Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
‘It had worked for me for a long time. Then it stopped working.’
Kristen BellIn 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) protested at the U.S. decision to resupply the Israeli military during the Yom Kippur War. The emergence of a powerful oil lobby realised U.S. fears about its strategic weakness, especially in the light of its extended and failing defence of South Vietnam. The consequences for evangelicals everywhere were significant. Dispensationalist millenarians predictably saw the crisis as foreshadowing the end of all things – and certainly, it would be the end of some things. Broad-based American evangelical support fell in behind the Israel lobby. In Latin America, the exposure of weak economic structures to the roller-coaster ride of global capitalism directly impacted the effectiveness of emerging democracies and the civic role of the rapidly growing evangelical communities that supported them. In Africa, the front lines between Christians and Muslims became increasingly tense. On the Day of Atonement 1973, there were only 17 million Africans who described themselves as ‘born-again Christians’. Over the next three decades, that number would grow to more than 400 million. Mainline denominations, even some in Keswick circles (such as the SIM-related Kale Heywet Word of Life Church in Ethiopia), which had earlier resisted pentecostal spirituality, were energised by an indigenous, charismatic spirituality. By the turn of the century, such charismaticised evangelical communities were facing resurgent fundamentalisms in the Middle East and Asia, and struggling with ‘secular’ states from France to China. These tensions fed back into the internal conversations framing civic evangelical thought and action around the world. They produced a fractured evangelical community searching for positive agendas which could be worked in the light of the new transnational realities. Over this period, evangelicalism would face the collapse of Christendom and the crises of a divided world by developing new symbolic rhetorics, new forms, and new relationships.
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