The governor of Vermont gets religion Episode 9: “Howard Dean’s Bikepath Conversion” dropped last night. Subscribers to Current at the Longshore level and above receive this narrative history podcast. Here is a teaser: Listen to Episodes 0, 1, and 2 here. If you like...
history of evangelicalism
Episode 4: The Waning of Christian America
Conservative evangelicals respond to a perfect storm capable of wiping out the Christian ideals that built their great nation. Episode 4: “The Waning of Christian America” (our fifth episode) dropped last night. Subscribers to Current at the Longshore level and above...
“Give it up. You have Trump derangement syndrome. Start writing about something else.”
I often get asked something like this: “Why do you waste your time writing about Trump’s court evangelicals?” Or angrier people say this to me: “Give it up. You have Trump derangement syndrome. Start writing about something else.” I get […]
The Author’s Corner with Wendy Raphael Roberts
Wendy Roberts is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Albany, SUNY. This interview is based on her new book, Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2020). JF: What led you to write Awakening Verse? WR: When...
Walking Back Metaxas’ Tweet on Biden to Blackface Days
Religion News Service asked me to write something on this. Here you go: Eric Metaxas, a Christian author, radio personality and one of the president’s most prominent court evangelicals, wants to make America great again. Earlier this week we got...
Remembering Donald Dayton
Theologian and church historian Donald W. Dayton has died. While I was a student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School pursuing an M.A. in American church history, I read a lot of Dayton. As a young evangelical, I was passionate about...
Mark Noll on the Definition of Evangelicalism
Over at Religion and Politics, Eric C. Miller talks with historian Mark Noll about the definition of evangelicalism. Noll is the editor of a recent book on the subject (co-authored with George Marsden and David Bebbington) titled Evangelicals: Who They Have...
How Billy Sunday Handled the 1918 Influenza Epidemic
One of the first things I ever published was a journal article on evangelist Billy Sunday’s 1918 crusade in Chicago. The title played-off a line from a popular Frank Sinatra song about Chicago: “The Town That Billy Sunday Could Not...
What’s New at the Billy Graham Center Archives?
If you study American evangelicalism, you have probably made a visit to the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College. Last year the archives lost the papers of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, but it also acquired some very interesting...
The “Age of Fracture” and Evangelicalism
In his 2011 Bancroft Prize-winning book The Age of Fracture, Princeton intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers writes: Across multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books of social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in...
A History of the Jerks
No, this is not a political post. Over at The Panorama, University of Richmond religion professor Douglas Winiarski writes about the jerks, a “fascinating spirit possession phenomenon” often associated with certain forms of evangelical Christianity. It looks like this short...
Darryl Hart on Boston’s Park Street Church, Evangelicalism, and the “Ghost of Harold John Ockenga”
Harold John Ockenga was the pastor of Boston’s Park Street Church from 1936 to 1969. He was one of the early leaders of the neo-evangelical movement in the 1940s and 1950s. We normally associated the rise of neo-evangelicalism with people...
A Short History of Evangelical Fear
As we have already noted, today is the release of the paperback edition of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. As part of the roll-out, I am going to republish some of the piece I wrote back in the...
The Imaginary Turn in Evangelical Scholarship
Historian David Bebbington Martin Spence is Associate Professor of History at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is writing for us this weekend at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City. Enjoy his latest...
Have You Visited the Billy Graham Center Archives?
Last year evangelist Franklin Graham moved the papers of his father, Billy Graham, from the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College to the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina. We commented here and here and here. Despite the...
“Christianity Yesterday, Today, and Forever!”
In 1962, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth came to George Washington University for a question and answer session with American religious leaders. Carl F.H. Henry, the editor of Christianity Today magazine, was one of these leaders. Here is how he described...
Are Trump’s Evangelical Critics Elitist? The Pietist Schoolman Reflects on Evangelical Populism
After Mark Galli published a Christianity Today editorial calling for the removal of Donald Trump, several pundits accused Galli of betraying the populist roots of American evangelicalism. Galli, in other words, is an out of touch elitist. Read court evangelical Johnnie Moore’s...
19th-Century Evangelicals on the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
This morning I read chapter nine of Victor Howard’s book Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, 1860-1870. The chapter is titled “Impeachment and the Churches” and it focuses on how Protestant churches, denominations, and clergy responded to the impeachment of Andrew...
“Who is an Evangelical?”: Thomas Kidd on NPR
I was listening to National Public Radio on my drive to Grand Rapids, Michigan on Thursday and somewhere around Ann Arbor I heard Baylor historian Thomas Kidd talking about the definition of the word “evangelical.” Kidd, of course, was discussing...
More on the Billy Graham Archives Move from Wheaton to Charlotte
Religion News Service is running another piece on the Franklin Graham’s decision to move the Billy Graham Archives from Wheaton College to the Billy Graham “Library” in Charlotte. Back in March, I weighed-in as part of another RNS piece on this...