than a structural or systemic reality.

Fea illustrates this from his own teaching: evangelical students consistently reach for relational or individual responses to racial injustice — volunteer work, cross-racial friendship, personal witness — rather than structural or political engagement. The Promise Keepers movement of the 1990s is discussed as a prominent example of the relational approach to racial reconciliation, along with its limitations.

Black Evangelicalism: Parallel Histories

The episode also considers the story of Black evangelicalism — a tradition that ran parallel to, and sometimes intersected with, white evangelical institutions — but which has been systematically underrepresented in archives and historiography. The hosts recommend Vince Bacote's documentary on Black evangelicalism and discuss how institutions such as Moody Bible Institute, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and Fuller Seminary both excluded African Americans and eventually opened to their participation.

Hummel notes a striking contemporary data point: as of 2026, the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, and Christianity Today — the three flagship institutions of postwar American evangelicalism — are all led by non-white leaders.

The "White Evangelical" Label: A Disciplinary Divide

The episode closes with a discussion of the term "white evangelical" itself, prompted by a view expressed in an earlier episode by guest Corey Marsh. Marsh objects to the racial modifier, arguing that evangelicalism is a theological category that shouldn't be bounded by race.

Hummel agrees in part — using the term as a reflexive political statement can be imprecise — but defends it as analytically necessary for historians studying communities that were, in fact,

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

SPEAKER_00 0:02

The men with their excess of flesh and silk hats, clad in dark, ominous clothing, gathered in a mob meant to petrify and terrorize. They waved their banners overhead and chanted in unison a chilling tune, as the newlyweds walked arm in arm down the wide brimstone path. In front of them, a sounder of black swine, fleshy and filthy, undulated and shifted away from the eerie verse. In hell at last, in hell at last, and earth and all her pleasures passed, in hell at last, in hell at last, for I and I the die is cast. The couple continued their walk, drawn inexorably down the path to hell, despite their holy lives, their salvation severed because of their decision to marry. Unsurprisingly, Holiness Minister J. M. Humphrey awoke from this nightmare, troubled and disoriented, the hellish music ringing in his ears and the awful picture still burning in his brain. He was convinced that this dream, like the three that preceded it, were God's message to him that his second marriage, in his words, a divorce marriage, had eternal consequences. Born in 1872, Jerry Miles Humphrey married Young, at the age of 19, to a woman a couple years his junior. They moved from Tennessee to Chicago in their early 20s and were both converted and sanctified there. But after a time of living together in harmony, Humphrey's wife renounced all religious scruples, became abusive, and embraced a life of sin, and in Humphrey's description, became unclean. Thus, Humphrey was forced to put her away as he felt the scriptures commanded him to do. However, he fully believed he must remain single, as divorce was an option only if followed by sexual abstinence, since any other sexual relationship, as he read scripture, would be adulterous. He began to doubt this only through the prodding of authorities in his church, men he described as holy, devout men who were more experienced both in word and ministry, and they held a different view. Taking the exception clause in Matthew 19 as evidence that the innocent party could remarry, they encouraged the traveling evangelist to do just that. Their advice, coupled with the stance of the major Orthodox churches, convinced him that he was in the wrong and his interpretation misguided. And so he married a second time. But, he wrote, the Spirit of God immediately acted to let him know of his error. The very next day after the ceremony was performed, I felt strangely. I did not feel that sky blue clearness. I felt a little smitten in the spirit. Particularly attuned to the potential for spiritual forces to affect his senses, Humphrey dismissed this as a scheme of the enemy. In other words, Satan. But after five months of recurrent periods of anxiety and distress, he set himself apart from his wife and dedicated himself to prayer and fasting over his self-titled divorce marriage. Humphrey's ultimate conclusion, which came after an 18-month period of prayer, fasting, and sexual abstinence, was a dramatic one, and notably not enthusiastically embraced by his second wife. He believed his divorce marriage would condemn him to an eternity in hell if he did not end the relationship. Although the spiritual unease he felt after his marriage had been disconcerting, it was a series of vivid dreams, increasingly threatening in nature, which proved to him that the argument for marriage was scripturally unsound and had eternal consequences. So he then left his second wife and promoted his testimony as evidence that the church needed to revise their stance on remarriage in order to save men and women from the grip of hell. I first came across Humphrey's ministry via an online collection of sermons defending the minority conservative evangelical view that remarriage was equivalent to adultery. I'm sure you can imagine how excited I was when I was able to dig up Humphrey's pamphlets. Divorce was not necessarily a theme that many preached on in the early 20th century, so to find someone who centered his ministry on it was unique. Humphrey's challenge to church authority, lifelong commitment to his position, as well as his substantive and thorough discussion of the role of personal revelation, all gesture toward important components of the intellectual history of the doctrine of remarriage in the church. I wanted to tell his story as completely as I could, so I requested every version of the pamphlet that I could find, perused his published sermon collections, and scoured the internet for information on the little-known minister. One version of the pamphlet I found, reprinted after Humphrey's death, included an additional letter offered to the editor of the pamphlet as a way to give support to the message contained within. The letter was from Jenny Jolly, an active evangelist in the Turn of the Century Holiness Movement and the sister-in-law of prominent minister E.E. Shellheimer. Reading her letter stands out in my memory as the single most flabbergasting moment in my career as a historian. I will be so glad for someone to print Brother Humphrey's A Word of Warning on Divorce Marriage, she wrote. He was a very dear and close friend of ours. Black, yes, but he could come nearer to preaching the saints under conviction than anyone I ever heard. Now, mind you, I had no idea that J.M. Humphrey was a black man. One of the difficulties of reading printed sources from individuals who are not well known is that you have only what you are given, and nowhere in his published materials is race ever mentioned. That in itself begs some important questions. But Jolly went on to paint an even clearer picture. Her letter outlined her relationship with Humphrey, which began when she worked at his printing office in Chicago as a young woman. He was already preaching at the time, so she and her sister took him with them to a Free Methodist camp meeting. When they arrived, personal connections allowed them closer access to the leadership, but people dismissed Humphrey. People saw the Negro and paid no attention, she wrote, just a Negro. The sisters asked that he be allowed to preach, so he was given an unimportant service. And he delivered a sermon on backsliding. They opened their eyes and mouths in astonishment. This was the most wonderful preaching to the Christians they ever heard, so he must preach the next day. And preach he did. Jolly spared no praise in describing the work of the man she claimed was the best preacher I ever heard. Jolly's letter struck me for a lot of reasons. Not only for the casual racism that was contained in the letter, which, though disheartening, is not unusual for a historical source, but more so the matter-of-fact way in which Humphrey's racial identity and racial belonging is discussed. After describing his profound success at the camp meeting, Jolly went on to say that colored people couldn't claim him after that. He was too much in demand by the free Methodist whites. That one sentence says so much, and I think we need to talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

Welcome to American Evangelicals, a history podcast. In this episode, the conversation turns to one of the most complex and contested questions in the study of American religion: the relationship between evangelicalism and race. Using the little-known story of preacher J. M. Humphrey as a starting point, the hosts explore how race has shaped evangelical institutions, theology, archives, and historical memory itself. Along the way, they wrestle with questions historians continue to debate: is racism intrinsic to evangelicalism? Or does it reflect broader American culture? And what happens when modern political debates reshape the way we interpret the evangelical past? From black fundamentalism and the rise of colorblind Christianity to the Christian right and the politics of historical interpretation, this episode offers a thoughtful and deeply layered discussion about faith, history, race, and the challenges of telling honest stories about evangelicalism in America. Let's join the conversation with our historians, Maggie Capra, Dan Hummel, and John Fia.

