Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right

Abstract

Writing in the shadow of the religious right, a group of historians beginning in the 1980s crafted a new history of American evangelicalism to counter the politicized, right-wing faith of their era. Rather than focus on the movement as a product of specific historical, cultural, and political contexts, they defined it by a set of abstract theological principles. Then they identified those people from the colonial period to the present who fit their definition and who made positive contributions to North American history. The result was a new, singular, multi-century, “evangelical consensus” in the literature that decoupled the movement from politics, race, class, gender, and sexuality. I assess the historiography they created and then argue that we should drop the use of the term evangelical from our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories, and I offer a new definition of postwar evangelicalism that embeds it in its cultural context.

IN 1983, historians Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden collaborated on a book they entitled The Search for Christian America. Six years later, they published an expanded version of the book with a new bibliographic essay from Randall Balmer, then a graduate student at Princeton University (Noll et al. 1989). The authors disclosed in the book’s introduction that they identified as evangelicals. They wrote the book in part, they confessed, to defend their opposition to their fellow evangelicals’ role in right-wing partisan politics and to highlight their anxieties about the movement’s current trajectory. “We are concerned,” they explained, “to point out how inaccurate views of the past may hamper Christians from mounting the kind of actions that our country and world needs” (Noll et al. 1983, 22). In particular, they worried about the growing influence of Francis Schaeffer, one of the architects of the religious right, as well as that of ministers and amateur historians Peter Marshall and David Manuel.¹ They felt that religious right leaders’ distortion of American history, in which activists claimed that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and then used that claim to justify a politics of Christian nationalism, damaged the reputations of all evangelicals. They believed that the history of evangelicalism as they worked to define it in North America, if properly understood, would demonstrate both the value of evangelicalism to the nation and its misappropriation by politicos. “A true picture of America’s past,” they insisted, “will make Christians today better equipped to speak the gospel in evangelism and to put it to work in social concern” (Noll et al. 1983, 21). Building this “true picture” of evangelicalism has been one of the goals of their long and impressive careers.²

Beginning in the late 1970s, Noll, Hatch, Marden, and Balmer, along with Grant Wacker, Harry Stout, and a handful of others, transformed the historiography on North American evangelicalism. They battled both right-wing amateur historians who distorted the past as well as other historians who they believed either ignored evangelicals or treated them unfairly. They were extraordinarily prolific, and they published excellent, compelling books and essays from tenured positions in elite universities. They wrote primarily for scholars of US history, but they also occasionally wrote for their fellow evangelicals in trade books, Christian presses, and popular magazines.

Over the course of their careers, they built a new and exceedingly positive evangelical historiography undergirded by two mutually reinforcing moves. First, they defined evangelicalism theologically, extracting it from specific historical, cultural, and political contexts. That is, they described an evangelical as someone who affirmed a specific set of abstract theological ideas, and the movement as centered on a set of general convictions and doctrines that transcended time and space. Evangelicalism was not, as they characterized it, defined by its practices, networks, or cultural affinities and certainly not by evangelicals’ commitments to ideas about race, gender, sexuality, or class.

Second, as they settled on a minimalist set of beliefs to define evangelicalism, they applied their definition retroactively to a broad host of subjects from the late colonial period to the present. They argued that evangelicalism was, in large part, the product of a rich historical tradition of socially conscious Christians intending to make a better world. They celebrated the work of “evangelical” abolitionists, pioneers in education, women’s rights advocates, urban reformers, and labor activists, as well as missionaries who sought to export religious liberty and human rights around the globe. They had, Jon Butler critically observed, created “a thesis that argues for evangelicalism’s centrality to nearly every important distinguishing characteristic of American life and especially to those characteristics that we find positive and valuable, both now and in the past” (Butler 1992a, 3).³

None of the historians in the group specialized in southern history, and while they always acknowledged the success of “evangelicalism” among white southerners and enslaved African Americans, they spent very little time in the 1980s and 1990s analyzing or writing about the South, pro-slavery “evangelicals,” or the rise of Jim Crow. When they turned to the twentieth century, they depicted evangelicals as the intellectually savvy heirs of a socially progressive and benevolent nineteenth century and predominately northern tradition. Together these moves allowed them to construct a singular history of North American evangelicalism, a new evangelical historiographical consensus.

However, rather than help us understand how Christianity operated and operates in North America, the efforts of these historians to link modern evangelicalism with earlier Christian traditions sometimes obscured as much as it revealed. Their application of the term evangelical to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century people and movements, and their efforts to connect those people and movements to the Americans who after World War II identified as evangelicals, did not always add greater clarity or precision to the historical record but sometimes just the opposite. In addition, they underplayed how post–World War II evangelicalism is at its heart a political movement. Rather than explain how evangelicalism became a powerful and effective partner for the Republican right, they instead claimed that a “true” evangelicalism existed separate from its political manifestations.

Their work did little to anticipate or help us make sense of the loyalty and devotion that evangelicals have expressed for Donald Trump. When on June 1, 2020, the then-president had riot police deploy tear gas to forcibly remove Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Square so that he could raise a Bible upside-down over his head in front of St. John’s Episcopal church, he demonstrated that he somehow understood what a generation of historians studying evangelicalism did not. Post–World War II evangelicalism is a political movement driven by particular constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Historians must be able to account for the sexism, racism, and xenophobia that allowed the president to win not just a large majority of white evangelicals’ ballots but also their hearts.

A new generation of scholars, including Katherine Carté, Darren Dochuk, Jesse Curtis, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Timothy Gloege, David Sehat, Daniel Silliman, Randall Stephens, Douglas Winiarski, and a few others—many of them trained by Marsden, Noll, Stout, Hatch, and Wacker—have pushed the study of evangelicalism in new directions, challenging their mentors and transforming how we understand the movement. But others, such as Thomas Kidd and John Fea, champion the consensus historians’ paradigm while updating and revising it. Either way, everyone writing today is responding to the evangelical consensus generation, expanding or challenging their arguments. The breadth and depth of their work makes their shadow inescapable. It is, therefore, long past time that we assess American evangelicalism as they constructed it and interrogate how they positioned it at the center of American history.

To make these arguments, I begin by narrating the rise of the most prominent evangelical consensus historians working in the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first (who together formed a tight-knit scholarly community), and I focus on their most important works to interrogate their efforts to define evangelicalism. Second, I examine how they inserted their newly defined “evangelicals” into the North American historiography, linking their subjects with major events in United States history. Third, I show how they then appealed to the very evangelical tradition that they had constructed to challenge the political evangelicalism of the modern religious right. I conclude by arguing that we must drop the use of the term evangelical from our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories, and I offer a new definition of postwar evangelicalism that embeds it in its current cultural, political, and historical context.

Ask any scholar to define evangelical, and an argument will inevitably break out. Yet according to recent polling data, more Americans today identify as “evangelicals” than as members of any other religious group, and they make up about one-quarter of the American population. These men and women have transformed recent American politics, helped shape American foreign policy, and are exporting their faith around the world at a rapid rate. It is essential that we understand the term, how historians have deployed it, and the political contexts that shaped a generation of scholarship. Only then can we build a new understanding of such an important movement.⁴

WHAT IS AN EVANGELICAL?

To establish what the consensus historians called a “true picture” of the American past, they had to develop a new definition of evangelicalism. They had a limited but immensely valuable record on which to build and redirect to their purposes. The first serious historian to make evangelicalism a central category of analysis was Robert Baird in 1844. He divided the nation into two groups: “evangelical” denominations and “unevangelical sects.” He believed that the vast majority of American denominations—Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Reformed churches, and even Quakers—were evangelicals. He listed among the unevangelical churches Catholics, Mormons, Unitarians, and Universalists. He placed churches into one or the other of these groupings first and foremost based on whether they supported or undermined the current social, political, or economic order. Thus, Catholics were suspicious because they were foreign and “undemocratic” (their allegiance was to a foreign pope, not the United States), as were “sects” like Latter-day Saints and Adventists, because they challenged conceptions of proper sexuality and family life, property relations, and general social propriety. For nearly the next century and a half, Baird’s vague and imprecise approach, which equated “evangelicals” with mainstream Protestant Christianity, carried the day (Baird 1844).

