This panel brings together historians of Christian political movements across the political spectrum in Egypt, Mexico, Korea, and Sudan from the First World War through the Cold War, decentering Euro-America as a privileged site for inquiries into Christianity and nationalisms in the twentieth century. By placing these histories in a global framework, this panel generates critical questions around the place of Christianity and Christians in modern politics across sectarian, fascist, colonial, anticommunist, and liberationist ideas, with some bleeding into one another. And in doing so, the presenters trace both the solidification of older boundaries and the creation of new territorial borders.

Nathan Ellstrand looks at how Mexican members of the Unión Nacional Sinarquista in the United States invested in the creation of conservative, Catholic colonies in the Mexican-U.S. borderlands to contest the power of the postrevolutionary Mexican state of the 1940s. Christopher Tounsel’s paper examines the relationship between missions and the government during the early years of the First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972), arguing that missionaries were co-architects of political theology during an era of sociopolitical change. Sandra Park delves into the expansive reach of Korean War-era Christian imagination in constructing public narratives of the conflict as a prophetic war for the Christian Church in Cold War South Korea. Amy Fallas explores how Coptic Christians in Egypt enjoyed a unique moment of national leadership in Egypt at the peak of the 1919 revolution – a stark contrast to the tensions and suspicions that characterized their national standing during the preceding decade.

Together, these papers demonstrate the powerful intersections between Christianity and politics as Christians sought to influence society. This session provides a truly global and comparative approach, examining different scenarios of the effects of Christian organizing around the world. Ultimately, this panel encourages fellow historians not to look at religion and politics as isolated, but rather as connected and integral to bringing about change in periods of conflict.