SPEAKER_05 8:20

So, Maggie, I have never heard of J. M. Humphrey. Why did you pick this document? Tell us a little bit more about how this story might open up a larger conversation about evangelicalism and race.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

So I think it's obviously impossible to not consider race and its influence on evangelicalism when thinking about any period of history where we're talking about American evangelicalism. However, we do center white evangelicals in our historiography because they had the power. And we do have a tendency to focus on the movers and shakers, where who was building the institutions, who's doing the evangelism, etc. And so when we focus on that, we lose other parts of the story. And there's some very important work out there that do other things. I'm not part of that, however. I started with a question, um, obviously, from the story I told about divorce and remarriage and and how people think about that. And because of that, race just doesn't come up in my own work very often. However, when I was doing this, as I already said, I had this kind of moment where I had to stop and really think deeply about how my sources are shaped by race in a way that I am oftentimes completely unaware. So we talk about whitewashing sometimes in classes and with students and how things can get whitewashed. And I think JM Humphrey is in many ways a perfect example of that. Because if you search for him, and I even did a Chat GPT search this week to see if there's been anything new. I mean, he's a very small figure. I don't think there's anyone out there really looking into him much. And still, no, ChatGPT, I asked, what do you think is J. M. Humphrey's racial origin? And they said because he was in this circle and because he had these publications, he was white. Like that was the assumption of Chat GPT. And I was like, well, okay, you know, at least on that same level with my own assumptions until I read that letter by Jenny Jolly. And this didn't change the way that I wrote him into my dissertation, other than a footnote describing some of this, because again, I don't deal with race, but it did get me really thinking about the role of just racist attitudes and the way that racism played into the institutional history of evangelicalism that impacts us as historians as we're telling that story. And I think that's something that we ought to talk about as historians and can do that in a responsible way. So that's what I wanted to start us off with today.

SPEAKER_05 10:58

Can you be more specific about how you see, you know, what are the sort of racial dynamics for those of you who just at the beginning of the episode heard you read the story? You know, I think you just did a great job of kind of framing why you picked this. What are what are some of the what are the some of the things of the story that you that jumped out to you? Give a little more of an interpretive lens on the story you just read.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

I mean, I think the biggest thing is when Jolly says that, quote, colored people couldn't claim him after that, he was too much in demand by the free Methodist whites. I mean, she's very explicitly stating because of his great talent, which was obvious to everyone who heard him, he was good enough for the whites, right? You can put good enough in scare quotes there. But that also meant they were entitled to him in a way that the black community now no longer was. And so there's just an assumption there of a separation of the two communities. Before this, he was preaching in both black and white churches, but now that he had reached a certain level of esteem and celebrity, now he just belonged to the whites. And in his published works, and I again I can't speak to his agency on this because there's no record of his choices, he does not talk about race at all. There's nothing in his stories, there's no indication that he was preaching as a black man. And that also was a choice, that his published sermons would not have that kind of emphasis. And I think that in that silence, there's a story there. So much so that like me writing in the 21st century might not even know what informed a lot of his perspective, that he was actually in a lot of these stories before he kind of hits the uh holiness circuit, he was operating within black communities more than white communities.

SPEAKER_05 12:48

What if this is also, though, a story? I I could imagine someone listening to this story and asking or coming at it a different way and saying, here's this white community that suspended whatever thoughts they had about black people and welcomed this black preacher and listened to him and put themselves under the authority of this black preacher. First, that's how I read it. And this was a help really helpful because you're taking it from the perspective of the the lost to the black community, because this guy is kind of whatever appropriated or whatever by whites. But what what about the fact that that these kind of evangelicals are also willing to embrace a black preacher, right? I mean, that's I can't remember where is this is this in the South or I can't remember where is it?

SPEAKER_00 13:36

I mean, she's operating out of Chicago and Pennsylvania. Yeah, um, but he was originally in the south.

SPEAKER_05 13:40

But still, I mean, I don't know, is that should we should we make note of that too?

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think that does matter. I but I also think it's important to note that he did it in a way that was very, again, whitewashed, right? He had to make himself very palatable. And again, sources are limited. I don't have all of the sermons that he preached, but from what has been published, um, it is stripped of anything that would be foreign to his white audiences, um, or anything that would m would center his own experiences as a black man in the early 20th century. And I think that's also sort of that that complex story of how were black evangelicals included in the history of evangelicalism, and it's a very complicated story.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

Aaron Ross Powell Regardless of how you interpret it, and I think there's multiple ways you could, just the fact that the documents show that the historical actors are just assuming there's these racial categories that people naturally fit into and then transgress and all that kind of stuff. You know, there's a bigger question here about race and evangelicalism or race and American religion, where it seems like it's unavoidable. This is one of the categories that organizes American society, and because religion is part of society, it is sort of one of these fundamental ways that at least historical actors think about how they're navigating the world. It's a racialized uh world in that sense. And I think for some, particularly post-civil rights movement, you know, more recent generations want to see that as something that is maybe part of the past but not part of the present, or because we are sort of uh educated and socialized into not sort of emphasizing or not wanting to be seen as racist, that we don't think about how significant that category was as just sort of part of the way people lived and thought about their religious life, let alone uh the rest of their life. I guess that raises a question for me is like, how do we think about evangelicalism and the question of racism? Is this something that is sort of part of what evangelicalism is, and there's historians who have made that case? Or is this something we can disentangle from evangelicalism and say there are obviously ways where they're interconnected, but they're not sort of necessarily connected. It's sort of more of a development of the historical circumstances that make race so prominent for like the historical actors we look at here, but that's not necessarily part of evangelicalism. What do we think about that sort of the polls of that debate?

