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Padilla DeBorst, Book Review  35 
 

Book Review 

 

Facing West: American Evangelicals in an 

Age of World Christianity 
By David Swartz 

 
Reviewed by Ruth Padilla DeBorst 

 

 
 

 
 

New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. $34.95 

 

I begin this review with a warning based on the old 

adage, “There are none so blind as those who will not 

see.” Regardless of where you are sitting, in the global 

East or West, South or North, if you would rather not 

be forced to question your assumptions or challenged 

to see the world and the Christian movement within it 

afresh, you had better keep this David Swartz’ book at 

arm’s length.  

Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of 

World Christianity ambitiously spans five continents 

and some 100 years of history, unveiling influences, 

currents and crosscurrents in world Christianity that do 

not fit into the categories constructed in the West, and 

revealing alternative stories that upend traditional 

scripts regarding the direction of mission and 

Evangelical influence. These stories challenge and 

complexify the assumed movement of mission “from 

the West to the rest.” 

The book first portrays the symbiosis between US 

patriotism and evangelistic fervor in Billy Graham 

campaigns, exemplary of a Christian Americanism that 

sought to propagate spiritual liberty along with political 

and capitalist economic liberty across the world during 

the Cold War era. Against this backdrop, Swartz then 

narrates one same story --the founding and first years of 

World Vision, the Christian humanitarian 

organization,-- through two vastly contrasting lenses. 

According to the US version, fiery US American Bob 

Pierce is the star protagonist and US American 

evangelicals are the moral benefactors of “his” 

orphanages. Meanwhile, the Korean version retells how 

Kyung-Chik Han, a respected Korean pastor, 

welcomed an unexperienced Pierce to Korea and built 

on his own long and proven trajectory of humanitarian 

work and political activism to co-found World Vision. 

This case study sets the ground for the other chapters 

by demonstrating that, while Christian Americanism 

influenced global expressions of evangelical 

Christianity, US American evangelicals also received 

significant pushback and were impacted by global 

Christians. 

“Global encounters” is the natural Part II, which, 

in consecutive chapters, carries readers to India; 

Lausanne, Switzerland; Mindoro, the Philippines; 

Almolonga, Guatemala; and Uganda, portraying how 

global Evangelical expressions not only resist being 

boxed into US American categories, but also challenge 

the very construct of evangelicalism, as well as reverse 

the traditional direction of mission. Readers first 

witness E. Stanley Jones’ missional conversion to 

contextual sensitivity and to social and racial justice as 

he encountered India’s caste system and eventually 

grew to advocate prophetically for these concerns in his 

home country. The 1974 Lausanne Congress on 

World Evangelization became the forum for what 

Swartz terms “a Latin American Challenge to North 

American Missiology,” a strong and theologically 

articulate challenge to Christian Americanism and the 

cultural trappings imposed on others by its adherents, 

in the voices of Samuel Escobar and René Padilla, from 

the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana. Chapter 4 

details how, in spite of much initial reticence, the post-

colonial move towards contextualization, and the 

broadening of the evangelical agenda to include social 

concerns made inroads in North Atlantic 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(1),  Summer 2020 

Padilla DeBorst, Book Review  36 
 

evangelicalism. Chapter 5 describes the progressive 

“de-Americanization” and internationalization of 

World Vision, thanks to the experiments of deep 

indigenous popular education and empowerment in the 

Philippines, and how personnel in the Majority World 

prompted the re-focusing of evangelicals’ vision from 

emergency relief to holistic, transformational 

development both abroad and in the US. Chapter 6 

delves into the realm of the supernatural and portrays 

the often ambiguous but increasingly welcoming 

reception given in the US to demonstrations of 

Pentecostal faith around the world. The section ends 

with a chapter titled “An East African Critique of 

American Sexuality,” which depicts the conflicts and 

unexpected East-West allegiances within the Anglican 

Communion in relation to the ordination of same-sex 

clergy. The detailed account of Bishop Orombi’s 

actions, a nuanced integration of a conservative sexual 

ethic with progressive stances on economics and 

politics, serves to highlight how the rest of the world 

cannot be forced to fit into US American categories. 

The final section, “Disorientations,” first carries 

readers abroad, into slums, brothels, and the 

underworld of human trafficking. It focuses particularly 

on the human rights work of The International Justice 

Mission. It parses out the complexities of cross-cultural 

encounter and the need for indigeneity, the challenge 

of structural injustice, the lessons learned in Thailand 

and beyond regarding protection, prosecution, 

prevention, partnership and policy, and highlights the 

disjoint between the holistic understanding of the 

NGOs on the ground and the “raid and rescue 

triumphalism” of donors of their US-based 

constituency. The section is completed with a portrayal 

of Christian communities in New England, and 

especially in Boston, as examples of how Christian 

immigrants are “re-Christianizing” the US and changing 

the face of evangelicalism by gifting it with renewed 

concern for the poor, and a focus on the relational 

dimension of the gospel, communal prayer and holistic 

indigeneity. “Reverse mission” is, in some cases, the 

fruit of intentional “missionizing” on the part of global 

Christians and, in many others, a natural result of the 

increasingly diverse ethnic make-up of the cities.  

Swartz concludes that “faith moves in disorienting 

directions.” By portraying global and diverse 

evangelicals as agents rather than passive receptors he 

showcases a reversal of the assumed direction of 

mission from the rest to the West. The new subjects, he 

affirms, see the US as the new ends of the earth that 

must be reached with the good news.  

In addition to recommending this engaging book, 

as one of those many subjects from outside US 

evangelicalism, I propose one significant editorial 

change. One of the assumptions constitutive of 

Christendom is that greater power naturally confers on 

its representatives the right to be heard and to shape the 

forms of religious observance, culture, and values of 

peoples with less power. Swartz helpfully unearths 

stories of resistance and reverse-influence that push 

against that assumption. He does so by effectively 

centering the voices from outside what he terms 

“Christian Americanism.” In my estimation, his 

terminology is helpful in as far as it reflects the 

association between faith (Christian) and nationalism 

(Americanism) so a-critically assumed in Christendom. 

As perceptive readers might have noted, in this review, 

however, I push terminology a step further. The term 

“American,” for many millions of people, alludes to all 

the inhabitants of North, Central, and South America, 

ranging from Alaska to the Patagonia. Since thorough 

resistance to colonialism requires sensitivity to how 

language acknowledges or invisibilizes people, I 

propose that if future editions employed the rather 

clunky but more respectfully humble term “Christian 

US-Americanism,” the post-colonial turn which 

underlies Schwartz’ work would be yet more powerfully 

effected. 

It is my hope that this bird’s eye view of Facing 

West… will have piqued readers’ curiosity enough for 

them to pick up the book and allow themselves the 

opportunity to revise their positions if these included 

the commonly held assumption that Christian mission 

and influence moves exclusively from greater to lesser 

power. Yet better, they might choose to humbly 

recognize that their categories to explain faith and its 

outworking in the world are anything but universal and 

to re-consider how they, personally and communally, 

might acknowledge and open space for the valuable 

contributions from corners of the world other than 

theirs.  

 
 

 

 

 

Ruth Padilla DeBorst is a theologian, missiologist, 

educator, and storyteller. She serves with Resonate 

Global Mission, leading the Comunidad de Estudios 

Teológicos Interdisciplinarios (CETI), the 

International Fellowship for Mission as 

Transformation, and leadership development 

initiatives of the Christian Reformed Church. She has 

been involved in theological formation for integral 

mission in her native Latin America and beyond for 

several decades.  

 

Author email:  rpadilladeborst@yahoo.com 

 
 

 


