Gospel of the 'Orient': Koreans, Race and the Transpacific Rise of American Evangelicalism in the Cold War Era

Abstract

This dissertation is a history of the transpacific rise of American evangelicalism in the Cold War era (1950-80). The Korean War (1950-53), the first “hot” war of the Cold War, brought together a new generation of American fundamentalists and South Korean Protestants who forged transpacific networks that helped to reinvent a parochial American fundamentalism into mainstream American evangelicalism. These networks led to the birth of World Vision (1950), the internationalization of Campus Crusade for Christ (1958), and the largest Billy Graham Evangelical Association crusade (1973). While South Korean Protestants were incorporated into these evangelical “parachurches” through Cold War Orientalist logic, South Koreans also used parachurches to reimagine their place in the world order as they aspired to become the next leaders of Christian empire. Such South Korean Protestant ambitions suggested a critique of U.S. Cold War expansionism in Asia, yet led to the rise of a conservative Korean Protestant right that transnationally reinforced the Christian right in America. Not unlike its eighteenth-century transatlantic roots, evangelicalism remade itself in the twentieth-century by crossing borders. This study employs English and Korean sources from archives in the U.S. and South Korea, and oral histories conducted in both countries. In narrating history from both sides of the Pacific, this dissertation recasts a tradition primarily understood in Atlantic and national terms, and reimagines American religious history in global context.