Page 881 – Christianity Today (2024)

The earth is a very big place.

Yes, it may be growing a bit smaller. (Google "shrinking globe" and you'll find dozens of essays about how interconnected we all are.) But world history projects reveal just how illusory this globalization is. Each country, each region, each town has its own story. Weaving the stories together into one can feel like writing the definitive account of a devastating multi-generational family argument: You're not going to do anyone's version of the quarrel complete justice.

In world histories, every narrative thread distorts some other part of the story. A chronicle that does a marvelous job with Europe warps the Asian past (the Durants); an account that fairly treats the development of East and West leaves out human personality (J. M. Roberts); a tale that balances human interest with political and military developments ignores culture and the arts (that would be me).

Peter Frankopan joins the world history effort with The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. His particular narrative thread traces the encounters of Western and Eastern goods, ideas, and people, as European nations push eastward along the multiple trade routes leading to Asia and Eastern cultures do the same, pointing west; the "Middle East" becomes the matrix where the two collide.

So Frankopan's version of world history begins when Alexander conquers Persia, opening up the trade routes between the two halves of the known world and producing a "vibrancy of cultural exchange" that allows "ideas, themes and stories [to course] through the highways, spread by travellers, merchants, and pilgrims." As he progresses (rapidly) through the centuries, his chapters are structured not around particular events but around dynamic processes that span multiple nations and change them all: the diffusion of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and its headlong crash into the Persian border ("The Road to a Christian East"); the spread of human trafficking ("The Slave Road"); the violent confrontation of "barbarian" and "civilized" worlds as the Mongols rampage ("The Road to Hell"); the European penetration of the Americas ("The Road of Gold" and "The Road of Silver"); the struggle between Britain, Germany, and Russia to control the oil riches of Persia ("The Road to Black Gold"); and so on, all the way up to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq ("The Road to Tragedy").

As schemas go, this one works pretty much as well as any other, meaning that some of these chapters are insightful while others miss the mark.

Although the "Silk Roads" of the title is intended as a metaphor, expressing the east-west/west-east movement of beliefs and ideals as well as the exchange of goods, the metaphor itself pushes Frankopan unerringly toward finding his explanations in economic factors. In the case of, say, World War I, this produces a shrewd counter-narrative to the traditional British account of brave and sacrificial soldiers resisting German aggression ("inspired," in Winston Churchill's words, "not only by love of country but by a widespread conviction that human freedom was challenged by military and Imperial tyranny"). Frankopan instead centers his admirably succinct (13 pages!) account of the Great War around the establishment of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Ottoman threat to the shipping traffic in the Suez Canal. These commercial interests become the core of the matter, the stacked tinder just waiting for the match; Gavrilo Princip's bullets are almost incidental. It's a somewhat reductionist version, yes, but one-volume world histories have to reduce somewhere, and Frankopan's oil-centered analysis allows him to point directly (and accurately) forward from 1914-1918 to the present: the "control of Persia's crown jewels [by] foreign investors led to a deep and festering hatred of the outside world, which in turn led to nationalism and, ultimately, to a more profound suspicion and rejection of the west best epitomised in modern Islamic fundamentalism."

Frankopan does an admirable big-picture job of sweeping from Alexander the Great to Barack Obama (I am not here suggesting any parallels between the two).

His method doesn't serve him quite as well when he reaches World War II. "The Road to Genocide" was paved, it appears, by purely pragmatic interests: faced with "food shortages and famine, the Germans … began to identify those who should suffer …. The great granaries of Ukraine and southern Russia had not generated what had been expected of them." With "too many people and not enough food," Russian prisoners and Jews were the first up for elimination: "The failure of the land to generate wheat in the anticipated quantities was a direct cause of the Holocaust."

While the economy of 1940s Germany is obviously not unconnected to the horror of the Final Solution, Frankopan fails to offer any explanation as to why Jews were seen as dispensable; the "silk roads" model doesn't lend itself to an understanding of the roots of racial hatred. Nor does it provide a signpost to the present, where anti-Semitism continues to flourish, even in the absence of famine.

