US Evangelicals Research Articles

Soldiers of Fortune, Soldiers of God: Evangelical Mercenaries and the Making of the Rhodesian-American Religious Lobby, 1965–1980

ABSTRACT This article tracks the emergence, evolution, and decline of the Rhodesian-American religious lobby, a transnational network of churches, magazines, lobbying groups, and other non-state actors that operated during the Rhodesian Bush War from 1965 to 1980. Voicing its concerns in religious, racial, and anticommunist terms, the lobby recruited US combatants into the Rhodesian Security Forces and mobilised US evangelicals to press political leaders to recognise Rhodesian sovereignty. By threading together the post-Vietnam mercenary diaspora with waning segregationist groups and the emerging Christian Right in the United States, the lobby significantly shaped US-Rhodesia relations and global far-right politics in the late Cold War.

Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

AbstractThis essay proposes a moral epistemological explanation for many US evangelicals’ growing unease about proselytizing. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at a church in Nashville, Tennessee, it highlights how a particular kind of epistemological certainty became a driving value of evangelical biblicism when early nineteenth‐century evangelicals attempted to apply the precepts of inductive science to textual interpretation. Members of the church I studied routinely express regret about this historical entanglement, which they blame for their denomination's dogmatic and ultimately unsuccessful fixation on persuading other people to believe the exact same things as they do. Against ‘proselytizing’ driven by ‘the desire to be right’, my interlocutors are trying to develop a practical social ethics whose explicitly biblical inspiration, they hope, will motivate others to want to become Christians. I show that as an analytic, religious suasion makes concepts like ‘proselytizing’ and ‘evangelism’ ethnographic again by sending them back to the field where our interlocutors themselves define and critique them. Doing this allows us to better grasp nuances in evangelicals’ own evolving ideologies and practices for making their religion intelligible to themselves and others.

Receptive-Productive Dynamics of US Evangelicals in Response to G. W. Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives’ Funding Programs

Faith-based organizations in the United States remain the primary shelter either for the indigent individuals seeking social help or for the government striving to reinforce its domestic policies. The aim of the present article is to investigate and assess the interrelation between religion and US politics via Evangelical faith-based organizations and government funding under G. W. Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative policy. The question remains whether being an Evangelical organization prohibits from receiving government funds. The study examines three Evangelical organizations: Union Rescue Mission, East of the River Clergy Police Community Partnership, and the Salvation Army in their response for Faith-Based Organization’s programs naming: Compassion Capital Funds, Ready4Work, and Continuum of Care. The article argues that the three organizations received government funds during Bush’s two presidential terms. Union Rescue Mission and East of the River Clergy Police Community Partnership acted positively for Ready4Work program while the Salvation Army used Compassion Capital Funds and Continuum of Care funds in serving the needs of US citizens.

The Latin American Bullring: US Evangelicals and the Reception of Anti-Protestant Violence from Cold War Colombia

In the shadow of the Cuban Revolution, American Baptist preacher Billy Graham and US President John F. Kennedy barnstormed South America through overlapping tours in 1961 and 1962. Kennedy's presidency has often been presented as an intermission in the drama of evangelical political power, but grassroots activism provides new angles for analysis at the intersection of the US and Latin America. While claiming an apolitical stance, Graham worked alongside the US State Department, planting spiritual seeds on the tilled ground of foreign policy. Graham – and Protestant leaders orbiting him – curated acts of violence, painting a picture of persecution for a watching public. This narrative employed violence to draw lines of worldwide spiritual affiliation and political obligation. US evangelicals placed themselves as custodians of America's most sacred values at home and abroad, responsible for upholding democratic values, including religious tolerance, the rule of law, and anticommunism. Graham's tactics created an entangled relationship with Kennedy, where Graham arose as a metaphorical matador, fighting for persecuted Christians. Here, American evangelicals could flex their growing political muscle, while operating as an imagined religious minority community. Narratives, discourses, and representations of violence circulated transnationally and acquired differing meanings depending on the political interests of those mobilizing them.

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

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.

