Overview
Professor Wacker joined the faculty after teaching in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1977 to 1992. He specializes in American Christian History. He is the author or co-editor of nine books, including Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (2001, Harvard University Press), America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (2014, Harvard University Press), One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham (Eerdmans, 2019), and more than two-hundred articles, essays, and book reviews. From 1997 to 2004,
Professor Wacker served as a senior editor of the quarterly journal, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. He is past president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, the American Society of Church History, and a senior trustee of Fuller Theological Seminary. Along with three teaching awards, he directed twenty-six Ph.D. or Th.D students at UNC or Duke.
Wacker is a lay member of First United Methodist Church in Cary, N.C., where he lives with his wife, Katherine Wacker.