But this is not so much a failing of The Silk Roads as an intrinsic flaw in any blueprint for a world history narrative: no single organizing principle is going to work equally well for all countries or for all Major Events. And the briefer the work, the more obvious the flaws: Despite the occasional stumble, Frankopan does an admirable big-picture job of sweeping from Alexander the Great to Barack Obama (I am not here suggesting any parallels between the two) in just over 500 pages. The necessary concision of his coverage means that readers who are already familiar with the basic outlines of world history will enjoy this work more than others, who may suddenly wonder what the Austro-Hungarian Empire is, and why it suddenly appears without warning at the exact moment of its dissolution.

But even readers who find themselves adrift in the dense thicket of proper names and unfamiliar places (The Silk Roads could do with a few more maps, not to mention a decent index) can take away one of the book's central insights, well worth mulling over. Ever since the long-ago collision of "Asian decadence" with "old-fashioned Roman virtues," conservatives (Juvenal and Seneca, back then) have lamented the influx of new cultural influences and feared for the preservation of the old ways. Yet Frankopan's narrative suggests that it is precisely at these points of greatest fear—where we are most protective of our own ways, and most alarmed by the inevitable intrusion of other worlds—that the most unexpected, and elegant, flowerings of culture occur.

Susan Wise Bauer is the author of The History of the Ancient World, The History of the Medieval World, The History of the Renaissance World, and The Story of Western Science, all published by W. W. Norton.

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

George Washington is not the first person to come to mind when we're talking about modern-day matters of immigration, but there he is. A man who knew his Scripture, Washington had a dream for himself and for others in America that came from Micah chapter 4: "for they shall sit every man under his own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid." Washington loved this verse, the Israel dream turned into the American dream. A place for every person to rest their head, to feed themselves and their families, to live unafraid. Have we forgotten that it is OK to long for this dream, not just for ourselves but for all of our neighbors, both near and far?

Who, more than the stranger in our midst, shows us how far we have to come in seeing this dream realized? Who else unveils our own strange ways, the flaws in our society, and yet also the kindness of humans? Refugees prove to be a very telling mirror when it comes to the questions we all ask ourselves in regards to neighbor-love. So many of us, longing to be justified, want to know exactly who is my neighbor, and what is my obligation to them? We find the answers in Scripture, or in political ideologies, or we busy ourselves so that we don't have to entertain the questions at all. But then sometimes the miraculous happens. Sometimes, the most unlikely neighbors move in next door.

When I signed up, more than a decade ago, as a volunteer to work with Somali Bantu refugees, I did not know that Human Rights Watch had identified the ongoing civil war in Somalia as "the most ignored tragedy in the world." I did not know that The New Yorker, in an article about Somalia, declared the country to be the "Most Failed State." All I knew was that each time I showed up with a few English worksheets clutched in my hand, it became increasingly clear that my new friends had more pressing needs to attend to. Many were experiencing the Western world for the first time: light switches, stairs, running water; credit cards with crippling interest; boxes and boxes of mysterious food in the grocery store. Non-literate and non-English speaking, these refugee families were given the requisite eight months of government assistance and were then expected to successfully assimilate into American culture—an expectation that has driven me to tears more than once in the years since.

Catherine Besteman understands my poor, overwhelmed heart. In Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees in Lewiston, Maine, she writes as an anthropologist who makes no pretense to an academic detachment from her subjects. Her detailed, contradictory, depressing look at Somali Bantu refugees resettled in a small town in Maine is a deeply personal work. In 1987, she tells us at the outset, she lived in a small village in the Banta area of Somalia, where people from a culture based on subsistence farming and kinship ethics occupied a marginalized position in a social and physical environment defined by "profound insecurity."

A few years after she left Banta, civil war erupted in Somalia. Besteman, desperate for news of her friends, was horrified to hear how violence and death had shattered the small and fragile communities she'd studied. One of the last letters she received from aid workers in the area before they fled the country contained the news that every child aged five and under in Banta had died from starvation, while others she'd known and loved had been shot and killed. This personal brush with tragedy informs the entire book. Besteman sees the entire refugee resettlement process, both pre-war and even many years after relocation in America, in the light of this trauma.

