Elesha Coffman on John Corrigan, Melani McAlister, and Axel R. Schäfer’s *Global Faith, Worldly Power: Evangelical Internationalism and U.S. Empire*

At the border of my city and its white-flight suburbs stands an Assemblies of God church. As a poll worker, I know the church primarily as an early-voting site with a reputation for being very busy, very Republican, and prone to partisan scuffles in the parking lot. The church staff is white, aside from a Cuban couple the website lists as pastors who minister to “our Spanish speaking neighbors.” I would not ordinarily think of the church as evangelical, a term that, in my mind, describes the local Baptist churches and the megachurch where Chip and Joanna Gaines attend but not a church that lists on its statement of faith “Speaking in tongues as initial evidence of Spirit baptism” and “Divine healing of the sick.”

The edited volume Global Faith, Worldly Power: Evangelical Internationalism and U.S. Empire would challenge my classification of First Assembly. The context of suburbanization and Republican politics seem most obviously salient to me, but the Assemblies of God is a global denomination; of its 69 million reported members, just 3 million live in the United States. And while speaking in tongues and divine healing are not textbook evangelical beliefs, everything else on First Assembly’s “about” page is—including the emphasis on militant masculinity visible in links to FatherHeart ministries, a Wild at Heart daily prayer, and the Royal Rangers ministry for boys.

Does it make more sense to place a church like First Assembly in the context of white, conservative, American politics or in the context of a global, multiracial religious movement? How much do the boundaries between tongues-speaking and non-tongues-speaking Christians, or between a church’s understood “us” and “our Spanish speaking neighbors,” matter? What, ultimately, does the label evangelical mean, and whom does it include?

The edited volume does not settle any of these questions, taking a consistently “all of the above” approach. It argues that evangelicalism “encompasses a broad range of people who do not always even recognize each other as fellow travelers” (36), including not just white, American Baptists but African and Asian prosperity megachurches, Latin American progressives, and missionaries of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Together, editors state, all of these Christians constitute “an evangelical community that is both transnational and transdenominational” (31), as well as “an empire of faith” (37) where currents of power frequently emanate outward from the United States but follow other trajectories, too.

The book, which grew out of a 2018 conference at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, features contributions on three broad topics—America’s missionary impulse, global Christianity and the Cold War, and evangelicals in the neoliberal order—to broaden what we scholars talk about when we talk about evangelicalism. Although the individual essays (and the monographs by the essay contributors) are well-sourced and carefully argued, I remain unpersuaded that trans-everything lenses overturn or even significantly improve upon more targeted studies. “In the end,” editor Schäfer writes in his historiographic chapter, “transnational perspectives thus frequently end up affirming what they had set out to challenge” (264), an observation that applies to many moments in the book.

In a chapter in the “missionary impulse” section, for example, Dana Robert unpacks a legendary telegram sent in 1889 from Kyoto to Northfield, Massachusetts, reading “Make Jesus King.” “What mythology characterized as a spontaneous telegram sent by Japanese students appears on closer examination to have been orchestrated by American YMCA leaders,” Roberts explains. “’Make Jesus King’ signaled the calculated exportation of an American version of putatively ‘global’ evangelicalism” (123). Japanese Christians went on to use YMCA ideas and connections for their own domestic purposes, not in concert with American Christian empire but in competition with it. Beneath the shared slogan “lay different cultures, theologies, social locations, and political priorities” (135), with a global evangelical imagination stretched, like a thin gauze, over the top.

The propensity of evangelicalism, even when conceptualized globally, to reinforce rather than elide racialized and nationalistic priorities recurs throughout the book. Drawing on Korean-language sources, Helen Jin Kim demonstrates the formative influence of World Vision’s Korean founder, Kyung Chik Han, on its much better-known American founder, Bob Pierce, but also Han’s misrepresentation and erasure. There’s a reason hardly anyone knows about Han: “Pierce and Han’s reliance on the superiority of the salvific power of the American Cold War state short-circuited the full effect of the transnational, intimate, and existential exchanges between two men from vastly different worlds” (197). In a drama dominated by American notions of race and anti-communism, the only role that Korean Christians—or, as other essays illustrate, Christians in the Middle East, or behind the Iron Curtain, or in countless other places—could play was martyr.

The role most available to people in what was then considered the Third World was potential convert. Centering the Philippines, Sarah Miller-Davenport shows that, “Far from hampering American global expansion, decolonization helped to amplify it as the United States sought to shape the course of decolonization toward its own ends” (173). To the American evangelicals increasingly allied with American militarism, “the shifting world order posed an opportunity, not a crisis—even as they often used the language of crisis to highlight the scale of opportunity” (173).

Coming into contact with people from other cultures did affect American evangelicals, to what several contributors to the book contend was a transformative degree. “As evangelical voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America have become more vocal and assertive within the movement,” Schäfer writes, “conservative Protestantism emerged as a more pluralistic, multidirectional enterprise characterized by instances of indigenization, anti-colonial resistance, and ‘reverse missions’” (270). But it is hard to square this argument with the numerous studies showing that American evangelicals are exceptionally insular, racist, and nationalistic, generating headlines like “68% of white evangelicals think America shouldn’t house refugees,” “Once again, white evangelicals are outliers on beliefs about race and American history,” and “A third of Americans are Christian nationalists and most are white evangelicals.” Even in this book, which goes out of its way to find instances of mutuality, evangelicals do a lot more bullying than listening, a lot more throwing their weight around than being truly moved by another’s plight.

Paradoxically, it is simultaneously true that the majority of evangelicals are people of color who live outside the United States (Lifeway, 2020), and that the majority of American evangelicals either adhere to or sympathize with Christian nationalism (PRRI, 2023). It is hard not to conclude that either Americans are not very good evangelicals, or “evangelical” isn’t a very good analytical category. The word ought to mean something, ideally the same something to the believers (American and global) who claim it and to the scholars who study it. Speaking both as a former evangelical and as a historian of American religious history, though, I simply don’t know what that something is anymore.