The study of US foreign relations (what is now often called “America and the World”) has been in a protracted “religious turn” for at least a decade. One of the most prominent statements of the turn was Andrew Preston's article in Diplomatic History from 2006, “Bridging the Gap between the Sacred and the Secular in the History of American Foreign Relations.”Footnote ¹ Preston, a trained diplomatic historian who made an indelible contribution to the turn with his later Sword of Spirit, Shield of Strength: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012), called for “paying more attention” to religion in the field of American foreign relations. More precisely he urged historians to make of religion “a systematic rubric under which various moments in the history of American foreign relations, or the whole history itself, can be analyzed and explained.”Footnote ²

Of course, religion, like gender, race, and other categories, was always part of the study of US foreign relations. The problem was that it had not before been formalized and theorized within the field. This accomplishment, Preston was certain, would open new areas of inquiry and bridge a gap between American religion and foreign relations. Happily, his call was noticed, though not exactly how he envisioned. Those within the field began to pay attention to religion when writing their diplomatic history.Footnote ³ But at the same time, as the three books under consideration demonstrate, historians from other fields have even more dramatically expanded the boundaries of America and the World to include intellectual, religious, and institutional methodologies. In subjects near and far, from transnational religious networks to the religious beliefs of policy makers to American religious thought, the religious turn has made its mark on the field of diplomatic history in ways neither Preston nor anyone else fully anticipated.

While the broader religious turn is not unique to US foreign relations, its effects on this field have particular valences and points of interest. The framework of twentieth-century US foreign relations—the rise of the United States as a global power and the post-World War II international system that gave Americans exceptional freedom to move, shape, exploit, and influence events abroad—play a prominent role in these books. Moreover, the organizing questions of the field of US foreign relations have informed much, though of course not all, of the scope of the religious turn: how religious Americans, acting alternately in national, international, and transnational contexts, navigated the rise and decline of American power. These concerns are a result of the cross-pollination of religion and foreign relations evident in the three authors under consideration. David Hollinger (an intellectual historian), Melani McAlister (an American studies scholar), and Ronit Stahl (a social historian) represent a growing cohort of researchers—from graduate students to emeriti—who are now must-reads for diplomatic historians. Hollinger, McAlister, and Stahl would have had few interlocuters at the annual conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in 1999. Twenty years later their books receive dedicated panels.Footnote ⁴

Hollinger's Protestants Abroad deepens his long-standing interest in ecumenical Protestantism and places mainline Protestant missionaries at the center of the story of the rise of American power in the first half of the twentieth century. These “missionary cosmopolitans,” Hollinger argues, were exposed to different ideas and cultures and shed their Christian and Western triumphalism to help usher in a new attention to pluralism (of all types: religious, cultural, racial, intellectual) and plant the seeds of multiculturalism.Footnote ⁵ McAlister, in many ways offering a mirror study of post-1945 American evangelicalism, probes the deep stresses caused by evangelical exposure to other cultures and societies through missions and growing internal diversity in the era of the Cold War and American internationalism. Though less coherent than Hollinger's cosmopolitan missionaries, McAlister's evangelical internationalists also presided over—and not always easily—a rapid diversification of evangelical ranks in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Stahl's Enlisting Faith grounds concerns over power and pluralism in the institution of the American military chaplaincy. If the American century had an enforcer, it was the American military. And that military, Stahl shows, also confronted growing American religious diversity amid repeated and often-extended interventions abroad that tried the religious and emotional lives of soldiers as much as it did their physical safety.