SPEAKER_05 16:09

This is a debate going on right now, I think, within the conversation among scholars about evangelicalism, you know, and this gets to a question I think that we've kind of wrestled with in the first three episodes, right, about how to define evangelicalism. Is it a theological movement that has certain theological convictions, but yet on social questions like race, you can find them all over the place. You know, you can interpret the Bible the way you want, and you, you know, if you're a Southern Baptist in 1840 or 1850, you interpret it one way concerning race, and if you're uh Northern abolitionist evangelical, you interpret it a another way. That would be staying true to the Bebington quadrilateral, but saying, you know, yeah, these were all evangelicals and they all came down in different places on race or on slavery, right? You know, which I think are two different things, especially after, you know, 1865. You know, then of course the other side is, you know, that like you said, Dan, you can't have evangelicalism without racism.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Or a study of evangelicalism without racism, yeah, you can't consider being racism.

SPEAKER_05 17:19

Well, I think I think there's some who are making the argument that, you know, the movement evangelicalism is a white supremacist. Maybe that's going a little too far. The term has been used, but you know, uh a white racist, you know, and if you if you are intelligent enough, smart enough, theologically astute enough to pull the racism out of evangelicalism, then you it's not evangelicalism anymore. So uh I think these are interpretive questions, of course. I'm thinking of people who don't write about evangelicalism, who have been critical of kind of wokeness or or identity politics, and so on. I'm thinking like uh, you know, the Illinois state historian Tore A Reid, who has an interesting thing called, you know, take called race reductionism, right? Race is the most important category to interpret any historical movement, not class, not gender, not spirituality, right? So I think there's a certain kind of presentism, right? That you kind of are looking for things to say about evangelicalism in order to I think the field of evangelical interpretation kind of changed after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. And some ways in a good way, right? People are starting to call attention to a lot of things that evangelical historians had missed. That's good. That's revisionism. And again, some people might think that's a some listeners might think, oh, revisionism is a bad thing, but that's what historians do, right? The question I think is how much what said do you become reductionists and say it's all about X, Y, or Z issue, in this case, race. I I think that's just another way of kind of saying what Dan just said. I don't really know what the what the answer is. I think most I think historians are going to look at this in different ways, depending on oftentimes depending on where they're situated in the present. I'm not entire always entirely comfortable with that approach to history. I think that's the way the field is moving right now.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Well, I have two things to say in response to that. One, I agree with you that the kind of tone in talking about evangelicalism has changed since 2016. Um, so I teach a class on religion and the culture wars, and so my students are often talking about evangelicals in the context of 20th century politics. And they were just this week talking about evangelicals, and I kind of returned them to, well, who are you talking about? What are the definitions that you're using? And even though in class we had gone through Bebington's quadrilateral and talked about the fundamentalist modernist split and all these different theological commitments, every single one of them was more ingrained in thinking about evangelicals politically. Like it's just how they're thought about today. So there is that reality of it that I think historians have to keep in mind. And I could have added that to my list of race, class, gender, spirituality, right, politics. But I also think that in terms of looking at race as a category, it's an extremely important part of our field. But I think each one of us has our own specialty and areas that we look into that matter, that intersect in various degrees with race, but isn't necessarily our central focus. And I think there is a real benefit to that approach in the field, because we do have a lot of people who love history and a lot of people who like looking at history in different ways. But one perhaps helpful way to frame this is thinking about well, what about the average person who's out there who's interested in evangelical history? I always think about my parents because I was told once that you should write for someone who's slightly smarter than you but knows nothing about the subject. I just think that's phenomenal advice.

SPEAKER_04 20:53

That's good.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

And so I'm always like, okay, that's who I'm writing for. People that are slightly smarter than me but know nothing about everything that I know about. And so, how can we help that person or those people understand the way that race is situated in evangelical history and the ways that it's not, so that it can be something that's helpful for them in understanding the field. And one thing I would say is that the way that we all look at evangelical history is American evangelicalism. That's our specific focus. The story changes, for example, if you change that lens to global evangelicalism, and then race suddenly has a very different dynamic in the books that you're going to read and the kind of stories that are pulled in. So, yeah, that's kind of an example I would give as the lens can shift depending on what you're looking at. What kind of ideas do you have related to that? Or what would you sort of tell that person?

SPEAKER_02 21:45

It can be a bit abstract to think about evangelicalism as what what do you what even comes to your mind when you think about that and race? I think it can be helpful to really try to think about particular eras or even developments, and how did race Or racism shape those, just to pick two that are somewhat far apart. You can think about Reconstruction after the Civil War and the way that uh racial politics affected religion. There's a really good book that I benefited a lot from by the historian Edward Bloom about Reforging the White Republic. It's about the 1860s and 1870s, and the way that religious leaders in particular, people like Dwight Moody and others, the Beechers, really were significant political and social actors, along with religious actors, in changing or solidifying how Americans thought about race and the relationship between the North and the South. And Bloom's book is part of a really big academic conversation about race after the Civil War, but he looks at sort of religion in that. And then another one that's that's closer to our time is there's a pretty you know ongoing debate about the rise of the Christian right and racism. So this will go back to you know into the 1970s and ask questions about like what really motivated people like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, who are at the sort of top of this wave of political activism by conservative Christians, what motivated them, and how much of that was the racial politics of the era. And you have very different views on that as well. You have someone like Randall Ballmer, who's made the case that basically it is all about race and sort of maintaining the ability, particularly in the South, for Southern Christians to be able to keep their communities white against an encroaching federal government and diversifying country and so forth. And then you have other historians who aren't necessarily trying to diminish the racial views of people like Jerry Falwell, but are saying, you know, there's other things happening, like the things that someone like Fowl would cite, which would be things like the pro-life movement and organizing against abortion or organizing against the rise of secularism in the education system. And so you you have historians like that, someone like Daniel Williams would be um on that side, who'd really have like a multi-causal way of thinking about um the rise of the Christian right, where race is part of that, but it's not the sort of overwhelming organizing principle. That would, you know, if you got interested in one of these topics, you could really sort of get in and understand it depends on who you're looking at, how seriously you take what they say in public versus what they've they've said in private. That that's often, I know for Ballmer, part of the reason he sees race as so important in the 1970s is not necessarily because Jerry Falwell gives speeches where he says this is about race, but because there's other documents he's looking at about sort of the background organizing where they're talking a lot about race. And so he's like, that's actually more important to understanding what's really going on and what people are saying in public. Well, you know, this gets into sort of basic historical craft questions about how do you how do you weigh the evidence, how do you decide what's true and what's not. And I think for something that can be really sort of a macro concept like evangelicalism and racism, getting down into the weeds when possible, and I don't mean a listener has to do all that research themselves, but there's been a lot of really good historians who have spent a lot of time doing that and have produced some really good scholarship to at least be able to understand the contours of that and then be able to sort of make a judgment on your own about where do you land um based on that.