After World War II, the American historiography underwent a religious turn. “For the study and understanding of American culture,” Henry May noted in 1959, “the recovery of American religious history may well be the most important achievement of the last thirty years” (May 1964, 79).⁵ In the era of the Cold War fight against “godless” communism, historians, including Perry Miller, Alan Heimert, and William McLoughlin, started looking backward in history for antecedents to Billy Graham and the revival of Christianity that characterized their day. They emphasized continuity and saw parallels between contemporary revivals and those of earlier eras. Nevertheless, they spent little time defining evangelicalism; when they invoked the term, they did not use it with much precision.

Among the Cold War historians, Timothy L. Smith, a Nazarene preacher and historian at Johns Hopkins, had the greatest influence on the coming generation. Smith, evangelical historian Leonard Sweet explained,

has set our agenda ever since his publication of Revivalism and Social Reform (Smith 1957), which is important both as an historical study of Evangelicalism and as an historic evangelical document. Where previous treatments of revivalism tended to be dismissive, Smith linked revivalism to reformist, not reactionary impulses, and insisted that perfectionist ideology was as social as it was personal. (Sweet 1984, 34)

Smith sometimes labeled his subjects evangelicals, but he used the term loosely. He included among his evangelicals social gospel liberals and those he called “evangelical Unitarians” (Smith 1957).

In the 1970s, Sydney Ahlstrom, like Baird and the Cold War historians, used the term evangelical to describe a kind of general, mainstream Protestantism distinguished mostly by the fact that it was not Catholicism or Unitarianism (Ahlstrom 1972). Still, historians had done little to examine what relationship if any existed between the nineteenth-century churches Baird dubbed “evangelical” and the post–World War II Christians who had started calling themselves evangelicals.

Meanwhile a new generation of scholars who identified themselves as evangelicals was coming of age. They and their parents in the 1960s and 1970s worked to distance themselves from their direct predecessors, the fundamentalists of the interwar era, and they sought cultural legitimacy and influence. They recognized that one way to convince Americans to take their religious movement seriously was through the world of ideas. They promoted higher education and earned degrees from top-tier schools. Some specialized in the field of philosophy, a few in English, and some went into science. But in no discipline did they have a greater impact than in history.

Here in the pages of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Leonard Sweet summarized the influence of the new evangelical historians and described how their backgrounds had shaped their work (Sweet 1988). These men were “not subjected to fundamentalism’s harsh schooling in the uxorious sobriety of bad-tempered debates or the rigid realities of doctrinal legalisms,” he wrote (Sweet 1988, 401).

But they were given truths of divine whisperings, tools of biblical literacy, and techniques of doctrinal discussion. They all knelt at family altars. They were put to bed not just with once-upon-a-time stories, but with once-before-time Bible readings and once-in-time family prayers. Their home environments were heady with theological inquiry and heavy with moralism, a powerful combination that has spurred intellectual endeavor and creativity throughout history and has even spawned households of children driven to become intellectuals. (Sweet 1988, 401)

Sweet observed that apart from Grant Wacker, few among the group had drifted very far from their childhood faith. Wacker’s “full-blown theological rebellion”—he traded tongues-speaking pentecostalism for staid mainline Methodism—made Wacker “of all the evangelical historians” the “one who is best able to point out the ironic and comic in fundamentalism’s iconic astringencies” (Sweet 1988, 402). Having grown up in a more marginalized tradition, Wacker has, throughout his career, been the most conscious of the way power functioned in religion as well how gender and class intersect with faith.⁶

Yet, the significance of these historians’ early work was not immediately clear. Historian Martin Marty lamented in a 1982 summary of the state of the field on evangelicalism and fundamentalism: “Given the generation-long surge of conservative Protestantism one would have expected more vitality in historical fields surrounding it.... But through the end of the 1970s there was a paucity of good research” (Marty 1982, 102). Indeed, in the earliest books by many of the men who later shaped the evangelical consensus, including Nathan Hatch’s The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (1977) and Mark Noll’s Christians in the American Revolution (1977), evangelicalism was not a central category of analysis. Harry Stout, in his first book, the Pulitzer Prize finalist The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (1986), used evangelical mostly as an adjective to describe a style of preaching, emotional, spontaneous, and theatrical, which he contrasted with a “rationalist” style (Stout 1986). Nor was evangelical a major category in a 1982 collection of essays (based on 1979 conference papers) entitled The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History that included contributions from Marsden, Hatch, Noll, Stout, and Wacker (Hatch and Noll 1982).

Marsden, however, proved the exception. He focused on building a new understanding of “evangelicalism” right from the very start of his career. The first sentence in his first book, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (1970), asserts, “For many years American historiography was marked by a quiet prejudice against evangelical Protestantism in nineteenth-century American life” (Marsden 1970, ix). He hoped to reverse this trend through this book and subsequent work. He has perennially criticized “secular” academics for what he viewed as their patronizing dismissal of all things evangelical, which he tried to counter by inserting evangelicals into the historiography.

Meanwhile, in the 1980s, the self-identified evangelicals leading the religious right started making regular headlines. They became in the minds of most Americans, historian Steven Miller argues, “the public expression of born-again Christianity” (Miller 2014, 60). As the term evangelical appeared ever more regularly in the media, Noll, Hatch, Wacker, Stout, and Balmer joined Marsden in seeking to distinguish historical evangelicalism from the religious right and to excavate what they saw as the long-forgotten origins of their own religious tradition. In the process, they aimed to establish a permanent, pure, almost timeless evangelicalism and highlight where it appeared in North American history. Like Baird, they saw evangelicals as having shaped the nation in positive ways—and as having kept the forces of illiberalism and social anarchy at bay. They saw the religious right, on the other hand, as an anomaly, neither a product nor representative of true evangelicalism but a strange and temporary sideshow much like the religion of the post–Civil War Lost Cause.⁷

In 1982, Noll and Hatch cofounded the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. They funded the center with grants from the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Luce Foundation. A lot of foundation officers wanted to believe in an evangelicalism that differed from and might compete against the version Jerry Falwell represented, and they proved willing to pay for it. The institute hosted regular conferences featuring all of the consensus historians (and annual summer retreats at a Christian camp complete with family softball games), which fostered collaborations among them and led to the publication of as many as thirty edited volumes. Putting this much effort and money into research on American evangelicals—mostly by self-identified evangelicals—guaranteed that the broader US historiography would feel its effects.

The first, and most important, move that the evangelical consensus historians made in the 1980s to build a usable history of evangelicalism different from that of the religious right was to decouple evangelicalism from partisan politics and specific cultural commitments—to remove it from history. They began by developing a new definition for evangelicalism grounded in theology and beliefs and not practices, networks, or cultural affinities. In a collection of essays that included contributions from Noll, Wacker, and Hatch, Marsden argued that we could identify evangelicals based on their views on the authority of the scriptures, the historical work of God revealed in history and through the Bible, individual salvation through Jesus alone, emphasis on making converts, and commitment to living a transformed Christian life (Marsden 1984). This five-fold definition was so broad that Wacker, the following year, could assert that most Protestants between the Reformation and the start of the twentieth century were “evangelicals” (Wacker 1985, 17).

