In Exhibiting Evangelicalism, Devin Manzullo-Thomas brings together two disciplines that have largely remained separate, namely public history and religious studies. Public historians have rarely explored religion as a subject, and they have not taken seriously religious people as an audience for their work. Given the extent to which white evangelical Christians have played a public political role in recent years, that appears to be an area of serious neglect. Manzullo-Thomas makes a compelling case why that reality should change and what scholars can learn when that bridge is crossed. In addition, his book contributes to the religious study literature about the history of evangelicalism, and he explains public history's experiential, emotional, and hands-on turn in the 1970s. The exhibits he analyzes here were in line with industry trends that public history scholars and practitioners have long understood.
Originally defined theologically and then historically, the label evangelical today is more likely to point to a political category. The subjects of this book often self-consciously applied the label to themselves, and their use of it suggests the ways in which the theological, historical, and political were intertwined. To that end, the book focuses on “evangelical heritage,” which Manzullo-Thomas defines as a “set of stories about the past that people who call themselves evangelicals tell in order to represent who they are in the present and who they should be in the future” (6). The book's narrative begins with a story that is familiar to scholars. In the wake of World War II, some white conservative Protestants sought to shed the “fundamentalist” label and fashion a new “evangelical” identity, an undertaking that required them to re-shape perceptions of their movement and their place in American history. They accomplished that by—according to the book's chapter titles—“inventing ” evangelical heritage, then “reviving” it, “experiencing” it, “weaponizing” it, and finally “mainstreaming” it.
The task of “inventing” evangelical heritage began with Helen Sunday's efforts to memorialize her husband Billy and continued with the historic Park Street Church's inclusion on the Boston Freedom Trail, a walking tour intended to connect various Boston area Revolutionary War sites. Billy Sunday died in 1935, but his wife Helen fashioned the home—known as Mount Hood—they shared in Winona Lake, Indiana, into a living museum that served as a shrine to the late evangelist and a tool for uniting disparate conservative Protestant groups. In the 1960s, Park Street Church, whose long-time pastor Harold John Ockenga was a key intellectual leader of the new evangelical movement, used the Freedom Trail to confer evangelical identity with historical and intellectual legitimacy. Ultimately, however, neither Mount Hood nor Park Street Church successfully “garnered the national prominence necessary to catalyze new evangelicalism as a social movement” (68).
That catalyst would come with evangelist Billy Graham, the prime figure in the rise to prominence of the new evangelicalism. In 1970, the evangelist recruited Lois Ferm to help with the planning for a physical space that would be a repository for Graham's archives. Ferm was highly accomplished and well-educated, but male members of the board of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) sidelined her, rejected her ambitious plans for creating a center that would be modeled after presidential libraries, and then appropriated some of her ideas. Before plans could be finalized, “crises of nation and politics” (92)—namely Graham's close association with Richard Nixon—complicated matters and threatened the legitimacy of the new evangelicalism.
Ultimately, the BGEA decided on a scaled down Billy Graham Center Museum to be hosted at Wheaton College in Illinois. Finally opened to the public in 1980, the Billy Graham Center was designed to reflect the emotional, immersive, and experiential turn public history had taken in the 1970s. After experiencing multimedia exhibits that celebrated Graham's life and ministry and placed the evangelist firmly within the American tradition of revivalism and the nation's Christian heritage, visitors were invited to convert to Christianity. Selective in their rendering of the American revivalist tradition, these exhibits included no Catholics, no slaveholders or Black evangelists, and no women. The museum was not as successful as promotional materials and advocates claimed, and eventually the BGEA turned its attention to a new project.
The Billy Graham Library opened in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2007. By then evangelicals were a potent political force, so this shrine to Graham and the movement he represented took a turn in both message and medium. For starters, the library was less concerned about the respectability of new evangelicals and more focused on shaping perceptions of the New Christian Right. To that end, “weaponizing” evangelical heritage now called for nostalgia and a “yearning vision of America as a Christian nation” (149). The medium also changed with the message. Not content to be an immersive museum experience with artifacts and text panels, the Billy Graham Library borrowed ideas and designs from Christian theme parks. A brief conclusion about the Museum of the Bible, which opened in Washington, D.C., in 2017, wraps up the argument and highlights how “evangelical heritage became vitally important to conservative Protestantism” (173).
Exhibiting Evangelicalism successfully explains the extent to which contests over retelling American history drove cultural and political conflict for much of the past century or so. Presenting a “usable” and accurate version of the past is difficult, and this book encourages religious studies scholars and public historians to work together to “truly make sense of religion's ‘presence of the past’” (178).
