Matthew Sutton is the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of History at Washington State University.

During his talk, Matthew will focus on the rise of the American evangelical movement across the twentieth century and discuss how this group of Christians, feeling besieged by Satanic forces including secularism, family breakdown, and government encroachment, took to the pulpit and airwaves to explain how prophecies of Biblical end times made sense of a ravaged modern world. By the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and conservative Republicans reached out to evangelicals, and together they built the Religious Right. In the 2016 presidential election, no group supported President Trump more enthusiastically than white evangelicals. Sutton’s talk helps explain why, and if this support will still be there in November 2020.

Matthew is the author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, the first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation. It was named an American Library Association “Outstanding Academic Title of 2015.” He has also lectured on religion, politics, and American culture across the U.S. and in universities in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic and been featured on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and MSNBC’s The Last Word, among many other news shows.  His latest book, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War, was published in September 2019.