Spiritual Development: Christian Missionaries in the Bretton Woods Order

Although we tend to associate Christian missionaries with the imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, far more transnational evangelists were at work after World War II than before it, and like their predecessors, they were often active promoters of an economic vision alongside their spiritual one. My preliminary archival research suggests also a close tie between domestic developmentalism in the U.S.--schemes to modernize the American South, later infatuation with the “entrepreneur in the ghetto” as the solution to industrial flight--and its international wing. One key transfer mechanism between these two was the post-colonial missionary movement, which updated the turn-of-the-century “soap-and-Bibles” outreach both at home and abroad.  The mission centers in places like Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri shared with their overseas hosts the experience of recent incorporation into a worldwide economy of feminized service industries and flexible production--leaving the farm for the sprawling exurb or megacity rather than the industrial hub. Although historians from E.P. Thompson to Jean and John L. Comaroff have probed the relationship between nineteenth-century imperialism, industrial relations of production, and Christian conversion, a revealing story remains to be told about evangelical Christianity’s productive encounter with the developmentalism and free-market relations of the Bretton Woods era.