Twentieth Century Global Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity (review)

Mary Farrell Bednarowski’s Twentieth Century Global Christianity is the final installment of the seven volume A People’s History of Christianity, a series under Denis R. Janz’s general editorship. Each volume in the series gathers the work of a dozen or more distinguished scholars who each contribute a piece of a collective social history of Christianity. The series stretches from the origins of Christianity until the close of the twentieth century, providing a wide survey of the world’s largest religion. The chapters are uniformly well written, engaging, and highly illustrative. The contributors are all accomplished scholars who have embraced the project enthusiastically.

Bednarowski’s volume addresses twentieth century church history “with a difference.” She explains that “church” in this study “is not to be understood first and foremost as the hierarchical-institutional-bureaucratic corporation; rather, above all, it is the laity, the ordinary faithful, the people.” (xvii) Most readers of the Journal of Social History would find this an unsurprising approach in 2008, more than four decades after the establishment of a journal dedicated to just this approach to history. That it appears so novel to the editor, contributors, and possibly the primary audience for this volume may be because they come, for the most part, from departments of theology and religious studies. This volume represents both experimental forays into new ways of understanding religious history and a summing up of the progress to date. It is not a comprehensive narrative history of Christians in the last century, though. Instead, each of its sixteen chapters focus on specific moments or developments within the broader story.

Bednarowski divides the chapters among three broad sections, each united around a distinct theme rather than a chronological grouping. Part One addresses “The Authority of New Voices,” and includes three chapters on women’s experiences in various settings, as well as one chapter on Filipino popular religion. The book’s second part (“Traditions and Transformations”) includes six chapters that address aspects of Christianity on four continents. Part Three, entitled “Innovation and Authenticity,” consists of six chapters that focus more intently on Christianity in western culture, especially within the United States.

Many of the chapters convey the sense of excitement and experimentation that was common in early studies of the “new social history” of a few decades ago. These chapters read more like initial forays into exciting areas than summative reflections on oft-studied subjects. A strong sense of discovery runs through the introduction and most chapters, as the authors encounter this new way of seeing and understanding religious experience and practice. Bednarowski notes in her introduction that the book’s social history approach “is hardly new among academic historians” studying secular subjects, but relays that church historians, or historians of Chrsitianity, have instead focused on “theology, dogma, institutions, and ecclesio-political relations,” or on the “self –understandings of Christian intellectuals.” (xvii–xviii) But social history has recently begun to change theological studies. This sense of novelty can make for engaging reading, as one can see the authors’ growing awareness and palpable excitement with their new paths.

The authors seem to genuinely like their subjects and more often than not champion their lives and experiences. For example, Rosetta Ross presents the story of rural southern black women in the United States through the biographies of Fanny Lou Hamer and Victoria Way DeLee. Their stories lead to a focus on Christianity as a liberating experience, as they culminate in the civil rights movement of the middle twentieth century. Similarly, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz explores Hispanic women’s religion in the U.S. through the lens of a group of women working to save their parish from closing in Spanish Harlem. In each case, the authors present women supporting each other, organizing, and striving to preserve or assert community and human dignity—historical agency even—in the face of powerful oppositional forces.

Perhaps because the theological tradition in America is rooted in textual...