Deploying a model of evangelicalism based on a few core beliefs that millions of Americans across space and time could affirm allowed the evangelical historians to pick and choose who to include in their histories and who to ignore, what was essential for describing an evangelical and what was not. They could acknowledge that, yes, some people may have additional core beliefs, or some might practice their faith in different ways, but what held evangelicalism together was this small set of theological commitments. If almost every American Protestant qualified, they could choose their own historical cast and fill it with people of multiple races and classes while simultaneously minimizing how race and class were embedded in the theologies and communities they studied. They could include within the movement nearly everyone they found inspiring while treating the racists, the sexists, and the cranks as unrepresentative, or at least they could treat racism and sexism as functioning independent of faith. Nevertheless, at times they shoehorned some groups that actually despised each other into a common tradition and at other times they downplayed groups (such as white southerners) who fit more naturally within the evangelical paradigm they had constructed.⁸

Eventually they narrowed the definition further and adopted the criteria outlined by British historian and fellow self-identified evangelical David Bebbington. In his Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989), Bebbington sought a single definition of evangelicalism that spanned two and a half centuries, a dubious project at best. “There are the four qualities that have been the special marks of Evangelical religion,” he wrote. They were: “conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Together they form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism” (Bebbington 1989, 16). Almost immediately the consensus historians appropriated the “Bebbington quadrilateral,” and it is now ubiquitous in the literature. Yet, the Bebbington quadrilateral is so vague and generic that most Christians in most places in most eras could claim it. Although liberal Protestants and Catholics and Mormons might define the terms differently and might add other “essentials,” they all could affirm the quadrilateral. Nor does the Bebbington definition show us the actual practices of “evangelicals.” It tells us nothing, for example, about why evangelicals would split on the question of slavery or be so enamored with Donald Trump. Despite the efforts of more recent historians to offer clearer and more precise definitions, since 1989, the quadrilateral is invoked by writers every year more often than the last. Marsden, only half joking, recently called it “canonical” (Marsden 2019, 20).⁹

In 2016, historian Linford D. Fisher provided the first, and long overdue, analysis of the term evangelical from the Protestant Reformation to the early twentieth century. He focused primarily on how various groups of Christians, rather than the historians who studied them, deployed it. His work revealed how much Bebbington and the consensus historians took for granted. “Indeed,” Fisher argued,

to equate what it has meant to be ‘evangelical’ across time and space with four or five or nine or even twenty beliefs misses the rich and diverse ways the word has been used between the sixteenth century and the present. If there is any continuity in the use of the word ‘evangelical’ throughout history, it is this relative, primitivist, comparative, and contestable sense of being more true to the gospel than others, at least as defined within that particular cultural moment. (Fisher 2016, 207)

In other words, Protestants who wanted to claim that their beliefs were truer, or that their faith was more real and active, than those they viewed as their religious enemies described themselves as “evangelical.” Protestants of many theological stripes invoked the term to signal authenticity, and it had no stable definition outside of specific contexts.

BUILDING THE EVANGELICAL THROUGHLINE

The most important move the evangelical consensus historians made in their analysis of evangelicalism was to tie it to major events and movements in American history. They did not work from a master plan but instead filled in what they saw as historical gaps, sporadically and one at a time, as their own interests developed and changed. As they worked, they likely had little idea that their entire published corpus, when assessed together, created a singular evangelical throughline that runs from colonial revivals to the present. Yet, that is the end result of their prodigious efforts.

The consensus historians marked the birth of modern American evangelicalism with the revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. Historians leading the historiographical “religious turn” in the 1960s and 1970s had been placing ever more emphasis on the significance of what they called the “Great Awakening.” The consensus historians used this attention to claim the revivals as the birthplace of their movement. Marsden identified the revivals as “evangelical” in The Evangelical Mind, and so did Stout in a 1977 article (Marsden 1970; Stout 1977). Both then returned to this topic in subsequent major publications.

Stout made the origins argument explicit in The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (1991), which he published with a Christian press. Stout dedicated the book to Noll, who edited the series in which the book appeared. Hatch wrote the forward. Whitefield, Stout argued, “helped introduce a new concept of religious experience that grew throughout the nineteenth century into a recognizable ‘evangelical’ movement” (Stout 1991, xx).

Marsden made a similar argument in his biography of Jonathan Edwards, which won a slew of prizes, including the Bancroft and the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti award, as well as major accolades from both Christian and secular audiences. He credited the New England divine for setting the stage for evangelicalism’s triumph. “Edwards’ eighteenth century Calvinistic evangelicalism,” Marsden wrote, “played a prominent role in subsequent American history” (Marsden 2003, 8). Edwards’s life helped explain “why evangelical Christianity flourished in America and why its revivalist style became one of America’s leading exports” (Marsden 2003, 9). Edwards’s heirs “or their near counterparts,” Marsden continued, had unparalleled and mostly laudatory influence in the post-revolutionary era. They “controlled most of the nation’s leading colleges, including the state ‘universities.’ They were leaders in the reform movements, including temperance and antislavery” (Marsden 2003, 8–9).

Some of the evangelical historians went a step further and tied the revivals directly to the American Revolution. In an article for the William and Mary Quarterly, Stout argued that the “changing style of communications in the revivals” helped create “an egalitarian rhetoric” that spurned growing republicanism among the populace (Stout 1977, 521). “Evangelicalism’s enduring legacy,” he asserted, “was a new rhetoric, a new mode of persuasion that would redefine the norms of social order” (Stout 1977, 525). Ultimately, he argued, evangelicalism made the revolution possible. “Evangelical attacks on a settled and educated ministry may have expressed a pristine ‘anti-intellectualism’ in the colonies, but it was an anti-intellectualism that was positive and creative—indeed, revolutionary. Without it,” he asserted, “there would have been no creation of an egalitarian American republic” (Stout 1977, 540).¹⁰

In the early republic, the consensus historians argue, evangelicals moved from an upstart iconoclastic minority to the dominate religious group in the country. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (1989) picks up after the revolution. His book won major prizes from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the American Studies Association and is perhaps the single most important work published by the consensus historians. “The rise of evangelical Christianity,” Hatch argued in Democratization, “in the early republic is, in some measure, a story of the success of common people in shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outlined by gentlemen such as the framers of the Constitution” (Hatch 1989, 9). His evangelicals attacked traditional hierarchies, instilled democracy into the new republic, and saw no limits on their ability to make a better, more just, more harmonious society. They were white and Black, poor and middle class, and they sought to create a better world. And sometimes they were authoritarians, playing on the loyalties of the masses. “They offered,” he writes, “common people, especially the poor, compelling visions of individual self-respect and collective self-confidence” (Hatch 1989, 4). They viewed “class structure” as “society’s fundamental problem.” For Hatch, to be evangelical was to be an egalitarian revolutionary (Hatch 1989, 7).¹¹

Marsden’s Soul of the American University highlighted a different kind of nineteenth-century evangelical. He argued that evangelicals laid the foundations for and then led American higher education until the late nineteenth century, when “secular” leaders systematically excluded them from the universities they had erected. “The American university system,” he insisted, “was built on a foundation of evangelical Protestant colleges,” which dated back to colonial times. “As late as 1870 the vast majority of these were remarkedly evangelical.” Yet, within half a century, these same colleges “had become conspicuously inhospitable to the letter of such evangelicalism” (Marsden 1994, 4). Here again Marsden used history to advocate for more Christian (and more generally religious) influence in contemporary secular arenas. Yet, Marsden’s early to mid-nineteenth-century educated elites and Hatch’s populist revivalists despised and competed against each other—they battled for religious supremacy and power, illustrating how historians’ use of the term evangelical in this era can obscure as much as it illuminates (see also Marsden 1997).