SPEAKER_05 25:22

I think you give Baumer too much credit, and he's a friend of mine. But I think Baumer got off on this track, not to get us off on a track here, but I think Baumer got on this track because he spoke with Paul Weyrich. He actually had a he had a face-to-face conversation with Paul Weyrich, and and Paul Weyrich told him, right, it wasn't about abortion, it was about desegregation of Christian academies that they didn't like.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

And then he kind of So Weyrich is this um behind-the-scenes sort of political organizer.

SPEAKER_05 25:50

He's actually Catholic, but he's very much in with the in with the Falwellian group.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 25:55

But your point is really well taken because in a microcosm, the whole Balmer versus, you know, I think you use Dan Williams as an example, is what we're asking here. Like, I think is a big question that needs to be addressed, right? Because it seems like the historiography right now, the way certain historians are telling the story is in this, they're writing about particular issues, whether it be Kristen Dumas on gender and patriarchy, or Anthea Butler on race, or you know, whatever the identity kind of issue is. And then they're making large claims about this is what evangelicalism is. Yeah, the whole thing. Yeah, the whole thing. I think Butler's book is great on racism and evangelicalism. I think Dumay's book is great on patriarchy, but they do it subtly within the book, but the books then take a life of their own in the media and so forth to suggest that they are writing histories of evangelicalism, or their particular study of a particular category of interpretation is what evangelicalism is. And that's a hard sell to me, at least, right? You know, how much do we stay in the particularities? Because right now the discussion is about a grand interpretation, especially after reading, you know, Matt Sutton's essay in the Journal of American uh Academy of Religion. The question now seems to be grand synthesis of what evangelicalism is or has been, as opposed to here are these particular studies of particular ways, politics, identity, gender, class, right? So I think there are two different questions. I think when you look at the particulars, you're gonna be focused on, you know, these things like particular way in which evangelicals have responded in a particular social circumstance, as opposed to, I'm thinking of well, what are we trying to even do here, right? We're trying to reflect on what is evangelicalism. And I don't know, can we even ask? I don't know if we can even ask that question. It's so complex, it's so diverse, even on this question of race, right? You have uh, I glanced at before I came here for this podcast, I glanced at uh, you know, Mark Knoll's book on race and evangelicals. And, you know, it's like any good historian, it's about complexity, right? It's about nuance, it's about there's some examples of really bad stuff, racist stuff. And there's a lot of examples of other, you know, where evangelicals have stepped up to the plate. There's abolitionists, there's pro-slavery evangelicals, there's all this. But then when you read, you know, maybe a religion scholar or a sociologist, you know, they tend to, they tend to speak in much wider, I would say flatter kind of ways, more universal ideas than necessarily like, well, if you're really looking at the past, you're gonna find all kinds of ways evangelicals are dealing with race.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

One thing that comes to mind in thinking about this is I think a lot of people are concerned about criticisms of evangelicalism that they take very personal, right? Like that's something you kind of hear that that sort of personal attack, which I find very interesting because we don't really have as much of a problem personally attacking, again, in scare quotes, uh, the early church, right? For their kind of groupings and hatred of each other and problems that were based on ethnic identity and all of that. And they're, you know, theoretically as much a part of any kind of evangelical past as 19th century evangelicals. So part of it is I think historians, especially those who self-identify as evangelical themselves, wanting to hold their own past accountable for ways in which their community fell short. And I would put myself in that category, right? Like that I, when I look in the past, like I have an affinity for a lot of these people. I share some beliefs with them, but I also feel like it's necessary to call out when there's problematic patterns, especially patterns that I see still impacting the way we tell the story today. So I think that's something to consider.

SPEAKER_05 30:06

Yeah, this is what I tried to do in the book I wrote about Trump in 2018. I don't know what people thought about it, but you know, I tried to trace certain characteristics about like evangelical fear of social and cultural change or the politics of nostalgia or the pursuit of power. I've tried to trace these things back. Like we shouldn't have been surprised that so many evangelicals turned to Trump in in 2016. I'm not sure I was writing a history of American evangelicalism, right? You know, I probably could have written a mirror image book of evangelicals through history, overcoming all of these negative things. But I think a lot of people took it as a history of evangelicalism. So how do you ex- you know, for me it the question is, how do you how do you express that nuance once your work, I mean, there's nothing you could do to control your work once it gets out there, people are going to use it in different ways. But uh yeah, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_02 30:58

It's almost like inherent to you you've listed a bunch of books, John, including your own, that are interested in in something maybe narrower than a uh macro story of the history of evangelicalism. But because of the timeliness or the the sense that this book is going to explain something to us about our world now, it's almost impossible for those arguments not to then be expanded into saying, oh, you're explaining this whole group of people and where they came from and why they're like they are now. I mean, I think the unfortunate way you'd get out of that is you would not tie your study of evangelicalism to anything that's contemporarily hot. I mean, the the the the the Anthea Butler's book or Kristen Dumay's book, like those books had a lot of we're going to help you explain to you what just happened in the last decade or so with evangelicalism politics. Obviously, a book about the evangelical road to Donald Trump explaining what just happened. And so that you know, that might be sort of just one of the dangers or at least cautions of that type of history that it's not presentist in the sense that it's not just saying we need to interpret it on our turns, but it's saying this is not just a sort of as opposed to say a history of Victorian religion, yeah, which you would have to sort of stretch to make it really relevant to the contemporary moment. These books are just oozing contemporary relevance.

SPEAKER_05 32:24

And I think everything that people like Dumay and Butler and others did for their particular topics, I'm probably guilty of in my Trump book. Right? No, I'm I wanted to help people. I've never written a book like this. All my other books were like what you're saying, Dan, right? Like, no one cares about this right now, but I find it interesting, and I'm gonna write a book about it as a historian. So yeah, I think my book was interpreted by at least non-evangelicals, especially, to be uh a book about evangelicals broadly, and and a lot of not necessarily Trump supporters, but but critics, John Wilson's review in the Hedgehog review, go look at that, you know, in which he basically was like, criticized me for being too harsh and too, this is not just what evangelicalism is. And I agree with that too. When you get into the interpretive categories, you know, and this whole question of like, are we being reductionists by by boiling evangelicalism down to just one major issue. You know, I don't think any of the authors we mentioned would say evangelicalism is just about the topic of their books, right? But I think they would put it kind of as the primary or one of the top kind of interpretive lenses for which to look at evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_02 33:39

You know, one other thing I I think plays into why this just is a very touchy topic, Maggie, you you mentioned sort of in religious communities that are evangelical or are sympathetic, is you know, something that actually historians can help explain, which is the predominance of what is called sort of colorblind Christianity.

