James D. Strasburg. God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe.

Abstract

The kingdom of God has no borders, reminded us of the title of Melani McAlister’s groundbreaking book on the global history of US Evangelicals. And indeed, James D. Strasburg beautifully shows in his monograph God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe how American evangelical, fundamentalist, and mainline Protestants lived that vision in thoughts, words, and deeds in their encounters with Germany during the first half of the twentieth century and the early decades of the Cold War. In eight compelling chapters and an epilogue, he introduces his readers to the ways American Protestants viewed their home country and defined its role in the world. Deftly and rigorously he traces how “Christian Nationalism” and “Christian Globalism” (5) developed as two competing ideals guiding American missionary engagement in Europe; how these visions tended “to both connect and to divide American and German Protestants” (6); and how religious, global, and political considerations sometimes aligned but more often competed and collided. Strasburg’s religious actors are missionaries, evangelists, church leaders, and theologians—some are well known, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Billy Graham, others such as Steward Winfried Herman and Frank Buchman less so. The transnational world Strasburg introduces his readers to takes shape through theological exchanges between church leaders, the work of key organizations, such as the World Council of Churches and Youth for Christ, and highly individual everyday transnational initiatives and encounters. The latter in particular adds much in terms of breadth, depth, but also liveliness to Strasburg’s narrative: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s encounter with African American Christianity in New York in 1930 left a significant mark on the way the German theologian thought about nationalism and racism in his home country and in his home church; American Protestant churches held vigils after Martin Niemöller’s arrest in Nazi Germany; after the war, they would donate for the erection of wooden churches dotting the German inner border as symbols of Christianity as well as democracy; and German church leaders such as the Catholic bishop Konrad von Preysing and his Protestant counterpart Otto Dibelius traveled the United States in the late 1940s to vouch their very own commitment to the creation of the Christian West. Strasburg’s transnational encounters did not just sharpen the global and national visions of American Protestants; they also had a profound influence on the German religious scene.