In a time when secular progressives are often caricatured by the right as being anti-God, anti-American, kombucha-loving, anarchist-endorsing, limousine liberals, and religious conservatives are often caricatured by the left as being anti-human, white nationalist, venison-loving, hypocritical, hateful absolutists, it is refreshing to read Melani McAlister's The Kingdom Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals. Rather than reducing American religious conservatives, in this case, evangelicals, to the 81% of white self-identified evangelicals who came behind Trump in 2016, presumably due to the aforementioned characteristics, McAlister opens up the world of evangelicals. She moves beyond the domestic political arena (abortion, marriage), and offers an account of American evangelical global engagement over the last 50 years; I strongly recommend it to you.

Based on careful historical research, interviews, and participant observation undertaken over 10 years, McAlister proposes that most evangelicals are fighting the same conservative battles at home and abroad, railing against a perceived encroachment of communism, and more recently that of Islam. She considers whether or not evangelicals are neo-colonial masters or handmaidens of the U.S. state; and/or whether or not they are agents of change, shaped by global Christianity and engagement (see Robert Woodberry's 2012 APSR article and Lamin Sanneh's 2008 book Disciples of All Nations).

McAlister at times signals her disagreement with those whom she interviews, yet writes about them respectfully. She opens with an account of a trip to Sudan undertaken with a globally-minded evangelical, Wisconsin megachurch Pastor Dick Robinson, in 2006. Robinson, himself a missionary kid who grew up in the Congo, longs for “a ‘postmodern’ church family, with American Christians circulating through the halls of power, traversing borders, and worshipping in multiple languages. But he also recognize[s] that American sojourns in the Global south might be problematic: ‘The question is, I suppose, are they present [overseas] … for Kingdom reasons, or simply to advance the interests of the American empire?’” (p. 2).

McAlister takes a deep dive into American evangelical engagement post-World War II in missions, international development, and international religious freedom, revealing that evangelicals from the Global South (comprising 70% of all evangelicals worldwide) frequently engage as a countervailing force to American evangelicalism (often but not always in a more progressive direction politically: see Chapter 5 on Lausanne and the future of missions, versus Chapter 14 on Uganda and locally-led conservative sexual politics). In an interview for Christianity Today, she describes features of the faith and the global expansion of evangelicalism that lead evangelicals toward nationalism and toward internationalism: “there are elements in evangelical religious experience that cultivate exclusivity and a sense of nationalism, religious superiority, gender conservatism, and racial barriers. There are also elements that empower cosmopolitan connection, a sense of social justice, and openness to difference. I have seen both at work at every historical moment” (8/2/18).

McAlister complicates the picture of evangelicalism by evaluating a larger array of evangelicals than just the “religious right.” Her study confirms that even within the American context, there are many Christians who share evangelical theological beliefs (pp. 5–7) but hold quite varied political opinions, revealing key fault lines, including the small “evangelical left” movement (e.g., Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action); the larger evangelical center (e.g., World Vision, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, Institute for Global Engagement, Christianity Today, National Association of Evangelicals, National Black Evangelical Association, Christian Life Commission and Women's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention, Lausanne Movement); and the well-known religious right (Moral Majority, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Samaritan's Purse); in so doing, she highlights key leaders including Jim Wallis, Gloria White-Hammond, Howard Jones, Robert Seiple, Rick and Kay Warren, Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, and Jerry Falwell.

Her case studies focus on American evangelicals' global engagement in Africa (given the rapid rise of Christianity there) and the Middle East (given extensive U.S. engagement there), but less so on Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Regarding non-white evangelicals, she spends more time evaluating the work of African-American evangelicals than she does other evangelicals of color, maintaining that they have had a bigger role in shaping American evangelical relations in those regions. She helpfully emphasizes the role of Pentecostal evangelicals, less so the outsized role of Reformed and Anabaptist evangelicals (in terms of theology and activism). She covers significant territory, but expanding her coverage of other global regions and other racial/ethnic minority categories of American evangelicals would have been welcomed.

McAlister emphasizes two key orientations shaping American evangelical global engagement, one of “enchanted internationalism” that romanticizes faith in the global South, and one of “victim identification” with the persecuted global church. Her book attempts to account for “the institutions, emotional attachments, and cross-border ties that pushed American evangelicals toward greater interest in humanitarianism, human rights, and economic justice than anyone—most evangelicals included—would have imagined in 1945” (p. 3). She organizes her chapters by these three categories, but sticking to this rubric makes for a clunky fit at times. I would have appreciated even more emphasis on the governing structures shaping this evangelical global engagement, and being shaped by it, as well as empirical evaluation of the evangelical opinion of these engagements.