SPEAKER_04 33:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

That sort of enters the mainstream of evangelicalism in the 70s or so. There's a good book by Jesse Curtis called The Myth of Colorblind Christianity. Jesse has does a really good job from the documents showing how this idea of colorblindness, or that the sort of the most Christian way or the or the most sort of gospel-centric way to view people is to sort of ignore their race, sort of takes hold in the 70s and becomes a very big part of mainstream evangelical culture, and you could say still is. It's a it's a pretty significant chunk of it. And so within that paradigm, if you're a colorblind Christian and you grew up thinking like the moral thing to do when someone talks about race is to either is to ignore it, then the reverse of that, which is when people bring up race, it's like divisive. Like, why are you inserting this topic that you know we've been taught to sort of look beh look past and making it a point of conversation? That can certainly happen at the church level, and that's um I would commend Vince Baycote's documentary on black evangelicalism, where they get into that topic. The experience of a lot of black evangelical leaders where bringing up issues of race in mixed company was often seen as sort of being disruptive, inserting strife into the community where it wasn't supposed to be. But in a broader sense, not just in congregational life, but in the way we talk about evangelicalism, to layer on race as a main theme of it, I think for a lot of evangelicals today, just because of the culture they grew up in, feels like that's an implicit critique. It's sort of claiming that evangelicalism isn't actually what it says it is, which is a universal religion for everyone, and that we actually look beyond race in our communities. So you know, I I assume that's not the that's obviously not the only reason it would be controversial because before colorblind Christianity, you know, race was still a hot topic. But I think there's a particular way it's talked about in the last few generations of particularly white evangelical communities because of this way of talking about race that emerged um in the 70s and 80s.

SPEAKER_05 36:04

I think that's worth trying to understand, as I think Curtis tries to do, right? I meant to look this passage up before I came, right? The Galatians passage, there's neither Greek, Jew nor Greek, slave or free, right? If you truly believe that theologically, there's a certain logic to saying, well, by bringing up the differences in people, you are suggesting that there's division within the kingdom of God or, you know, something like that. On the other hand, right, it's really hard to make those cases. And this is where I think the theologians and the historians are gonna be different, right? It's hard to make those kinds of cases, knowing how that belief of, well, we're all equal, we're all colorblind, we're all equal before God, the church is, I don't think you'd ever hear them say multicultural, but technically it is, right? That was never consistently applied in the history of American evangelicalism. Maybe by some, but there's huge problems with the application of that idea. So it's the historians who are interested in the, you know, they want to look at this. Well, how have evangelicals behaved over time, right? And yeah, there's this ideal, but it hasn't been, you know, put into practice in some sense. So we want to call that out, or we want to we want to situate it in a so situate this kind of colorblindness in a sociocultural context, and then it can be critiqued, colorblindness. But there's something logical about colorblindness as a kind of theological kind of idea. Again, this is not to say agree or disagree with it, but there's a there's a logic behind that I think uh historians can uncover, can talk about without taking sides one way or the other on it.

SPEAKER_02 37:48

And there's multiple, um, this is one thing that the book we've been talking about, The Myth of Colorblind Christianity, does well, which is that there's multiple colorblindnesses, or there's different ways to be colorblind. And I think there is this sort of universal vision of the kingdom of God, of the church, where these divisions that divide our world don't matter ultimately in the next life. And that is one type of colorblindness today a lot of Christians profess. I think there's another one, though, that is more conditioned to the late 20th century, where what is meant actually by colorblindness is minority groups absorb into the majority culture. And this is this is one of the interesting things about this period of history, is that it's at the same moment that a lot of evangelicals, both in the US and in missions, are embracing the church growth model of it's a particular philosophy for how you quickly grow churches numerically. And the idea behind this church growth principle, the guy who came up with it was uh Donald McGravin, who was a missionary-turned professor at Fuller Seminary, was that you recognize that there is something in the world, it's a real thing, called the homogeneous unit principle. And the homogeneous unit principle is that churches grow uh just like sort of any voluntary association does, when people gather with people like themselves. And this was a way to think about missions work where you wouldn't just go in and try to impose your vision of how the church should function in some other country. You would just take the lead of how that society is structured and try to work within it. But when you turn that back on the US, which is what a lot of people were doing in the 70s and 80s, and this was when the growth of the mega church sort of movement as well, the idea was you pick a demographic, like say, professional white middle class people in the suburbs, and then you you focus in on that subgroup and you say we're gonna build a church for those people. Like, what do those types of people need? What's their average family size, their average average income size? And it's really successful. Turns out that actually does do what the theory says it does. But it takes a lot of assumptions about sort of what's the default culture a church in that setting would have. And so that's where a perception of bringing in a conversation like, well, what about racial justice or what about economic inequality is seen as that's hurting the homogenous unit. Like that's hurting the things that keep us united, and it's inserting things that are actually going to, in a very sort of clinical way, decrease interest in attending that church because you're actually emphasizing heterogeneity, not homogeneity in the group. This is just something that's happening in American society in the 70s and 80s, and it's very successful. And so by the time you get to the 21st century, there's just millions and millions of evangelicals who grew up in that culture and just assumed that this was the way you grow churches, this is how you talk about divisive issues in the church. And then as race is and remains a an issue that gets people animated and concerned, it becomes something that is seen as disruptive. And you know, maybe there's way places to talk about that, but not at church type thinking. So that's just all really interesting recent history that gets at, I think, why this, among all the controversial topics, has a particular way that it plays out in evangelical churches and spaces even today. The issue you raised about division, right?

SPEAKER_05 41:26

It's worth exploring historically. So there's a choice that's made there that union in a congregation, no division, or maybe even the idea we talked about this in the last episode about kind of sharing the gospel and effectively sharing the gospel to our neighbors is a higher priority for many evangelicals than discussing these hard issues. I think about it, I think a lot about there's a great comparison here between, say, modern-day socialists, a certain kind of socialist who doesn't like to talk about race because it divides the working class, and then they can't achieve their kind of eschatological end, right, of a of a utopian society, because race is dividing the working class between black and white. Now, you you know, to understand them, they believe that a socialist believes, or the Marxists say believes that the highest end or the highest goal is to have a unified solidarity in the working class to overthrow capitalism or something like that. And thus racism is an issue, but it's secondary to the larger, more important agenda, right? And I think there's some similarities between that, right? You know, like it's not that many white evangelicals, some are, but not they're they're just openly kind of want to be racist, but they see these discussions about race as being a secondary or a tertiary thing to saving souls or you know, something to that effect. I think, again, this is a historical analysis, right? You know, agree or disagree with that. But I think this is why uh, you know, this is why you, you know, you see so many of these in my own work I'm working on now, so many of these Christian right leaders, and like even on the environment, right? You know, it's like we can't make the environment in the early 2000s. We can't make that an issue for evangelicals because it'll distract from saving souls. So next thing you know, you got people, you know, saying, like, we got to kick you out of the National Association of Evangelicals. Or so there just seems to be this every movement has its highest priority. And for evangelicals, it's always about conversion, right, doctrine, you know, those kinds of things. And these these are secondary issues. That doesn't excuse it, but it's, I think maybe it gets you into the mind of a kind of everyday evangelical.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

