American Religion, Askew: An Experiment in Global Interpretation
by Hillary Kaell
In 2005, I moved from Canada to the United States to start a doctoral degree in American Studies. That year was also a good one for scholarly turns of phrase calling attention to the unevenness of global power. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo had just called it “patchy,” while Frederick Cooper pronounced it full of “lumps” and Anna Tsing pinpointed its “frictions.”
As a first-year student I had yet to encounter this scholarship, but moving to the US did unsettle me in ways that later drew me to it. It was during the initial grad school seminars, sitting among my American peers, that I became aware of a certain sensibility that comes from growing up in a place of comparatively little global power and a tenth of the population of its neighboring country. Canadian understandings of a national history and culture, as well as our aspirations for success, are so often framed looking outwards. We are wedged between England’s Commonwealth and France’s francophonie. We are deeply entangled with the (far larger) US culture and economy. Now that I’m back in Canada, I’m reminded of our peripheral status any time I try to order something online and am told the Canadian market is too small to justify stocking it; I can cross the border to pick it up in Vermont. A small inconvenience, of course, but one that keeps markets, place, and power on my mind.
There is an analogy in this to the study of US religion. Americanists—including me—are such a big, self-supporting market that we have the privilege of looking inwards. We generally read American-published books by American scholars, with some exceptions for our colleagues in Western Europe and Australia. It’s not malicious; we just don’t need to read what other people write. When I told a friend who studies Zambia that I was concerned my work wasn’t sufficiently comparative and ‘globally’ oriented, she laughed. That’s not a problem in her field. There are too few studies by Zambians or about Zambia to sustain a closed system. To be in conversation with others, scholars must offer cross-national comparisons and clarify larger patterns. And Zambians are used to thinking that way; it’s a small country with a recent colonial history, surrounded by eight neighboring states.
Returning to Frederick Cooper’s term, being an Americanist is a “lumpy” type of power. Lumpy because, while it may cause an uncomfortable jolt on the road, it rarely makes us change course. As I was writing Christian Globalism at Home, however, the lump began to chafe. The book covers two centuries of fundraising through child sponsorship in order to clarify how US Christians who rarely travel make ‘the global’ seem real. The term “globalism” alerts readers to how objective existing networks of people, infrastructure, and money are important, but not the only story; we also need to pay close attention to the imaginative and experiential labor that fuels an idea of the global. That idea at the heart of Christian globalism necessarily obscures friction. It acknowledges power differentials—economically, politically, and such—but the ultimate goal is to strip them away to reveal ‘true’ human sameness under God. The book sheds light on the process of making sameness by pointing out gaps, infelicities, and absences. And yet my research methodology was, one might say, an exercise in lumpy power. It cut across dozens of locations outside the US where sponsorship organizations operated, but always from the perspective of American sources. I was also privy to hundreds of letters by foreign people, but only those that American organizations and donors chose to preserve.
The number of new and forthcoming studies of US religion and its global connections makes it an exciting time to be doing this kind of work, and many of us are considering the challenges involved. Three issues are discussed most often. First is the question of bounded expertise. As a scholar who specializes in the study of the United States, making authoritative claims about other people poses an ethical dilemma; I want to be careful not to make facile assumptions or usurp the work of scholars working elsewhere. Second, a methodology grounded in multi-sited research is important, but it is also (sometimes prohibitively) expensive. Third, and relatedly, we are often linguistically unprepared to take on studies that deeply engage non-English speaking locations. Diversifying who is admitted to American Religion programs—especially more students who are heritage-language speakers—is a key first step. Another is emphasizing language training at the PhD level and, ideally, providing resources for study abroad. Scholars of US religion have been making strides to address these issues, but we can also learn from adjacent fields. Our colleagues studying ‘world history’ are debating issues of bounded expertise; those in anthropology are designing multi-sited collaborations; those in Latinx and Ethnic Studies are working to diversify linguistic repertoires and value students and colleagues who are non-native English speakers.
I note these possibilities to prompt discussion in our conferences and classrooms. I hope this ‘experiment’ is an object lesson of sorts to encourage us to sit uncomfortably with the “lumpy” power of our field, while envisioning future possibilities. How might we design more, and better, experiments like this one? How might we think otherwise about the boundaries of our work?
Repurposing Christian Globalism at Home
I often tell graduate students that no piece of scholarship is ever really done. My immediate aim is usually to give them the confidence to stop re-editing and hand in their work, but I also believe it to be true. With that in mind, as I sent the final proofs of Christian Globalism at Home to the publisher, I decided to see if I could repurpose the project to prompt conversation between scholars in multiple regions. How might a scholar elsewhere might respond to a book, like mine, on US globalism? How could their responses help us set US religion askew?
It was a mildly nerve-wracking process. After examining dozens of departmental websites, I emailed six colleagues in six different countries who were strangers to me. I was quite sure I would never hear back but, to the contributors’ lasting credit, they graciously agreed to hear me out.