Almost two decades after her time in Somalia, Besteman attended a panel where Somali Bantu refugees were sharing their stories. She was shocked when she recognized several of the boys she knew in the village—now grown men, articulate and eager to share their experience of life in America. She learned that Lewiston, Maine (pop. 35,000), has become a hub of Somali and Somali Bantu resettlement. As Besteman began to explore the circ*mstances that led to the arrival of thousands of Somali refugees in the primarily French-Canadian mill town, she realized that a study of Lewiston would be an excellent framework for a much larger conversation on refugee resettlement policies, attitudes toward assimilation, and what defines both citizenship and success in the US.

In the first section of her book, Besteman goes into great detail about the living conditions in rural Somalia, the rise of conflict and violence there, and the history of the creation of refugees as stateless individuals. She explains how the people from villages like Banta came to be known as "Somali Bantu" and (along with the Sudanese Lost Boys) became of special humanitarian concern due to the persecution they suffered under the Somali majority during the war and afterward in the refugee camps. All of this led to the US eventually deciding to resettle 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees starting in 2004.

Making Refuge explores the various ways Lewiston has responded to the influx of Somali refugees. One section ("We Have Responded Valiantly") highlights how the city officials describe their own role in creating programs and services from scratch in "an environment of severe economic constraints and social hostility." Another section ("Strangers in Our Midst") details that social hostility, outlining the ten most common myths about the refugees, both humorous and heartbreaking to behold (all Somalis keep chickens in their kitchen cupboards, for example).

Besteman is particularly keen to point out the harm in the simplified humanitarian message portraying refugees as helpless, grateful, apolitical people. Later in the book, building on this critique, she makes one of her most sobering points: "the very people who must present themselves as dependent recipients of charity in order to gain resettlement must, within the space of a few weeks, become economically independent and productive residents who make no demands on their American host communities." She takes time to interview "Helpers in the Neoliberal Borderlands," as she calls them; social service providers and community activists caught between a government which professes to provide services for the most vulnerable but then faults those who want to access those same services.

She clearly admires the social workers, day shelter operators, and community police officers who strive to connect with the refugees and ensure that they receive the same access to benefits as anyone, but she finds their relational approach to problem solving (as opposed to political action) to be largely ineffective. The second half of the book highlights the work the Somali Bantu refugees have done to advocate for themselves, and chronicles both the enormous challenges they face and their hopes for their future in America.

It's a devastating read, full of complex geopolitical realities, crushing social revelations regarding race and poverty in America, the seemingly insurmountable problems the Somali Bantu in particular face, and a general public prone to nasty blog comments and xenophobia. But perhaps I am too close to the situation to review this book in an objective manner—after all, I am one of those do-gooder types that Besteman describes.

I admit that I have found myself, more often than not, indulging in a sense of hopelessness when it comes to the plight of refugees, both globally and those resettled here in the supposed promised land. Both the conservative anti-immigrant rhetoric and the vague goodwill proclamations of the progressives fill my stomach with a cold sense of despair. Arguing about literal and metaphoric walls (either building them up or tearing them down) seems oddly esoteric in light of the challenges of daily life in America for recently resettled refugees. My mind shifts toward Washington's vine and fig tree. Where are the job creators looking out for unskilled and non-literate workers, providing a living wage for those with limited English language abilities? Where are the landlords willing to rent to large families, to broker different cultures and customs, to fight for the right of affordable housing for all? Where are the teachers and police officers and social workers going above and beyond to ensure that refugees receive access to the services promised to them by our government? Both Making Refuge and my own anecdotal evidence gathered in living with Somali Bantu refugees for the past decade confirm that, here and there, this practical work is being done, but there is still much ground to cover.

A primary goal of anthropological fieldwork is to gain an understanding of how people make sense of their world. Besteman discovered that, despite the hardships they faced, the refugees in Lewiston found much to value, celebrate, love, and enjoy in life. This thread of resilience is evident wherever Somali Bantu refugee communities are to be found. I once asked a Somali Bantu friend which place had been easier for them, the camps or America. My friend paused for a long while. "Both places are hard," he finally told me. "Both places are very, very hard." This isn't the answer I wanted to hear, of course. And while it is true that many (if not a majority) of refugees do attain self-sufficiency, there is something to be said for listening to the voices of those who have been least successfully acclimated, according to resettlement agency standards.

