Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 176:701 (Jan 2019)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 176:701 (January-March 2019) p. 107

Book Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals. By Melani McAlister. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xvi + 379 pp. $29.95.

McAlister is associate professor of American studies and international affairs at George Washington University. This book “explores how American evangelicals have engaged the world beyond their borders over the past fifty years, particularly in the Middle East and Africa” (2).

McAlister divides the book into three parts. The first “highlights the networks that shaped the postwar period—the spaces, institutions, and ideas that brought a broad range of evangelicals into conversation in the United States and globally” (12). In the second, she “examines the politics of the body” (ibid.). She discusses evangelical responses to apartheid in South Africa and activism in South Sudan in the end of the century. She argues, “An embrace of the church as the body of Christ and narratives of persecution were central to evangelical body politics” (12–13). The third part focuses on “public circulation of emotion. . . . Any of us might respond to events with our heart, but our hearts learn from the world of feeling around them” (13)

She concludes her introduction: “For fifty years, US evangelical life has been lived across borders, alive with passion and fraught with questions. Hope, anger, fear, and longing have shaped the ways that American believers operate on the global stage, as they have struggled to live in a world they understand to be God’s kingdom. That kingdom has been understood to be universal, borderless. And yet, evangelicals, like everybody else, have lived in a world deeply divided by national borders, inhabited by refugees and migrants, riven by dramatically uneven distributions of wealth and power, and dominated by the US as the most powerful state the world has ever known” (ibid.). It is this tension between the borderless kingdom and the American cultural situatedness of evangelicalism that is the heart of her book.

McAlister is a good teller of stories, a competent historian, and a gifted writer. Written by a scholar, this excellent book is accessible to nonscholars. The people and events described are familiar to a generation of American evangelicals who lived through this period. Younger evangelicals are well served by having some understanding of the history of this movement and particularly its impact and influence outside North America. And nonevangelicals will be helped to grow in their understanding of this movement.

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