“Overlooked” might not be the first word that comes to mind when describing Europe. Yet as Hans Krabbendam argues, the post-World War II American missionary movement did believe Europe had been overlooked, at least as a mission field. Concerned about its growing pluralism and secularity, American missionaries made a concerted effort to “save” postwar Europe. As Krabbendam shows, the missionaries failed in the task by their own standards, but they did succeed in importing new religious organizations to Europe and, at least in the case of evangelicals, integrating Europeans into an international evangelical community.

Krabbendam's narrative covers some ground familiar to scholars of U.S. missions and post-World War II American Protestantism. We have Billy Graham and Carl McIntire, divisions among fundamentalists, evangelicals and mainliners, and conferences at Lausanne and Uppsala. Yet as Krabbendam argues, Europe has often gone unmentioned in these narratives even though the conferences happened there. Krabbendam thus joins a growing group of scholars studying religious interactions between the United States and Europe in the postwar period. He shows that American Protestants brought with them both their diagnosis of European problems and their competing solutions. What emerged was a tripartite contest between American mainliners, evangelicals, and fundamentalists for Europe—a contest that fundamentalists fairly quickly abandoned and that, by the mid-1970s, saw more cooperation and agreement between mainline and evangelical Protestants than either side, perhaps, was prepared to admit.

Using archival sources drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, Krabbendam adds to our understanding of the development of postwar religious networks and offers a reminder that as we consider the exchanges and interactions that mark twentieth- and twenty-first-century Christianity, we should not overlook Europe.