Melani McAlister: Evangelical Internationalism
My goal for this post is to lay out some thinking I’ve been doing lately about US evangelical Christians and their perceptions of the Middle East, which is the topic of my current research. In the book I’m working on, I argue that many observers, including most people on the left, have misunderstood the nature of American evangelical politics, in part because they misconstrue the nature and direction of evangelicals’ interest in global issues, starting with Iraq and the Mid East, but also in Africa and elsewhere. The picture is far more complicated than is often acknowledged by those who see all evangelicals as trying to bring about Armageddon.
Yesterday, the _Washington Post_ reported on the narrowing of the “God gap” between Republicans and Democrats in the United States, arguing that the Democrat wins last Tuesday could be traced, in part, to shifts among white evangelical Protestants: in this election, compared to the House races in 2004, the Democrats got 28% of the white evangelical vote. It wasn’t a tremendous increase from 2 years ago, but it was something. And it does leave us with the reality that almost 30% of white American evangelicals voted Democratic. African American evangelical numbers were undoubtedly much, much higher. I'm not one to see voting for the Democratic party as the sign of great liberalism, much less liberation, and it certainly was not either for many who cast their ballots. But for those of us opposed to the Iraq war and the “war on terror,” there are some genuinely positive changes going on among American evangelicals, including not only some changes in voting patterns, but also a d
ramatic increase in consciousness of global issues and increasing willingness to fight for certain global social justice issues (i.e. global poverty or environmentalism). But there is also among evangelicals a strong anti-Islamic strain that is actually accentuated and enabled by this globalization, and which positions evangelicals at the center of the deadly rhetoric and politics of the “clash of civilizations.” (There are also evangelicals who are opposed to much of what I will trace below, who have positioned themselves in the forefront of “dialogue” with Muslims, although they are a minority. And of course, the “clash” rhetoric is not an evangelical invention; it is a secular concept, popularized by Samuel Huntington, and widely used as political shorthand.)
Missionary work has been no small part of what I’ll shorthand as the new evangelical internationalism, with the understanding that internationalism, like cosmopolitanism, is an ambiguous term. It’s is important to note, however, that this “missionary work” no longer refers to an activity in which predominantly Western or Americans go off to unilaterally evangelize “native” peoples. Instead, with the rapid emergence what Philip Jenkins has called the “next Christendom” – the numerical and social ascendance of the churches of the global south-- the worlds’ Christians evangelize in all directions. The United States remains the single largest “sending” country in the world, but South Korea, with its far smaller population, is second, and Nigeria, Brazil, and many others send large numbers of missionaries. (Well aware of, and often embracing, this globalization, US evangelical culture – through magazines, books, and even music video-- increasingly represents itself as impressivel
y and necessarily internationalist in its outlook. At a conference recently, one white evangelical man said something to me that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago: “I can’t help thinking about global issues,” he insisted. “I’m part of a third world religious group.” And it’s true that evangelicals are quite active on issues they once avoided or opposed, like increasing US aid for Africa. Maybe this speaks to some of the debate about compassion that we’ve been having; and, as I hope this post indicates, the difficulty of finding a “pure” act of compassion.)
But Islam has also been a central concern in new missionary work, and in the concomitant “looking outward” of American evangelicals. In the 1990s, global missionary work took on a new intensity when Argentinian evangelist Luis Bush founded the “AD2000 and Beyond” movement, which proclaimed as its goal “a church for every people and a gospel for every person by A.D. 2000.” The movement’s more specific target was the “10/40 Window,” that is, the rectangular region on the world map between 10° and 40° north latitude, encompassing North Africa, most of the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. This, according to activists, was an area where Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism “enslave” a majority of the inhabitants. Of these three religions, he argued Islam was of the greatest concern because it was “reaching out energetically to all parts of the globe; in a similar strategy, we must penetrate (its) heart with the liberating truth of the gospel.”
The AD2000 movement took off, and it included a commitment to proselytizing everywhere, including countries where proselytizing is illegal. And that has been the source of a great deal of tension on the ground – particularly when “outside” Christians, be they Americans in Sudan or Brazilians in Iran, come in and start evangelizing local populations. In many of those situations, local Christians are in fact discriminated against or suffer violence, and they are only more endangered with enthusiasts from elsewhere in the world show up to help. It should also be said that evangelical Christians –themselves- are very aware of this issue, as hotly contested debates in church magazines and missionary conferences attest; they are not ignorant of the problems, but disagree about what the strategies for addressing it should be. (Some of the participants in this discussion may be able to speak to specific situations better than I can. As part of my research, however, I have recently t
raveled to Cairo with a missionary group, and will go to Southern Sudan with another soon.)
