Evangelicals – Part One – Altared States

Welcome to Origin Story, the show about why we are where we are. This week we begin the story of evangelical Christianity and its influence on politics.

Starting in the 1730s, Protestants in colonial America replaced the dour strictures of the Puritans with an ecstatic, empowering new creed that promised salvation through conversion: the word evangelical means spreading the good news. Over the next 150 years it swept the country through waves of revivalism, as star preachers like Charles Finney and Dwight Moody professionalised the business of soul-saving. The movement changed Britain, too.

Evangelicalism cut across all the major Protestant denominations but believers disagreed over the timing of the prophesied Millennium and therefore whether they should focus on converting individuals or reforming society. Activist followers of the Social Gospel were at the forefront of the fight to end evils like slavery and child labour. It was slavery that caused the formation of a more conservative Southern church.

By the early twentieth century, factional conflicts were piling up: over social reform, Biblical scholarship, the theory of evolution. Some evangelicals felt that there were effectively two religions, with liberals (or modernists) pitted against conservatives (or fundamentalists). The fundamentalists were gathering force until 1925, when Tennessee prosecuted a teacher named John Scopes for teaching Darwinism. A national media event, the trial made fundamentalism appear intolerant, ignorant and absurd, leading to decades of retreat and quiet rebuilding.

America’s post-war evangelical megastar was Billy Graham, whose canny big-tent messaging and horror of controversy chimed with President Eisenhower’s tolerant civic religion. But through radio, television and bestselling books, the new fundamentalists were laying the ground for a culture war. A string of controversies in the 1970s revealed a much more militant and aggressive form of Christianity that was determined to transform not just evangelicalism but all of America.

Why did evangelicalism become the dominant American religion and what part did British thinkers play? Who were the charismatic men and women who spread the word? Why did the battle between modernists and fundamentalists become so bitter, and how did the fundamentalists recover from the humiliation of the Scopes trial? How does the ambition to reform society complicate the task of conversion? And how did Martin Luther King inadvertently inspire the fundamentalists to finally become a political force?

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Reading list

• Robert Ajemian – ‘Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word’, Time (2 September 1985)