One of the most complex and contested questions in the study of American religion is the relationship between evangelicalism and race. Episode 5 of American Evangelicals: A History Podcast takes up that question through an unexpected doorway: the story of J. M. Humphrey, a little-known holiness minister who built a ministry in the early twentieth century — and whose race, historian Maggie Capra discovered, was invisible in the sources until a single letter revealed it.

That discovery — that Humphrey was Black, and that his racial identity had been effectively unknown from the sources that survived him — opens into a wide-ranging and deeply layered conversation. Maggie Capra, John Fea, and Dan Hummel explore how race has shaped evangelical institutions, archives, and historical memory itself, and they wrestle with some of the sharpest debates among scholars today: Is racism intrinsic to evangelicalism, or does it reflect broader patterns in American culture? What is "colorblind Christianity," where did it come from, and what does it mean for how evangelicals discuss race today? And how do political developments — above all the rise of Donald Trump — change the way historians interpret the evangelical past?

From Black fundamentalism to the church growth movement to the sociological insights of Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, this episode offers a nuanced and historically grounded examination of faith, race, and the challenge of telling honest stories about American evangelicalism.

Most episodes of American Evangelicals open with a narrative story about the subject. In Episode 5, Maggie Capra reads from J. M. Humphrey's pamphlet "A Word of Warning on Divorce Marriage" — a deeply personal testimony about Humphrey's tormented conscience after remarrying following divorce — and from a letter written by Jenny Jolly, a white evangelist in the holiness movement who knew Humphrey personally.

Jolly's letter, appended to a posthumous reprint of Humphrey's pamphlet, contains the sentence that stopped Capra cold: "Colored people couldn't claim him after that. He was too much in demand by the free Methodist whites." Nowhere in Humphrey's published sermons or pamphlets had race appeared. The letter was the only surviving evidence of his racial identity — and its tone, matter-of-fact in its racism, raises hard questions about who gets preserved in the historical record, and why.

Who was J. M. Humphrey? Born in 1872 in Tennessee, Jerry Miles Humphrey and his wife moved to Chicago in their early twenties, where both were converted and sanctified in the holiness movement. After his first wife renounced her faith, Humphrey divorced her and eventually — under pressure from church leaders — remarried. He spent the rest of his ministry promoting his belief that his "divorce marriage" was spiritually dangerous, using his own experience as a warning to others. Only one surviving letter, written after his death, reveals that he was Black. 

The Whitewashing of the Historical Record

Capra's experience with the Humphrey sources illustrates a problem historians increasingly acknowledge: the archives are not neutral. Racist attitudes and exclusionary practices shaped which voices were preserved, which pamphlets were reprinted, and whose papers were collected. As a result, historians working from traditional archives may unintentionally reproduce the racial biases that shaped those archives.

The hosts discuss how this dynamic shaped the story of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy — a narrative almost entirely built around white evangelical figures — and note ongoing scholarly work, including Daniel Bare's book on Black fundamentalism, that seeks to recover what was excluded.

Is Racism Intrinsic to Evangelicalism?

The episode grapples with one of the most contested questions in the field: Is racism essential to evangelicalism as a movement, or is it a historical contingency — present in particular eras and communities, but not definitionally part of what evangelicalism is? The hosts survey both ends of this debate:

Some historians argue that evangelicalism, as it developed in the United States, is inseparable from white supremacy — that pulling racism out of it leaves something unrecognizable.

Others, drawing on the Bebbington Quadrilateral's theological definition, argue that evangelicals held widely divergent positions on race (abolitionists alongside slaveholders) and that racism is better understood as reflecting broader American culture than as intrinsic to the movement.

A third concern, raised by John Fea, is "race reductionism" — the tendency, accelerated after 2016, to interpret evangelicalism primarily or exclusively through a racial lens, producing historical accounts that are accurate in their particulars but reductive as total explanations.

Colorblind Christianity: Origins and Consequences

Dan Hummel traces the rise of what scholars call "colorblind Christianity" — the belief, which entered the mainstream of white evangelicalism in the 1970s, that the most Christian approach to race is to ignore racial difference altogether, to see all people as equal before God without acknowledging race. Drawing on Jesse Curtis's book The Myth of Colorblind Christianity, Hummel explains how this ideology took hold and what its consequences have been.