In the context of this missionary expansion, stories of persecuted Christians are everywhere. In emails and on websites, in fundraising DVDs or in sermons, American evangelicals hear stories of the sufferings of fellow believers – pastors imprisoned in China, new converts attacked in India or Egypt… story after story, and horrific images, all delivered straight to their inbox. It is crucial to say here that I absolutely support freedom of religion, and while the tensions between religious groups globally are obviously an enormous topic I can only mention here, I am deeply disturbed by what seems to be a decline in the “secular” spaces that allow religion to be practiced freely. But the question is how the struggle is waged, the terms of the debate. In the evangelical community, those tensions have led many American evangelicals, -along with Christians from around the world- to see themselves as –fundamentally- persecuted.
In evangelical culture in the US, the vivid accounts of suffering have led to a common refrain that there is a kind of global conspiracy against Christianity. At the international level, that conspiracy is posited as being one of Islam against Christianity. Domestically, however, the idea of persecution has been enormously productive for American evangelicals, who see themselves as fighting against secularists as well as “radical Islam” (to use the somewhat disingenuous phrase that is common in the US). Drawing on the general, global sense of endangerment and embattlement, the idea of a “war against Christians” in the United States has been used by conservative evangelicals to present every defeat or setback to their agenda (i.e. the Ten Commandments in the courthouse) as an example of persecution.
Let me end this overly long post, though, by pointing out that, whatever else it is, the world view encoded in the missions work and the focus on persecuted Christians, it is –not- a code for white power. The imagined geography here is –not- the West against the Rest (as Samuel Huntington famously put it). Instead, it posits a great multi-racial coalition of Christians around the world, Christians (mostly evangelicals) missionaries and the persecuted Christians who “confront Islam” in their own nations. Nations do not mark the fault lines of this clash; the imagined communities are in key ways transnational and global; they are made up of believers across the globe who see their alliances with each other as more central than national or regional identities. For American evangelicals, it might well mean that ties to American nationalism and even identifications with “Western civilization” are in competition with, and perhaps even/one day subservient to, a new kind of Christian globalism.
> Melani McAlister
Yesterday, the _Washington Post_ reported on the narrowing of the “God gap” between Republicans and Democrats in the United States, arguing that the Democrat wins last Tuesday could be traced, in part, to shifts among white evangelical Protestants: in this election, compared to the House races in 2004, the Democrats got 28% of the white evangelical vote. It wasn’t a tremendous increase from 2 years ago, but it was something. And it does leave us with the reality that almost 30% of white American evangelicals voted Democratic. African American evangelical numbers were undoubtedly much, much higher. I'm not one to see voting for the Democratic party as the sign of great liberalism, much less liberation, and it certainly was not either for many who cast their ballots. But for those of us opposed to the Iraq war and the “war on terror,” there are some genuinely positive changes going on among American evangelicals, including not only some changes in voting patterns, but also a d
ramatic increase in consciousness of global issues and increasing willingness to fight for certain global social justice issues (i.e. global poverty or environmentalism). But there is also among evangelicals a strong anti-Islamic strain that is actually accentuated and enabled by this globalization, and which positions evangelicals at the center of the deadly rhetoric and politics of the “clash of civilizations.” (There are also evangelicals who are opposed to much of what I will trace below, who have positioned themselves in the forefront of “dialogue” with Muslims, although they are a minority. And of course, the “clash” rhetoric is not an evangelical invention; it is a secular concept, popularized by Samuel Huntington, and widely used as political shorthand.)
