White Evangelicals as a “People”: The Church Growth Movement from India to the United States

Abstract

This article begins with a simple question: How did white evangelicals respond to the civil rights movement? Traditional answers are overwhelmingly political. As the story goes, white evangelicals became Republicans. In contrast, this article finds racial meaning in the places white evangelicals, themselves, insisted were most important: their churches. The task of evangelization did not stop for a racial revolution. What white evangelicals did with race as they tried to grow their churches is the subject of this article. Using the archives of the leading evangelical church growth theorists, this article traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). It shows how evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later. After first resisting efforts to bring these missionary approaches to the United States, CGM founder Donald McGavran embraced their use in the wake of the civil rights movement. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the Global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. Embracing a culture of consumption, they sought to sell an appealing brand of evangelicalism to the white American middle class. The CGM story illuminates the transnational movement of people and ideas in evangelicalism, the often-creative tension between evangelical practices and American culture, and the ways in which racism inflected white evangelicals’ most basic theological commitments.