RECKONING AND REPAIR: THE URGENT CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE IN THE BLACK CHRISTIAN PODCAST CIRCUIT

This paper focuses on the Black Christian response to the 2020 uprisings against police brutality in the United States. Through a critical discourse analysis of three podcasts and interviews with podcasters, this paper argues that the Black, Christian podcast circuit is a counterpublic (Squires, 2002) that seeks to change Christian culture in America. I argue that it is the affordances of the medium of podcasting that make this counterpublic possible and that make it a potent force for changing the Christian conversation about race. These podcasters offer a portrait of a divided Christian church in need of repair and they make the case that repair is only possible through decolonizing the Christian faith, repenting and offering reparations for the racial trauma caused by white Christians, sparking Christians’ activist inclinations in favor of racial justice causes, and interrogating and correcting sexism within both the Black church and white evangelical culture.

Evangelicalism before the Fall: The Christian Herald and Signs of our Times

“Evangelicalism Before the Fall” reveals the surprising and largely forgotten world of the premillennialist wing of late Victorian Evangelicalism through a close reading of its leading paper, The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. Organized around five thematic soundings (“worldly affairs”; “great questions”; “self and other”; “meeting modernity”; and “Evangelical culture”), the paper shows that premillennialism comported easily with socially elite status, liberal instincts, and irenic habits of mind not commonly associated with those holding similar beliefs in the decades after. Although the primary goal of the article is to recover an overlooked moment in Evangelical history, it secondarily contributes to a historiographical debate in the field of Fundamentalism studies, where revisionists have challenged the “fall” narrative of an earlier cohort of scholars, such as George Marsden and Joel Carpenter, who documented a decline in social standing and influence for the movement relative to the late nineteenth century. The article lends support to the fall narrative, properly understood as a change in social and cultural status.

Battle for the Soul of a City: John Roach Straton, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in New York, 1922–1935

The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was a defining moment for New York in the 1920s and one of the most significant theological battles in the city's history, as key doctrines of the Christian tradition such as the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, and the bodily resurrection of Christ were debated in the mainstream as well as the religious press. The principal figures in the controversy were John Roach Straton and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two prominent clerics whose intellectual and oratorical confrontation showed just how deep this nationwide religious divide had become. Straton and Fosdick used their New York pulpits as public platforms to articulate their opposing theological visions and to justify them as the correct expression of historic Christianity in the present. In doing so, they made the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy very much a New York story, remapping the city's Protestant evangelical culture and reorienting one of the most important episodes in American religious history. The aftermath of the conflict, however, reveals that the lines between “fundamentalist” and “modernist” as distinct categories of religious experience became blurred as each embraced elements of the other. By 1935, both fundamentalists and modernists in New York City had been transformed, just as they had transformed the city.

Faith and the Family: Family Life and the Spread of Evangelical Culture in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, c. 1790–c. 1860

This examination of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd (Gaelic-speaking area) extends beyond protestant ideas about the gendered family to how people actually implemented spiritual practices at home. The results complicate earlier conclusions, showing that family worship undermined as well as reinforced the patriarchal family. The challenge to fathers’ authority came less from the influence of mothers than from children and non-family members who, through literacy, became better equipped than fathers for spiritual leadership. Examining family life shows how some Gaels used evangelicalism to reshape their culture while also exposing how others resisted this change.

Thomas Cole and the Landscape of Evangelical Print

This chapter defines the central concept of evangelical space. It shows how the evangelical print that flooded the nation in the 1820s and 1830s combined with an emerging landscape art culture that produced spectacular visualizations of the evangelical spatial imagination. It also mentions illustrated religious tracts, almanacs, and Bibles alongside one of the most iconic landscape paintings of the period, Thomas Cole's View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. The chapter reveals that landscape art enacted a symbolic synthesis of two competing impulses in northern evangelical culture: the individual believer's inward pilgrimage toward God and the collective work of global missionary activism. It reconstructs an immersive form of looking closely that is tied to evangelical reading practices and shows how devout viewers used the landscape to orient themselves in sacred history.

Puritans and the Great Awakening in America (1630–1790)

This chapter examines the necessity and nature of conversion from the earliest Puritan communities in New England through the colonies-wide Great Awakening. It begins with the conversionary views of Thomas Shepard, examines briefly the phenomenon of the Great Awakening, and ends with an extended discussion of the centrality of conversion in the life and writings of Jonathan Edwards. Despite the awakening’s many variations, the unifying theme that transcended denominational boundaries was its attention to “heart-centered,” conversion-oriented religion. Indeed, the legacy of the awakening—what makes it truly “great”—was the formation of a distinctively American evangelical culture whose touchstone was the conversion experience and whose influence has stretched into our own time and expanded around the world.

Awakening Verse

Beginning with Isaac Watts’s Horae Lyricae (1706) and concluding with the burgeoning poetic print culture of the early nineteenth century, Awakening Verse unfolds how evangelical ministers, itinerants, and laypeople in colonial British North America capaciously engaged prevailing ideas about literary taste and created a distinct transatlantic poetics grounded in Watts’s notion of the “plainest capacity.” From the evangelical women who were instrumental in the development of bountiful verse ministries and the creation of poetic coteries to the itinerant ministers for whom poetics and its attendant sociability were central, evangelicals produced new forms of the “poet-minister,” “print itinerancy,” and “espousal poetics” that emerged as crucial practices of revivalism and facilitated rearrangements of ecclesiastical, gendered, and racialized authority. Well-known poet-ministers, such as the Scottish Ralph Erskine, the Bostonian Sarah Moorhead, and the Virginian James Ireland, reimagined formal poetic elements in the service of saving souls. Others, like Samuel Davies and Phillis Wheatley, became enmeshed in critical debates over the racialization of evangelical verse. Countless others, in print and in manuscript, joined with Watts to save poetry from its “profligate” uses. Awakening Verse shows that American literary and religious histories that regularly exclude one hundred years of verse severely impoverish the understanding of early evangelicalism and American poetry. Taking revival poets and their verse as seriously as they and their contemporaries did provides an entirely new understanding of eighteenth-century evangelical and literary culture, one in which poetry serves as one of the primary actors in the creation, maintenance, and adaptation of evangelical culture and religious enthusiasm animates American poetics.