From Contextualization to Combat: Fuller Seminary, Spiritual Warfare, and the Diabolization of Evangelicals’ Global Enemies

During the 1980s and 1990s American evangelicals became fascinated with "spiritual warfare”. As they saw it, demonic forces were invading not only people and neighbourhoods, but whole nations, global regions and world religions — not least the territories of Islam — requiring in response what Fuller seminary professor Peter Wagner termed “strategic-level spiritual warfare”. In Wagner’s influential mode of engagement, geo-political and spiritual goals coalesced, with prayer becoming “militarized” and global politics spiritualized.

These pentecostalized politics linked American evangelicals with the Global South in complex ways. This paper builds on recent studies by focusing on Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission as a vital center of interchange and influence from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Taking engagement with Muslims and Islam as a case study, the paper shows how the seminary's shift of emphasis from contextualization to spiritual warfare, though premised on learning from the spirit-engagements of Christians in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, led to more hostile designations of religious traditions. This included an attention to the myriad forms of “folk Islam" as being inhabited by malevolent forces. Rather than Fuller’s embrace of spiritual warfare being determinative for how Wagner and George Otis Jnr could imaginatively map the Muslim world as a contiguous zone of spiritual malevolence, the paper will argue that Fuller’s cataloging of an invisible spirit dimension was “supercharged" by something else: the writings of Hal Lindsey and Frank Peretti whose apocalypticism popularised the notion that global politics had become the arena for the spiritual battle of light and darkness.