Hummel connects colorblind Christianity to the church-growth movement of the same era, particularly Donald McGavran's Homogeneous Unit Principle — the sociological observation that churches grow when they gather people who resemble one another. Applied to American suburbs, this principle reinforced the idea that building a racially homogeneous congregation was not just strategically sound but compatible with Christian identity. The result: millions of evangelicals raised in churches that treated race as a divisive topic, one better left outside the sanctuary door.

The Christian Right and the Racial Politics Debate

The hosts discuss competing historical interpretations of the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s and the role race played in motivating figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Two contrasting views emerge:

Randall Balmer argues, based in part on a direct conversation with political organizer Paul Weyrich, that the Christian right was primarily mobilized not by abortion but by opposition to the desegregation of private Christian academies — making race the foundational political issue.

Daniel Williams and others offer a multi-causal account: race was certainly present, but so were concerns about abortion, secularism in public education, and other issues. Reducing the Christian right to a single motivating factor, they argue, distorts the history.

Evangelicals and Systemic Racism: The "Toolkit" Problem

The conversation turns to a landmark study by sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith (2000), which argued that evangelicals possess a limited "cultural toolkit" for thinking about race. Because evangelical theology places such heavy emphasis on individual conversion, free will, and personal accountability, evangelicals tend to frame racism as an individual sin rather than a structural or systemic reality.

Fea illustrates this from his own teaching: evangelical students consistently reach for relational or individual responses to racial injustice — volunteer work, cross-racial friendship, personal witness — rather than structural or political engagement. The Promise Keepers movement of the 1990s is discussed as a prominent example of the relational approach to racial reconciliation, along with its limitations.

Black Evangelicalism: Parallel Histories

The episode also considers the story of Black evangelicalism — a tradition that ran parallel to, and sometimes intersected with, white evangelical institutions — but which has been systematically underrepresented in archives and historiography. The hosts recommend Vince Bacote's documentary on Black evangelicalism and discuss how institutions such as Moody Bible Institute, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and Fuller Seminary both excluded African Americans and eventually opened to their participation.

Hummel notes a striking contemporary data point: as of 2026, the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, and Christianity Today — the three flagship institutions of postwar American evangelicalism — are all led by non-white leaders.

The "White Evangelical" Label: A Disciplinary Divide

The episode closes with a discussion of the term "white evangelical" itself, prompted by a view expressed in an earlier episode by guest Corey Marsh. Marsh objects to the racial modifier, arguing that evangelicalism is a theological category that shouldn't be bounded by race.

Hummel agrees in part — using the term as a reflexive political statement can be imprecise — but defends it as analytically necessary for historians studying communities that were, in fact, overwhelmingly and self-consciously white. The disagreement, the hosts suggest, reflects a genuine disciplinary difference: theologians tend to define evangelicalism ideally; historians define it from the particular communities and institutions they study.

Books and Resources Mentioned

Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005) — Examines how Protestant leaders, including Dwight Moody, helped reshape American racial ideology in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras.

Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2000) — A sociological study arguing that evangelical theology — particularly its emphasis on individualism and free will — limits evangelicals' ability to recognize or address systemic racism.

The Myth of Colorblind Christianity (New York University Press, 2024) — Traces the rise of colorblind Christianity in white evangelical culture from the 1970s onward and examines its theological and cultural consequences.

Evangelicals and Race: A Documentary History (Crossway, 2023) — A documentary collection presenting a range of evangelical voices on race across American history, emphasizing complexity and contradiction.

Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (New York University Press, 2021) — Recovers the history of African American Christians who self-identified as theological fundamentalists but were excluded from white fundamentalist institutions and publications.

Strangers and Pilgrims No More: The Collected Stories of African American Christian Evangelicals (IVP, 2018) — Referenced in connection with Bacote's documentary work on Black evangelicalism, exploring the experience of Black evangelical leaders educated in white institutions.

God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford University Press, 2010) — Offers a multi-causal account of the Christian right's rise, arguing that race, abortion, secularism, and other concerns together shaped the movement.

Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Eerdmans, 2018) — Traces patterns in evangelical history — fear, nostalgia, the pursuit of power — that, Fea argues, help explain why so many evangelicals supported Trump in 2016. Discussed in the episode in relation to questions of historical presentism and reductionism.

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2020) — While not named directly, the broader debate about white Christianity and racism that frames much of this episode reflects conversations this book helped shape.