Abstract
In fifteen deftly crafted chapters, George Washington University’s Melani McAlister lifts our gaze beyond the well-documented emergence of evangelicals onto the US political scene to focus on the understudied projection of American evangelical presence and power onto the global stage over the last half-century. Tracing overarching themes of global networks, the persecuted body, and the public circulation of emotion, McAlister brings a background in Middle Eastern and African area studies and a deep sensitivity to issues of gender to analyze how US evangelicals’ discourse and behavior have shaped and been shaped by global events ranging from the Congo crisis of 1960 to the antiapartheid campaign in South Africa, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the HIV-AIDS crisis in Africa, and the more recent phenomenon of anti-LGBTQ interventions in Africa.
McAlister analyzes the emotionally charged, iconic images that have shaped the way US evangelicals understand themselves and their relationship to US politics and the world: martyred missionaries Dr. Paul Carlson (killed by Congo rebels) and Jim Elliot and his four colleagues (killed by members of the Auca, or Waorani, people in Ecuador) embodied a pure, self-sacrificing faith but were brutally persecuted by an uncivilized and hostile world. Images of believers’ bodies tortured by Communist regimes from Romania to China fueled the fires of anti-Communism and tempered evangelical responses to the crises in South Africa and Central America. The events discussed in the book served as bridges that helped American evangelicals cross the theological line from the apolitical stance of the 1950s to the highly engaged politics of the current moment.
God’s Kingdom Has No Borders sheds needed light on the complex and evolving networks of movement building that have transformed US evangelicals as a potent force in US politics by “defining boundaries, inviting participants, and choosing people who were worth disagreeing with” (12). Institutions such as the Urbana Student Missions Conference, interdenominational missions such as the historic African Inland Mission and Sudan Interior Mission, Christianity Today magazine, campus ministries such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade, and the “global nodes” that American evangelical seminaries and Bible colleges represent help the reader understand how evangelical identity has been strengthened and its members mobilized to the point that evangelicalism has replaced mainline Protestantism as a Washington political “insider”—and globally, evangelicalism has mushroomed into a force to be reckoned with.
While McAlister offers moments of empathy for the American evangelical experience and the people whose lives have been shaped by it, the bulk of the book is a critical, etic perspective that makes an important contribution to a little understood phenomenon that is increasingly affecting the lives of millions of people around the globe.