For decades, American religious history predominantly amounted to American national history. Its national identity is deeply ingrained in religious traditions and it has a lively religious heritage. Titles of influential and important recent books reveal something about the centrality of religion to nation building: America's God, America's Pastor, and American Jesus.Footnote 1 These titles suggest a unique, if not exceptional, development of the American religious scene. Embedded into a strongly religiously infused national narrative existing in the US, these works seemed to speak to America's religious exceptionalism.
But at the same time, as the term “transnational” has become a catchword from conference titles to grant applications, the field of US religious history has also undergone significant transformations. We witness an increase in transnational religious studies, covering topics from the international evangelical humanitarian group World Vision and relief work to American missionaries abroad. Leading scholars in the field of religious studies and American studies such as Melani McAlister and Heather Curtis have turned to the exploration of the interplay between US evangelicalism, global humanitarianism, and foreign aid. Simultaneously, religion has forcefully entered historiographical debates about American foreign relations and diplomacy. A change of perspective has also been enhanced by a group of European-based scholars who recently entered the discussions about the transnationalization of American religious history, making use of their position outside the chosen nation.
What is striking. though, is that transnational US religious history is undergoing its global turn by the nearly complete exclusion of the European component. Scholars in the field of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious history, such as Richard Carwardine and David Hempton, have produced groundbreaking work on the flows between European and American theology and religiosity.Footnote 2 But connections between European and American Christians do not seem to play a significant role in the transnationalization of twentieth-century US religious history, which primarily looks out at Asia and Africa at the moment.Footnote 3 The reason, therefore, is obvious: American Christians who attend megachurch services in Houston, Texas have much more in common with their evangelical brethren in Singapore than they do with German or Norwegian Lutherans praying in the empty pews of churches in Oslo or Berlin.
Religious studies scholars have for a long time pointed out that America is not exceptional regarding its religious vibrancy, which it shares with most of the world's nations. The exceptional case regarding the apparently inevitable decline of religion in modern times is Europe. This experience has formed a defining narrative captured in book titles such as Religious America, Secular Europe.Footnote 4 Accordingly, in the following pages, I would like to explore the possibilities of reintegrating Europe into the framework of a transnational US religious history. I do not do this out of a nostalgic yearning for traditional transatlantic history. Moreover, I believe that revisiting the European case allows us to formulate research questions that open new perspectives for the transnationalization of the field more generally, and to discuss European influences on US evangelicalism post-1945 particularly.
At first sight, the religious landscapes of Europe and the United States could not have developed more differently after World War II. While Americans enjoyed a Cold War religious revival in the 1950s (with an increase in church growth and civil religious expression in public life), witnessed the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and 1980s, and saw the rise of televangelists and megachurches in recent decades, European religious life went nearly dormant. Churches in Germany and Great Britain were emptying rapidly by the early 1960s, religious broadcasting remained restrained as much by national laws as by viewer habits, and religious tropes featured less and less prominently in the political discourse. While American religious life was marked by a symbiotic and dynamic relationship with modern, capitalist, and now neoliberal ideas, in Europe secularization theories turned into self-fulfilling prophecies.
But is the symbiosis between modernity and religiosity that contradicted Max Weber's prediction that religion would become extinct in modern times an exceptional American privilege? What insights do we gain when we highlight the compatibility of religion and modernity or more precisely the fruitful interplay between religion, politics, and consumerism on the European scene? Here I would like to revisit two sets of recent works on US religious history: those on the spiritual Cold War and those on evangelical consumerism, to explore the possibilities and limitations of a transatlantic and transnational approach in those two fields.
Recent works by Jason Stevens, Jonathan Herzog, and Kevin Kruse have convincingly shown that the US experienced a religious Cold War revival, but also how this revival was stirred and shaped.Footnote 5 Thousands of suburbanites flocked to their churches every Sunday, large revival meetings spread across the country, and President Eisenhower addressed religious faith with more force than most Presidents before him. By Congressional act, the phrase “In God we trust” was added to the dollar bill and a national day of prayer was installed. The term “One Nation under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance and European students of American religion today usually roll their eyes at this moment and mutter something like: “Only in America.”
The US Cold War revival, however, had significant transnational dimensions. America did not just fight a spiritual Cold War against Communism at home, but also abroad. The evangelical youth organization Youth for Christ traveled throughout Europe and Asia immediately after the end of World War II, preaching the American Gospel of faith, freedom, and democracy. Billy Graham, who would soon rise as America's most famous revival preacher, ventured to Britain with Youth for Christ and would return for his own solo crusades to London and Berlin in 1954. The fact that America's Cold War religiosity reached abroad is surely less impressive than the fact that it fell on fertile ground in Europe in the 1950s. The belief in a kind of linear secularization path in Europe has meant that the European Cold War religious revival went unnoticed for a long time. It is important to note, however, that the revival rhetoric of Billy Graham and Youth for Christ was well received in Europe because Europeans shared many Cold War anxieties with their American brethren. American missionaries appealed to debates about the Occident and the Christian West in Europe.
