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)

• Anonymous – ‘Billy Graham: A New Kind of Evangelist’, Time (25 October 1954)

• D.W. Bebbington – Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to

the 1980s (1989)

• Paul S. Boyer – When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992)

• Peter J. Boyer – ‘The Big Tent’, New Yorker (15 August 2005)

• Isaac Chotiner – ‘How Donald Trump Is Teaching Christians to Abandon Empathy’, New Yorker (1 April 2025)

• Whitney Cross – The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York 1800-1850 (1950)

• Jerry Falwell – Listen, America!: The Conservative Blueprint for America’s Moral Rebirth (1980)

• ‘The Gospel According to Ralph Reed’, Time (15 May 1995)

• Frances Fitzgerald – The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (2017)

• Harry Emerson Fosdick – ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ (21 May 1922)

• Richard Hofstadter – Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)

• Hal Lindsey – The Late Great Planet Earth (1970)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Billy Graham’s Movement Lost Its Way’, New Yorker (21 February 2018)

• Michael Luo – ‘The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind’, New Yorker (4 March 2021)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again’, New Yorker (29 July 2024)

• Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

• George M. Marsden – Fundamentalism and American Culture: Second Edition (2006)

• Pat Robertson – The New World Order (1991)

• Damian Thompson – The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (1996)

• Kenneth L. Woodward, John Barnes and Laurie Lisle – ‘Born Again: The Year of the Evangelicals’, Newsweek (25 October 1976)

Films and podcasts

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (2000)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

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