The diverse approaches by Hollinger, McAlister, and Stahl—all now under the big tent of America and the World—are evidence of the methodological changes in the field of US foreign relations since the early 2000s and the broader cultural turn in the field. The methods of religious and cultural historians have further recast “foreign relations” from questions and archives of high-level diplomacy to include cultural sources and methods and multilingual and multi-archival research. But what continues to bind the old and the new—and one reason why SHAFR has not abandoned its name or that of its journal, Diplomatic History—is the enduring recognition of the importance of American power as a focus of analysis.Footnote ⁶ And because leadership of the American state depended on political coalitions, popular and democratic appeals, and long-standing institutions, domains like religion played influential roles in the exercise of American power, though of course the causal relationships can be overstated. In any case it is clear from recent scholarship that religious worldviews informed high-level calculations of national interest; religious institutions wielded money and influence; and religious actors worked, spied, and reported for the state.Footnote ⁷ This capacious view of US foreign relations with power as a central focus is the basis on which much of the religious turn has been accepted by the old guard and made palatable by the new.

Hollinger, McAlister, and Stahl exemplify this trend by offering multifaceted explorations of American intellectual and theological responses to ever-increasing religious pluralism in American society, and track the changing roles that the American state, and its global projection of power, have played in shaping how Americans—especially Protestants—responded. When they veer from questions of state power, these studies inhabit ground more familiar to religious and intellectual, rather than diplomatic, historians: the breakup of American Protestantism over the course of the twentieth century and the expansion and limits of religious pluralism. This story, it turns out, has much to say about American foreign relations.

* * *

Hollinger's considerable body of scholarship is enriching in part because it consistently interrogates the historical development of cosmopolitan cultures, and the enduring tensions between cosmopolitanism and particularism in American thought. His recent work, especially in Protestants Abroad and After Cloven Tongues of Fire, evinces this same interest turned to the history of ecumenical Protestantism.Footnote ⁸ Hollinger writes that his focus on Protestant missionaries is meant to discover “what conditions have promoted and enabled” cosmopolitanism and its trademark celebration of diversity and pluralism and attendant reduction of sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism.Footnote ⁹ Though it is understated throughout, Hollinger also seeks to make a claim about influence: in his depiction, cosmopolitan missionaries transformed American social and culture norms, and because of their elite status influenced American policies toward the world.

As improbable as many observers may find it, the crucible of foreign missions produced some of the most multicultural Americans of the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰ Hollinger's thesis in Protestants Abroad follows: the pressures of modern foreign missions, especially when conducted in societies including China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, led increasing numbers of missionaries to abandon denominational, confessional, and even national loyalties to promote a new ecumenical Christianity and to preach a “gospel of inclusive brotherhood.”Footnote ¹¹ Geopolitics, including World War II and the American Cold War, fused this ecumenical Christianity with the “American-century” outlook, making missionaries and, just as crucially, their multilingual offspring influential shapers of American diplomacy, area-studies programs, and nongovernmental organizations.

While straddling the lines between intellectual, transnational, diplomatic, and religious history, a familiar narrative of American Protestantism undergirds Protestants Abroad. Those missionaries with more education, who accepted biblical higher criticism and Darwinian evolution, responded to the pressures of missions by liberalizing their Christianity—by making it less confessional, less triumphalist, less universalist. Conversely, in a subplot that runs through the book, less educated missionaries, often from conservative or fundamentalist missionary agencies, guarded their orthodox theology and rejected liberal attempts to prioritize social and economic reform over conversions. While correct, this is also not the whole story. Work by scholars such as Robert Woodberry and Melani McAlister highlights the multifaceted legacies of fundamentalist/evangelical missionaries that don't fit easily into fundamentalist/particularist–modernist/cosmopolitan dichotomies.Footnote ¹²

