Just after I finished reading Christian Globalism at Home, I attended a Protestant church service that featured an announcement about the denomination's partnership with World Vision in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pastor explained that one of the primary ways members could connect with God's work around the world was through child sponsorship. She then showed a video narrated by a ten-year-old Congolese girl named Deborah who told viewers that she was “a girl, like any girl,” (she does her chores, goes to church, and plays with friends). However, Deborah reported, life was hard for children in the Congo because of the devastating effects of civil war that made access to clean drinking water, health care, education, and economic opportunity scarce—especially in the Northwest region where she lives, “an area so remote it can only be reached by boat or plane.” When the presentation concluded, the pastor recounted how she had sponsored a child as a young person in the United States, how looking at the picture of that child had made her feel a part of God's global enterprise, and how meaningful it was to be continuing this project in the present. While the denomination could feel blessed to be sponsoring about 1,400 Congolese children, there were several hundred still waiting for adoption.

I recount this anecdote to underscore the significance of Hilary Kaell's excellent study, Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States. As I listened to the pastor's presentation and watched the World Vision video that Sunday morning, I witnessed Kaell's arguments enacted: Christian globalism is an intentional process (it does not just happen) cultivated through techniques of connection (such as child sponsorship) that stress the universal humanity of all God's children (Deborah is “a girl, like any girl”) and enable individuals in the United States to respond in a highly personalized way (by adopting a particular boy or girl) to immense and seemingly overwhelming problems (the aftermath of “Africa's World War” in a remote region where only 11% of the population has access to clean drinking water). These techniques of connection, Kaell indicates, seem to shatter barriers of race and ethnicity, language and culture, and geography and nation by emphasizing presumably common human experiences (hunger, sadness, happiness, hope) and aspirations (education, health, financial security), and by affirming the responsibility of those with resources (capacity) to help their “brothers and sisters in Christ” move forward to a brighter, shared future.

As Kaell shows, however, the “politics of sameness” that promote “engaged empathy” (12) among Christians through practices like child sponsorship are, in fact, dependent upon assumed and deeply entrenched binaries between rich/poor, Christian/heathen, white/black, and West/rest. “Without difference,” Kaell writes, “there can be no miracle of sameness under God” (104). And these binaries, Kaell indicates, are not neutral (as many forms of Christian globalism suggest). Instead, economic, religious, racial, and social differences reflect asymmetries of power that are the product of global capitalism, European and American imperialism, and national chauvinism. By encouraging American Christians to change a child's life through sponsorship, organizations like World Vision promote an illusion of “idealized Christian equality” that elides the structural factors and systemic racism that create and sustain global inequalities. Donors can feel that they are making a difference, but in so doing they are reinforcing “their own abundance and power” rather than redressing the root causes of poverty and suffering; they are reaffirming rather than challenging the status quo (156).

Christian Globalism at Home thus raises pressing ethical questions. I especially appreciated Kaell's trenchant analysis of the ways that Americans seek to assuage their anxieties about materialism and consumption by romanticizing the poverty of foreign others. Also appreciated is her description of donors’ tendency to “transfer culpability for poverty” in the global south to corrupt elites or government officials in these countries and to blame U.S. poverty on the “greed, laziness, and corruption” of individuals who take advantage of “entitlement programs.” By ignoring the “structural links between wealth in the United States and poverty elsewhere,” Kaell concludes, American sponsors absolved themselves of any culpability for “the unethical practices of market capitalism” and avoided the responsibility of recognizing the inextricable relationship between “their own privilege” and “other people's suffering” (184).

In the contemporary political and religious moment, Kaell's critiques are particularly salient—especially for the American Christians who are enmeshed in global projects like child sponsorship. For this reason, I do wish that Christian Globalism at Home were more accessible to a general audience. Kaell admits that “writing an interdisciplinary book” was “challenging and liberating.” Because she expertly attends to theoretical debates in a variety of fields—including anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, and history—Kaell's prose is often opaque and difficult to follow for readers who are less fluent in the dense academic rhetoric and abstract concepts she employs. Historians may find her tendency to “interrupt the chronological narrative” jarring rather than liberating—although Kaell insists that these intentional disruptions and digressions serve to highlight the complexities of narrating a seamless story across the expanses of time and space that she covers in the book. Given the moral urgency of Kaell's arguments, I worry that her “experimental approaches to writing” may exclude non-specialists—including the Christians who participate in child sponsorship like the ones at the church service I attended and, even more importantly, those she spoke to for her study—from this important conversation (18). As a contribution to scholarship, however, Christian Globalism at Home is stellar: a deeply researched, methodologically innovative, theoretically rigorous analysis of how American Protestants from the early nineteenth century to the present have imagined the world through child sponsorship and, in so doing, continually reinscribed the inequities they supposedly seek to remedy.