“When I go to preach the Gospel,” declared Billy Graham at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, “I go as an ambassador of the kingdom of God—not America” (90). Billy Graham's claim was misleading; he was indeed a diplomat of sorts. He addressed audiences from Brazzaville to Moscow and consorted with foreign leaders, notably Israelis, whose 1967 territorial gains most American evangelicals were happy to endorse.  At the same time, he deployed donations to fund schools, hospitals, and other institutions that projected American soft power. Men like Graham, along with legions of American evangelical missionaries, philanthropists, aid workers, and preachers, helped to make a world where about seventy percent of evangelicals lived outside the United States and Europe by 2010.

In this ambitious and wide-ranging study, which draws on nearly a dozen archives and on periodicals, interviews, and fieldwork, Melani McAlister traces the global entanglements of American evangelicals from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first. Because evangelicals, who accounted for about a third of all Americans by 2015, “marched out across the globe and became enmeshed in global politics,” she contends that “the history of American evangelicalism cannot be fully understood through a domestic lens . . . . ” (3). She also shows how American evangelical engagements in Africa and the Middle East reflected the contentious political landscape of the United States on issues like immigration, wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and race.

McAlister argues that the bedrock principles of Christian evangelicalism—loving the Bible, contemplating Christ's death on the cross, believing in personal salvation, and sharing the gospel—did not suffice to bridge the chasm of race in America or convince many evangelicals who identified as white to confront racial supremacy and inequality. The result was a persistent dissatisfaction and ambivalence among many African-Americans, who shared core evangelical values but fit uneasily into the movement. Black evangelicals from Africa had a somewhat easier time finding room at international evangelical conferences, although when they came to the United States, they sometimes collided with racism, too. Consider Sam Oni, a Ghanaian exchange student in Macon, Georgia, who tried in 1966 to attend a “white” evangelical church where two deacons were Ku Klux Klan members but where the preacher was a “racial liberal” (17). As Oni climbed the steps to enter, churchgoers hauled him into a waiting police car, thereby ending his bid to desegregate.

Racism in the United States did not stop white American evangelicals from romanticizing Africa or heading there on missions. McAlister explains this tendency in terms of “enchanted internationalism,” an ideology that “depended on an expectation that Christians abroad [in the global South] had a spiritual wealth that was lacking in the United States . . . ” (211). McAlister sees enchanted internationalism at work, for example, in short-term missions that evangelical congregations sent to places like Sudan. There, American evangelicals functioned as what she understatedly calls “problematic actors” (192), who, amidst the Sudanese civil war in the 1990s, ransomed captives in ways that may have stimulated the revival of slave raiding by making it financially lucrative for captors.

The book contains many case studies. McAlister examines, for instance, the post-World War II anti-communist crusades, when evangelicals collaborated with prominent public figures like Ronald Reagan and John Wayne; disputes about apartheid in South Africa; and the efforts of some evangelicals to rally American support for the post-2001 “War on Terror” and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq by stoking anti-Muslim sentiment. “Internationally . . . ,” she observes, overt Islamophobia ” . . . was an unworkable, fundamentally destabilizing posture” (215) for the administration of George W. Bush, which could not operate in the Middle East by antagonizing all of its Muslims.

She considers, too, short-term missions that influenced the formation of the Peace Corps in the early 1960s and that led to what are now “Global Urban Treks” and other ventures for students. The last phenomenon combines NGO-style-work with tourism and enables undergraduates to go abroad for a few weeks to do things like entertaining refugee children in Cairo church camps or painting walls in Oaxaca. These treks reflect what McAlister calls “consumer-driven models” of evangelism (203), though they also sound like résumé-padding for twenty-year-olds.

One of the most compelling chapters considers how certain American evangelical activists ensured that a hefty share of U.S. government funding for HIV prevention in Africa went to promoting abstinence and not safe sex. In 2009, some of these activists had the grace to cringe during interviews when pressed about the Ugandan government's Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which prescribed seven-year prison terms for homosexual acts and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” The moral of this story, she hazards, is that American evangelicals abroad could not dictate rules for “American-style respectable conservatism” (267) of the kind that might preach against homosexuality without killing people for it.

The book is long, and its font is small; even at half this length, it would still feel substantial, because its stories are so thought-provoking. Assigning chapters would work beautifully to stimulate classroom debate about the political engagements of American evangelicals abroad, and more generally about Americans’ responsibility for making the United States and the world what it is.

McAlister ends with an epilogue about the U.S. presidential election of 2016, when eighty-one percent of “white self-identified evangelicals” voted for Trump (287). What does it mean, she muses, that many of the same evangelicals who claim to hold universal Christian values based on love helped to install a man known for repeated hostile, even threatening remarks about Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants broadly? How can or should evangelicals of the Global South relate to evangelicals in Trump's America? “The kingdom of God may have no borders,” she concludes, “but American evangelicals have yet to craft a politics cut to the measure of the world” (290).

McAlister writes with warmth about evangelicals who invited her on visits to South Sudanese churches, and who openly discussed their hopes and concerns about improving people's spiritual and material lives. And yet, the history of American evangelicals abroad that she presents here is deeply troubling. She makes readers see, even feel, the rub of evangelical ideals against practices—of lofty goals against real-life consequences—and these tensions make her book sizzle.