The outlines of the fundamentalist–modernist split of the 1920s are nevertheless easily discernible in the reactions of missionaries in the field. Hollinger is certainly not the first historian to internationalize the split by looking at missionaries, but his is perhaps the most comprehensive and most attuned to the implications for the fate of missions as an arm of US diplomacy, which in the early twentieth century remained the purview of mainline Protestants.Footnote ¹³ By mid-century, ecumenically oriented Protestants “facilitated the migration of many of their young into post-Protestant secularism,” an identity and way of seeing the world that would also inform the American century.Footnote ¹⁴ Though ecumenical Protestants far outpaced their congregations in rethinking the cultural assumptions of Western Christianity, it was they, and not the laity in the pews or conservative Protestants, who actually formulated American foreign policy, led its elite institutions, and articulated its role in the world. Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Henry Luce, the Dulles brothers, James Baker, Colin Powell: these descendants of mainline and ecumenical Protestantism, many trained at the prestigious area-studies centers and educational institutions founded by cosmopolitan missionaries—if not related to missionaries themselves—adapted American foreign policy to its “post-Protestant secular” orientation that was only punctured episodically by evangelicals Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, both in any case outside the chronological range of Protestants Abroad.Footnote ¹⁵

Just as foreign societies forced missionaries to reevaluate their religious and cultural assumptions, so too did the contours of the American state shape how missionary cosmopolitanism filtered into American society. Hollinger's “boomerang” metaphor for the sending and returning of cosmopolitan missionaries is complicated by the wrinkle that because of the passage of time—years, even decades—the “thrower” of the boomerang (American Protestantism) had changed dramatically by the time the boomerang itself (missionaries) returned home. While late nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries left an America with a nascent higher-education landscape, rapid industrialization, and enduring sectional loyalties, the world wars and the rise of the national security state changed each of these factors in drastic and often unexpected ways, dictating how American society received and applied missionary cosmopolitanism. After World War II, expansive US interests abroad made the language skills and knowledge of missionaries and their children especially valuable.Footnote ¹⁶ With the onset of the Cold War, the civil religion trumpeted by Truman and Eisenhower was indebted to the insights of cosmopolitan missionaries (or descendants of missionaries) such as Henry Luce and John Foster Dulles that expanded a once-Protestant American religious elite to one that was “Judeo-Christian” or, in the words of Eisenhower, simply “monotheist” in opposition to atheistic communism. As American higher education ballooned in response to the GI Bill, missionaries founded centers and joined the professoriate in universities that channeled their knowledge toward state-funded research. This legacy is perhaps more morally ambiguous than Hollinger implies, but its profound influence on the maintenance of American diplomatic, cultural, and economic power abroad is hard to ignore.

* * *

While ecumenical Protestantism, through its cosmopolitan reevaluation of Christianity and migration into American public institutions and NGOs, “transformed itself virtually out of existence” in the cause of advancing its multicultural values, evangelical Protestantism turned itself into a powerful political movement in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Perhaps, as Hollinger suggests, this is because American fundamentalist and evangelical missionaries lacked the same intellectual tools to rethink their faith when they were confronted with difference. Certainly there are ample examples of this. But in McAlister's The Kingdom of God Has No Borders we see another explanation based in the divergent theological, social, and affective inflections of the two communities. From one angle McAlister's history is consonant with Hollinger's in its delineation of an evangelical resistance to cosmopolitanism. But evangelicals did not merely shut themselves off from the world. Their understanding of missions also changed, as McAlister traces it, with evangelicals themselves recontextualizing their place in the world as they entangled themselves with American internationalism after 1945.

Methodologically, McAlister casts her eye toward the ways evangelical beliefs operated within a broader system of meaning that included, along with texts, arguments, and epistemological questions, a style of engaging the world. She presents “evangelicalism as not just a form of believing but as a way of operating in the world” that influenced the ways evangelicals deployed their beliefs. These styles included tendencies toward populism and anti-intellectualism, waves of revival and renewal, valuing entrepreneurship and innovation.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus evangelical missionaries responded to their surroundings not just intellectually, but also affectively—in the practices, dispositions, and emotions they relied on in their interactions with and in foreign societies.

