Ever since the birth of evangelical Christianity in the 1730s, believers have disagreed over whether to dedicate themselves to changing society as well as converting individuals. For most of that time, the most activist American Protestants were politically progressive but that all changed in the 1970s thanks to two activist entrepreneurs: Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

Falwell and Robertson turned televangelism, or the “electric church”, into a lucrative industry, producing celebrity preachers like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. They also had unprecedented political ambitions. Beginning with Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979 and expanding with Robertson’s Christian Coalition in the 1990s, their crusade sought to put social conservatism at the heart of the Republican Party and wage a culture war against so-called “secular humanism”. What Darwinism was to the original fundamentalists of the 1920s, abortion and homosexuality were to the new religious right.

Evangelicals gave Republicans their votes in return for policies but this quid pro quo was complicated by broken promises, overreach and scandal. The movement and the party developed a symbiotic relationship that proved mutually corrupting. Once evangelicals threw themselves behind the strikingly ungodly Donald Trump, conservatism seemed to overtake Christianity. Even as evangelical churches boom in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the American movement is losing support and influence, turning off young people with its intolerant dogma. Perhaps evangelicals were right to keep politics at arm’s length.

How responsible are Falwell and Robertson for our present era of conspiracy theories and culture wars? Did the fundamentalist tradition ultimately prevail or is this something else? What place is there now for liberal evangelicals? What happened to the big-tent message of Billy Graham and has evangelicalism today betrayed its roots in its quest for political power? And what influence is it having on politics in the UK?

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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)

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye, written by Abe Sylvia and directed by Michael Showalter (2021)

• Inherit the Wind, written by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith and directed by Stanley Kramer (1960)

• The Testament of Ann Lee, written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet and directed by Mona Fastvold (2025)

• Things Fell Apart: 1000 Dolls, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (9 November 2021)

• Things Fell Apart: Dirty Books, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (16 November 2021)

• Things Fell Apart: A Miracle, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (23 November 2021)

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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