The Conference on Faith and History Podcast

In the fourth episode of Secondary Sources, co-hosts Prisca Bird and David McFarland interview Dr. Leah Payne and discuss her book "God Gave Rock and Roll To You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music" (Oxford, 2024). This episode is a fantastic follow-up to the May 2024 CFH Book Talk episode also featuring Dr. Payne.  Our conversation went in a new direction by looking at the implications and applications of this scholarship to teaching high school students, particularly Christian students, who have inevitably been shaped by the subculture's music (even if it was the music their parents listened to!)

Secondary Sources is a podcast that seeks to connect scholars and secondary teachers who are both committed to the effective discipleship of students through compelling historical research and dynamic pedagogy. It is produced by secondary educators connected to The Conference on Faith & History. 

Today’s political and cultural polarization has led to suspicion and animosity in our churches, our workplaces, and even our families. It has also led to a false sense that our options are limited to choosing a side. But there is a better way.

Shirley Mullen invites readers to claim the powerful, redemptive potential of the courageous middle. Far from being a place of bland averaging, moral cowardice, wobbling indecisiveness, or lazy indifference, the courageous middle is a place where thoughtful individuals work with urgency to foster attentive rather than dismissive listening in order to garner what is true and praiseworthy even from those with whom they disagree. Their Christian faith, which makes it impossible for them to align themselves fully with one side or the other, uniquely equips them to call their communities to imagine a more hopeful, grace-filled future.

Claiming the Courageous Middle offers a Christian theological framework for the work of “middle space” drawn from the Old and New Testaments. It also includes practical advice on how to prepare for this work, examples of those who have called their communities to alternatives beyond binary options, and discussion questions.

Join us for a book talk with Dr. Shirley Mullen on her book, Claiming the Courageous Middle (Baker, 2024). This conversation was moderated by CFH President, Dr. Lisa Clark Diller.

The beloved Little Housebooks by Laura Ingalls Wilder have sold over 60 million copies since their publication in the first half of the twentieth century. Even her unpolished memoir, Pioneer Girl, which tells the true story behind the children’s books, was widely embraced upon its release in 2014. Despite Wilder’s enduring popularity, few fans know much about her Christian beliefs and practice.

John J. Fry shines a light on Wilder’s quiet faith in this unique biography. Fry surveys the Little Housebooks, Pioneer Girl, and Wilder’s lesser-known writings, including her letters, poems, and newspaper columns. Analyzing this wealth of sources, he reveals how Wilder’s down-to-earth faith and Christian morality influenced her life and work. Interweaving these investigations with Wilder’s perennially interesting life story, A Prairie Faith illustrates the Christian practices of pioneers and rural farmers during this dynamic period of American history.

Enjoy a book talk with Dr. John J. Fry on his book, A Prairie Faith: The Religious Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Eerdmans, 2024). This conversation was moderated by Lucy S. R. Austen, author of Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (Crossway, 2023).

The story of five best-selling novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped 

Who are evangelicals? And what is evangelicalism? Those attempting to answer these questions usually speak in terms of political and theological stances. But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions—institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology. 

In this unique exploration of evangelical subculture, Daniel Silliman shows readers how Christian fiction, and the empire of Christian publishing and bookselling it helped build, is key to understanding the formation of evangelical identity. With a close look at five best-selling novels—Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack—Silliman considers what it was in these books that held such appeal and what effect their widespread popularity had on the evangelical imagination. 

Reading Evangelicals ultimately makes the case that the worlds created in these novels reflected and shaped the world evangelicals saw themselves living in—one in which romantic love intertwines with divine love, humans play an active role in the cosmic contest between angels and demons, and the material world is infused with the literal workings of God and Satan. Silliman tells the story of how the Christian publishing industry marketed these ideas as much as they marketed books, and how, during the era of the Christian bookstore, this—every bit as much as politics or theology—became a locus of evangelical identity.

Enjoy this book talk with Dr. Daniel Silliman on his book, Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith. This conversation was moderated by Dr. Joey Cochran.

In God Gave Rock and Roll to You (OUP, 2024), Leah Payne traces the history and trajectory of CCM in America and, in the process, demonstrates how the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped–and continue to shape–conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism. For many outside observers, evangelical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders are silly expressions of kitsch. Yet Payne argues that these cultural products were sources of power, meaning, and political activism. Throughout, she draws on in-depth interviews with CCM journalists, publishers, producers, and artists, as well as archives, sales and marketing data, fan magazines, merchandise–everything that went into making CCM a thriving subculture. Ultimately, Payne argues, CCM spurred evangelical activism in more potent and lasting ways than any particular doctrine, denomination, culture war, or legislative agenda had before.

