American Evangelicals - A History Podcast

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 sour...

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 their careers thinking carefully about...

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 he disagreed with, even on minor po...

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 faith, to be transformed from the insid...

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 two years that follow — opens a wind...

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 evangelicals, and the lives of real figures w...