That's a good point. So the thing that what I was just talking about with sort of church growth, colorblind Christianity, I mean, those are things. That are we can say are relatively recent developments, last 50 years or so. There's also something, I think, much deeper we could say in evangelicalism that would lead to evangelicals thinking about race in a particular way that is different than how scholars and and others think about it. And you mentioned sort of the interest in saving souls as a as maybe a higher priority. That just reminds me of the really influential book from I think it was around 2000. It was um Michael Emerson and Christian Smith called Divided by Faith. It was a look at evangelicals and race from two sociologists, but they ended up concluding that evangelicals had a limited, they called it a toolkit, a limited tool, a cultural toolkit or something like that to think about any type of society-wide, what we call like today, like a systemic problem. And that was often because they were so theologically so committed to ideas like individualism and free will as being at the sort of the heart of what it meant to be a Christian and to be a moral person in the world. Evangelicals would be willing to identify individual sins of racism, like someone can be a racist, but the idea that the society is racist or that there's sort of structural injustice is not within the natural evangelical toolkit. For Emerson and Smith, this would be part of what it means to be an evangelical or what evangelicalism is, is there's a certain set of commitments and priorities to things like individual accountability that mean you're just never going to naturally within your community think about systemic injustice in the same way that a tradition where that was at their forefront, they might not think about individual accountability in the same way, but they would think about systemic. So I think, you know, those are sociologists weighing in on something that we're talking about historians, but I think there is something to that that because of the desire to evangelize and to really see that the the sort of the core drama of anyone's life is their conversion, and that this is really what the gospel is, is bringing individual people into the kingdom of God, out of sin, into salvation. If that is how you think of the world, then you're going to have ways you talk about race that are going to be different than people, for that's not what their focus is.

SPEAKER_05 46:28

Really, the best way in which evangelicalism kind of is a product of the larger Protestant, right? You're gonna stand before God as an individual and give an account as to whether or not you embrace the gospel in some way, accepted Jesus as your savior, had a born-again experience, right? So these are the penultimate things. I like the way Smith and Emerson put it. You know, they don't just don't have the toolkit to do that.

SPEAKER_02 46:54

And I'm just being reminded, one of the other things they they emphasize that evangelicals do have, they're sort of critical of it, but they they call it relationalism. And so the idea is for most evangelicals, like the way you solve a problem is you relate to someone. You just talk through it.

SPEAKER_04 47:11

Right.

SPEAKER_02 47:11

And you get on the same page and understanding, and then you can act differently. And so there have been many attempts in the evangelical world to do like things like racco racial reconciliation. You can think of the Promise Keepers movement in the 1990s as a as an example. And if you look at what the Promise Keepers model was, it was to actually create individual relationships between white men and black men and through the befriending across racial divides, sort of like heal the race problem in general. And evangelicals tend to, I mean, this they're interested in evangelism in in sort of a similar way, which is building connections to people in order to introduce the gospel uh to them. Now, the critique of that is the problems in America with race extend beyond being friends with people of other races. They are about economics and politics and the legal system and and housing and and all those types of things. And those just cannot be solved through relational goodwill. But the evangelical mind, or whatever we want to call it, would sort of like default to that. That's just sort of the natural way to solve a problem is to relate personally um with the people that you're trying to help. So that's just another example of of the way that um at least Emerson and Smith see that evangelicals like they have ways they deal with these things, but they come up short to sort of addressing on a systemic level the problem of race.

SPEAKER_05 48:34

I think if I think if Noel wrote another chapter, revise the scandal of the evangelical mind, this would be a great chapter to discuss. You know, I've I've taught evangelical students for almost 25 years, and I still have been unable to convince them that I mean this is not an evangelism thing as much as maybe it still falls under Bebington's kind of fourth point of activism, right? But their default position is if they want to do something good in the world to solve social problems, their default position is to go down into the city of Harrisburg, which is the city next to where I taught at Messiah College, and work in a soup kitchen or march in a Black Lives Matter protest or something. I would try to tell them, you know, it's it may be just as significant, if not more significant, if you spend some time reading economics or urban history or you know, these kinds of things that they might be able to have a bigger view of how to solve some of these problems or at least make a gesture towards solving these problems, these systemic problems, but it just you see it over and over again with evangelical, sort of in my case, 18 to 22-year-olds. No, no, that's a waste of time. We want to go and do the individual relational thing where we give the soup or we go to a promise keepers meeting or whatever the equivalent is for my students, right? So it's it's it's really is what you're saying is is really true. It always surprises me, too, about the systemic stuff. I mean, any American historian, I remember these debates over critical race theory that we had a few years ago, right? You could debate the details of like what critical race theory is. There's you maybe find some problems with it and so forth. But the idea that there's systemic racism inherent within American history, it's really hard not to embrace that piece of critical race theory. I mean, literally, you go to Virginia in 1676, Bacon's Rebellion, they're basically trying to keep to uh systemically create a racialized class, at least as Edmund Morgan argued it, right? A racialized class so that the white poor would be able to be above them. I mean, it's all government planned, right? This kind of systemic racism. And so there's it's hard to argue with the idea that systemic racism, any historian has to see it, you know, if you just study urban history or something to that effect. But it's always surprised me how evangelicals who are supposed to have this very robust or whatever view of sin just can't get their heads around the fact that sin can pervade systems as well. The world, right, is you know, if you listen to like people like N.T. Wright and others, right? The the entire world is groaning, right? It's the whole planet, the whole, it's it's all stained by sin, waiting for redemption, not just uh individuals. But now I'm now I got my theologian and and preacher hat on, not my uh historian's hat. Well, I but that's always been shocking to me. That's always I can't get my head around that one.

SPEAKER_00 51:33

Well, I think you're pointing to something that is a really key concern for a lot of conservative evangelicals in particular, is that if you start talking about systemic sin, then suddenly are you talking about systemic salvation? And isn't that moving away by the kind of individual conversion that is, as I think you pointed out really astutely, the thing for evangelicals. And so on some level, it's failure of scholarship to handle that well and to describe what we're talking about well. So, one example that I think comes to mind for me is thinking about the way that racism has played a part in the institutional history of evangelicalism and how that impacts us as scholars. And I think my story at the beginning points to that, right? There's just certain things that we don't have access to any longer because racism cut that part of the story out. But and that was individuals' racism that coalesced into building a system that excluded people. And so in that way, it's a little bit of a both and. But also in looking at the way that evangelical historiography is built up. So I think about the fundamentalism, modernism controversy. It primarily is the story of white evangelicalism, and yet we do have some scholars now that are saying, well, is it just the story of white evangelicalism? Right. So there's a book on black fundamentalism.