As McAlister makes clear throughout The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, evangelical responses were deeply shaped by the structure of the postwar American state, international system, and inherited assumptions about church and state. To take one of McAlister's most detailed examples, evangelical human rights discourse emerged at the intersection of anticommunism and concern for religious freedom in the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁹ It did so in a peculiarly evangelical way that shaped international engagement for decades. Evangelicalism's emphasis on individual experiences of faith, and definition of religious freedom as an inherent right, highlighted persecution narratives to spark action. With a particular concern for “the integrity of the human body,” those victims of persecution like Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand, whose 1967 autobiography Tortured for Christ crystalized the physical persecution of Romanian Christians under the Soviet system, made the case for American evangelical identity to include non-American Christians; to make the case, as Wurmbrand did when he appeared shirtless in the film version of his story and displaying the physical torture he had suffered, that it is evangelicals’ “duty to fight to stop these sufferings and sustain love with your brothers behind the Iron Curtain.”Footnote ²⁰ Persecution narratives, McAlister argues, became a defining force in evangelical identity, extending the metaphor of the “body of Christ” globally even as the exclusive emphasis on religious identity as the cause for suffering obscured more discerning—and potentially more effective—evangelical interventions in areas ranging from the “10/40 Window” of missionary engagement with the Islamic world to combating slavery in South Sudan.

Evangelical internationalism after World War II, of course, featured the more familiar values of domestic anticommunism, Christian Zionism, and American exceptionalism, but McAlister also paints a more complex picture by expanding the definition of “evangelical” beyond its embedded “white American” assumptions.Footnote ²¹ The inclusion of black American evangelicals, along with non-American evangelical communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, turns her focus to sites where differing visions of evangelical internationalism came into contact, and often conflicted. Historic college ministry conferences, such as Urbana 1970, and pivotal international gatherings, such as the 1974 Lausanne Conference on World Missions, have been the focus of recent historical research by David Swartz and others, but in McAlister's telling they become inflection points where the future internationalism of American evangelicalism is shaped by the concerns, and growing majority, of non-American evangelicals.Footnote ²²

To the extent that we can see the imprints of American evangelical influence on American foreign policy—a linkage that is hard to show conclusively—the increasing democratization of American foreign-policy making through the rising influence of transnational identities and nongovernment organizations (and political action committees) are where we should look. Evangelical interest in religious freedom, Christian persecution, and support for Israel have made their policy marks in an age of increasing political polarization and electoral coalitions that depend on interest groups, such as evangelicals, to win votes.Footnote ²³ This dimension of domestic politics will undoubtedly shape the future of evangelical internationalism. McAlister detects a deepening split—born out of both her analysis and her anticipation—between “white American evangelicals” and the “transnational evangelical community” that divides, we might say, precisely along lines of competing conceptions of state power and international diplomacy, and of particularistic and cosmopolitan cultures.Footnote ²⁴ Over the course of the twentieth century, white evangelicals, benefiting from the preponderance of American power abroad, crafted a politics that assumed their own centrality. As white evangelicals have declined in numbers within the United States, and as the United States has faced the limits of its power abroad, the assumptions underlying evangelical politics, so tightly interwoven into its theology, style, and worldview, will continue to unravel and reorganize.

* * *

In the cases of mainline Protestant missionaries and evangelicals, the American state intersects with the religious lives of Americans, but does not dictate them. The fundamental purpose for most missionaries and religious Americans abroad, at least, was not to extend American power, even if, both consciously and unconsciously, their actions did so (or gave justification for others to do so). The case for otherworldly motives is harder to make for the US military. Any actions the military takes are inevitably intertwined with the interests of the American state—indeed in some sense are the expressions of the state.

Stahl's Enlisting Faith frames the entanglements of religion and state in the military chaplaincy as one of the key sites of religious encounter in the twentieth century. The deep strands of pragmatism, compromise, and tension that defined the chaplaincy, which became institutionalized in World War I and greatly expanded in World War II, add to the importance of this site of encounter. In a methodological move that evinces social and political historiography, Stahl brackets the concerns of high-level generals and policy makers, and of theologians, to bring to the fore the role of administrative regulation and civil-military relations in the chaplaincy.Footnote ²⁵

