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Landmark studies by Philip Jenkins, David Martin, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert, and Andrew Walls have powerfully described the move of Christianity's center of gravity from the Christian West to the Global South. Now comes an extraordinarily valuable book series titled Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South (5 stars), which includes volumes on Latin America (Paul Freston, ed.), Africa (Terence O. Ranger, ed.), and Asia (forthcoming, David Halloran Lumsdaine, ed.). The series heralds a new day for understanding the contemporary realities of world Christianity. With funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, and under the leadership of Timothy Samuel Shah, scholarly teams were commissioned to produce studies that examine the diverse ways the world's newer evangelical communities relate to currents of political democracy.

The teams provide diligently researched case studies explaining what life on the ground has really been like in this era of rapid evangelical expansion. There are five for Latin America (Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, and Brazil) and six for Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa).

With an impressive display of careful research, the books' chapters explore a series of complex yet very important questions: Have the evangelical movements of the majority world contributed to the strengthening of democratic institutions and practices? Has American influence made evangelicals elsewhere in the world dupes for regimes propped up by American military aid or multinational business interests? Does it make a difference whether evangelicals are Anglicans (say, in Kenya or Nigeria), Pentecostals (in much of Latin America), or neo-Pentecostals with an emphasis on health and wealth (in many African and Latin American regions)?

The easiest question to answer is the charge that world evangelicals are simply puppets of American interests. While some of the case studies reveal important influences from the U.S. (whether government, business, or missionary), in all regions the day is long past when world evangelicalism can be read as a mere extension of North American evangelicalism. Freston's comment on the Brazil chapter generally holds true for most of the other studies as well: "This fine grained analysis … challenges facile equations of evangelicalism with conservative stances [and shows] the distance of these actors—indeed, total independence of these actors—from the American evangelical right."

Answering other questions requires a great deal more.

There is Frederick Chiluba, who, shortly after his election as president of Zambia in 1991, proclaimed his country a "Christian nation." There is Brazil, where representatives of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded in the 1970s, have served in Parliament since the late 1980s. In South Africa, there are Nicholas Bhengu—founder of the Back to God crusade, mobilizer of godly women, and organizer of hundreds of churches—who mostly avoided politics yet helped undermine apartheid, and Frank Chikane, a member of the Apostolic Faith Mission and forthright Christian layman who was such an active supporter of the African National Congress that he was asked to join the post-apartheid administration of Nelson Mandela.

The complex picture revealed by these case studies demands careful interpretation. On one side is what might be called the shock of delusion. Classical evangelical theology clearly teaches that redemption in Christ does not guarantee consistent integrity of life. Yet it can still be depressing to read about numerous cases when evangelical politics has been besmirched by corruption, favoritism, violent tribalism, and other political maladies that bedevil the developing world.

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June 2008, Vol. 52, No. 6