Evangelical Heritage and Public History: Bridging an Artificial Divide

Historian and archivist Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas’s Exhibiting Evangelicalism is the first work dedicated to the history of evangelical history museums in the United States, standing as a call to action for public historians whose field has often ignored these museums because of their religious nature. This book tells a history of the public interpretation of conservative Protestant1 religious pasts “in the hopes that public historians will learn from and about the distinctive ways in which a particular segment of America’s faithful have crafted and deployed a usable past” (3). An installment in the series Public History in Historical Perspective from University of Massachusetts Press, Exhibiting Evangelicalism is a timely and necessary intervention for the discipline. Manzullo-Thomas begins his inquiry in the 1930s with the Billy Sunday Home and concludes with Museum of the Bible (MOTB) in the present to argue that conservative Protestant Christians developed ideologies about preserving the past for various ends, and terms this practice the construction of “evangelical heritage” (3). Manzullo-Thomas deploys evangelical heritage as a conceptual framework, involving a collection of myths, traditions, and narratives about the past that are constructed, consumed, and disseminated in public spaces to represent who evangelicals are in the present and who they should be in the future. Manzullo-Thomas argues that for conservative Protestants, this evangelical heritage is both instrumental and inspirational, as well as ultimately a means to build community and contribute to the broader goal of conversion.