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 inside out?

To get at that, the hosts dive into a fascinating 19th-century story: the meteoric rise — and spectacular fall — of Robert Piersall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, a husband-and-wife duo from Pennsylvania who became transatlantic religious celebrities in the 1870s by promoting what they called the Higher Christian Life. Their story takes us from an elegant estate in Hampshire, England to the inaugural Keswick Convention, from packed revival halls in Paris and Berlin to a private room, a locked door, and the scandal that would end Robert's ministry overnight.

Hannah's story is even more interesting than her husband's. A Quaker by background who has been called both an "orthodox heretic" and a "rational mystic," she became one of the most widely-read religious writers of the 19th century. Her book, The Christian Secret of a Happy Life (1875), became an international bestseller — and its influence reaches all the way to Sarah Young's Jesus Calling, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 21st century. The Smiths' ideas outlasted their reputations by more than a century.

But this episode is about much more than one couple. Using the Smiths as a lens, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra open up a series of genuinely contested questions about American evangelicalism: What is the real relationship between the Calvinist and Wesleyan traditions? The dominant historiography traces evangelicalism through Reformed theology — Princeton, Warfield, Machen — but historians like Donald Dayton argue that the Wesleyan holiness movement has been systematically underweighted. What role have women played in evangelical life and leadership? The holiness movement created more room for women teachers than most evangelical traditions — not because it was egalitarian, but because charisma and gifts were not, in Wesleyan theology, coded by gender. Yet nearly all these women ministered in the shadow of their husbands. When Robert's scandal broke, Hannah's platform collapsed with it. Why does evangelicalism seem so susceptible to scandal? The hosts identify the structural vulnerabilities: the celebrity preacher model, itinerant ministry far from local accountability, high moral rhetoric, and deep decentralization. And perhaps most intriguingly: how did evangelical spirituality shade into what we now call the self-help genre? Dan Hummel traces the surprising overlap between Higher Life teaching and the positive thought tradition running from Emerson through Dale Carnegie to Oprah.

This is a rich, wide-ranging conversation that reshapes how you might think about evangelical history — and about the millions of people who, across nearly two centuries, have been trying to figure out what it means, in practice, to live a holy life.

Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, Uni

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This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

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 window into one of the most important and contested movements in American history: evangelicalism.

Hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra use Cole’s diary as a launching point for exploring the deceptively simple question at the heart of this series: What is an evangelical?

Topics Covered

• The story of Nathan Cole and his encounter with George Whitefield at Middletown, CT (1740)
• George Whitefield as the first true celebrity of British America
• The Bebbington Quadrilateral — the four theological markers historians use to define evangelicalism: Conversionism, Biblicism, Crucicentrism, and Activism
• Why the “New Birth” is the most distinctive feature of evangelical identity
• The 1976 Gallup poll and Jimmy Carter’s influence on how “born again” entered mainstream American vocabulary
• The trans-denominational character of early evangelicalism — and why Whitefield crossed church lines freely
• The First Great Awakening as a largely Reformed/Calvinist phenomenon, and the difference between “New Lights” and “Old Lights”
• Whitefield’s theatrical preaching style and the role of celebrity in evangelicalism, then and now
• The “parachurch” dimension of evangelicalism — how much of the action happens outside formal church structures
• The question of whether the First Great Awakening contributed to the American Revolution (Alan Heimert’s 1966 thesis and its critics)
• Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity and evangelicalism’s relationship to popular democracy
• How historians have debated whether evangelicalism is the “center” of American religious history

Key People & Works Mentioned

• Nathan Cole — Connecticut farmer; his diary is held at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford
• George Whitefield — Anglican itinerant preacher; subject of Harry Stout’s biography The Divine Dramatist
• Jonathan Edwards — Theologian, pastor at Northampton, MA
• Gilbert Tennant — New Jersey revivalist preacher, trained at the Log College
• David Bebbington — Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Taylor & Francis, 1988)
• D. Bruce Hindmarsh — The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2005)
• Mark Noll — The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (IVP Academic, 2003)
• Nathan Hatch — The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989)
• Alan Heimert — Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1966)
• Harry Stout — The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991)
• Frank Lambert — Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton University Press, 1993)
• John Butler — His

Send us Fan Mail

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

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 who shaped the movement.

Hosted by three historians of American evangelicalism, discover how evangelicals have shaped and been shaped by the challenges of not just theology and belief, but by the same forces that have contributed to American society.

This twelve-episode podcast mini-series offers a historical viewpoint of American evangelicals on issues like race, economics, politics, celebrity, science, and many more. In the end, we try to define what an American evangelical is and how we got here.

HOSTS

JOHN FEA is a historian who taught for 23 years at Messiah College in central Pennsylvania, where he was Professor of American History. He is currently a Visiting Fellow in History at the Lumen Center, an initiative of the SL Brown Foundation. He is the author of multiple books on American religion and politics, including Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? and Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. John is a widely cited voice on the history of evangelicalism and its relationship to American politics, and his work has appeared in publications ranging from The Washington Post to Christianity Today.

DAN HUMMEL is the Director of the Lumen Center, an initiative of the SL Brown Foundation. He's a historian of American religion, focusing on theology, foreign relations, and evangelical culture. He is the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations and The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Dan brings to the podcast a particular interest in the intellectual and theological life of evangelicals and their international connections.

MAGGIE CAPRA is a visiting instructor in American history at Beloit College. Her research centers on the theological dynamics within evangelical and holiness communities, with a particular focus on questions of marriage, family, divorce, and gender in the 20th century. Her work recovers the stories of lesser-known figures whose lives illuminate the intellectual and spiritual history of the movement — including those marginalized or overlooked in the standard historical record. Maggie brings to the podcast a talent for narrative history and a commitment to telling the full complexity of the evangelical story.

Send us Fan Mail

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour