Melani McAlister

Summary: An exploration of the international dimension of American evangelicalism, focusing particularly on Africa and the Middle East, the impact this American movement has had globally, and in turn ways global evangelicalism is engaging American evangelicalism.

American evangelicalism has been the subject of much historical, sociological and political analysis. Nearly all of this has been focused within the borders of the United States. Melani McAlister studies this movement through a different lens--the mission efforts of the past fifty years that has led to an international engagement, particularly as growing indigenous movements have challenged American evangelical beliefs and practices. The focus of the author is on efforts in the Middle East and Africa, consistent with the author's research area as an associate professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University.

The scope of this study is the last fifty years, going back to the 1960's. After an introduction, the first section of the book is concerned with "networks," the linkages of various key organizations within evangelicalism (e.g. the National Association of Evangelicals, InterVarsity, the Southern Baptist Convention, and others) both with one another, at conferences and in mission efforts. The narrative begins with the efforts of evangelicalism to reconcile its concern for peoples of color with the racial struggle coming to the surface in the 1960's, then moves on to the Congo Crisis and encounters with Marxist movements and the intersection of religious and political concerns--would Congo become another Vietnam. At the same time, Israel captured the American imagination in its victory in the 1967 war, leading to travel to biblical sites and increasing linkages between religious hopes and American foreign policy. This section concludes with the largest networking encounter of the period, Lausanne '74 and the growing tension between missional advance and social justice concerns from delegates in the developing world who were asserting their own voices increasingly.

Part Two is organized around body politics. It begins with Richard Wurmbrand displaying the wounds from his tortures before the U.S. Congress. Much of this section concerns persecution of evangelicals abroad and the intersection with concerns for religious liberty at home. McAlister traces the engagement with South African apartheid and how U.S. evangelicals dealt with the treatment of blacks and the witness of black Christian leaders. She explores the rising awareness of the Muslim World and the 10/40 Window heuristic for the unreached and resistant areas of the Muslim World. The section concludes with African American evangelicals efforts to address the crisis in South Sudan, and the redemption of people taken into slavery, an engagement of the heart that fails to get to the heart of the political turmoil in this troubled part of the world.

This leads naturally into Part Three, titled "Emotions." McAlister explores what she calls "enchanted internationalism" that motivates much of evangelical mission. She chronicles the "short term missions" movement and the motivation of so many who "have a heart" for the lost, but often do not truly engage the cultural realities of the places they go, often supplanting national workers who may be as, or more capable. McAlister tells the complicated story of American engagement around HIV/AIDS, and homosexuality in Africa, where African evangelicals take a much harsher line than Americans like Rick Warren, and resent what they see as American cultural imperialism asserting itself into African churches. Again, much of the focus is South Sudan, as we follow Dick Robinson from Elmbrook Church as he visits believers scattered through the country and joins a Global Urban Trek of InterVarsity students in Egypt working with South Sudanese refugees as they confront both the enchantment of close identification one student had with Muslim Egyptians, and the struggle of a black participant who feels the racism of Egyptians while identifying more closely with the South Sudanese. All confront the expectations on Americans, the complexities of political and social realities, and the challenge of trying to live authentic Christian lives in difficult circumstances.

As someone who lives inside the world McAlister is studying and works in one of the organizations she studies, I wondered how she would treat us. She is honest at one point in identifying herself as secular (on an InterVarsity mission project, one of the few organizations that permitted her to participate in such projects), and I thought fairly represented the facts. This was neither tribute nor hatchet job. It represents both noble efforts and questionable outlooks. She explores how global realities intersect with the American expressions of evangelicalism--how can we care for people of color around the world while tolerating racism at home? How do we hold mission in the Muslim world together with an increasing animus toward Muslims at home? How concerned are we for the religious liberties of the other as we advocate for our own? Furthermore, will we truly regard those who are fellow evangelicals around the world as equals and allow them to speak into our religious and political life as Americans? What happens when grateful recipients become equal partners? What happens when American evangelicals are a minority in a growing global movement?