Leslie Dorrough Smith, Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity

Reviewed by: Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity by Leslie Dorrough Smith Elaine Schnabel Leslie Dorrough Smith, Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) Leslie Dorrough Smith’s second book, Compromising Positions, examines the role of US Christianity in creating the conditions that allow some politicians and not others to survive a sex scandal. Smith argues that sex scandals are not about sex. Sex scandals are about the construction and embodiment of national identity, a complex theater in which racialized and gendered tropes determine the political fate of the men who wield them. In other words, Americans will condemn some politicians and excuse others for perceived sexual immorality based on the extent to which a politician can mobilize and embody a form of white masculinity associated with “American Values.” To make this argument, Smith draws on a familiar cast of characters, both an interdisciplinary gamut of theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, Bruce Lincoln, and Benedict Anderson, and political figures whose sexual relationships for a time captured the American imagination like Anthony Weiner, Roy Moore, and (of course) Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump. In tackling issues of gender and sexuality, politics, and morality, Smith’s work is a timely explication of the seeming contradictions inherent in American evangelical support of the 45th president. [End Page 145] In each chapter, Smith examines both the “winners” and “losers” of various sex scandals, using the case studies to explore the religious conditions that lead to those results. Chapters one and two focus on scandal and religion respectively, while three through five focus on sex, nation, and media. In her first chapter, Smith proposes a new model for understanding sex scandals as crises of national identity, using Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy as her case study. In chapter two, Smith shifts to the role of religion in that model, following Bruce Lincoln to argue for religion’s inherently political nature. For Smith, religious discourse is “the means by which various groups within a culture preserve their power structures and norms” (62). Supernatural or extraordinary elements lend credence to these groups seeking to legitimate these regimes of normativity. She compares and contrasts the cases of Mark Foley and Roy Moore to explicate how sex scandals can decimate some careers and leave others relatively untainted. Anita Hill and Paula Jones are featured in chapter three where Smith draws connections between evangelical marriage and sexuality literature and the ways women are characterized (“feminists” and “whores”) during these scandals. Chapters four and five fill out her argument by incorporating conceptions of nationhood and the role of the media. Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Arnold Schwarzenegger provide the empirical data for her argument that certain men are able to mobilize a kind of virile or toxic masculinity. Because of its capacity to protect US citizens, this aggressive masculinity makes some men’s promiscuity not just acceptable but natural. Others—such as John Edwards and Anthony Weiner—fail to mobilize that ideology in their favor because they apologize or admit their weaknesses. In her final chapter, Smith compares and contrasts the recent Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford hearings with the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings to explore the strength and malleability of white masculinity. Despite Blasey Ford’s portrayal of the ideal (white, rational) victim of sexual assault, the credibility of Kavanaugh’s white masculine aggression and rage made him a righteous and innocent victim of the Democrats’ sinister machinations. Compromising Positions comfortably sits in a body of work that identifies US Evangelicalism’s political role in establishing white, patriarchal heteronormativity on a national scale. For the most part, Smith argues that White Evangelicalism is simply one of the most politically powerful carriers of racialized and gendered tropes that shape US national identity. While Smith proves this with aplomb, some of her chapters evince a disconnect between the case studies about sex scandals and her preceding theoretical argument. For instance, in chapter four, Smith draws on Lauren Berlant and others who show the strong correlation between the conviction that the US is a “Christian” nation and the people who voted for Trump. Smith persuasively builds on the work of...

Immobile Global: Christian Globalism at Home in the United States

ABSTRACTDrawing on research with Christian child sponsors in the United States, this article explores the everyday techniques that work global commitments into being. It argues that global projects are compelling in how they tack back and forth between states associated with differing scales: the “immensity” of a God's‐eye view and a grounded view of human relatedness. Both are emotive and often embodied forms; however, the former lifts one outside humanness, while the latter seems to deepen connections with people far away. These modes are illustrated through the Christian use of statistical aesthetics and foodways. In the process, this article seeks to undo the persistent assumption that being global is natural to contemporary US evangelicalism. At a broader level, it contributes to a growing body of work that positions “transcendental orientations” (Keane 2015) as integral to the “world‐making” (Tsing 2005) through which people make and imagine global connections, whether they travel or not. [globalization, embodiment, humanitarianism, Christianity, United States]

“Abusers of Themselves with Mankind”: On the Constitutive Necessity of Abuse in Evangelical Sex Manuals

In this essay, I recount the recent narrative of an evangelical awakening on issues of sexual violence though the impact of Rachael Denhollander, an advocate and survivor of sexual trauma. Denhollander’s evangelical credentials authorized fellow US evangelicals to sympathize with the #MeToo movement. I then show how this script of awakening obscures a long history of abuse in relation to LGBTQ persons of faith. I demonstrate how American evangelical sex manuals make abuse both constitutive to a genuine discovery of personhood and simultaneously marginal to one’s self-identification. Paradox becomes a framework for describing the “problem” of homosexuality in evangelical circles. Finally, I reflect on what it suggests to scholars of religion that a religious community ensconces abuse in this distinctive way.

Who are American evangelical Protestants and why do they matter forUSclimate policy?