Noll’s door-stopping synthesis, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), which he dedicated to Marsden, ties together the scholarship on the revivals, the revolution, education, and the early republic. For Noll, America’s God from the 1730s to the 1850s was the “evangelical” God. “This book’s main narrative,” he explained in his introduction, “describes a shift away from European theological traditions... toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America” (Noll 2002, 3). Across hundreds of pages Noll saw evangelical Christianity empowering ordinary people and giving rise to popular democracy, American republicanism, and benevolent social reform. To make this argument, he invoked Bebbington’s definition of evangelicalism, which allowed him to frame a large argument about evangelical influence while sanding edges, massaging differences, and downplaying conflicts and divides among his subjects (see also Noll et al. 1994; Noll 2003).

In addition to publishing detailed, original monographs, these historians embedded the evangelical consensus into popular survey texts that have shaped a generation of students. They consistently treated evangelicals as the stewards of the American republic who helped make the nation exceptional in mostly positive ways. Noll’s textbook, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (1992), never offered a specific definition for the term evangelical but instead allowed his subheadings and chapter titles to do much of the theoretical work for him. Following his discussion of the eighteenth-century revivals, he concluded with a section entitled “From English Puritanism to American Evangelicalism.” He called the chapter on the early republic “Evangelical Mobilization” and titled another chapter focused on the era from 1800 to 1865 “Evangelical America.” For Noll, the history of the United States between the eighteenth-century revivals and the mid-nineteenth century was the history of evangelicalism. His 2019 second edition followed this same structure (Noll 1992, 2019a).¹²

Marsden made a similar case in his textbook. “Evangelical Protestantism was the most common religious outlook in America,” he wrote in Religion and American Culture (Marsden 2001, 72). “By the mid-nineteenth century,” he continued, “evangelical religion was a major force shaping dominant American values” (Marsden 2001, 62). Evangelicalism and the liberal values that inspired the American Revolution went hand in hand in his telling. The “traits of evangelicalism were also traits of much of the greater American culture” (Marsden 2001, 63). Dismissing stereotypes of evangelicals as anti-intellectual, Marsden depicted them as pioneers in nineteenth-century education and science. “Educated evangelicals,” he asserted, “in the early Republic did not see the learning of the day, especially science, as conflicting with Christianity” (Marsden 2001, 68).

Wacker made similar arguments in the textbook Religion in the Nineteenth Century (2000). “The evangelical stirring would rank as the largest, strongest, most sustained religious movement in U.S. history,” he wrote (Wacker 2000, 31). “Never again would a single religious outlook come so close to defining what it meant to be an insider in U.S. culture” (Wacker 2000, 32). The evangelical consensus literature also revealed by default what it meant to be an outsider—a Catholic, an atheist, a person of color, etc. When we look at the work of these historians as a whole, they identified as “evangelical” mostly those Christians who upheld the existing social and political order, or who changed it in positive ways, while sometimes relegating those who did not to the margins.

The arguments of these men, positioning evangelicals at the center of US history between the 1730s and mid 1800s, was so persuasive that they now saturate more general books on the early republic. Gordon Wood, for example, argued that the nineteenth-century revivals “marked the beginning of the republicanizing and nationalizing of American religion. It transformed the entire religious culture of America and laid the foundations for the development of an evangelical religious world of competing denominations unique to Christendom” (Wood 2009, 582). Daniel Walker Howe made a similar claim in his Pulitzer Prize–winning What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007). The “evangelical movement exerted a powerful social, moral, and cultural influence over the United States during the critical transition to industrialization and urbanization” (Howe 2007, 169). He wove evangelicalism through his analysis and credited the nineteenth-century revivals with putting “religious practice in the United States on an upward trajectory that would continue through the twentieth century” (Howe 2007, 186; see also Howe 1991). Andrew Preston, a historian of American foreign policy, credited the early and mid-nineteenth century evangelicals in his Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith for reforming the nation and leading efforts to foster global peace and settle international disputes without war (Preston 2012). Historians would be hard pressed to find many books on politics, economy, or reform in the early republic that do not mention “evangelicals.”

In framing evangelicals as mostly reformers and advocates of liberty, the consensus historians had to decouple race from evangelicalism. They treated racism as incidental to evangelicalism and not as part of its DNA. Hatch addressed slavery in his work only in passing, and he mostly emphasized what he interpreted as white evangelicals’ generally positive and supportive work with Black Americans, enslaved and free. Marsden and Noll, in their textbooks, allocated much more space to “evangelical” abolitionists and Black Americans’ embrace of “evangelicalism” than to the ways in which evangelicalism bolstered racism and slavery.

The consensus historians recognized that the Civil War presented a challenge to their historical arc—after all, evangelical brothers were killing each other on the battlefield over slavery, and the Bebbington definition does nothing to help us understand why. They treated the war as a rupture that fractured what they called “evangelical America” and that separated the South from evangelicalism. Stout asserted that “the ‘Lost Cause’ of the white Christian South,” which he identified as the postwar expression of southern evangelicalism, constituted “a self-contained region—and religion—isolated from the international community of believers” (Stout 2006, 292). The consensus historians treated southern evangelicals as no longer joint guardians of the movement with their northern co-religionists but regional rebels who during the conflict peeled away from it. In the end, the consensus historians saw the Civil War as isolating and then driving the racist, slaveholding South out of the broad evangelical coalition, leaving it to those in the North to usher true evangelicalism forward. The faithful in the North, in their telling, rejected those clinging to misguided Lost Cause beliefs as having their own version of Christianity distinct from “evangelicalism” (see also Noll 2006).

But how did the “true” evangelicals of the North rescue evangelicalism from the carnage of war? How do we get from the so-called evangelicals of the Antebellum era to the post–World War II evangelicals of Billy Graham’s generation (and then the religious right)? What was evangelicalism’s path if not through the South?

The evangelical historians had a major problem. They knew that the post–World War II evangelicalism that they personally identified with emerged out of the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century. But fundamentalists, unlike their Antebellum “evangelicals,” were not the caretakers of the nation and its culture. They were sectarians who had broken from the old “evangelical” denominations. Yet, the connections were too clear and the history was too recent to ignore the close connection between fundamentalism and postwar evangelicalism. This required the consensus historians to treat fundamentalists as the true heirs of the legitimate evangelical tradition, to treat fundamentalism as the bridge that connected Civil War–era evangelicalism to World War II evangelicalism.¹³

For the argument to work, the consensus historians had to write the vast majority of southerners as well as mainstream, post–Civil War Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians out of the evangelical narrative arc, which is exactly what they did. To center fundamentalism in their histories, they argued that after the war the South fell into the abyss of the Lost Cause while the established northern denominations abandoned the orthodox, historic, “evangelical” faith and substituted in its place theological “modernism” (echoing their fundamentalist subjects). Marsden explicitly summed up this shift: “Fundamentalists were especially militant evangelicals who battled against the modernists’ accommodations of the gospel message to modern intellectual and cultural trends.” “In short,” he argued, modernists “had abandoned the essentials of evangelicalism” (Marsden 1984, xii). In other words, over a couple of generations the old evangelicals forsook the “true” evangelical faith, leaving the northern, sectarian fundamentalists as evangelicalism’s legitimate heirs and the guardians of Protestant orthodoxy. This argument constituted the heart of Marsden’s now classic Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (1980), which, according to Publisher’s Weekly, has sold “tens of thousands of copies” (Reiss 2014).