SPEAKER_03 52:58

Yeah, you have Matthews.

SPEAKER_00 52:59

I think it's Daniel Baer. This one, I mean, what's interesting about it is part of the argument is that yes, black fundamentalism existed. They were theologically conservative, they self-identified as fundamentalists, but they don't show up when scholars look because they were excluded from the institutions and the publishing that you look at. And that's that I mean, that's me in our early narrative, right? Like I'm looking at certain sources and I'm in certain archives and I have what I have. That is a way that you get this kind of in perpetuity problematic approach that I would describe. So if someone, you know, again, a well-meaning person comes up to me and is like, explain to me how systemic racism works. That would be an example that I would give. And the way that I think some scholarship is pushing back on it.

SPEAKER_05 53:49

I'm assuming you've been there too, Maggie. I know Dan's been there, and I love the Wheaton evangelical, right, you know, archives. I uh shout out to you guys if you're listening to this. I have nothing but positive things to say about the work you're doing. But in some ways, the way that collection developed is a great illustration of your point. I'd have to go back and think again. Maybe you guys know off the top of your head, just how many black evangelicals papers are there. Um I'm sure there are some. But there is this sense of like, well, if you want to study like post-World War II or maybe 20th century evangelicalism, you know, you go and look for a topic at Wheaton, you know, in the archives and you read someone's papers, and and it is, it is, you know. I I have a colleague at Messiah who who uh is a uh South Asia, Southeast Asia historian who often talks about, you know, he's constantly dealing with archives. He studies Nepal, and uh, you know, he's constantly dealing with archives that were crafted and shaped by British imperialism. So like he talks about the racialization of the archives, it adds a whole other layer of what you do when you walk into the archives as opposed to someone who's writing about white evangelicals. You just, I'm studying evangelicals, and here's the archive, here's where I find out what they're all saying, right? You know, that's a great point, Maggie.

SPEAKER_02 55:05

Yeah, I think the story of the segregation in the archives, you know, also reflects a real institutional segregation as well in the evangelical world. I think this is where something like Vince's argument that there is a black evangelicalism that's sort of running parallel to, but then also intersecting with white evangelicalism helps broaden the story a bit to realize that you go to Wheaton for the National Association of Evangelical Papers, I think. I think that's probably where they're there. But then you have the National Black Association of Evangelicals. I don't even know where their papers are.

SPEAKER_05 55:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:40

Maybe they are at Wheaton, and then um that would be a good move uh on Wheaton's part. But that would be, you know, that that's a different institution that would have a different set of priorities on where they leave their historical sources. I do think, though, that you know, going to Vince's documentary, one of the interesting things that he really highlighted in that, and that the people he interviewed highlighted, was that a lot of them had, and this is what sort of it meant to be a black evangelical, at least at one point in the 20th century, was you were educated and formed in white evangelical institutions, a place like Moody Bible Institute, which is going to be majority white. I don't know enough about Moody to know, but I'm sure there's complicated racial politics around who got accepted and so forth. But at some point in the 20th century, a number of African Americans went there and became part of the story of Moody. I mean, that and and I think there's definitely an example of like intervarse Christian fellowship being another institution that was started by white evangelicals and then broadened out. You can think of seminaries like Fuller Seminary, which uh started very white and is now very diverse as well. And so there are ways you can tell some of that's what's one of the interesting things about 20th century evangelicalism is there is a story of broadening racial representation in some of their key institutions. It's notable to me that as we're sitting here in 2026, the triumvirant of organizations that almost every historian mentions is the part of post-World War II American evangelicalism. The National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, and Christianity Today are all led by non-white people right now. And for some of those organizations, they're not the first people to be the first non-white person. So there is definitely a trajectory there that shows that even within sort of the core institutions of evangelicalism, there was space or space made over time to not be sort of really narrowly defined by race. And I think you could still go to some of these archives, like the University archives, which are in Wheaton as well, and you could see some of that if you were very attentive to thinking through how do some of these uh people from the black community or other communities enter into a big organization like that and then become not just guests, but actually leaders in that organization. I think there's stories to tell there even in the traditional archives, but they're often not the stories that historians are are going there for, and they're they're often not the dominant stories, even in the institutions where we can see these changes.

SPEAKER_05 58:14

Like all history, it's just messy, right? You know, it's not easy, it doesn't fit into easy boxes. You know, I think that point you make, Dan, about and Vince made it first was these African American leaders, these black leaders coming out of white institutions and celebrating the white institutions for what they taught them about. You know, I think Vince talks about how they loved the inductive Bible study. They hadn't thought about the Bible in these kinds of ways before. You're talking about like the cerebral discipleship model. Yeah, the discipleship model and all of this kind of stuff. But they saw problems as well. And it's a little more complicated than these kinds of uh binary, flat, I would say, analyses.

SPEAKER_00 58:52

And I think one thing that is important in considering this, because once again, you're just kind of thinking about that average evangelical listener who's like, oh, but you're always just pointed out the bad things in the past and things like that. Like, ask any historian like, was it true in other contexts? And we have stories about all people being racist in different time periods. Like, it's not that we're necessarily picking on evangelicals. However, there is something that allows us to hold evangelicals to a higher standard, and that is their claim that their highest priority is the Bible and God's word. And so that does put evangelicals in a different tier of criticism. And I think that that's a good thing and something that needs to be considered. And maybe one of the reasons why we can let down some of that personal wall of fear is that not all historians, of course, are coming from this lens, but I do think that there are plenty of historians who do care about that legacy within evangelicalism. And that's one of the reasons why they're interrogating certain things that are problematic in the past in order to help shed light on things that we shouldn't be considering in the present.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:04

