The influence that American evangelicals have had on Christian practice, popular culture, and world events after World War II has been vast, and scholars continuously find it to be more pervasive than previously realized. Historians studying American evangelicalism have recently turned toward understanding the impact that U.S. evangelicals have had abroad, homing in on how evangelical networks operate across national, cultural, and political boundaries. While there have been significant strides toward this end, much ground remains uncovered.

As global evangelicalism becomes increasingly diverse, some scholars have examined how major evangelical figures have helped evangelicalism to cohere as a single movement. Yet apart from such intellectual history “from above,” how have ordinary, everyday Christians “from below” shaped and sustained global evangelicalism? As evangelicalism continues to spread throughout the majority world, how have American evangelicals responded to the growing diversity of their networks? How have other Christian groups around the world reconfigured their political orientations and religious alliances to respond to evangelicalism’s growing sway? What motivates evangelicals to influence and support U.S. foreign policy, and how do these motivations shape evangelicalism as a global movement? How have formal and informal evangelical networks influenced foreign policy, both “from above” and “from below”—and what effects has this influence had in the U.S. and abroad? Positioned at the disciplinary intersection of American Religious History and World Christianity, this panel addresses the historiographic gaps undergirding these questions, pushing the study of evangelical history in new directions.

The first paper introduces a new analytical focus to the field: how ordinary Christians shape global evangelicalism. Drawing from Billy Graham’s 1950s crusades, it demonstrates how everyday Christians created an international evangelical community “from below” shaped by their commonplace practices and experiences, turning prayer into a consequential means of transnational communication and mode of affect. The second paper looks at how American evangelicals influenced international communities “from above.” Studying Billy Graham’s unofficial diplomacy with heads of state during Nixon’s presidency, it argues that Graham’s unofficial diplomacy offers insight into how popular evangelical beliefs shaped U.S. international relations.

The third paper considers how, starting in the 1990s, Coptic migrants to the United States advocated for Christians in Egypt through allying themselves with a conservative coalition that included American evangelicals. Coptic narratives and images of persecution and martyrdom in Egypt broadened discourses on global Christian persecution as they were disseminated throughout global evangelical networks, shaping global evangelicalism—and American evangelical foreign policy objectives. The final paper investigates how everyday evangelicals pressured George W. Bush’s administration to change U.S. foreign policy, exerting diplomatic power in Southeast Asia to curb human trafficking. Yet Thais, Khmers, and even some American evangelicals decried how the resulting policies perpetuated unjust political and economic disparities, and so they established alternatives—creating a complicated, “incoherent” evangelical antitrafficking movement.

This panel, then, not only locates historiographic lacunae and reveals why filling them matters, but also demonstrates how multifaceted and intricate the international influence that American evangelicals have exercised can be.