Marsden treated southerners as mostly absent during fundamentalism’s formative years. “Until the 1920s,” he writes, “Southern revivalist conservatism and Northern fundamentalism developed more or less independently, although in parallel ways.... When in the twentieth century fundamentalism became a distinct entity, Southerners with a long history of revivalist conservatism eventually flocked to the movement” (italics mine, Marsden 1980, 103; see also Marsden 2022). According to the consensus narratives, southerners left “evangelicalism” during the Civil War and did not return until a few generations later (see also Noll 1986, 3–4). When they did “return,” consensus historians treat their racism and Lost Cause theology as having little relevance to their contributions to fundamentalism.¹⁴

In treating northern fundamentalism as the link between the Civil War and post–World War II eras and fundamentalists as the heirs of a deep, scholarly, respectable tradition that dated back to Whitefield and Edwards, the consensus historians had to tiptoe around a second problem. Fundamentalists were often on the wrong side of the great political and social issues of their day—they supported Jim Crow segregation, opposed women’s suffrage, defended Prohibition, promoted global conspiracies about one world governments, fretted about Jews’ and Catholics’ growing power, worried that Hollywood was destroying American morals, and fought the teaching of evolution in schools. The consensus historians treated these issues as secondary (if at all), focusing instead on the theological debates between fundamentalists and modernists. Marsden insisted that fundamentalism was not political. “Ever since fundamentalism first appeared on the scene,” he opined, “its opponents had suspected the existence of a sinister political dimension to the movement.... Since the early 1960s, however, most interpreters have agreed that fundamentalists’ deepest interests were more ideological and theological than political” (Marsden 1980, 206; see also Marsden 1987, 1993).

Balmer offered a similar narrative. “Throughout most of the twentieth century,” he wrote, evangelicals “evinced little interest in social issues.... Politics itself was corrupt and corrupting” (Balmer 2010, 38). The Marsden/Balmer narrative of apolitical fundamentalism giving way to apolitical Cold War evangelicalism, which consensus historian Joel Carpenter makes as well (Carpenter 1980, 1997), has dominated the literature on twentieth-century American religion. In 2017, for example, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Frances FitzGerald, who had been writing about the religious right for decades for the New Yorker, reiterated the multi-century evangelical consensus narrative arc and described evangelicals (inaccurately) after Scopes as cultural “exiles” wandering in the “wilderness” (FitzGerald 2017, 147).

Nevertheless, not everyone bought what the baby boomer evangelical historians were selling. Many historians writing in the 1980s and 1990s tried to challenge and broaden the developing historiography, and the consensus historians welcomed and often encouraged the debate. Betty DeBerg and especially Margaret Lamberts Bendroth relentlessly emphasized the centrality of gender to the movement (DeBerg 1990; Bendroth 1984, 1993). D. G. Hart problematized the term evangelical and argued that fundamentalists and their archenemies, the modernists, represented two sides of the same coin—both groups were pietistic and highly individual rather than communal or churchly in orientation (Hart 2002, 2004b). Donald Dayton fretted that many of the consensus historians’ Reformed backgrounds caused them to overlook more Arminian expressions of “evangelicalism,” and he drew a distinction between what he called the “classical evangelicalism” of the nineteenth century and post–World War II “neo-evangelicalism” (Dayton 1987, 1993). Leo Ribuffo argued that the evangelical historians did not take the politics or anti-Semitism of fundamentalism seriously enough (Ribuffo 1983). Multiple historians of the South, including Christine Leigh Heyrman, tried to bring southern “evangelicals” back into the master narrative (Heyrman 1997).¹⁵

In constructing the evangelical paradigm as they had, bounding it by a few general theological ideas, the consensus historians presented a formidable front. They welcomed the work of these other scholars who sought to broaden the evangelical coalition. New scholarship further served their goal of making the case that evangelicals occupied the center of American history without ever forcing them to reckon with all the less savory elements of the movement they called evangelicalism. But all this work also demonstrated that the term evangelical was so elastic you could stretch it to eternity.

A few historians led by Jon Butler and Catherine L. Albanese, rather than expand or work within the evangelical consensus paradigm, sought to overthrow the entire thing. Butler argued that “evangelicalism has emerged as the academic historians’ single most common tool with which to describe and explain the unfolding of American society” (Butler 1992a, 2). Then he turned to what he viewed as the true questions at hand: “And in asserting evangelicalism’s importance are we explaining, much less analyzing, the myths about evangelicalism’s actual role in history? Or are we merely celebrating those myths for noble or dubious purposes?” (Butler 1992a, 4). These were questions he had been asking for years. Butler had previously attacked the developing evangelical consensus at its foundation by going after the mid-eighteenth-century evangelical origin story (Butler 1982). He called historians’ accounts of the “Great Awakening” and their efforts to use it to mark the rise of modern evangelicalism “interpretive fiction,” and he later claimed that their emphasis “may say more about subsequent times than about its own” (Butler 1992b, 165). He sought to dismantle Hatch’s Democratization thesis in his prize-winning Awash in a Sea of Faith (1992). “The Christian contribution to a developing democracy,” he insisted, “rested as fully on its pursuit of coercive authority and power as on its concern for individualism or its elusive antiauthoritarian rhetoric.” He warned of the evangelical consensus that “its existence is increasingly taken as self-evident, and its character and extent are assumed rather than demonstrated” (Butler 1992b, 287).¹⁶

In more recent years, some historians have challenged the dominant evangelical paradigm by recentering Protestant liberalism in the narrative of twentieth-century religion. Despite the consensus scholars’ slighting of the mainline, David Hollinger, through multiple books and essays, has demonstrated liberals’ vibrant and robust influence on American religious life and culture (Hollinger 2013, 2017, 2022). His work has inspired a new generation of scholars, including Gene Zubovich, Matthew Hedstrom, and Elesha Coffman, who have revealed how Protestant liberals led the way in fighting for progressive causes, from human rights to international peace (Zubovich 2022; Hedstrom 2013; Coffman 2013). If they had secured the millions of dollars in private funding that bolstered the evangelical consensus scholarship, I suspect the historiography would look very different today. We would know far more about the many contributions, positive and negative, of protestant liberals to the larger trajectory of United States history. Perhaps evangelicals, rather than serving as the baseline from which we understand the diversity of the American religious experience, would seem more like the outliers.

Others have offered new interpretations of twentieth century evangelicalism that challenge the consensus paradigm. Some have emphasized the explicit political nature of the movement. Darren Dochuk highlights the ways in which southern plain-folk whites shaped modern evangelicalism (Dochuk 2011). Daniel K. Williams shows that the politics that drove the religious right are not new but began with the birth of fundamentalism (Williams 2010). I argue in American Apocalypse (2014) that fundamentalists and evangelicals always engaged in political and social activism; they never stood quietly on the sidelines (Sutton 2014). Timothy E. W. Gloege shows that fundamentalism was tied to the rise of modern business and free market ideologies (Gloege 2015). Bethany Moreton illustrates how the evangelical ethos and service-industry economy melded (Moreton 2009). Daniel Vaca reveals how corporate interests and marketing, especially around books, shaped and reshaped definitions of evangelicalism (Vaca 2019). Daniel Silliman argues that we cannot interpret evangelicalism apart from consumer culture (Silliman 2021b).

Nevertheless, the evangelical consensus remains embedded in many US history books. It survives because few historians have evaluated it as a whole. Each piece of scholarship highlighted in this article is excellent in and of itself—each tells an important slice of the story of North American history. And because our discipline is so specialized, and the work on evangelicals so vast and covers so much chronological terrain, few scholars have stepped back and analyzed the larger evangelical narrative arc from its origins to the present. We have failed to see what, when taken together, this body of work emphasizes and what it elides. Perhaps even the consensus historians themselves have failed to see the forest that they cultivated for the individual trees. Meanwhile, historians who do not specialize in religious history simply have not paid enough attention to changes in the field. They have deferred to the experts, to the evangelical consensus scholars.¹⁷

Furthermore, the consensus historians are a formidable group. Stout holds the Jonathan Edwards Professor of History Chair at Yale. Hatch taught at Notre Dame, became the school’s provost, and then assumed the presidency of Wake Forest University, where he served for sixteen years. Marsden taught at Duke University and then held the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Chair at Notre Dame. Wacker spent many years at the University of North Carolina and then moved to Duke, where he became the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian History. Randall Balmer currently holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth, the oldest endowed professorship at the college, and before that he taught for many years at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is ubiquitous on PBS documentaries focused on American religion. Mark Noll also held the Francis A. McAnaney Chair at Notre Dame, and in 2006 George W. Bush awarded him a National Humanities Medal. Noll, Marsden, and Hatch are all members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Clearly, they no longer need worry that scholars are not taking evangelicalism seriously. The issue now is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the historiographical tradition they constructed.

