Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire

by Helen Jin Kim

Overview

In 1973, Billy Graham, "America's Pastor," held his largest ever "crusade." But he was not, as one might expect, in the American heartland, but in South Korea. Why there?

Race for Revival seeks not only to answer that question, but to retell the story of modern American evangelicalism through its relationship with South Korea. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the first "hot" war of the Cold War era, a new generation of white fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals forged networks with South Koreans that helped turn evangelical America into an empire. South Korean Protestants were used to bolster the image of the US as a non-imperial beacon of democratic hope, in spite of ongoing racial inequalities. At the same time, South Koreans used these racialized transpacific networks for their own purposes, seeking to reimagine their own place in the world order. They envisioned Korea as the "new emerging Christian kingdom," that would beat the American evangelical empire in a race for revival. Yet these nonstate networks ultimately foreshadowed the rise of the Christian Right in the US and South Korea in the 1980s and 1990s.

Employing a bilingual and bi-national approach, Race for Revival reexamines the narrative of modern evangelicalism through an innovative transpacific framework, offering a new lens through which to understand evangelical history from the Korean War to the rise of Ronald Reagan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190062422
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	9.80(w) x 6.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Helen Jin Kim is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Emory University. She completed her PhD in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University and her BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

1. Martyrs: War and World Vision, 1950–1953
2. Students: Immigration, Conversion, and White Fundamentalism, 1950–1960
3. Orphans: The Mirage of Evangelical Diplomacy, 1960–1969
4. Revival: Billy's and Billy's Largest "Crusade," 1969–1973
5. Explosion: The "New Emerging Christian Kingdom" and the Christian Right, 1972–1980

Editorial Reviews

"Meticulous and ambitious...The Korean lives that she illuminates are poignant and compelling." — Christian Century

"With polish and a welcomed fresh purview, Helen Jin Kim reveals the Cold War exchange of activism that linked South Korea and the U.S in a phenomenon of booming Protestant ministry, and gave rise to a Christian Right that could boast transpacific ties while privileging the authority of its white American constituency. This stellar book is essential reading for anyone who wants to grasp the power of modern evangelicalism and its political expressions on a global stage." — Darren Dochuk, author From Bible Belt to Sunbelt

"This is a fascinating yet sobering examination of ties between South Korea and the US, forged by war and blessed by a mutually advantageous relationship of right-wing evangelical Christianity. Helen Jin Kim's fine book shows how dogmatic certainty invites an unholy alliance with authoritarian power. This trenchant review of recent transpacific history provides timely warning of how easily evangelicalism becomes a handmaiden to populism." — James T. Laney, Former Ambassador to South Korea, President Emeritus, Emory University

"Just when we thought we had examined nearly every facet of contemporary U.S. evangelicalism, Helen Jin Kim swoops in with a thoughtful and fascinating new history that demonstrates that to understand the development of U.S. evangelicalism, one must pay deep attention to evangelical movements in Asia, and Korea, in particular. Kim's lively and compelling account offers a window into the "multiple evangelicalisms" that we encounter today and demands that we engage more seriously with the role of American empire and race in U.S. religious history." — Janelle Wong, University of Maryland, College Park, author Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change

"Deeply researched and beautifully written, Race for Revival stitches together the intertwined but often separated stories of Cold War evangelicalism in the United States and Korea. Kim deftly demonstrates how these histories, steeped in race, empire, and war, have profoundly shaped religion and politics through a transpacific framework." — David K. Yoo, Professor of Asian American Studies & History, University of California, Los Angeles

"Expanding on religious historian Laurie Maffly-Kipp's call for a Pacific Rim perspective on U.S. religious history...Kim has established in this work a more concrete pathway to transpacific religious history. Challenging the nation-bound focus, she unravels and reties the ambiguous, unseen, and sometimes contradictory pieces in American religious history and Korean Christianity that occurred in the grips of the Cold War politics in Asia. Kim also weaves studies of American religion, Asian American history, and Asian history-three fields that have not often been in conversation-in a transpacific context, which makes the book not only suitable but necessary for interdisciplinary studies." — Chanhee Heo, Stanford University

"In Race for Revival, Helen Jin Kim traces not only the rise of Christianity in South Korea as a response to the Cold War, but also how this rise revived evangelical crusades in the U.S. More than mimicking their imperial progenitors like Billy Graham, Korean protestant leaders had their own aspirations in the new world order. This remarkable and meticulous study is only possible through diligent archival research and oral histories conducted over two continents and in two languages. The intermingling religious histories of the U.S. and Korea forecast the rise of Christian Right from the Reagan era to this day and add an important layer of heterogeneity to our conception of Asian America. It's a timely contribution to both the field of transpacific history and our understanding of how religion continues to shape politics today." — Association For Asian American Studies

From the Publisher