In choosing who to email, I was guided by the themes and geographic regions covered in each chapter of the book. I looked for scholars whose expertise overlapped with aspects of the thematic content and, ideally, regional focus. I was inspired by the 2001 forum in Religion & American Culture, in which four contributors reflected on how people in their countries of origin—South Africa, South Korea, India, and Germany, respectively—viewed US religion from afar. Rather than ask non-Americans to discuss their perceptions of Americans, however, I wanted to hear about their research itself. I also wanted to diversify the line up, since the 2001 forum was limited to senior male scholars. I contacted a mix of senior and junior scholars from a range of disciplines. I also chose scholars who hailed (more or less) from the places in which they worked, rather than foreign-born professors at US universities.
For Chapters 1 and 2, which cover US missions in India and ideas about sin, love, and family, I invited Charu Gupta, a historian of colonial India who specializes in family structures and sexuality. Chapter 3 centers on how Near East Relief promoted modernity, politics, and humanitarian ‘friendship’ in the 1920s, so I contacted Ömer Turan, a historian of the Ottoman Empire with expertise in modernization movements and Protestant missions. Chapter 4 covers mid-twentieth century American ideas about race and ‘kin-like’ attachments to Korean children, which led me to Hyang-Jin Jung, an anthropologist who writes about emotion and personhood in South Korean education. For Chapter 5 on US Christian debates about materialism and charity in the 1970s and 1980s, I asked Wai Lung Steve Cheung, a sociologist whose recent PhD work examines religious giving in Hong Kong. Chapter 6 focuses on faith-based organizations and trust-building, drawing on examples from African field sites; I contacted Megan Robertson, whose PhD thesis in Religious Studies tracks identity and Christian organizational culture in South Africa. Last, I emailed Robbie Boon Hua Goh, a professor of literature in Singapore whose latest book examines transnational South Asian Christianity. I asked him if he would comment on Chapter 7, which explores Christian techniques for creating spatiotemporal collapse.
Once I had the contributors in place, I needed a structure. Nearly a decade of working in bilingual Montreal has impressed upon me the importance of flexible communication strategies for cross-linguistic dialogue. Although ultimately each contributor opted to write an essay-type piece, I left the format wide open. Depending on how they felt about writing in English, they could have generated point form notes, photos with captions, or something else. I also edited each piece, going back and forth with some of the authors over email a number of times. No one wants to sound like an AI translating device; based on my own experiences contributing scholarship in French, I recognize the valuing of knowing—even before committing to a project—that a colleague is prepared to take the time to help polish the text.
Initially, I sent each contributor a copy of the book manuscript, highlighting the chapter I had ‘assigned’ them. I reminded them that it was not a book review; each contribution should showcase their work. However, based on contributors’ initial feedback—essentially, what are you asking me to do?—I decided to tailor the discussion further. I sent each one another email outlining a handful of themes from their ‘assigned’ chapter that I felt were pertinent across many studies of US religion, which could serve as a starting point for cross-cultural engagement. For instance, when I emailed Charu Gupta about the first two chapters, I listed five general themes: Patriarchy, gender, and the nineteenth-century family; Colonialism and role of children therein (e.g. missionary schools); Sentimentalism and the idea of circulating sentiments (e.g. disgust, shame, love) within the family and/or the ‘human family’; Universalism and how certain ideologies (e.g. Christianity) understand the world as interconnected; Middle-class anxieties about gaining/retaining wealth in growing capitalist economies. Following the list of themes, I asked each contributor to consider how their work, or that of their colleagues, could enhance discussions about these themes. I ended with a question: What should students in North America know to get a more trans-global perspective?
Reading Across the Contributions
Readers will make their own links and raise their own questions as they explore the contributions but, from my perspective, a few aspects are notable.
The contributions by Turan, Goh, and Gupta all make the point that American intervention destabilizes local power on a number of levels, from the highest political channels to interpersonal relations. Americanists are familiar with this premise, of course, but our colleagues’ work can steer us into more subtle terrain as we begin to hear from locals how history is remembered and lives are lived in relation to those pressures. The authors make abundantly clear that the effects of American power can only be adequately understood if we learn more about its interaction with preexisting structures elsewhere. In Turan’s contribution, the result is a chipping away at empire from within; in Gupta’s case, it aggravates and disrupts caste pressures; in Goh’s study, it affects how evangelical congregations negotiate which speakers to invite or which languages to use. I do not suggest that our monographs ought to include everything—a Sisyphean task if there ever was one—but we should consider how reading and assigning work by scholars such as these, alongside our own work in courses on American religion, can help address the lumpy power that comes from imbalanced levels of detail: our work on the US offers nuance, subtlety, and recognition of regional difference, while our descriptions of places elsewhere so often remain general and ill-formed.
The contributors also remind us of gaps in our scholarly priorities. Goh’s work, for example, emphasizes the symbolic and pragmatic character of language. Scholars of US religion prioritize categories of difference like gender and race over linguistic diversity. But Goh writes from Singapore—a nation with four official languages—about India, a nation with 2 official languages and 29 individual languages with more than a million native speakers. The Asian congregants Goh studies view English as structuring business, diplomacy, and evangelical Christianity—which therefore can become linguistically-related fields of action. At the same time, as he notes, US cultural influence is significantly constrained in territories where English is not popularly used.