CREATING AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

The consensus historians acknowledged at various times in their careers that one of their goals in shaping this history was to provide an alternative to the evangelicalism of the religious right. They believed that their religious forefathers had changed the United States, more often than not for the better. Only in recent decades, they argued, was the evangelical movement highjacked by political activists such as Anita Bryant, Bob Jones, Jr., Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Francis Schaeffer, and Ralph Reed. As a result, they implied (and sometimes stated directly) that evangelicals’ alignment with the religious right beginning in the late 1970s was not natural or inevitable and therefore could be undone. If evangelicalism was not inherently sexist, racist, and political, then it did not have to be so now or in the future. The movement could be redeemed. They appealed to the older, progressive, democratic, benevolent evangelical tradition—the tradition they had written into the broader US historiography—to challenge the politics of the evangelicalism of their own era. They constructed an evangelical narrative that was racially diverse, democratic, inclusive, and concerned about social justice.

Yet, they sometimes held similar views to their religious right counterparts on social issues. “With them,” Noll, Marsden, and Hatch acknowledged in the Search for Christian America (1983), “we deplore abortion-on-demand. We recognize that secular ideas undermine education in public schools. We abhor the ravages of divorce and the weakening of the family” (Noll et al. 1983, 22). But they hoped that a better understanding of older evangelicalism would prod the religious right in more positive directions.¹⁸

Noll consistently sought to educate his fellow evangelicals on the history of religion and politics to encourage them not to take the religious right’s claims as gospel truth. He published an article in Christianity Today one month before the 1984 presidential election comparing the 1800 presidential election with the current campaign (Noll 1984). Then, in time for the 1988 election, he published a book with a major trade press on religion and politics (Noll 1988); next, he published Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (1990), a collection of essays by many historians including Stout, Hatch, and Marsden. All this work complicated the version of history championed by religious right leaders.

The religious right was present in Hatch’s mind in the late 1980s while he was writing what became Democratization. Highly educated Americans in the age of Reagan, he wrote at the time, had rejected religion and with it “traditional” values. The United States was now divided between those with “advanced education and nontraditional views on abortion, homosexuality, prayer in the schools, and the teaching of evolution” and those “in the religious heartland” (Hatch 1989, 218). Hatch essentially blamed secular elites for provoking the backlash that was the religious right. He believed that the evangelicals of Democratization—populist, inclusive, democratic—demonstrated how faith could and should play leading roles in American society for the good of the nation.

In 1990 Marsden delivered a paper published three years later that highlighted what he viewed as some positive aspects of the religious right and linked it with benevolent nineteenth-century traditions. Wacker proved more cautious than his friend. “As historians,” Wacker wrote in response to Marsden, “we are committed to the task of tracing roots as far back as possible. That professional inclination readily connects with the Evangelical Right’s own powerful desire to excavate a usable past for itself.... But sometimes the more difficult task is to discern not only where the roots lead but where they do not” (Wacker 1993, 23). Wacker still celebrated the compassionate nineteenth-century reformers, but he saw little of them in the religious right.

As the consensus historians aimed to distinguish their version of evangelicalism from that of the religious right, they regularly invoked nineteenth-century “evangelical” human rights activism as a positive counterpoint. In Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (1991), Marsden claimed that evangelicalism was “not overtly racist” but “had forsaken its nineteenth century heritage of advocating the black cause” (Marsden 1991, 96). Implying that nineteenth-century evangelicals as a group cared about the “black cause” was quite a stretch, yet Marsden’s claim was consistent with the way he and many of his colleagues wrote about past generations of evangelicals.

Sometimes the consensus historians even credited Antebellum white evangelicals with developing the tactics that Black Christians used in their fight for justice in the 1950s and 1960s. Noll claimed in his Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) that evangelicalism helped set the stage for the modern civil rights movement. If only evangelicals would rediscover their true heritage, he contended, they might embrace racial equality. “The cultural distance between black activists and white evangelicals North and South,” he lamented, “was simply too great for the whites to recognize how much revivalist evangelicalism contributed to the civil rights movement” (Noll 1994, 170). He did not accuse the evangelicals of racism but simply of failing to recognize that their faith tradition had helped inspire the civil rights movement.

Noll made a slightly different argument in his America’s Book (2022), which focused on the period from 1794 to 1911. He emphasized what he saw as the many benefits accrued by nineteenth-century Christian leaders’ efforts to construct a “biblical civilization,” what he sometimes called “evangelical America,” which ended as the nation became more religiously diverse in the early twentieth century. Rather than treat fundamentalism as the inheritors and continuing promoters of this “evangelical” Christian nationalist legacy, he argued instead that “the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s” and not the religious right “represented the most effective reprisal of the nineteenth century’s aspirational biblical civilization” (Noll 2022, 671). For Noll, once again, civil rights–oriented Black Christians represented the authentic continuation of nineteenth-century evangelicalism rather than those activists shaping the white evangelical right. Despite Noll’s continuing efforts to separate what he saw as a benevolent nineteenth-century evangelicalism from religious right evangelicalism, he has, however, incorporated race much more directly into his work and written more critically about the darker side of “evangelicalism” in all eras (see, e.g., Noll 2008).

More than any of the other consensus historians, Balmer repeatedly returned to a carefully curated image of nineteenth-century evangelicals to speak to the present. He treated the rise of the religious right as if it was an aberration and inconsistent with historic evangelicalism. He opened his Thy Kingdom Come (2007) with the following: “The evangelical faith that nurtured me as a child and sustains me as an adult has been hijacked by right-wing zealots who have distorted the gospel of Jesus Christ” and “defaulted on the noble legacy of nineteenth-century evangelical activism” (Balmer 2007, ix). Evangelicals, he asserted, “organized to abolish slavery, to combat the scourge of alcohol abuse, to reform the prison system, to educate women, to create public schools, and generally to make the world a better place” (Balmer 2007, xiv–xv). When “the Religious Right began to coalesce in the late 1970s,” he concluded, it “bore scant resemblance to the concerns of nineteenth-century evangelicals” (Balmer 2007, xxvi; see also Balmer 2021).¹⁹

However, although many revival-oriented Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians in the nineteenth century held anti-slavery views, few were abolitionists. Many were racist (like most other white Americans in the era), and in the South many developed biblical arguments in defense of slavery. As Luke Harlow argued in an essay honoring Noll, twentieth-century evangelicalism owes more to the pro-slavery tradition than to abolitionism (Harlow 2017).²⁰

Balmer has, in addition to publishing condemnations of the religious right, published books on what he sees as truer, more faithful Christian political visions. This was most apparent in his religious biography of Jimmy Carter, who he regarded as a model of authentic evangelicalism that better reflected his version of the “historic” faith than that embodied in right-wing Christians (Balmer 2014). For Balmer, as for his fellow consensus historians, Jimmy Carter and Black civil rights leaders best represent the continuation of their heavily edited and polished version of nineteenth-century “evangelical” Christianity. Unfortunately, however, the faith of Christian Black activists and progressives like Carter has little correspondence to the actual voting habits and practices of those Americans who in recent decades called themselves evangelicals.