Stahl's overarching narrative from homogeneity to pluralism is familiar enough. In World War I, the US military chaplaincy recognized two religions: Protestantism (including African American Christians) and Roman Catholicism. By the end of Stahl's narrative in the 1980s, the military recognized more than seventy faiths. The earlier paucity of recognized faiths often obscured greater diversity in the ranks of soldiers, but there was also real demographic change in the religious makeup of the military over the twentieth century. Moreover, seismic events within American religion, such as the fundamentalist–modernist split, further fractured the religious allegiances of soldiers. Even as military administrators did not recognize fine (or not-so-fine) distinctions between conservative and liberal Presbyterians or Baptists, soldiers—and the religious institutions themselves—did.

If demographic diversification did not give the lie to the purportedly “secular” neutrality of the military, then its mobilization for war did. “Despite assumed secularism, the military built a massive infrastructure to instill religion in its men,” Stahl writes.Footnote ²⁶ The chaplaincy became the conduit between one of the largest administrative arms of the American state and the “elixir of belief and rituals that, theoretically, existed entirely outside the framework of the state.”Footnote ²⁷ Any ideas of secular–sacred divisions hardly withstood scrutiny, as Hollinger and McAlister also show, but the operating philosophy of the military's chaplains and administrators was less theologically nuanced and oriented solely toward maximizing the potentials and minimizing the operational perils of infusing religion into the fighting forces.

As an institution separate from both ecumenical Protestantism and evangelicalism, yet also intertwined with the two communities, the military chaplaincy intersected with later episodes in the ongoing liberal–conservative Protestant struggle. In the wake of the Vietnam War, evangelicals gained a foothold in chaplaincy leadership positions and chipped away at the reigning ideology of ecumenical pluralism. Evangelicals were hoping to create opportunities for more pointed theological teachings and evangelizing within the soldier ranks—and they succeeded at least in part through the 1980s as the military swelled with evangelicals and a more socially conservative culture. On the other hand, later successes at inclusion by Muslims and Buddhists, among other religious minorities, to gain their own chaplains might at first appear as a rebuke to evangelical inroads. But both sides had leaned into the language of pluralism, albeit from different directions. A combined assault on liberal Protestant hegemony—self-imposed by Hollinger's ecumenical missionaries, waged by McAlister's evangelicals, and pursued by an array of religious communities demanding representation—is an ambiguous coda to the legacy of Protestantism in the American century and its dual challenges of managing power and pluralism.

* * *

The American state, like the broad outlines of US foreign relations in the twentieth century, plays a conspicuous role in Stahl's narrative, as it does for Hollinger and McAlister. Religion is analyzed through diverse methodological vantage points: as an integral part of identity, as an institutional mover, as a thinly veiled political project, as a system of meanings and affectations, as a set of ideas. Amid this methodological diversity, these works unite in exploring the power of religion to shape foreign-policy choices and the influence of religious actors on the wider trajectories of US foreign affairs. It is in this sense that they are integral markers of the progress of the religious turn in US foreign relations.

Some may find this focus limiting, and indeed within the ranks of SHAFR there is debate over the balance of transnational and international approaches and the future of the field.Footnote ²⁸ But even in the current moment the “turn” has merged specializations and historiographic genealogies to make available new research questions. “The state's role in shaping American religion remains underdeveloped,” Stahl reminds us, “though this is beginning to change.”Footnote ²⁹ As more historians attend to the intersection of religion and the state we might ask how deeply the changing role of the state shaped American religious thought, especially about the religious significance of America. Likewise, we might ask how an animating story of twentieth-century American religion and thought—the decline of Protestant hegemony and the pluralization of American religion—influenced both elite and popular attitudes toward enduring categories in US foreign relations: realism and idealism, internationalism and isolationism, domestic and foreign.Footnote ³⁰ These categories are themselves often problematic, as diplomatic historians are quick to point out, but they retain explanatory power as well. Hollinger, McAlister, and Stahl thus illustrate the potential of the religious turn to shape our understandings of America's place in the world.