Yet these avowedly Christian longings to see the world transformed did not always line up; by 1970 they were being defined over and against each other. Fuller seminary’s Donald McGavran objected that the 1968 World Council of Churches had “betrayed the 2 billion” non-Christian people of the world by redefining mission as humanitarian action, and he actively opposed the evangelical social justice contingent at the 1974 Lausanne Conference on similar grounds. These different versions of “saving the world” were themselves in flux and, despite power differentials, profoundly shaped by Christians in the Global South with whom Americans partnered and who resisted being confined to the role of beneficiaries.

Though transnational studies have tended to focus on either liberal or conservative Christians, this panel brings together experts from both streams. Starting at the critical juncture of the early 1970s, the papers offer four contrasting Protestant errands to the world, each profoundly shaped by transnational encounter: Margaret Mead’s anti-plutonium advocacy and its links to the South Pacific; the Lausanne movement and its insurgent anti-capitalist undercurrent; the development of geo-political “spiritual warfare” at Fuller seminary; and Christianity Today’s repositioning of itself as global mediary at the dawn of the digital age. Set alongside each other the papers raise a less-pursued line of enquiry: how were these competing Christian visions shaped by one another, and even constituents of a sprawling American Protestant globalism that cannot be so neatly divided in two?