I mean, yeah, so so evangelicals, you know, I I said this before we came on the so-called air here. To what extent is evangelical racism just the same as general racism in American history? But the point you make, Maggie, is a good one because I have these same debates when I write about evangelical fear, you know, and the quick response is, well, everyone's afraid. Liberals are afraid, secularists are afraid, you know, just read what they're saying. The Christian nationalists are going to take over and we're afraid, right? But I always come back to that. I don't know if I'm entirely right by saying, yeah, well, we're we're told to fear not. Jesus says, you know, perfect love casts out fear. Like, I don't know, I don't expect a secular person to like not be fearful. It's a natural thing, right? But we're called to something higher. And I think the same thing applies with what you're saying about race. There's some atheist who's a racist in Mississippi, but Christians are called to something higher, right, than just saying, you know, well, we're just like, you know, they're everyone's racist. So I think the critique of evangelicalism and the pointedness of the critique from either outsiders or insiders is rooted in that. You can't say, maybe you can't say, well, evangelicals are just as racist as everyone else. Or evangelicals have the same divorce rate as everyone else. Yeah, that might be true, but everyone else isn't going around preaching against divorce and saying that we're all equal before God and these other things like evangelicals are doing. I don't know how that fits with like our historiographical discussion here, but it's it is it is a sort of a higher calling, I guess, that evangelicals should have that maybe they don't, and that precipitates the critique that that we make of ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:45

Yeah. That's interesting. I haven't never thought of that. I don't know, I'll have to think about that more. I feel like a lot of communities, you know, have high aspirations. Maybe including evangelics, including Marxists, including I don't know. Everyone's sort of has these visions of I don't know if I've ever, you know, as a historian, used that as the barometer.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:03

I think I have it as a sort of point of conversation with people who are not historians when they get really offended by the history of the evangelical past, because there is a certain responsibility that someone, and you can put this in any faith community, but there's a certain responsibility that anyone who believes something holds, which is the integrity of that faith. And so I think looking at history and kind of evaluating history that's being told with that in mind, like my responsibility is to the integrity of the faith. And if there are things that are problematic in the past, there should be a sort of willingness to at least discuss them or be aware of them that I think kind of elevates a conversation and kind of helps.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:47

And I don't think that's a problem for any kind of historian. They'll go after whatever they need to go after to tell the truth. I think now we're talking about our tribe or you know, you know, so to speak, you know, how if you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking, like, why should I be critical? Or I don't like that they're even doing an episode I'm right. Right. You know, something like that. You know, I think that's that's what you're saying, Maggie, speaks to that. The historian, they don't care. But they're yeah, they're like, absolutely, this criticism ought to exist. Let's tell it. Let's tell it. Dive in, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:18

But I do think that there's a little bit of resistance, and this is you know definitely coming from personal experience, but that's that's my answer to that. Is that I like, but there is a certain responsibility that exists.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:35

Yeah, I've been thinking about what Corey Marsh has said to us on the last episode. And he gets into it more in his book about he he just really has a beef with the phrase white evangelical. He thinks that that's sort of a politically correct thing that really doesn't reflect for him, evangelical shouldn't have, you know, sort of some type of racial modifier to it. And I think as I've as we've been talking, you know, what I think I sort of agree with him and I sort of don't. And the part where I agree with him is that there does seem to be a category that's beyond a racial group that is evangelical. And so if the only way you ever refer to evangelicalism is by modifying it with white, that seems to be either you're intentionally wanting to talk about a subset based on the racial makeup, or you're being politically correct, I guess. I guess I would agree with him in that, that that you're just sort of doing something because of the moment uh we're in.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:30

Before you say what you disagree with, right? One thing we didn't discuss in this podcast, right, is Asian American evangelicals, you know, uh Hispanic evangelicals. There's still a lot more to discuss. Um Maggie mentioned the global globally, too.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:45

It's like, you know, so yeah, and now so in that sense, I think I agree with him that unless you're being, and I've I'm sure I've used that word, that that phrase in print, yeah. White evangelical, and I tend to want to be actually identifying, and this will get me to buy I disagree with him, a particular historical set of institutions and communities that are overwhelmingly white, and I actually think that's relevant to the story that I'm telling. And so that's where I would disagree with him is as a historian, it's sort of malpractice. I don't know if I'd say that. I it would be malpractice. I feel like I was doing malpractice. If something that seemed very obvious to me as I was looking at, say, late 19th century Moody movement, Drite Moody and all his network of people, they are overwhelmingly white. And actually that's part of their identity. And that's part of how they've constructed that movement is to build bridges with other Southern whites in a way that allows them to exclude non whites. So for me, then you know, labeling that white evangelical, that's actually doing analytical work, or it's or it's sort of showing that that actually was a relevant category there. There, I think it's it's a quite a valid thing. And I think throughout American history, you can add modifiers to evangelical for historical reasons that are. Aren't necessarily making a statement about the Platonic definition of evangelicalism, while you're still saying in this time and place, race really did matter. It helped inform the divisions of who worshipped with whom, who worked with whom, which theological ideas were popular in which community. A lot of that had to do with race, sometimes legally, sometimes just through cultural practices and prejudices. But in that sense, I would want to say, no, that's still a useful term to have in your toolkit. There are examples where you can abuse it or it's not actually that precise.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:34

And that's a historian's thing to say, right? I agree with you. Yeah, it's very much a historian's thing to say. You know, people like um Corey, you know, as a theologian, I'm not saying he doesn't have the capability to think that way, but he just his default is not to think that way. Right, right. He sees evangelicalism as purely a theological issue, and also, of course, church attendance and the other things he added, right? And so to say it's white is suggesting, again, back to what we talked about earlier, this division, this, you know, you're dividing people on race.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:06

Yeah, sort of a false boundedness to the term that he doesn't want. But when you're analyzing the past, we need that boundedness to make our claims clear.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:14

And Corey and I have talked about this uh off offline as well. But so much of how we come at these issues is through our disciplines. Yes. And that can feel like a relativistic statement, like, oh, well, we each have our disciplines and we and I don't mean to say it that way. I also don't mean to say that there I guess I am being relativistic in another way, saying I don't think there's a superior discipline. Like everything must be understood historically, or else it's a bad way to understand it. But I think there just is a reality that the questions you're going to ask, even how you interpret the question, what is evangelicalism, is going to be different if you're a historian or theologian or a philosopher or whatever. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:48

Political scientists, sociologists, activists, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:51

You know, it's it is it really is. Right. And you're right. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And there's something about recognizing when that's a disciplinary thing, because you can spend many, many, many hours debating these things, and there's there will never be a meeting of the minds because you're not doing the same type of thinking. And I think this question of the white evangelical label might be one of those examples, too.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:10

It's particularly interesting with historians, though, because um, I'll get pushback for saying this, but historians in terms of their discipline are not always necessarily activism, isn't it? Their first thought. So all those other disciplines, sociology, flaw, there's plenty of room for activism, giving your opinions, you know, using your scholarship to advance a social agenda or something. Not that historians don't or can't do that. It's just we're trying to defend a discipline that seems to be all the other social science disciplines, especially. And even humanities are uh are doing something more leeway, maybe, at least in my view, than than we do.

unknown 1:08:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

No, it's not. It's it's a limited discipline.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:53

We need more time.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:56

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