God's Internationalists

If history is fundamentally about story, King succeeds here. Against all odds, he manages to make the history of this bureaucratic behemoth a rollicking tale of one man's strength and weakness-and an organization's fascinating response to the chastening of decolonization, Vietnam, and famine in Ethiopia . . . [T]his book succeeds because the story of World Vision matters . . . {It] may be one of the most necessary interventions in American evangelical historiography in many years. -Patheos/The Anxious Bench David P. King constructively upends long-standing narratives of modern evangelicalism's development in the twentieth century that tend to emphasize its politicization on American soil. Offering a refreshingly nuanced reading of World Vision, he uses the organization's history to illustrate how modern evangelicalism's work abroad unfolded independently of domestic political developments dictated by the Religious Right. Along the way, he raises intriguing and important claims about the nature of church-state relations, secularization, and religion and public life in contemporary America. -Darren Dochuk, University of Notre Dame God's Internationalists is a fascinating new narrative about American evangelicals and politics in the 20th century . . . [T]his is an important book that complicates our understanding of how evangelicals came to see social issues as a key part of their Christian witness. -Christianity Today