New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa by Stephen Offutt (review)

The relationship between the global and local in the study of religion is a vexed one. Either authors float too high, providing grand generalizations without much substance, or they focus in so closely to the subject that their data has no obvious theoretical value. Stephen Offutt's New Centers of Global Evangelicalism attempts to solve these problems by focusing on two particular "New Centers of Evangelicalism" (or "NCEs"), El Salvador and South Africa, and by generating theoretical approaches that interact with the data he generates through literature research, fieldwork, and qualitative data from interviews. Essentially, the latter emerge from interpretations of the Weberian tradition, filtered through Peter Berger, David Martin, Simon Coleman, and the like. It is in the qualitative data (particularly narrative accounts of his subjects) that the book shines most brightly: his interviews with evangelical political actors in South Africa in particular create a sense of solidity that is often missing in other, similar works. Overall, the work is a useful contribution to the field, snapshotting El Salvador and South Africa in case studies that will no doubt be used again and again by teachers of world religions.

Offutt also does the field of global evangelical studies a service in what the book fails to do well. The core concepts—of NCEs and Religious Social Forces—reflect a broader trend to attempt to manufacture facticities via "anagramization." Both concepts face their problems as the book progresses. By the end, we are not sure, for instance, to what the term "NCE" actually refers. It is used variously to refer to places (like Seoul, Wenzhou, Singapore, Lagos, Sao Paolo, and the like) that have become net exporters of evangelical Christianity, that have a transnational evangelical professional class, and/or that simply have a large number of evangelicals. The problem, of course, is the anagram itself, which raises the expectation that it refers to a definable social phenomenon rather than "gee, there are a lot of evangelicals here." In the end, its real contribution is to point toward nodes in a global religious exchange economy, the careful study of which might well tell us a lot more about how "Religious Social Forces" traffic ideas, identities, and other cultural forms around the world. Here, too, there is a problem. Offutt's definition of a Religious Social Force "is one in which religious symbols, resources, actors or organizations are in motion, and are setting other (in this case religious) symbols, actors or organizations in motion" (p. 8). This does not add much to what we already know about the expansion of evangelicalism in the Global South. Offutt commendably has a good description of how identities are transmitted and exported. Missing, however, is an adequate theory—applicable to NCEs more broadly—of why religious identities originate and how they are formed and develop in such NCEs.

Constraining the restless global data also leads Offutt into statements that are ambiguous, badly adapted, or inaccurate. It is surely not accurate to say, for example, that there are "three primary audiences or groups of consumers that evangelicals in NCEs hope to reach when they export religious people and products," when the "groups" referred to are "their own emigrant populations, other Christian centers that usually include neighboring countries or the West, and parts of the globe that are predominantly non-Christian" (p. 119). While these are a mixture of movements and geographical indicators, none of these "audiences" are consistent with one another, or in some cases, actually audiences at all ("the Christian West"?). That sort of artificial categorizing is, while no doubt the result of having to compress heavily to meet the publisher's format, neither accurate nor helpful in terms of laying a basis for better analysis. What was needed here is a close reading of the...