In her first chapter, important for our times, she addresses racism in U.S. missions in the mid-20th century and the imperialist presumptions of many American missionaries engaging what they perceived as “backward cultures” in need of America, perhaps more so than Jesus. By contrast, she highlights the role of African-American missionaries in Africa, including Howard Jones, alongside other missionaries striving to honor other cultures while sharing the faith, yet struggling given rampant problems with racism in the United States, which persist today. Still, many turned around and used some of these transformative mission experiences to fight racism and segregation in the United Studies (see her description of the raging civil rights debate at the Southern Baptist Convention in 1964, led in part by missions' organizations). “For many Southerners—indeed for many American Christians in general—the most powerful arguments against segregation and racism were built on the terrain of missions” (p. 27).

Chapter five is one of her best, exemplifying the role of global south evangelicals in shifting and broadening the thinking of American evangelicals. Here we see Latin American leaders like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar and African leader John Gatu battling it out with Western evangelicals at the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, a movement started by the Billy Graham Evangelical Association. Such global south evangelicals, theologically conservative, yet extremely concerned with inequality and American abuses of power, call out the American church and Western missionaries for failing to take on a more radical discipleship. They push for holistic missions that focus on social action alongside evangelism. However, McAlister contends subsequently that call to social and political engagement was heeded not simply by the evangelical left and center (exemplified by rise of anti-apartheid activism in the 1970s and 1980s; see Chapter seven), but by the right (focused on abortion domestically, and on communism globally; see Chapter six).

In Chapter nine, we see one of her themes under contestation, as McAlister describes the foundation for the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA). She notes the advocacy of many politically conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews. In many cases, such activists framed the issue in terms of persecuted Christians. For instance, Voice of the Martyrs' Richard Wurmbrand emphasized Christian persecution under communism and Islam to garner support for passage of IRFA. McAlister juxtaposes this with the leadership of other, more moderate evangelicals like Robert Seiple, the first U.S. ambassador for IRF, who come behind IRFA to support freedom of religion and conscience for all, by emphasizing engagement, education, interreligious dialogue, and respect, rather than using denunciations and sanctions and focusing only on the plight of fellow Christians abroad.

Thankfully and helpfully, McAlister tackles many key arenas of evangelical global engagement, and yet there were significant global issues that could have been included. Given the significance of immigration in contemporary evangelical politics, especially among evangelical Trump supporters, I was hoping for more evaluation of immigration, evangelical immigrants, and overall evangelical engagement with immigrants and refugees at home and abroad. As with civil rights, here significant work is built again on “the terrain of missions.” Former missionaries and reverse missionaries to the United States with greater global awareness often lead the charge in terms of refugee resettlement and immigration work (e.g., developing the World Relief Refugee Service), and in the process spur congregations to be more aware of vulnerable populations abroad and more supportive of humanitarian and human rights work on their behalf (Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt, Evangelicals and Immigration, 2019, also reviewed in this volume). McAlister does address the anti-slavery movement working in South Sudan, highlighting the leading role of the African-American church (Chapter 10). Yet an evaluation of the American evangelical preoccupation with and advocacy against sex trafficking globally would have been welcome too (see, e.g., the work of International Justice Mission).

One small item of note: as for educational leadership of evangelicals in the global arena, McAlister tends to rely heavily on the cases of Wheaton College and Fuller Seminary as a sort of shorthand to exemplify the debates, struggles, and shifts within evangelicalism. But a broader evaluation of the influence of Christian colleges and seminaries, and in particular the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), was warranted. In particular, given her contention that evangelicals are driven by a concern with Islam, evaluating the 25-year-old Middle East Studies study abroad program of the CCCU, originally based in Egypt and now in Jordan, which seeks further understanding of Islam, the Middle East, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, would have been a more appropriate focus of study than the much lighter, though impressive, short-term mission trip to Cairo with Inter Varsity (Chapter 15).

McAlister is a good storyteller and a snappy writer; even her endnotes pack a punch. While I would have appreciated a conclusion chapter to facilitate a more careful review of the applicability of her hypotheses altogether, she concludes the book with a pithy epilogue that reviews the nationalist and internationalist impulses within evangelicalism. Such is a needed reminder in a time of perceived evangelical uniformity—a perception that is perhaps understandable given overwhelming white evangelical support for the avowedly nationalist Trump, but inaccurate nonetheless.