A MORE FAITHFUL DEFINITION OF EVANGELICALISM

The term evangelical developed its modern connotations in the years during and shortly after World War II. At that time, evangelical had mostly fallen out of use in the United States. A search on Google Books’ Ngram Viewer reveals that 1942 was the absolute low point of the use of the term among writers. It was exactly that year that a group of white American Protestant men, most of whom identified as “fundamentalists,” resurrected evangelical. Their use of the term had little to do with theological quadrilaterals and everything to do with organizing particular groups of Christians to secure more cultural and political power.²¹

In the early 1940s, missionary executive Ralph T. Davis and Boston-based fundamentalist J. Elwin Wright approached fundamentalist leaders around the country about creating a political lobby. They sought to compete against the more politically and socially liberal, and religiously ecumenical, Federal Council of Churches (FCC). The federal government often partnered with the FCC, which hampered fundamentalists’ efforts to place their people in military chaplaincies. The fundamentalists also wanted to maintain their access to the radio airwaves. Wright fretted that the Federal Communications Commission had allied with “politically radical, anticapitalistic, and even communistic” forces against fundamentalists. Then, further revealing his conservative politics, he added, “The weight of its influence is on the side of labor as against management, government ownership as against private industry, paternalism as against free enterprise, radical socialism as against the American democratic system of the past” (Wright 1944, 4). Davis and Wright were not calling for people to leave their churches and join a new one. They simply wanted to form an effective political lobby in the nation’s capital to represent the interests of socially and politically conservative Christians from many denominations. They believed that God had a specific plan for the United States and that their job was to ensure that true Christians faithfully executed that plan.²²

They initially planned to call their group the “Fundamentalist Council” as an alternative to the Federal Council. But as their ambitions expanded, they coined a new name. They decided to call their group the “National Association of Evangelicals for United Action” (NAE). Replacing the label fundamentalist with the term evangelical was a canny move. It allowed them to rebrand their movement and connect it with the old Bairdian “evangelical” tradition.

In choosing the term evangelical, they were using it exactly as Fisher described in his assessment of previous generations—to signal that they were the real, dedicated, and most faithful Christians. Like Baird’s nineteenth-century “evangelicals,” they claimed to be the stewards of the Protestant Reformation. They saw the FCC and ecumenical, mainline seminaries as packed with communist sympathizers and social gospel liberals who supported civil rights movements, critiqued capitalism, and cheered anticolonial movements. In other words, from their perspective, the mainline Protestants threatened the social order.

Although they did not speak explicitly about race, de facto racial segregation prevailed. Their inclusion of vocal segregationists among the leadership and their courting of explicitly segregated denominations guaranteed that Black Americans were not welcome. Their goal was not to represent historic Christianity writ large but to represent the interests of white, middle-class, politically conservative fundamentalists. In their effort to cast as wide a net among whites as possible, NAE leaders intentionally downplayed issues of doctrine. (On their website today, they use the Bebbington quadrilateral to define their notion of evangelicalism [National Association of Evangelicals].)

With the NAE founded, the newly self-identified “evangelicals” then made multiple moves to grow their brand and influence. They launched a new magazine, Christianity Today (CT), which proved to be an ideal venue for promoting evangelicals’ efforts to bring Christian revival to the United States, remind the nation of its supposed Christian foundations, and promote a political conservatism that exalted individual faith, free markets, and anti-statism. They located their offices in Washington, DC to make the magazine “a symbol of the place of the evangelical witness in the life of the republic” (Christianity Today 1956, 21). In a letter to the board of directors, the magazine’s editor made the periodical’s political presuppositions explicit. “The magazine is committed to neither party, but it is committed to specific principles.” The editor identified those principles as limited government, the free enterprise system, and church-state separation (meaning keeping Catholics from gaining any advantages) (Henry 1960).

The postwar evangelicalism they constructed was steeped in Christian nationalism. Their leading evangelist, Billy Graham, like his allies, claimed that the United States had always been a Christian nation and that God wanted them to return it to its roots. “Our country,” Graham insisted in 1955, “was founded upon a supernaturalistic concept—a belief in God and a belief in the book we call the Bible.... Our forefathers meant that this country was to be established as a Christian nation.” As such, only godly men in tune with God’s plan for the ages should rule it (Graham 1955a, 68–69; see also Graham 1955b).

Advocating for free market economics was also central to the mission of the new evangelicalism. Funding for many of evangelicals’ mid-century projects came from staunch conservative oilman J. Howard Pew. Economics, not theology, seemed most important to Pew, and he used whomever he could to baptize his free market agenda in the language of Christianity. Pew hoped that evangelical leaders would sanctify libertarian economics, push ministers to the right, and persuade their congregations to move with them (see Dochuk 2019).

The white men who built the NAE were political, but they were not partisan. They despised New Deal liberalism and championed conservative, anti-statist, free market policies; however, they had been cautious about affiliating with either political party. As long as the post-war Republican Party shared FDR’s multilateral internationalism and supported a moderate, watered-down version of the New Deal state, they felt little motivation to organize along purely and explicitly partisan lines. And those from the South, especially, wanted to maintain segregation.²³

This political but nonpartisan approach characterized evangelicals into the 1970s. When Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter campaigned for the presidency in 1976, a Newsweek cover story entitled “Born Again!” indicated that the increasingly important evangelical vote was still up for grabs. The Georgia governor was challenging incumbent Gerald Ford, who, like Carter, claimed to be an evangelical. Carter earned almost half of self-described evangelicals’ ballots and easily defeated Ford. This was the last time the white evangelical electorate split so evenly. In 1979 popular evangelical minister Jerry Falwell and a small group of GOP activists launched the Moral Majority. In every election since 1980, the Republican Party has crafted platforms specifically designed to appeal to those whites who identify as evangelicals. Evangelicals did not change; the GOP moved to meet them where they were.

The cozy relationship between evangelicals and right-wing political activists that continues to this day challenges many of the consensus historians’ presuppositions. At the same time that historians worked to distance evangelicalism from partisan politics, racism, sexism, and nationalism, evangelicals grew ever more prominent within the GOP, culminating in their enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, the consensus historians continue to try to distinguish between what they see as an authentic, pure, timeless faith from its deployment by political activists. Noll, Marsden, and Bebbington edited and published a wide-ranging set of essays under the title Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be (2019). Although the book included essays by Jemar Tisby and Fred Clark that pushed against the consensus narrative, in the end, the editors stuck to their agenda (Tisby 2019; Clark 2019). “Here’s the point,” Noll writes in the introduction. “The careful conceptual definitions that historians have used to write histories of evangelicalism relate only partially to the evangelicalism so casually evoked in much contemporary punditry” (Noll 2019b, 7). The consensus historians are not yet conceding defeat, although their arguments have become more precise and nuanced.²⁴

Other historians contend that we can no longer afford to separate evangelicalism from race, sex, gender, and politics. Anthea Butler argued in her White Evangelical Racism (2021) that “racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism” (Butler 2021, 2). She highlighted evangelicals’ long support for slavery and segregation, which, she contended, “speaks to a history that is obscured by some historians of evangelicalism who cannot or will not deal with the racism at the core of evangelical beliefs, practices, and political allegiances” (Butler 2021, 5). Jesse Curtis argued that in the wake of the civil rights movement, white evangelicals adopted a “colorblind” approach to faith that allowed them to maintain white supremacy and undermine Black efforts toward equality (Curtis 2021). Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in her surprise bestseller Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020), argued that sexism and a commitment to patriarchy are central to any definition of evangelicalism. For white evangelicals, she argues, “the ‘good news’ of the Christian gospel has become inexorably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity” (Du Mez 2020, 6–7). The work of these three scholars, alongside that of many others, demonstrates that we are overdue for a new definition of postwar evangelicalism that reflects both what those fundamentalist men who resurrected the term in 1942 were trying to accomplish as well as the convictions of those who serve as some of Trump’s most faithful supporters.

