This Month’s Podcast: David R. Swartz and the Evangelical Left

The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 1In the November Penn Press podcast, David R. Swartz, Assistant Professor at Asbury University and author
of Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, discusses the overlooked history of progressive evangelical Christians in the United States.

In this section of the interview, Swartz describes the differences between fundamentalist Christians and other evangelical believers:

Evangelicalism–often called neoevangelicalism to
distinguish it from nineteenth-century versions of it–came out of
fundamentalism. This was a more separatist movement. And this was the era in
which Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians are starting to split along
fundamentalist and modernist lines. Neoevangelicals came in the wake of that
and wanted to reengage the world. They were less separatist, and they were less
fired up in some ways.

When you see a conservative Christian, say, railing against
gays on a YouTube video, that’s almost always a fundamentalist. The pithiest
way to say this is that a fundamentalist is an evangelical who’s angry about
something. Now unfortunately in the popular imagination, the word evangelical
has come to mean fundamentalist. So there’s a historical part to this, but
there’s also a temperamental  aspect to
these two movements.

David Swartz, author of Moral Minority by PennPress

The complete interview is available at the Penn Press podcast page.