In the last section of the book, Besteman writes about one of the first Somali Bantu refugees to graduate from college, a man who worked night and day to provide for his family and help his community. Currently he runs an advocacy program to help the Somali Bantu community navigate the various power structures (schools, prisons, social services) they come into contact with daily. It's such a small story in such a long book of trauma, but I treasure it, the fruit of a dream that should not be limited to a select few: safety, meaningful work, education. Every individual sitting under their own vine and fig tree, where no one can make them afraid. This is a dream that translates well to subsistence farmers, to a people oppressed by so many factors in so many places. My Somali Bantu friends have taught me that it's a dream we can all share, the same one that the prophets and the founders of America urged on us—a dream stemming from the God who created us all.

D. L. Mayfield has a book forthcoming from HarperOne, Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In his 2005 feature debut Man Push Cart, Iranian American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani's cinematic signature is already evident: highly watchable low-budget tragedy, laced with comedy, telling the stories of people who function as furniture in the reality of most art-house audiences' everyday lives. Ten years later, he'd be looking at the housing crisis in 2015's 99 Homes, but for his first three films, restricted by budget, Bahrani worked mostly with non-actors, training his camera on the extraordinary and mundane lives of immigrants in America, those who get overlooked.

That word, overlooked, is worth dwelling upon for a moment. It signals a number of behaviors: to look past; to look over; to see but not see. One power the filmmaker wields, uniquely among artists, is to direct our visual attention anew in a way that resists and counteracts our habitual overlooking. Staring at a stranger's face isn't allowed in polite society, but filmmakers can give us that power (or force it upon us) simply by directing our gaze and moving in close. And what we can't get from a photograph—the dynamic emotion that changes just below the surface of a face, only observable when we spend time watching—is a deep, moving potential in film. Now, as observers, we see people with more clarity. We can no longer overlook them. There's nowhere else to look.

Man Push Cart—which premiered at the Venice Film Festival—is the perfect introduction to Bahrani's films of attention. The protagonist is Ahmad (non-actor Ahmad Razvi, who Bahrani spotted working in a pastry shop), a once-successful Pakistani rockstar who now slings coffee from one of those ubiquitous metal carts that dot midtown Manhattan, serving up hot drinks and pastries to early-morning bankers and businesspeople. Ahmad, we slowly gather, migrated to the US from Lahore with his wife, but she died, and his in-laws—who blame him for her death, for reasons we never discover—now care for his small son and restrict Ahmad's access to him. Ahmad pushes the cart to its spot every morning before the sun rises and pulls it back later in the day before hawking p*rn DVDs on the sidewalk and picking up odd jobs to make extra cash.

The longer we live alongside Ahmad, the more shadowy and blurred his days become, marked by lack of sleep and a string of frustrating encounters. He works constantly. He preps the cart methodically every day, stuffing the blue "We Are Pleased To Serve You" cups with teabags. He and his regulars maintain the kind of friendly relationship you have with someone you see every day but don't care about in the least. A wealthy Pakistani businessman recognizes him from his rock album—while Ahmad is painting his living room—and seems to make overtures of friendship, but they only go so far. And Ahmad's endless labor is no insurance against those all too ready to cut corners. His fate becomes Sisyphean: three steps forward, two and a half back.

Ahmad reappears as a minor character in Bahrani's 2008 feature Chop Shop, the story of two teenage siblings trying to build and sustain a life in Willets Point, an area of Queens behind Shea Stadium and Citifield, where the Mets play. Sometimes called "The Iron Triangle"—or, in The Great Gatsby, the Valley of Ashes, where Tom Buchanan's mistress lived—Willets Point has been a hot topic in New York City politics for the past few years; in 2013, the City Council approved a highly controversial proposal to raze and redevelop the area, constructing 2,490 housing units, a shopping center, and an entertainment complex. (Not so long ago, Willets Point had only one legal resident.)

Ale and Izze, the 12- and 16-year-old Latino siblings at the center of Chop Shop, likely wouldn't be able to live in even the 1,000 "affordable" housing units the city plans to construct. They share a little loft above a garage. Until you spot Shea Stadium in the background, you barely realize they're in the United States, let alone New York City. They're trying to build and sustain a life, but their parents are never mentioned; school is an abstraction. They dream of a brighter future, a sure outcome of the food truck that Ale is saving to buy and operate.

