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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States by Hillary Kaell Allison Kach Hillary Kaell, Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021) US Christians see themselves as global citizens intrinsically engaged in God’s worldwide plan. In Christian Globalism at Home, Hillary Kaell explores exactly how such Christians imagine and experience themselves, others, and the world without travelling beyond their geographic borders. Through the lens of child sponsorship and the mechanisms that support, extend, and perpetuate its predominance in US Christian practice and meaning-making, Kaell disentangles US Christianity from the globalism it is assumed to embody. With a special focus on the “immobile global,” Kaell weaves together history, experience, practice, and belief coalescing in the dynamic relationships and connections created, facilitated, and maintained by child sponsorship from the West to the rest. Kaell’s multifaceted analysis combines archival work, participant observation, and surveys with her keen ability to integrate qualitative and quantitative research findings. The result reads like a smooth conversation between friends that simultaneously unearths complex relational, identity, and power dynamics. Kaell’s interdisciplinary approach traces the long-term development of child sponsorship’s fundraising method over a two-hundred-year period. Her treatment reveals the substructure of sponsorship which “provides an archive [End Page 130] of the development of a particular form of universalism, shaped by modern orientations and aspirations, and expressed through U.S. Christian conceptions of body, self, and soul” (229). The study’s broad goal is to track the development of one type of Christian globalism while highlighting the need to extend and expand studies of similar “world making” to other regions and religious groups. With creative complexity, Kaell constructs her study of child sponsorship as it relates to relevant history, identifiable themes, and contemporary trends and offers insightful cues for a variety of academic disciplines and everyday readers interested in globalization and modern US culture, the history of US and global humanitarianism, and World Christianity. Christian Globalism at Home is grounded in a central paradigm of the immense and the particular, a concept the author draws from Timothy Morton’s ecotheory on hyperobjects. Kaell masterfully tailors Morton’s idea of immensity to the story of child sponsorship, demonstrating that the immensity of the real problem of starving, orphaned children across the world animates US Christian global engagement through particular action. Child sponsorship is sustained and promoted by the overwhelming reality of the problem (the immense) that is connected to conceptions of God, the world, and US Christian identity and moral responsibility (the particular) in global and local contexts (160). The book follows a loose chronological history of child sponsorship, beginning with the early nineteenth-century advent of US Christian mission concern for foreign children through the work of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Mission (ABCFM). From this starting point, Kaell weaves one hundred years of globalizing US Christian history together with a focus on key themes and developments of child sponsorship. She gives special focus to Christian organizations, four Protestant and one Roman Catholic, that grew around the work and fundraising model of child sponsorship—Save the Children, China’s Children’s Fund, World Vision, Compassion, and Unbound. Chapters one and two explore how emerging nineteenth-century practices of systematic giving and caring for children coalesced with US evangelical ideas of love to fuel Christian globalization. Chapter three traces the use of visual media in the late nineteenth century through World War I to facilitate visceral reactions and ultimately to mobilize sponsorship in US audiences. Chapter four focuses on the development of Protestant promises of “heart conversion,” international Christian relationships, and racial unity through sponsorship in the 1950s and1960s. Chapters five and six explore how sponsorship’s global relationships, moral interpretations of success and the future, and economic practices and inequalities trouble the already complex global connections formed and sustained by sponsorship practices. Chapter seven examines globalization theory as it relates to the space-time construction of sponsorship. [End Page 131] Kaell’s corrective to the historical record is a significant reminder for readers and scholars alike; child sponsorship, like other socio-religious phenomena akin to it, is...