Enjoy a book talk with Dr. Leah Payne on her book, God Gave Rock and Roll to You (OUP, 2024). This conversation was moderated by Dr. Joey Cochran, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Wheaton College.

Exhibiting Evangelicalism provides the first account of the growth and development of historical museums created by white evangelical Christians in the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exploring the histories of the Museum of the Bible, the Billy Graham Center Museum, the Billy Sunday Home, and Park Street Church, Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas illustrates how these sites enabled religious leaders to develop a coherent identity for their fractious religious movement and to claim the centrality of evangelicalism to American history. In their zeal to craft a particular vision of the national past, evangelicals engaged with a variety of public history practices and techniques that made them major players in the field—including becoming early adopters of public history’s experiential turn.

Enjoy a book talk with Dr. Devin Manzullo-Thomas on his book, Exhibiting Evangelicalism (UMass, 2022). This conversation was moderated by Dr. Joey Cochran, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Wheaton College.

Cultural Christians in the Early Church, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the rule, rather than the exception, in the early church. Using different categories of sins as its organizing principle, the book considers the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity, as they struggled to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire. These believers blurred and pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be a saint or sinner from the first to the fifth centuries CE, and their stories provide the opportunity to get to know the regular people in the early churches. At the same time, their stories provide a fresh perspective for considering the difficult timeless questions that stubbornly persist in our own world and churches: when is it a sin to eat or not eat a particular food? Are women inherently more sinful than men? And why is Christian nationalism a problem and, at times, a sin? Ultimately, recognizing that cultural sins were always a part of the story of the church and its people is a message that is both a source of comfort and a call to action in our pursuit of sanctification today.

Enjoy a book talk with Dr. Nadya Williams on her book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan, 2023). This conversation was moderated by Dr. John Wilsey, Associate Professor of Church History and Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. “Socialism,” he wrote, “has become a distinct substitute” for the church. He was not wrong.

In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. They demanded an expanded local, state and federal infrastructure which supported collective bargaining for better pay, shorter work-days, and an array of municipal services. Protestant clergy worried that if the labor movement kept growing in momentum and cultural influence, socialist policies would displace the need for churches and their many ministries to the poor. Even worse, they feared that the labor movement would render the largest Protestant denominations a relic of the nineteenth century.

In The Gospel of Church, Janine Giordano Drake carefully traces the relationships which Protestant ministers built with labor unions and working class communities. She finds that Protestant ministers worked hard to assert their cultural authority over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously-unaffiliated working-class communities. Moreover, they rarely supported the most important demands of labor, including freedom of speech and the right to collective bargaining. Despite their heroic narratives of Christian social reform, Protestant reformers’ efforts to assert their authority over industrial affairs directly undermined workers’ efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States.

Enjoy a book talk with Dr. Janine Giordano Drake on her book, The Gospel of Church (Oxford University Press, 2023). This conversation is moderated by Dr. Mark Edwards, Professor of US History and Politics at Spring Arbor University.

In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches’ doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them, stoking fears of drunken Black men defiling white women in their efforts to reframe alcohol restriction as a means of racial control. Later, as the alcohol industry grew desperate, it turned to Black voters, many of whom joined the brewers to preserve their voting rights and maintain personal liberties. Tracking southern debates about alcohol from the 1880s through the 1930s, Payne shows that prohibition only retreated from the region once the racial and religious order it helped enshrine had been secured.

Enjoy this book talk with Dr. Brendan Payne on his book, Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow (Louisiana State University Press, 2022). This conversation was moderated by Dr. Paul Thompson, Dean of the College of Humanities and Science at North Greenville University.

What has been the history of the Conference on Faith and History? What have been the high points, the difficult points, and what have we learned as an organization that seeks to explore the relationship between the Christian faith and history? And what would one generation of historians wish to pass on to the next generation of historians?

Listen in as the Western Regional President of CFH, David McFarland, moderates a panel of longtime members of CFH, which include: Shirley Mullin, Barry Hankins, Rick Kennedy, and Bill Trollinger.