Recent scholarship on the contemporary history of American Evangelicalism has displayed an understandable concern to highlight those strands of the movement that emphasise social engagement, justice and an understanding of Christian mission that goes beyond the salvation of the soul. Contrary to what might be supposed from media coverage of conservative Christianity's support for the presidency of Donald Trump, such left-leaning manifestations of Evangelical Christianity in the United States are not insignificant. David Swartz first explored this theme in his monograph Moral minority: the Evangelical Left in an age of conservatism (2012). He has now placed this subject in transnational perspective. Facing west expounds the thesis that the missionary encounters of American Evangelicals with non-Western Christians have widened the intellectual horizons of the domestic constituency. The tight nexus between conservative religion and conservative politics that seems so axiomatic in North America does not hold for much of the non-Western world. Hence, overseas missionary engagement has had a significant reflex influence on conservative Protestantism in the US. Although not the first to notice such a reflex influence, Swartz breaks new ground through the geographically comprehensive nature of his vision.

His chapters cover an impressive range of case studies. Several have been the subject of previous scholarly attention, for example the role of Latin American Evangelicals in the 1974 Lausanne Congress, or the origins of World Vision in the Korean War, or the combination of conservative attitudes to sexuality and radical commitments to social justice among East African Anglicans. Swartz engages closely with much existing scholarship in his field, though his chapter on the involvement of Youth for Christ in post-war Germany misses the important book by James C. Enns, Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian mission to West Germany, 1945–1974 (Montreal 2017). In other chapters Swartz adds significant value to the existing literature. He adds to the evidence that the Methodist missionary to India, E. Stanley Jones, was a major channel whereby Gandhi's ideas of non-violence were mediated to the American civil rights movement. He makes a persuasive argument that accounts of the foundation of World Vision have neglected the key role of Kyung-Chik Han, a North Korean Presbyterian migrant to the South and pastor of the mighty Youngnak Presbyterian Church, who was already practising an amalgam of evangelism and humanitarian relief to refugees before the Youth for Christ evangelist Bob Pierce arrived and turned the amalgam into World Vision. A later chapter traces the de-Americanisation of World Vision and its evolution into one of the largest development NGOs. Of particular interest here is the account of the Chinese Christian pioneer of mass literacy, Yen Yang-ch'u, whose Mass Education Movement had some influence on Mao Tse-tung. Exiled from China to the Philippines after the Communist Revolution, Yen applied the same principles to a comprehensive programme of rural development, which became a model for Bryant L. Meyers, who led World Vision into a new era characterised by the concept of ‘transformational development’.

This is a valuable, thoroughly researched and engagingly written study that will inform all future work in the field. None the less, two facets of the book deserve some critical comment. Swartz has limited his scope to American Evangelicals, which is fair enough, but in places his field of vision is too narrow. The Pentecostalisation of American Christianity, the theme of chapter vi, was not only ‘not limited to evangelicals’ (p. 186) – it did not even begin with them. More recognition could also be given to the fact that Evangelicalism was from the beginning a transatlantic movement. Readers could be forgiven for drawing from his analysis the illegitimate inference that the white American version is the default setting of Evangelicalism, and that the existence of alternative styles of being Evangelical is a new exotic phenomenon resulting from the growth of world Christianity. Where Swartz ventures into Evangelical territory on the other side of the Atlantic, and sometimes further afield, he begins to look like a stranger abroad. John Stott is described in terms he would not have owned as an Anglican ‘priest’, and All Souls’, Langham Place, as ‘All Souls International Fellowship’. Lesslie Newbigin appears simply as ‘a missionary to India’. John Wimber features in relation to the Pentecostalisation of the mission curriculum at Fuller Theological Seminary, but there is no reference to his extensive influence in Britain, or globally through the Vineyard movement (though this is mentioned). The East African Revival movement, so closely linked to Anglican Evangelicalism, did not launch ‘new Pentecostal-oriented religious movements’ (pp. 202–3).

The second point is less substantial, but it has left this reader, at least, somewhat perplexed. Swartz rightly observes that ‘Bob Pierce's “rescue” of Korean Christians – and the West's portrayal of his relationship with Pastor Han, the interpreter – looks very different facing East rather than West’ (p. 51). Chapter vi begins with a quotation from John Wimber: ‘The West is looking East for a Faith’, and the common thread running through Swartz's case studies is how American Evangelicals looked eastwards and southwards to non-western Christianity, observed different styles of Evangelicalism and – to a regrettably limited extent – permitted those different styles to challenge and amend their own understanding of the faith. The result of this uneven process of adaptation, Swartz concludes, is that ‘Evangelicalism remains a fundamentally unstable construct’ (p. 301); another example of how he tends to take the American variant as representative of the whole of the Western Christian phenomenon. Why, therefore, is the book not entitled ‘Facing East’? The answer is found in the concluding sentence of the book: ‘Facing West, evangelicals have their sights set on a new ends of the earth.’ That statement properly acknowledges the fact that the predominant directions of Evangelical expansion are increasingly from East to West, and South to North, but this is not the central theme of Swartz's book. Rather, Swartz views world Christianity through the eyes of American Evangelicals, and then assesses what has changed in his own world in response, and what needs to change some more. American Evangelicals have begun to face East, but their horizons remain too exclusively Western. Is this what the book title is hinting at? Probably not.