I was deeply impressed with the incarnational approach of McAlister, who makes the effort to get on the inside that enables readers to see what American evangelicalism in its global efforts might look like to an outsider. I often read accounts of evangelicalism that are unrecognizable. The challenging aspect of this book is how recognizable it is, a mirror held up to us that shows all our features---and flaws.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary advance review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.… (més)

In Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000, Melani McAlister argues, “Cultural products such as films or novels contributed to thinking about both values and history in two ways. First, they helped to make the Middle East an acceptable area for the exercise of American power. Second, they played a role in representing the Middle East as a stage for the production of American identities – national, racial, and religious” (pg. 3). McAlister further argues, “After World War II, political and cultural conditions in the United States produced a post-Orientalist model of representing the Middle East for American audiences. These new representational dynamics were not always in the service of U.S. state power; in certain cases they explicitly contested the presumptions of official U.S. policies. But even the official rhetoric of nationalist expansionism worked to establish the United States as different from the old colonial powers, and it did so in part by fracturing the East-West binary on which traditional Orientalism had depended” (pg. 40). McAlister draws upon the theories of Edward Said while interjecting a greater focus on gender and race into traditional studies of foreign policy.
Examining film, McAlister argues, “The biblical epics [of the 1950s and 1960s] made representations of the religious history of the Middle East central to a discourse of U.S. ‘benevolent supremacy’ in world affairs” and that “biblical epics should be read not simply as antitotalitarian narratives but as anticolonial ones, situated at the moment when the United States took over from the European colonial nations the role of a preeminent world power” (pg. 46). In terms of race, “in the 1950s and 1960s, the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors took on a new salience in African American cultural politics. In part, the energized significance of the Middle East had to do with decolonization” (pg. 85). In this way, “Between 1955 and 1972, a potent combination of religious affiliation, anticolonial politics, and black nationalist radicalism turned claims upon the Middle East into a rich resource within African American communities. For both Christians and Muslims, religious culture made salient not only ancient histories, but also contemporary political events in the region, particularly the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs for control over territory” (pg. 86).
Looking to museum exhibits, McAlister writes, “Examining The Treasures of Tutankhamun as a diverse set of representations, it suggests that newspaper and television news stories, T-shirts and trinkets, books and magazine articles, museum catalogs, and the exhibit itself created ‘Tut’ as a significant cultural phenomenon. The Tut phenomenon was striking for two reasons: first, for the intimate relationships it forged between the high-culture world of museum exhibits and the popular traffic in celebrity icons, and second, for the way it became a site of struggle over both the nature of American world power and the domestic politics of race and gender” (pg. 125-126). Further, “Tut’s presence as a commercial sensation in the twentieth century linked him to commodity culture; like the department store Orientalism at the turn of the century, Tut’s presence enabled the marketing of everyday consumer goods as exotica” (pg. 150).
Moving to the late Cold War, McAlister writes, “In the 1980s…the discourse of terrorist threat developed in new and important ways as public reactions to the Iran hostage crisis were staged in the speeches of policymakers, in television news reports, and in the activities of communities around the country. These accounts brought Americans, rather than Israelis, into the primary position as victims of – and eventually fighters against – terrorism” (pg. 199). She continues, “As the discourse of terrorist threat developed, during the Iran crisis and after, it helped to construct a subtle but crucial change in the imagined geography of the Middle East, a change that was marked by a reclassification: ‘Islam’ became highlighted as the dominant signifier of the region, rather than oil wealth, Arabs, or Christian Holy Lands” (pg. 200).
McAlister concludes, “In the period after 1945, I have argued, there was a move away from the distinctly modern concern with the construction of a unified (white, masculine) national and racial identity toward a construction of the national subject as disjointed and diverse, gendered both masculine and feminine, and ultimately multiracial” (pg. 270). Finally, “The Middle East was mapped for Americans through the intersecting deployment of cultural interests and political investments. In constructing this history, [McAllister has] aimed to intervene in several ways in the current scholarship in cultural studies, American history, and colonial discourse studies” (pg. 270).… (més)