AbstractWhite evangelical Protestants are the most skeptical major religious group in the United States regarding climate change. While their position of political influence in the Republican coalition is widely recognised, the full range of effects of this position on evangelicals' climate opinions is not. To move research on evangelicals from the margins of climate change opinion research, we review and integrate the interdisciplinary literature on US evangelicals, climate change, and politics. In assessing this literature, we identify three areas in need of further research. First, there is a critical need for more research on the climate attitudes of evangelicals of color, who comprise a growing share of the evangelical tradition in the US. Second, highlighting the Christian Right's active engagement in the climate debate, we identify a need for more experimental work examining how cues from religious elites may shape evangelicals' opinions. Finally, we suggest that to better harness insights across disciplines, researchers must become more explicitly aware of how different disciplines conceptualize temporality. Attending to temporal scale suggests that a new approach is needed to test how dominion beliefs, which are widely thought to be an important theological driver of climate skepticism, operate. We also suggest that two factors that appear to play a weak or limited role in driving climate skepticism over the short term (anti‐science attitudes and evangelical religiosity) may in fact play a significant role in driving skepticism over the medium term.This article is categorized under:Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate ChangeTrans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

Lifeboat Theology: White Evangelicalism, Apocalyptic Chronotopes, and Environmental Politics

ABSTRACT In this paper, I use insights from extensive ethnographic research with evangelicals in Colorado Springs, Colorado to investigate how competing ethical understandings of time and the future underpin conceptions of and responses to ecological collapse. It argues that a dominant apocalyptic chronotope in US evangelicalism makes the future earth redundant, an understanding that Christian Right leaders have linked to decreased interest in environmental issues. This dominant evangelical view looks to the future with anticipation when a promised and ever-close apocalypse and rapture will signal the end of the earth. The temporal structure of climate change clashes with this narrative about time and the future of the planet. In contrast, a new theological understanding is emergent among younger evangelicals, where Christ’s return is understood as involving a remaking of the earth, and not an ejection from it. This contrasting view makes the care of the planet a crucial Christian priority.

US evangelicals: from prophecy to policy

Many evangelicals draw on Biblical prophecies about the apocalypse in order to shape US policies. Multilateral solutions to global problems need to recognize and constructively include such worldviews, argue Cora Alder and Emanuel Schaublin in this CSS Policy Perspective.

Crossing the buffer: ontological anxiety among US evangelicals and an anthropological theory of mind

AbstractScholars describe the dominant model of mind in the United States as secular: bounded, private, supernaturally inert, and the locus for self and identity. I argue that US charismatic evangelicals live with the secular sense of a seemingly immutable boundary between the immaterial mind‐self and the material world – what Charles Taylor might call ‘boundedness’ – but at the same time, their commitment to supernatural connection means they imagine the mind‐world boundary as porous under certain circumstances: a brittle, fragile buffer between the natural and the supernatural. To allow this porosity, charismatics develop strategies for crossing the buffer, which include spoken prayer, powerful emotions, playful modes of pretend, and bodily rupture or ‘breaking in’. These strategies provide evidence that the supernatural is real. Yet practitioners remain anxious about the relationship between these supernatural experiences and the scepticism around them. This ‘ontological anxiety’ becomes visible in three ways. First, charismatics cultivate intense bodily sensations that demonstrate the reality of God. Second, they describe their experience with a ‘common‐sense realism’. Finally, charismatics are disturbed by the incoherence between their evangelical and secular impulses around the possibility of mental action.

Evangelical Populist Internationalism and the Politics of Persecution

This article explores the rise of the US movement for persecuted Christians as a form of evangelical internationalism. This internationalism is built on a moral geography that highlights the ties between US evangelicals and Christians in other parts of the world, challenging the isolationist self-regard that American evangelicals are often accused of. This article argues, however, that some important components of the persecuted Christians movement mobilize a common populist trope of an in-group facing attack from outside. Rather than organizing around religious freedom broadly, they construct a narrative of American Christians as part of a victimized and marginalized group, based on their ties with a global Christian community defined as persecuted. Rather than being part of a binary of populism versus internationalism, key parts of the persecuted Christians movement use internationalism to support Christian populism.

American Evangelicals, the Changing Global Religious Environment, and Foreign Policy Activism

Since the end of the Cold War, US evangelicals have become increasingly globalized in their outlook, building from a recognition that evangelicalism, both nationally and internationally, is no longer centered on white Americans. As a result, the US evangelical community of the last 30 years has become more transnational in its outlook, and active on a variety of foreign policy issues. US evangelical activism on two issues serves to exemplify these changes: first is the persecuted Christians movement, particularly in relation to the civil war in Sudan in the early 2000s, and second is the debate over immigration after 2016.

