The Quiet Revival

How a "global reflex" has been reshaping evangelicalism in the U.S.

Even before we blogged together at The Anxious Bench, I got to know historian David Swartz when I was invited to take part in a panel on Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (2013). While that book primarily told the story of American evangelicals active on the political left in the 1970s, my paper suggested “that time might tell that the most significant chapter in Moral Minority is the one that has the least to do with (North) American history: the chapter entitled ‘Samuel Escobar and the Global Reflex.’” As a scholar who was interested in American evangelicalism but had been trained in international history, I was excited to read about the Peruvian theologian whose speech at Lausanne 1974 helped convince John Stott, Billy Graham, and other Western evangelical leaders to take seriously both evangelism and social justice.

Escobar’s experience at Lausannce then became one of the transnational encounters that populate David’s second book, Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity (2020), “encounters abroad [that] have deeply shaped certain sectors of American evangelicalism.” While admitting that “evangelical cosmopolitanism is not pervasive at present,”¹ David convincingly argues that “[i]n the meeting of East and West, influence flowed in multiple directions. Sometimes the ‘empired’ struck back.”