God’s Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism, by David P. King

Abstract

With its multibillion-dollar budget funding scores of projects in over one hundred nations since its 1950 founding, World Vision’s history is vast and sprawling. As David King puts it, “the organization is simply too big and diverse to tell a single story.” In fact, “To paint a full picture of the organization, scholars would need to produce a number of ethnographically informed case studies” spanning many nations. Each “would convey a small piece of the truth about World Vision” (246). King’s book offers a substantial slice of World Vision’s institutional history that centers on its U.S. office. Drawing from years of meticulous research, God’s Internationalists paints a well-crafted and sophisticated portrait of key aspects of World Vision’s development across nearly seven decades.Covering a range of topics reflecting divergent aspects of World Vision’s identity (for example, humanitarianism, evangelism, international nongovernmental organizations, and Christianity’s twentieth-century spread), God’s Internationalists is likely to be useful to a wide readership. King situates his book within a burgeoning body of scholarship that studies American evangelicalism’s history through transnational lenses. It is here that King makes his greatest contribution: by demonstrating how much can be gained through using a transnational evangelical institution as an analytical focus, King makes a significant historiographic innovation in the study of American evangelicalism.On one level, King does so by documenting how U.S.-based evangelicals within World Vision interacted with fellow American evangelicals, missionaries, Christians outside the United States, donors, aid recipients, humanitarian crises, development projects, other humanitarian agencies, several World Vision national offices, World Vision personnel with increasingly diverse religious identities, and more. A constant barrage of such transnational encounters pushed the evangelical commitments of World Vision personnel in new directions, resulting in steady streams of internal conversations and negotiations regarding what it meant for World Vision to be an evangelical institution. At the same time, God’s Internationalists examines how discourses and norms from other international humanitarian organizations also navigating global geopolitics shaped World Vision’s identity. Ever nuanced, it even shows how World Vision’s “internationalization” sometimes kept it a step out of measure “from the identity politics, inerrancy debates, and culture wars that defined American evangelicals” (185).On another level, King tracks multiple ways in which World Vision, changed by transnational interactions, influenced global outlooks, values, and identities within American evangelicalism more broadly. This sometimes entailed placing alarming humanitarian needs abroad in front of American evangelicals, imploring their help, or educating evangelicals on humanitarian crises such as the AIDS epidemic (237–43). World Vision sometimes attempted to be a bridge between American evangelicals and Christians elsewhere in the world. For example, “World Vision positioned itself as the most logical common link within a maturing global evangelicalism. As global evangelicals spoke back to the West, World Vision felt they could come alongside as translators to a broad base of American Christians” (146). Even as transnational encounters led World Vision to reassess its own evangelical identity, World Vision often attempted to turn the gaze of American evangelicals beyond U.S. borders, influencing their understanding of—and place in—the world.Of course, any undertaking of this magnitude is bound to have at least some gaps. For instance, there is little sustained engagement with gender or race. As another example, while King examines two of World Vision’s founding myths (35–37, 70), he inadvertently reinforces a third, omitting a transnational dimension of World Vision’s creation by covering Bob Pierce’s founding role in World Vision while excluding Kyung-Chik Han’s. Drawing on Korean perspectives, subsequent scholarship has written in Han’s role.1 This illustrates a limitation of focusing primarily on one side of transnational encounters, a methodological consideration that could just as easily be posed to other volumes that seek fresh insights into U.S.-based Christianities by analyzing them through transnational frameworks.Yet, by demonstrating how World Vision’s U.S. office was shaped by, struggled against, and changed broader currents in American evangelicalism, the culture of international humanitarian NGOs, and, to an extent, even Christianities across the globe, King’s substantive approach situates what could have been a narrow institutional history within a confluence of larger historical streams that offers new purchase on each. Well-written and comprehensive, God’s Internationalists promises to reward anyone seeking more nuanced historical understandings of international relief and development, religious humanitarian organizations, and especially evangelicalism.