Other contributions flip or skew recognizable concepts. Jung’s piece starts with how mid-twentieth century notions of family related to communism and internationalism—a familiar topic in our scholarship and teaching—and reorients it through a Korean cultural lens. She introduces US religionists to the ideology of “familism,” rooted in the moral-political arrangements of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1897 CE), and its elaboration through the ‘intense’ appropriation of family metaphors in two Korean-born religious movements—Jucheism and the Unification Church. In conversation with my notion of “kin-like” attachments in sponsorship, Jung underscores how family metaphors powerfully exercise particularizing tendencies, even while they universalize within the boundaries they mark.
Of all the contributions, Cheung’s work on contemporary Hong Kong churches overlaps most significantly with my own, which makes it a good example of how the familiar can become strange once we pay attention to local context. In our respective projects, Cheung and I both emphasize how Christians mark their monetary giving as distinct from secular giving through the physical processes that accompany it: ritualization during worship and an emphasis on emotions like joy or gratitude. At one level, our overlapping conclusions are not surprising since Cheung writes about Baptist churches with roots in Anglo-Protestant missions. Yet though Baptists in Hong Kong and the US may both ‘pass the plate’ or cultivate feelings of gratitude, Cheung shows how his interlocutors measure their behavior against norms in Chinese folk religion. In short, similar rituals—even those shared in likeminded churches—may be colored by very different motivations and effects; we must be in conversation across cultures to pick up those subtleties.
In Robertson’s contribution, the Methodist Church of South Africa (MCSA) also has features that will be familiar to US readers. Comparing her findings to mine, she notes that organizations seen as progressive—sponsorship NGOs in my work or the “Church of Mandela” in hers—can nevertheless use subtle forms of ‘audit’ to control the bodies of those they purport to support: foreign children and queer clergy, respectively. Institutional identities can, in Robertson’s words, also “function as umbrella ideals” that shade the gaps left by absence (children who drop out of sponsorship) or violence (policing queer clergy’s bodies) to reassure sponsors or MCSA members that the institution is indeed fulfilling a Christian mission and driving social justice.
Robertson was drawn to the cracks in my narrative, which was especially evident in the earliest iterations of the piece she sent me over email. She lingered on my brief mention that a child’s unwillingness to smile is ‘more complicated’ than unhappiness. She caught how I wrote that measures of success reflect middle-class norms but failed to note how they also produce them. Reading into the ‘cracks’ is how we, as scholars, often engage each other’s work and, in that respect, there is particular value in widening our circle of conversation partners to include geographically diverse viewpoints.
Another productive moment of engagement emerged as I worked with Ömer Turan on his piece about US missionaries in the Ottoman empire. He critiques my chapter as treating missionary activities with sympathy and respect, partly because, in his view, I use the concepts of humanitarianism and mission interchangeably in the chapter I sent him. This reading surprised and not a little dismayed me: did it sound like I was advocating a century-old Protestant mission in the Middle East? In our emails, I wrote that I had thought I was rather critical of missionary work. Pondering it further, I believe the issue lies in our respective definitions of critique. The chapter tracks the “production” of humanitarianism—a task I view as inherently critical insofar as it deconstructs how fundraisers created slippage between Christian missions and “nonsectarian” humanitarianism. Whereas I view deconstruction as critique, however, my impression is that my Turkish colleague defines it more directly as a statement of who was right and wrong. “We are looking from different angles but both of us [are] searching [for] the truth,” he wrote to me. “We maybe complete each other. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between us.” We agreed that one day we’d like to have a more extended conversation about our respective work.
There are clearly challenges when we work across different languages, academic cultures, and disciplines—and that’s why such exchanges require that we treat them with patience as dialogues with potential to grow and change over time. This ‘experiment’ in interpretation is merely a first step. The question, for scholars of US religion, is how we can start the process across multiple conversations and platforms, and integrate the results into our teaching and learning.
Contributors
Charu Gupta, Associate Professor of History, University of Delhi, India
Ömer Turan, Professor of History, Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey
Hyang Jin Jung, Professor of Anthropology, Seoul National University, South Korea
Wai Lung Steve Cheung, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Hong Kong, China
Megan Robertson, Post-doctoral researcher, Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Robbie Boon Hua Goh, Professor of Literature and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore
Hillary Kaell is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal. She is also a faculty fellow in the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University where she co-directs the Sensing Atmospheres working group. She is author of Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (New York UP, 2014) and editor of Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec (McGill-Queens UP, 2017). Her most recent book is Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States (Princeton UP, 2020), which examines the development of US Christians' global networks and imaginaries through the lens of one of the world's most lucrative fundraising tools. She regularly publishes across a few intersecting fields in venues including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, American Quarterly, American Anthropologist, and the American Historical Review. She has written for popular audiences online and in print, and collaborated on a number of public education projects, including as a paid consultant on the PBS television series God in America. Currently, she serves as co-editor of the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion book series with Palgrave Macmillan press.