Missionary work has been no small part of what I’ll shorthand as the new evangelical internationalism, with the understanding that internationalism, like cosmopolitanism, is an ambiguous term. It’s is important to note, however, that this “missionary work” no longer refers to an activity in which predominantly Western or Americans go off to unilaterally evangelize “native” peoples. Instead, with the rapid emergence what Philip Jenkins has called the “next Christendom” – the numerical and social ascendance of the churches of the global south-- the worlds’ Christians evangelize in all directions. The United States remains the single largest “sending” country in the world, but South Korea, with its far smaller population, is second, and Nigeria, Brazil, and many others send large numbers of missionaries. (Well aware of, and often embracing, this globalization, US evangelical culture – through magazines, books, and even music video-- increasingly represents itself as impressivel
y and necessarily internationalist in its outlook. At a conference recently, one white evangelical man said something to me that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago: “I can’t help thinking about global issues,” he insisted. “I’m part of a third world religious group.” And it’s true that evangelicals are quite active on issues they once avoided or opposed, like increasing US aid for Africa. Maybe this speaks to some of the debate about compassion that we’ve been having; and, as I hope this post indicates, the difficulty of finding a “pure” act of compassion.)
But Islam has also been a central concern in new missionary work, and in the concomitant “looking outward” of American evangelicals. In the 1990s, global missionary work took on a new intensity when Argentinian evangelist Luis Bush founded the “AD2000 and Beyond” movement, which proclaimed as its goal “a church for every people and a gospel for every person by A.D. 2000.” The movement’s more specific target was the “10/40 Window,” that is, the rectangular region on the world map between 10° and 40° north latitude, encompassing North Africa, most of the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. This, according to activists, was an area where Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism “enslave” a majority of the inhabitants. Of these three religions, he argued Islam was of the greatest concern because it was “reaching out energetically to all parts of the globe; in a similar strategy, we must penetrate (its) heart with the liberating truth of the gospel.”
The AD2000 movement took off, and it included a commitment to proselytizing everywhere, including countries where proselytizing is illegal. And that has been the source of a great deal of tension on the ground – particularly when “outside” Christians, be they Americans in Sudan or Brazilians in Iran, come in and start evangelizing local populations. In many of those situations, local Christians are in fact discriminated against or suffer violence, and they are only more endangered with enthusiasts from elsewhere in the world show up to help. It should also be said that evangelical Christians –themselves- are very aware of this issue, as hotly contested debates in church magazines and missionary conferences attest; they are not ignorant of the problems, but disagree about what the strategies for addressing it should be. (Some of the participants in this discussion may be able to speak to specific situations better than I can. As part of my research, however, I have recently t
raveled to Cairo with a missionary group, and will go to Southern Sudan with another soon.)
In the context of this missionary expansion, stories of persecuted Christians are everywhere. In emails and on websites, in fundraising DVDs or in sermons, American evangelicals hear stories of the sufferings of fellow believers – pastors imprisoned in China, new converts attacked in India or Egypt… story after story, and horrific images, all delivered straight to their inbox. It is crucial to say here that I absolutely support freedom of religion, and while the tensions between religious groups globally are obviously an enormous topic I can only mention here, I am deeply disturbed by what seems to be a decline in the “secular” spaces that allow religion to be practiced freely. But the question is how the struggle is waged, the terms of the debate. In the evangelical community, those tensions have led many American evangelicals, -along with Christians from around the world- to see themselves as –fundamentally- persecuted.
In evangelical culture in the US, the vivid accounts of suffering have led to a common refrain that there is a kind of global conspiracy against Christianity. At the international level, that conspiracy is posited as being one of Islam against Christianity. Domestically, however, the idea of persecution has been enormously productive for American evangelicals, who see themselves as fighting against secularists as well as “radical Islam” (to use the somewhat disingenuous phrase that is common in the US). Drawing on the general, global sense of endangerment and embattlement, the idea of a “war against Christians” in the United States has been used by conservative evangelicals to present every defeat or setback to their agenda (i.e. the Ten Commandments in the courthouse) as an example of persecution.
Let me end this overly long post, though, by pointing out that, whatever else it is, the world view encoded in the missions work and the focus on persecuted Christians, it is –not- a code for white power. The imagined geography here is –not- the West against the Rest (as Samuel Huntington famously put it). Instead, it posits a great multi-racial coalition of Christians around the world, Christians (mostly evangelicals) missionaries and the persecuted Christians who “confront Islam” in their own nations. Nations do not mark the fault lines of this clash; the imagined communities are in key ways transnational and global; they are made up of believers across the globe who see their alliances with each other as more central than national or regional identities. For American evangelicals, it might well mean that ties to American nationalism and even identifications with “Western civilization” are in competition with, and perhaps even/one day subservient to, a new kind of Christian globalism.
> Melani McAlister