“Evangelicals believe…”

I am teaching my history course on the “Age of Hamilton” this semester. In between the first and second class periods I asked the students to watch Lin Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton. On the second day of class we discussed the literary genre of “Founder’s Chic.” In order to define “Founder’s Chic” we read H.W. Brands’s Atlantic article on the subject. I defined Founders Chic as an exaggerated focus on elite men–the so called “founders”–as the primary window into late eighteenth-century American life and culture. These are the big books on the founders by writers such as David McCullough or Joseph Ellis or Brands himself. (I joked with my students that perhaps some of them bought a Founders Chic volume as a Father’s Day gift.) Is Hamilton Founders Chic? We had a good discussion.

Throughout the class we talked about how the Founding Fathers did not speak in one voice. Those in search of a usable past may want the founders to speak in a unified way on behalf of the nation, as the 1950s “consensus” historians did, but these eighteenth-century men had profound differences. I suggested that whenever we hear someone say something like “the founders believed” or “if the founders were alive today,” we should immediately ask “which founder are you talking about?” Good history will point to the commitments that all or most of the founders shared (for example, most of them united around American independence). But good history will also focus on how they differed on the meaning and future of the American experiment they forged.

To illustrate this point, I asked the students how they react when they hear someone say “All Gen Zers believe….” The question prompted loud laughter. They had heard this before. These Gen Zers adamantly rejected the idea that everyone in their generation thinks or behaves the same way. Again, we could agree that Gen Zers did share some similarities. But good historians writing about Gen Z 250 years from now would be doing an injustice to this generation if they offered flat interpretations that did not address the complexity of the Americans born in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

One could perform the same exercise with any identity group. “All Black people believe….” “All women believe….” “All working people believe….” (The 2024 president election shattered that myth.) You get the idea.

When I got back to my office, I began to think about our class discussion in the context of the historiography of American evangelicalism. I am finishing a book on evangelicals and politics, so this topic remains fresh on my mind. As I have argued in multiple places, much of evangelical historiography these days is pretty flat. We learn from these scholars that American evangelicals–or at least most of them–are racist, patriarchal, or Christian nationalist. And, indeed, some of them are. But I hope future historians–like today’s historians of the founders and perhaps the future historians of Gen Z– will offer a more nuanced and complex narrative of the movement.

As I tell my students–historians make the smooth (or flat) places rough. Today’s evangelical historiography reads like the old consensus history.