Defining the American Evangelical Movement: Born Again

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 — Historian and critic of evangelical-centered narratives

•      Henry May — “The Recovery of American Religious History” (1964, American Historical Review)

Preview Episode 2

Dan Hummel introduces listeners to Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith — a “power couple” of 1870s evangelical celebrity who traveled the US and Europe preaching a new vision of holiness called the Higher Life. Their story picks up the themes of celebrity, conversion, and what it means to live as an evangelical.