You Tube Theology

What does it mean to be an evangelical?

It is the summer of 1976. A Gallup poll asks Americans a simple question: “Have you been born again?” Thirty-four percent say yes. Overnight, that single survey gives a name to a movement that has existed in America for over two centuries — and sets off a debate about definition, identity, and belonging that has never really stopped.

In this episode of American Evangelicals: A History Podcast, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra invite two theologians into the conversation — scholars who have spent their careers asking what evangelicalism actually is, not just what it has historically looked like.

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GUESTS
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VINCENT BACOTE is professor of theology and director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College. His 2020 book, Reckoning with Race and Performing the Good News, asks: if evangelicalism is really about good news, why has it so often been bad news for Black Americans inside the movement?
COREY MARSH is professor of New Testament at Southern California Seminary and co-host of The Pastor-Scholar Podcast. His book Recovering a Vintage Faith: Five Fundamentals of Evangelical Identity argues that modern evangelicalism has gone soft — and the only solution is to go back to the source.

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WHAT WE DISCUSS
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The episode opens with a review of the Bebbington Quadrilateral — the four-marker framework (conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, activism) that has anchored the podcast since Episode 1. Both guests affirm it as a useful starting point. Both push well beyond it.

Bacote describes evangelicalism as a “conservative Protestant ecumenism” and argues for a fifth marker: the active work of the Holy Spirit. As Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity grows globally, he contends that pneumatology can no longer be assumed — it needs to be named. He also asks what Black evangelicalism reveals about the movement’s unfinished work: that survival has long required taking the full ethical entailments of scripture seriously in ways that comfort has sometimes allowed others to avoid.

Marsh builds his own framework — five fundamentals he calls “vintage faith”: the supremacy of Scripture, the exclusivity of Jesus, zealous evangelism, theological education, and local church fellowship (what he calls the “crucial X factor”). His argument: evangelicalism cannot be defined by belief alone. Behavior matters. And Christian celebrity culture — “social power without proximity,” in Katelyn Beaty’s phrase — is corroding the movement from within. His verdict: “We need to kill Christian celebrityism.”

After the interviews, the hosts take stock. What does the theological perspective add — and what does it miss? How do Gallup, Pew, and the General Social Survey each define evangelical differently — and why does methodology matter so much? Is there room in any definition for orthopathy — right affection, not just right belief and right practice? And what do we make of Billy Graham’s decision to prioritize global missions over civil rights activism — a failure of neighbor love, or a coherent theological priority?
The episode ends not with resolution but with a sharper sense of what’s at stake when we ask — and answer — the question of evangelical identity.

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BOOKS MENTIONED
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• David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (Unwin Hyman, 1989)
• Vincent Bacote, Reckoning with Race and Performing the Good News (2020)
• Corey Marsh, Recovering a Vintage Faith: Five Fundamentals of Evangelical Identity
• Katelyn Beaty, Celebrities for Jesus (Brazos Press, 2022)
• Thomas Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical? (Yale University Press, 2019)
• John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011)
• Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1947)

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CHAPTERS
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00:00 Introduction: The Question That Defined a Movement
01:11 The Bebbington Quadrilateral Reviewed
06:14 Vincent Bacote: Defining Evangelicalism
21:26 Vincent Bacote: Black Evangelicalism and the Ethics of Belief
28:39 Corey Marsh: Historians, Theologians, and Vintage Faith
40:27 Corey Marsh: The Case Against Christian Celebrityism
46:25 Host Debrief
1:23:25 Outro

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ABOUT THE PODCAST
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American Evangelicals: A History Podcast is a twelve-episode series tracing the story of American evangelicalism from 18th-century revivals through the cultural and political conflicts of the 21st century. Hosted by historians John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra, and produced by the SL Brown Foundation.

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