Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States,

Abstract

Combing through missionary archives, periodicals, sponsorship cards found in church parlors, visits to the major organizational headquarters of ChildFund, World Vision, Compassion International, and Unbound, as well as a “roving variety” of ethnography (240) with US churches, families, and individuals who sponsor children abroad, Hillary Kaell takes readers on a thorough journey of how two centuries of child sponsorship conjure globalism within American Christianity. The breadth and detail of Kaell’s account is staggering, and yet she is also astutely aware of the borders of her research: with the exception of two “interludes” that reconstruct sponsor duos in the 1840s and 2000s, Kaell otherwise interprets sponsorship from the perspective of those who seek it out, the missionaries, the funders, the churches, and the sponsors in the United States, and how it is they imagine themselves, the nations, and the children they sponsor. Kaell argues that the paradox of immensity and particularity activated in child sponsorship serves to affirm God’s power and cultivate global intimacy. Fittingly, this balance between immensity and particularity is a hallmark of Kaell’s work, too: she brings Christian missions and contemporary Christianity into conversation with sophisticated social-cultural theories of globalization, parsing centuries of history with thoughtful and precise descriptions of sponsorship’s particular participatory techniques.Christian Globalism at Home will have far reach among sociologists, anthropologists, historians, missiologists, and theologians. Because Kaell is not writing a history of child sponsorship (18), the book experiments with structure by exchanging a loose chronology for thematic organization, and interspersing postscripts and the above-mentioned interludes to emphasize the resonance between historical periods, as well as the gaps, time lags, and absences characteristic of global relationships. The theoretical analyses in the first two chapters are particularly poignant: Kaell’s attention to how sentimentality comes to function through the (theological) paradoxes of love and disgust in chapter 1 and how statistics or “big numbers” come to uplift rather than undermine God’s chosen ministry in small sacrifices in sponsorship in chapter 2 thoughtfully reconceptualize Christian globalism born from the early days of Christian missions.Although chapter 3 is meant to serve as a resonant historical linchpin emphasizing the impact of photography and the way it changed the sponsorship game for good, I ultimately found the contemporary postscripts at the ends of chapter 2 and 3, as well as the 1980s quotations at the front of chapter 3 dizzying, especially as chapter 3 then plunges back into the 1880s! In chapter 4, the author’s ethnographic point of view also surfaces quite suddenly: for instance, on p. 123, she mentions laughing when a young adopted adult talks about concern that his mother’s sponsor child could have somehow replaced him, and this detail seems oddly out of place for two reasons. First, it abruptly draws the reader’s attention to the challenging variety of source material seamlessly integrated in the otherwise cohesive narrative. Second, it offers striking alarm to the feat that the text accomplishes so effortlessly throughout, which is the sensitive, respectful treatment of the author’s research subjects as real people, not plot points, in the author’s thorough analysis.Overall, yet another one of Kaell’s strengths is the way in which funders, sponsors, and families are treated as purposeful actors, whose theology is not so much critiqued on its own merit, but further unpacked and explained as it supports and extends the project of Christian globalism into the twenty-first century. Kaell’s ethnographic mastery comes full circle in the final three chapters, which drive home the complexity of relationality, materialism, and audit culture for everyday Americans committed to child sponsorship. The thickness of her ethnographic detail, despite the breadth of her subjects, is highly compelling, especially the second interlude, in which we grasp the challenges and nuances of an over twenty-year sponsorship relationship between Carol, a mother of modest means in Millhouse, Massachusetts, and her sponsor child, Rizal, living in the Philippines. Although World Vision discontinues its sponsorship work in Rizal’s community, a woman Carol meets at church reconnects them through a phone call nearly ten years later, and another decade later, the two send messages over Facebook, uneasily wading through their financial, emotional, and spiritual ties to one another. To Kaell’s credit, I would have loved to read several more chapters on this challenge virtual communication poses to sponsorship and globalism that arises organically in chapters 6 and 7. But I suppose that is yet another credit to this book: it theorizes Christian globalism at home with such richness that we are left wanting for more.