Melani McAlister. The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals.

Abstract

The role of American missionaries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been widely studied, but far less attention has been given to the modern American “evangelical” missionary movements abroad since the 1950s. As Melani McAlister shows in The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals, the context is very different. Gone was the hegemony of the European empires, leaving missionaries needing to negotiate their way with anticolonial regimes and independence movements; missionaries also had to deal with the Cold War machinations of both the United States and its Communist adversaries. Gone was the preeminence of the mainline Protestant churches of earlier decades, with 66.5 percent of funding and 85 percent of personnel coming from evangelical sources by 1974; also passing away was the numerical dominance of “white” peoples within global missions, with 70 percent of evangelicals based outside Europe or North America by 2010.