In Race for Revival, Helen J. Kim proposes to offer a “transpacific lens to interpret US evangelical history, politics, and race” (4). She further explains that the book “takes a snapshot of evangelical America and South Korean Christianity from 1950 to 1980, with a transpacific Cold War lens” (8). At its core, the book seeks to address two interrelated questions suggested by its title: How did Cold War South Korea shape – or help to shape – the American evangelical Empire, and how did South Korean evangelicals respond to that process?
Kim answers these questions by advancing three central claims (166). First, she argues that the Korean War, as the first “hot” war of the Cold War, linked a new generation of white fundamentalists – especially those associated with parachurch organizations, such as World Vision, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), and Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) – with South Korean Protestants, forging networks that helped “reinvent” white fundamentalism into mainstream evangelicalism. Second, she contends that South Koreans were incorporated into these parachurch networks through a Cold War Orientalist logic that projected the United States as racially egalitarian even while reinforcing white supremacy. Third, she maintains that South Korean evangelicals themselves used these parachurches to reimagine their place in the global Cold War order, coming to believe that their contributions positioned them as potential leaders of a new Christian empire.
The claim that transpacific networks helped facilitate the transition from fundamentalism to evangelicalism is plausible – assuming this is what Kim intends by “reinvent.” Even so, all three claims raise significant problems. The first rests on a thin and idiosyncratic characterization of evangelicalism that largely ignores established scholarship, while the second and third rely heavily on overinterpretation.
Kim situates her narrative in what she describes as a Manichaean Cold War culture in which anticommunism served as a primary marker of moral legitimacy. Within this context, a segment of formerly discredited white fundamentalists sought accommodation with the American mainstream. Parachurch organizations – most notably World Vision, the BGEA, and the CCC – spearheaded this effort. By advocating anticommunism and promoting personal conversion as an alternative to social revolution, these organizations gained acceptance among large segments of conservative America.
In Kim’s account, all three parachurches underwent formative experiences in South Korea. World Vision was founded there during the Korean War (1950–1953). The BGEA reached what Kim terms a “revivalist apex” when Billy Graham preached to an estimated 1.1 million people at a Seoul crusade in 1973 (2). Campus Crusade held its largest-ever gathering at Explo ’74 in Seoul, where over 323,000 people reportedly assembled for evangelistic training – far surpassing attendance at Explo ’72 in Dallas.
Kim contends that these organizations could not have achieved their prominence without these Korean experiences: without transpacific networking, global visibility, and the inspiration that propelled many white evangelicals into overseas missions. Moreover, she insists that none of this would have been possible without key Korean figures and participants, including Kyung Chik Han and members of the World Vision Korean Orphan Choir, Billy (Janghwan) Kim as Graham’s interpreter in 1973, and Joon Gun Kim, who persuaded Bill Bright to stage Explo ’74 in Seoul. Yet Kim ultimately argues that these contributions were neither adequately recognized nor justly rewarded. Instead, she claims, evangelical America exploited Koreans as peripheral laborers in an expanding empire: “As ‘multinational corporations,’ [the parachurches] mimicked the capitalist structure in which the metropole extracts resources from the periphery, without giving credit where credit is due” (18).
This passage illustrates the tendency toward overinterpretation that mars the book. While Kim is right to highlight Han’s importance in World Vision’s early history, her claim that he “founded” the organization contradicts her own evidence, which at most supports his role as a cofounder alongside Bob Pierce. Her observation that Korean contributions have been marginalized in official CCC narratives is persuasive, but her insinuation that CCC would have remained a parochial American enterprise without Explo ’74 and Korean participation is insufficiently supported. Likewise, her claim that the South Korean “masses” effectively “made” the BGEA overlooks the organization’s substantial prominence before 1973. If the evidence for systematic injustice toward Korean evangelicals is thin, then the further claim that white evangelicals exploited them – by “extracting resources” – remains questionable.
A deeper problem lies in Kim’s conceptualization of evangelicalism itself. Networking plays a prominent role throughout the book, and while its importance for the internationalization of evangelicalism is undeniable, Kim effectively collapses evangelicalism into networking. After briefly rehearsing familiar debates over definition – including a noncommittal discussion of the Bebbington quadrilateral – she concludes that “evangelicalism is a movement on the move, a shape-shifting network based in transnational one-on-one relationships that have religious, racial, and political consequences” (8). This definition is so expansive that it could plausibly encompass other transpacific religious movements of the period, including Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Given that most mid-twentieth-century fundamentalists and evangelicals would have rejected such a classification, Kim owes readers a more robust justification for her redefinition. None is provided. Also notably absent is any engagement with George M. Marsden’s account of the transition from fundamentalism to evangelicalism, especially as articulated in his groundbreaking work Fundamentalism and American Culture, which is not even mentioned.
Kim’s treatment of South Korean evangelicals’ alleged aspiration to “become the next leaders of Christian empire” (166) similarly reflects interpretive inflation. She magnifies Korean evangelicals’ reluctance to play second fiddle to Americans within global evangelization efforts into an incipient imperial ambition, a move that imputes motives exceeding what the evidence can sustain.
Presented as a work of historical interpretation, Race for Revival is marked by a pronounced hermeneutics of suspicion, with ideological explanations at times displacing careful attention to how historical actors understood their own commitments and practices. It is not for the faint of heart. Yet, because otherwise comparable studies – such as Melani McAlister’s The Kingdom of God Has No Borders – do not even mention entities such as Bob Pierce or Explo ’74, let alone Kyung Chik Han or Joon Gun Kim, specialists in global evangelical history may still find Kim’s book a provocative yet, in places, worthwhile contribution.
