Transnational Evangelicals and South–South Solidarity in the Lausanne Movement, 1974–89

This paper examines the efforts of South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American evangelical Christians to forge solidarities across barriers of nationality, language, and ethnicity within the Lausanne Movement, one of the largest international missionary organizations of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S.-backed and -funded Lausanne Movement brought together evangelical Christians from around the world in an attempt to create a global forum for evangelical missionary activities and a clearinghouse for the latest information on global missions.

I argue, however, that the Lausanne Movement also fostered an “insurgent” countercurrent within its ranks, bringing together Global South evangelicals steeped in radical politics who resisted U.S. hegemony—both in the mission field and in global political economy. Bringing together materials from under-utilized archives, I uncover the voices of Protestant thinkers with very different priorities than the U.S. evangelical establishment. These Global South Christians pushed their American counterparts to renounce their support of unfettered neoliberal capitalism and U.S. military interventions in the so-called Third World.

By shifting the focus from U.S. to Global South evangelicals, I re-think the history of global evangelicalism in a period of rapid growth and transformation. In addition, by bringing the religious and intellectual history of global evangelicalism into conversation with the global political history of the 1970s and 1980s, I challenge prevailing notions of evangelical Christians as monolithically conservative, provincial, and unconcerned with social justice. Finally, by focusing on these Global South figures, I demonstrate the ways marginalized thinkers and activists within the evangelical world created networks of support and solidarity within a global community whose leaders were often ambivalent (and occasionally hostile) to their goals and perspectives.