In this carefully researched and crafted book, Joel Cabrita draws from archival sources and interviews in Australia, the United States, Europe, and southern Africa (275–284) to render a fascinating interpretation of Zionist Christianity as an international movement situated within Evangelical Protestantism and modernity. The book seeks to do two things. The first is to correct the tendency to write about Zionism in ways that cut the movement off from its evangelical roots and limit it only to the “Anglophone Atlantic world,” failing to emphasize its transatlantic dimension that includes southern Africa (4). The second is to rectify the tendency of some African scholars to interpret Zionism mainly in connection to the quest for health in indigenous African religions, failing to see the global and modern dimensions of such a quest (5–7). As an international evangelical movement, Zionism developed in the wake of the religious ferment of the “Great Awakenings” in the United States and Britain, embracing tenets that are central to such evangelical revivals, including the promotion of egalitarianism and the frequent fragmentation spurred by the reforming spirit. As a modern movement, Zionism arose in the context of the rise of industrialization, urbanization, and some of the challenges that came with these, including poor working conditions and limited availability of health care. Thus, Zionism addressed not only the quest for individual bodily health—even though this is central to its vision—but also the quest for the health of the social body. It is for this reason that the city becomes the place for the emergence and manifestation of its vision. Zion is the city of God where all find well-being. Cabrita is careful not to portray Zionism only as a social or political quest but also as a religious one.

The book is made up of the introduction that lays out the thesis of the book, seven chapters that trace the intercontinental character of Zionism as a divine healing movement, an epilogue, and two appendices that record the sources the author used in his research. Beginning the story of Zionism with its founder, John Alexander Dowie, Cabrita describes his theological formation in his home country of Scotland, his migration to Australia, and how his initial ministry in Australia exposed him to dynamics of urban life and ways of practicing the Christian life in the city that led him to emphasize divine healing in his ministry. Beginning as a crusader in the temperance movement of nineteenth-century Australia, Dowie later came to see the Christian life as a relationship with God that healed the individual and social bodies. He thus began to preach divine healing, castigating the medical profession in the process and urging his followers to rely only on god for healing. With the waning of his influence in Australia, Dowie did missionary work in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands before moving to the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century, settling first on the west coast and then in the cosmopolitan city of Chicago, where he eventually founded Zion City as an antidote to what he saw as the chaotic and debauched life of the surrounding city. In the context of ethnic, linguistic, class, and racial differences, Dowie taught his followers that they all belonged to one head: God. His message of divine healing, egalitarianism, and cosmopolitanism first reached southern Africa through his famous periodical, Leaves of Healing. When Zionist missionaries first arrived in the Transvaal and the mining city of Johannesburg in South Africa during the last decade of the nineteenth century, they found an industrial context suffering from similar social ills that Dowie had experienced in Melbourne, Australia, and the United States. It was from the Transvaal and Johannesburg that the message of divine healing would fan out to other regions in southern Africa. Cabrita demonstrates that, as the movement spread, it continuously struggles to maintain its egalitarian and cosmopolitan vision in the face of racism, ethnicity, nationalism, sexism, young voices, and classism. These challenges have contributed to the significant fragmentation of the movement in southern Africa, even as it struggles with its relationship to Pentecostalism and a form of American evangelicalism that sees elements of Zionism as unchristian.

By focusing on the international dimension and cosmopolitan vision of Zionism, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of Zionism in particular and world Christianity in general. It effectively navigates the tension that is often encountered in thinking the local and the global in world Christianity by locating Zionism within an international context where the quest for health is imperative, especially in the context of rising health problems and fewer resources to adequately address them. This demonstrates that the quest for health in contemporary African Christianity, for example, is not to be located mainly in the indigenous worldview, as is often the case, but should rather be seen as a human imperative made especially pronounced by modern life. Also, connecting the frequent fragmentation of Zionism to its Protestant roots rather than to ethnicity challenges some of the essentialist ways earlier scholarship interpreted the process of ecclesial change in Africa (165). This book is an important resource not only to those studying Zionism and divine healing but also to those interested in the question of method in the study of Christian missions and world Christianity.