In this sophisticated, well-documented and wide-ranging book, James D. Strasburg examines twentieth-century efforts by American Protestants at reforming European Churches in a broader endeavour to save ‘the soul of Europe’ (p. 3) alike from Communism, Fascism, Catholicism and secularism. The focus throughout is on Germany, which, the author claims, was regarded as the pivotal ‘spiritual battleground’ (p. 17) by all the different Protestant factions involved in this effort to ‘remake the continent in the American image’ (p. 14) and adhere it to their own informal American ‘spiritual empire’ (p. 18). Somewhat misleadingly titled, the book does not actually cover only the Cold War period, but begins at the turn of the twentieth century and then slowly winds its way up to the Marshall Plan and its spiritual complements. These are covered only in the last several chapters.

The author weaves expertly back and forth between US and German contexts, Evangelical and mainline Protestant discussions and US government policy. The analysis discloses the author's deep familiarity with the different competing public theologies identified – American Christian nationalism in two very different forms, one fundamentalist/Evangelical and the other ecumenist, plus an emerging ‘Christian globalism’ (p. 20) that is here traced to post-1945 ‘Third Way’ theologians in West Germany. Building on recent work, inter alia by David Hollinger and elaborating on this work, Strasburg maintains that while Americans went to Europe seeking to reform European Churches, in the end it was they (or at least some of them) who ended up being transformed through the transatlantic encounter. More controversially, Strasburg seems to claim that it was only in Europe that the two rival communities of American Protestants first became fully aware of the deep cleavage that persists to this day in their public theologies, their sense of Americanness and their visions of America's and the Churches’ proper global mission.

Challenging traditional narrations of Christian nationalism, Strasburg argues compellingly that US ecumenists no less than Evangelicals tried to export a version of Christian Americanism to Western Europe. In one version, this nationalism was disguised under the rubric of ‘Wilsonian’ multilateralism and the global Social Gospel, and in the other it operated rather more openly as the ‘gospel’ of individual liberty, free enterprise, the limited state and muscular anticommunism. In truth, both faith-inflected nationalisms envisioned a new ‘Christian world order’ (p. 11) under US leadership and US principles. Challenges to both by German theologians and church leaders are given much needed attention throughout the book and expertly contextualised both in the Nazi era and after 1945. This includes illuminating discussions of the German pushback against the ecumenists’ brazen attempt at undermining the Lutheran Two Kingdoms doctrine as somehow un-Christian and conducive of Fascism and at instituting in its place a US-style lay-led Social Gospel. Reconstruction and relief funds (or their denial) were used as incentives.

Strasburg is on particularly strong ground when discussing American ecumenists, whose evolving vision and activities are here examined in a thoroughly documented case study that tracks the European activities of the minor celebrity Stewart W. Herman Jr, pastor at the American Church in Berlin in the 1930s and a World Council of Churches operative after 1945 who also moonlighted as an American spy. In this context, the author provides substantial new evidence on the interconnectedness of the ecumenical movement and the US state during the Cold War. Bracingly, it is even suggested that in some ways the World Council of Churches itself should be regarded as a tool of the US intelligence services in the early Cold War, given that its general-secretary Willem Visser t'Hooft too worked as an informant for these services.

At the same time, the author makes a persuasive case for the gradual weakening of such Church-State alliances – and for the centrality of German theological input in the emergence of a new ‘globalist ethic’ (p. 243) and agenda in this part of the transatlantic Church. Strasburg identifies German rearmament under Konrad Adenauer and the creation of NATO in 1949 as the turning-point in the growing alienation of a sizable section of the ecumenists from all forms of Christian nationalism, including from the consensus regarding the need to contain Soviet Communism. It was at this point that the United States became, to them, a cause of conflict and instability in the world rather than their solvent, and with that conclusion they began to ‘track out of orbit of the new mainstream commitments of Americans’ (p. 230).

Evangelicals and fundamentalists, on the other hand, appear on these pages somewhat as afterthoughts, and their activities are thinly documented (almost never from archival sources). Repeatedly, Strasburg makes the serious mistake of equating mainstream fundamentalists such as Carl McIntire with the far-rightists Gerald Winrod and Gerald L. K. Smith, and blithely declares them as co-equal representatives of a fundamentalist form of Christian nationalism. The author's tendency, clad in currently fashionable sloganeering, to see one or another form of racism, white supremacy and ‘exclusion’ under every rock and in every crevice (even, it is repeatedly pointed out, among ecumenists) also gets eventually quite tiresome.

Nevertheless, this book does constitute a formidable and powerfully argued addition to scholarship on American Protestantism's encounters with European Churches and, in particular, its long struggle to break free from ‘the creeds of nation, race, and empire’ (p. 239). At least in this telling, these constitute ‘Protestant Christianity's ideological captivity’ that has ‘corrupted the core tenets of the Christian faith’ and ‘clearly distorted the Christian faith’ (p. 239). Here it is the German ‘Christian globalists’ Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth who chart the way towards a ‘true’ Christianity freed from such captivity that engages in ‘mediating and reconciling’ (p. 239) instead, and on the other side of the Atlantic only a few brave souls, mostly ecumenists, have the courage to follow.