The study of the transatlantic revival of the 1950s helps us to reconceptualize European religious history beyond the belief in a linear path to secularization. It can also help us to understand the American side of that revival as less exceptional. There existed differences in the religious and intellectual traditions that Graham and Youth for Christ could tie into on both sides of the Atlantic, but these shrank under the shared Communist threat. A transatlantic religious revival was also shaped through people, missionary practices, and beliefs that crossed the Atlantic in both directions. When Billy Graham held his famous New York Crusade in 1957, the London Crusade of 1954 clearly served as a template as the first major metropolitan crusade. European ministers such as Stephen Olford and Joe Blinco joined Graham onstage at Madison Square Garden and converts from the London revival meetings traveled to New York in the hope to catch that one spiritual moment again and to become part of a transnational evangelical community. Graham's preaching during his American revival meetings, and during the New York Crusade, was also deeply influenced by his experiences abroad in war-torn Europe and decolonized Asia. Graham's American crusades were actually shaped by many European and other national and regional influences.
Similar exchanges and overlaps can be seen in another lively field in the study of US evangelicalism (and religion more generally). This developed around the question of an interplay between consumerism and faith. With monographs such as The Gospel of Oprah and God and Walmart, scholars such as Kathryn Lofton and Bethany Moreton have shown how the rise of consumer culture intersected with religious history. They have revealed that the boundaries between the sacred and the secular have become truly blurred in this context.Footnote 6 This dynamic interplay between consumerism and religion produced US megachurches, with integrated shopping malls, an evangelical marketplace of bibles and bumper stickers, and is now manifest in American football players praying before kickoff and television icons creating their own congregations based on shared consumption habits.
European Christians might look at these phenomena with pure bewilderment, as they perceive consumerism and religion as strictly separated and compartmentalized in their secular reality. But European religious life developed as well in an interplay with consumerism, not in a strict rejection of it. This process was heavily influenced by a lively transatlantic exchange in the religious field after World War II. American missionaries from Youth for Christ or visiting evangelists such as Billy Graham brought the gospel of the white middle class with them to Europe where it fell on much more receptive ground than one might expect. American missionaries abroad displayed the playful affluence of the New World, but, even more importantly, they showed that consumerism and Christianity were not mutually exclusive. Youth for Christ missionaries arrived as jet-age travellers in Europe and so did Billy Graham. As much as they gave European Christians a chance to define their future spiritual place in affluent societies, they shaped a Western transnational evangelical community that was not just formed around similar religious convictions, but also shared class and consumption features.
British and German evangelicals, for example, eagerly embraced the businesslike campaign style of their American brethren after World War II. The extent to which they incorporated consumer practices into their everyday faith – such as the use of fashionable prayer reminders, joint bus rides to church turned into pilgrimages, or piles of revival literature – was surely different compared to the commercialization of the evangelical milieu on the other side of the Atlantic. But their willingness to catch up and their eagerness to embrace modern consumer-oriented aspects of evangelical revival culture matter. They matter also because most of those religious practices incorporated a transnational dimension. Prayer newsletters were published on and sent from both sides of the Atlantic. Evangelical films, books, and records crossed the Atlantic and created transnational audiences that consumed revival culture together. These transnational evangelical communities formed around faith, class, and consumption. This became particularly evident in the rise to fame of American televangelists who featured prominently on German private television channels such as the Anaheim, California-based Robert Schuller, whose Crystal Cathedral was just a few short miles from Disneyland. Schuller's gospel of personal success and therapeutic faith held a particular attractiveness for the German middle class, which surely bonded with him much more around class features than around theological ones.
The European case highlights the fact that important aspects of US evangelicalism – such as its prominent role in Cold War culture and its close ties to consumer culture – are unique, but by no means exceptional. Those features of US evangelical culture developed and flourished in exchange with Europe and other parts of the world. Through the exchange of missionaries, objects, publications, films, and television productions, US evangelical communities turned into transnational evangelical communities. These were marked by hierarchies, imbalances, and cultural leadership, but in the everyday experience of believers around the world, they just existed as transnational communities that developed around shared faith, consumption habits, and political viewpoints.
Doing transnational US religious history allows us to free the history of US evangelicalism from its close ties to a national narrative that is shaped around the exceptional religious dynamics of the “one nation under God.” Comparative work in the field of religious history allows us also to see what makes the American case distinct, but less exceptional. Transnationalizing European religious history helps us as well to move beyond a firmly established regional narrative: that of linear secularization. The lively exchanges between the US and Europe in the evangelical milieu show that European Christians were confronted by and struggling with similar questions as their US brethren, regarding the Cold War world and the rise of consumerism. The history of those exchanges deserves a place in the transnational study of the complex political and cultural entanglement of Europe and the US in the second half of the American century.Footnote 7 It will certainly make religious America and secular Europe look less distinct in the future.