Religion and Brexit: populism and the Church of England

ABSTRACTDrawing on our own recent surveys on beliefs and values in Great Britain (Woodhead) and evangelical Christians in the UK (Smith) this article explores the links between religion, views and votes on leaving or remaining in the EU in the UK’s 2016 referendum. Poll data gathered shortly after the 2016 referendum (n = 3,243) allows us to test associations between religious identity and behaviour and attitudes to voting Leave, while controlling for other demographic variables. The main finding is that identifying as Church of England (Anglican) is an important independent predictor of voting Leave even when other relevant factors like age and region are corrected for. By contrast, self-defined English evangelicals (from an opportunity sample of 1,198, collected and analysed by Smith) appear to be more pro-EU and generally internationalist in outlook. Previous surveys by Woodhead on religion and values in the UK provide some explanation for these findings, and for the striking difference of UK and US evangelicals, 81% of whom supported Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. The article ends with reflections on whether the term ‘populist’ can be usefully applied to the evangelical pro-Trump vote in the US or the Church of England pro-Brexit vote in the UK.

The World Congress on Evangelism 1966 in Berlin: US Evangelicalism, Cultural Dominance, and Global Challenges

This article uses the World Congress on Evangelism held in Berlin in 1966 to explore the cultural dimensions of US leadership in the world of global evangelism post-World War II. It shows how a close alliance with technology and business, as well as traditional anticommunism and belief in Western civilization, spurred US evangelicals to assume global leadership. A closer examination of the cultural and spiritual atmosphere of the congress reveals, however, that beneath the apparent American leadership tensions emerged around race and social issues, expressed forcefully by new theological and political voices from the developing world. These tensions were negotiated through common practices and behaviours, such as during prayer sessions, dinner conversations, and discussions groups, and allowed a genuine transnational evangelical community to arise.

Special Issue: Exploring the Global History of American Evangelicalism Introduction

This introduction embeds theExploring the Global History of American Evangelicalismspecial issue into current historiographical debates in the field of US evangelicalism and globalization. It lays out the methodological framework and thematic scope of the special issue.

Can Pilgrimage Fail? Intent, Efficacy, and Evangelical Trips to the Holy Land

Many scholars have debated the potential results of pilgrimage, but few have tracked how pre-trip goals actually relate to post-trip outcomes. Based on research with US evangelicals, this article argues that, despite being confronted with the possibility of disrupted meaning, nearly every pilgrim comes to see the trip as a success. To understand why, I draw on studies that frame Christian rituals as processes that are partial and in flux. Firstly, I explore how gendered notions of relationality affect perceptions of efficacy and lead to multiple goal-setting. Secondly, I show how the journey is couched within broader epistemologies that define a Christian life as incremental improvements, where one ‘grows’ with God. Thus the meaning making associated with pilgrimage is never fully complete, but is compelled into a future where further interpretations and presumed successes are inchoate. Ultimately, the belief in future meaning is as important—perhaps more so—than immediate ritual success.

Emerging treason? Politics and identity in the Emerging Church Movement

The Emerging Church is one of the more interesting new movements in the religious landscape of the United States today. The Emerging Church has come out of US Evangelicalism, which has found itself in crisis, with a diminishing number of young people remaining in the church and a general popular impression of being intolerant, judgmental, and right-wing. Many in the Emerging Church are attempting to construct a vision of Christianity that addresses these problems. However, the Emerging Church is not a monolith; it includes a variety of perspectives and positions. What I will argue in this article is that there is, among several different perspectives within the movement, a critique of the US political and economic system that provides an interesting and new way of thinking about the relationship between Christianity, politics, economics, and identity that may serve to create a challenge to the hegemonic system of the United States. For the purposes of this article I use three examples to illustrate my point: Shane Claibourne’s “New Monasticism”/”Red Letter Christians” movement; Brian McLaren’s recent work, Why did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross The Road; and Peter Rollins as a self-proclaimed inheritor of the radical tradition. I will show that the Emerging Church thinkers, by challenging the theological constructions of US Evangelicalism, are likewise providing fodder, to varying degrees, for a critique of the US political and economic system. Whether this will coalesce into a real significant challenge or will ultimately be reabsorbed by the status quo and/or marginalized remains to be seen.

US Evangelicals and the Politics of Slave Redemption as Religious Freedom in Sudan

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the civil war in Sudan and the fate of Christians there became the abiding international preoccupation of US evangelicals. Framing the complex issues in Sudan as straightforward matters of religious and racial oppression, the Americans became activists, determined to change US policy toward Sudan. One of the signature activities of the Sudan movement was the practice of “slave redemption,” in which activists purchased people who had been abducted by northern militias, bringing them back to their villages in southern Sudan. Overall, the conflict in Sudan was one aspect of a fundamental transformation, in which US evangelicals wove themselves into a global, self-consciously decolonizing church, built in part on a narrative of its own suffering.