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New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa by Stephen Offutt (review)

T he relationship between the global and local in the study of religion is a vexed one. Either authors float too high, providing grand generalizations without much substance, or they focus in so closely to the subject that their data has no obvious theoretical value. Stephen Offutt’s New Centers of Global Evangelicalism attempts to solve these problems by focusing on two particular “New Centers of Evangelicalism” (or “NCEs”), El Salvador and South Africa, and by generating theoretical approaches that interact with the data he generates through literature research, fieldwork, and qualitative data from interviews. Essentially, the latter emerge from interpretations of the Weberian tradition, filtered through Peter Berger, David Martin, Simon Coleman, and the like. It is in the qualitative data (particularly narrative accounts of his subjects) that the book shines most brightly: his interviews with evangelical political actors in South Africa in particular create a sense of solidity that is often missing in other, similar works. Overall, the work is a useful contribution to the field, snapshotting El Salvador and South Africa in case studies that will no doubt be used again and again by teachers of world religions. Offutt also does the field of global evangelical studies a service in what the book fails to do well. The core concepts—of NCEs and Religious Social Forces— reflect a broader trend to attempt to manufacture facticities via “anagramization.” Both concepts face their problems as the book progresses. By the end, we are not sure, for instance, to what the term “NCE” actually refers. It is used variously to refer to places (like Seoul, Wenzhou, Singapore, Lagos, Sao Paolo, and the like) that have become net exporters of evangelical Christianity, that have a transnational evangelical professional class, and/or that simply have a large number of evangelicals. The problem, of course, is the anagram itself, which raises the expectation that it refers to a definable social phenomenon rather than “gee, there are a lot of evangelicals here.” In the end, its real contribution is to point toward nodes in a global religious exchange economy, the careful study of which might