Here it is: I argue that post–World War II evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics. Contemporary evangelicalism is the direct descendent of early twentieth-century fundamentalism, North and South. Both movements are distinct from Antebellum forms of Christianity. There is no multi-century evangelical throughline.

When historians want to focus on everyday religious life in the twentieth century, and not the public and political efforts of evangelicals, we need to be specific. We can describe pentecostal religious practices, or Southern Baptist congregational life, or splits among Presbyterians on questions of women’s ordination, or independent megachurches’ use of state-of-the-art technology, all without invoking evangelical. But when we do use the term evangelical in the modern American context, we need to recognize that we are referring to a religio-political coalition.

If we agree that any definition of the term evangelical in its post–World War II form must recognize the nationalist, patriarchal, racist, and political nature of the movement, what do we do with the earlier eras? How should we understand all those people who previous historians from Baird to Balmer have identified as evangelicals? We can no longer casually elide major eras in history, and we need to move away from the term evangelical altogether in the eras before 1942. We can write about those who worshipped in specific denominations or advocated for particular religious practices. We can highlight those who emphasized historic creeds and the importance of the church community and those who preached highly individualist revivalism. We can write about those who saw Christianity as a tool for social and racial liberation and those who used it to assert power and control over others. But we do not need to call any of them evangelicals. Dropping the term is a welcome move that a few recent historians have already made.²⁵

In sum, Noll, Marsden, Hatch, Wacker, Balmer, and Stout focused historians’ attention on important issues in American religion, highlighting characters and questions that many prior historians had dismissed or ignored. Their work has inspired many scholars, including me, to dedicate their careers to the study of religion. But we need to recognize how they resurrected and redefined the term evangelical, how it evolved in their hands, and what they emphasized and overlooked as they swam against the tides of the religious right. Recent presidential politics and Supreme Court decisions have guaranteed that understanding modern American evangelicalism, and the larger history of religion in North America that birthed it, is more important now than ever. There is still much work to be done.

Footnotes

1

On the behind-the-scenes debate between Schaeffer, Noll, and Marsden that in part inspired their book, see Burch 1996. See also Marshall and Manuel 1977.

2

Noll expands on some of these arguments in Noll 1988.

3

In the introduction of a recent festschrift for Mark Noll, Heath Carter and Laura Rominger Porter made a similar point. They observe that the rise of Noll and his colleagues marked a “pivotal turning point in the historiography of American evangelicalism.... In their work they located evangelicalism at the very center of American religious history. They contended that the roots of the faith most post-World War II American associated with Billy Graham extended all the way back to the colonial revivals.... The evangelical tradition was in fact older than the United States itself; and no other faith had so powerfully shaped the nation’s course from the American Revolution through the sectional crisis and all the way up to the rise of the Religious Right” (Carter and Porter, 2017, xv–xvi).

4

For an example of the evangelical definition wars, see Fea 2018; on evangelical statistics, see Pew 2021.

5

May originally made this argument in 1959 but did not publish it until 1964.

6

There have been multiple assessments of the new evangelical historiography as their work began reshaping the literature. See also Butler 1992a; Hart 2004a, 2004b; Sweet 1984; Sweeney 1991; Turner 1999; Wolfe 2000.

7

In late 1980, the ecumenical Christian Century called “the ascendence of the new Religious Right” the “most significant news story of 1980” (Christian Century 1980).

8

Historians of the South had already been invoking evangelical as a primary category of interpretation. In some ways, the consensus historians were attempting to wrestle the term away from them and re-center it in the North. On southern evangelicalism, see, for example, Boles 1972 and especially Mathews 1977. In 1993 Mathews shifted and suggested using the term evangelical only as an adjective and not a noun (Mathews 1997).

9

In addition to historians’ frequent invocation of the quadrilateral, journalists also invoke Bebbington or give space to evangelicals who use it to distance themselves and their movement from the religious right. See, for example, Walker 2011; Merritt 2015; NPR 2017; Keller 2017; Jacobs 2019; Economist 2021. For a recent critique of the quadrilateral, see Silliman 2021a.

10

Nor was Stout the only one connecting the revivals and revolution. He built on the important legacy of Heimert 1966. Patricia U. Bonomi later tied the revivals to the revolution (Bonomi 1986). For an assessment of historians’ efforts to link religion to the revolution, see Goff 1998.

11

Amanda Porterfield offers one of the smartest critiques of Hatch’s thesis (Porterfield 2012).

12

Noll made similar chronological distinctions in an earlier book on politics. He divided US history into three eras—“the colonial period under the influence of the Puritans (roughly 1630 to the time of the American Revolution), the national period under a more generally evangelical influence (roughly 1776 to the last third of the nineteenth century), and a modern period under the sway of the secular (roughly the last century)” (Noll 1988, 22).

13

Nevertheless, Marsden worked hard to make his fundamentalists seem more mainstream and less sectarian, which meant excluding more controversial groups from his fundamentalist tent—especially pentecostals who identified as fundamentalists. On this issue, Wacker offered an important corrective to the evangelical consensus (Wacker 2001). I make a similar argument in Sutton 2003.

14

An example of this minimizing of race appeared is Marsden’s chapter-length treatment of fundamentalist icon J. Gresham Machen. Here Marsden distinguished between Machen’s theology and his racist, Lost Cause political views as if the two were not connected (Marsden 1991). I am grateful to Austin Steelman for reminding me of this chapter. Edward Blum documented how central race and racism were to the construction of late nineteenth-century evangelicalism and how most previous historians had ignored them (Blum 2015).

15

Beth Barton Schweiger in contrast argued that southern historians should not call their subjects evangelicals since the term was so vague (Schweiger 2000, 8–9).

16

Catherine L. Albanese praised Butler’s efforts to “sabotage the evangelical thesis” and wrote that the story the evangelical consensus historians tell “has been seriously skewed by perspectives and data deployed to protect and promote the role of Christianity in the nation’s history” (Albanese 2007, 2, 4). See also Ribuffo, 1997.

17

On historians’ lack of attention to religion, see Butler 2004 and Schultz and Harvey 2010.

18

On historians of religion’s use of history for political purposes, see Lofton 2020.

19

Evangelical journalists have made similar claims, specifically invoking the evangelical consensus historians to critique the Trumpian religious right. See, for example, Gerson 2018 and Wehner 2021.

20

On the complexity of “evangelicals’” relationship to abolitionism, see Sinha 2016.

21

On the origins and use of the term fundamentalist, see Sutton 2014 and 2017.

22

I deal with much of the material in the next few pages in far greater detail in my American Apocalypse. See Sutton 2014.

23

In the 1960s and 1970s, younger evangelicals fought to broaden the movement, to make it more inclusive and less racist, nationalist, patriarchal, and wedded to free market economics. They mostly failed. See Swartz 2012 and Gasaway 2014.

24

For a new defense of the old paradigm, see Kidd 2019.

25

In perhaps the best book on the colonial revivals, Douglas Leo Winiarski explicitly avoids the term evangelical (Winiarski 2017, 17). Katherine Carté makes a similar argument in what is now the definitive history of religion in the revolution. She does not use the term, noting many of the problems with it that I identify in this article. See Carté 2021. Noll is evolving on this point. He writes, “Because designating individuals simply as evangelicals obscures too many important distinctions, I follow the wise example of Katherine Carté’s recent Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History that reserves the term evangelical as an adjective describing the religion that different varieties of Protestants embraced, but not as a noun for any of the Protestants themselves” (Noll 2022, 11).

Author notes

Matthew Avery Sutton, 301 Wilson-Short Hall, Department of History, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164-4030, USA. Email: [email protected]. For their comments and suggestions on drafts of this article, I am grateful to Katherine Carté, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Timothy E. W. Gloege, Luke Harlow, David Hollinger, Jeffrey Sanders, Austin Steelman, Grant Wacker, and David Harrington Watt, as well as the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.