Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of additional tickets remain available at the door.
Profs & Pints DC presents: “Evangelical Revelations,” an in-depth look at our nation’s evangelical Christians at home and abroad, with Melani McAlister, professor of American Studies and International affairs at George Washington University and author of The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals.
“White American evangelicals” have been everywhere in the news, most recently in the context of being described as supporters of Trump and opponents of Critical Race Theory. But their motivations, values, and politics often are poorly understood. And the simplifying term “evangelical” obscures a tremendous amount of diversity in terms of politics, culture, and specific religious niches. The story gets even more complicated when you look abroad, where US evangelicals have connected with believers in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Gain a much more nuanced understanding of American evangelicals with Professor Melani McAlister, a scholar of religion, culture, and politics whose book The Kingdom of God Has No Borders examined American evangelicals in the broader context of global faith, gender ideologies, and imperialism.
She’ll provide insights into how American evangelicals operate on the global stage, exploring the history of evangelical internationalism from the missionary movements of the 19th century to the foreign policy activism of the 21st. She’ll look at how US-based evangelicals working in the Global South in the 1960s came to encounter the politics of “social concern,” what today we would call “social justice.” And she’ll introduce the concept of “enchanted internationalism” in discussing how evangelicals from the U.S. describe their fellow Christians abroad.
Dr. McAlister will especially focus on transnational networks in support of the “traditional family” and on the politics of religious freedom on both the national and global stage (nationally and globally) and the transnational networks in support of the “traditional family.”
Finally, we’ll look at how race and racial diversity within our borders have shaped U.S. evangelicalism, which is not always white, not always conservative, and not always “American.” (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: A service at Lakewood Church, the Houston evangelical megachurch where Joel Osteen is the pastor. (Photo by ToBeDaniel / Wikimedia Commons.)