As in Man Push Cart, most of the film's running time is given to observing daily life, each scene slowly building into a tale that inverts the American Dream. And Ale's optimism about the bright future that awaits them in a city full of opportunity makes him an easy target. Alas, Ahmad arrives a bit too late to save Ale from that fate, but it's also clear from Chop Shop that Ahmad's luck has not turned since we saw him last. He's more cynical, less forgiving. The Land of Opportunity hasn't delivered on its promises, and unfortunately, the more they work, the worse the fall is.

Both these films are about a particularly New York breed of poverty and immigration, but Bahrani is more interested in his characters than in making some kind of easily distilled point—and that's significant. Ale and Izze and Ahmad are not sainted poor who transform the lives of the clueless white people they interact with: they're just people in a situation in life most of us don't know anything about. I walk by many coffee and donut carts in the city. Every New Yorker has dodged little kids selling candy bars on the subways. But with Bahrani's films in my head, I've begun to see what I had overlooked.

Ramin Bahrani was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Iranian parents. He graduated from Columbia University, where he now teaches in the filmmaking program. He cites a number of Iranian filmmakers among his influences, but is also clearly in the line of the neo-realists—the Italian filmmakers of the mid-20th century who made movies that shifted focus away from the glamorous and wealthy to the poor and ordinary. The neo-realists humanized the marginalized, giving them stories with rich detail and texture that reckon with poverty and suffering without false sentiment. In this vein, Bahrani has a lot in common with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Two Days, One Night; The Son; The Kid With a Bike), contemporary Belgian filmmakers who focus on stories about working-class people in their home country. The Dardennes also serve as executive producers on films like Thomas Bidegain's Les Cowboys (2015), about the challenges Europeans face due to global immigration.

Like the Dardennes, Bahrani doesn't make overtly political statements about justice, immigration, or poverty in his immigrant films (and even the unavoidably political 99 Homes retains the complexity of its topic). These are just people. These are their lives. They're unequivocally tragic stories, but not because of circ*mstances—just because life is both comic and tragic.

Bahrani's third film, Goodbye Solo, moved away from New York City to his home turf. Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané, in his first feature film) is an exuberant Senegalese immigrant driving a cab in Winston-Salem. One day he picks up William (Red West), an old man who is estranged from his family and plotting his own suicide. William hires Solo to drive him to Blowing Rock, where Solo assumes he will kill himself—and yet, as William makes preparations, Solo tries to reconcile him to his family, while running into a few difficulties himself.

On paper, the plot looks a lot like a permutation of Driving Miss Daisy, but instead of William being the focus and Solo being the guardian angel (or, worse, another instance of the so-called "magical Negro" trope), Bahrani positions this as a story about a friendship, with both characters carrying equal weight—in fact, if anything, this is Solo's story. We see the world through his eyes. We watch him pay attention, and in so doing, learn to look anew ourselves.

A deep sense of melancholy pervades all three of Bahrani's immigrant films, even when characters are experiencing moments of joy. Talking to Sam Adams for The A.V. Club about the film, Bahrani explained, "I cannot eliminate the sadness. [To do that] doesn't match my thinking or my cinema or the real world. I know Hollywood loves to … just give you happy. I think happy and hope is more hopeful when you acknowledge that there's awful things too."

That's precisely why Bahrani allows his characters to retain their dignity. Out in the audience, those of us who are used to walking by these characters on our way to work aren't made to feel guilty, but we're not let off the hook, either, because the point is simple: others aren't there as mere accessories in our world. They are real. They experience emotion and difficulty and fear and disappointment and exhaustion and passion. We "identify" with them not in some vague tribute to the "shared human condition," but because we realize how often we reduce those among us to two-dimensional backdrops for our lives.

Bahrani's films have yet to make inroads with American audiences, despite being set in the United States. And yet they represent the best potential of American filmmaking, to tell stories about those we may not know, to pay attention for a while to those we overlook. The gift of redirected attention is not always comfortable, but it's a vital gift that art gives—and that Bahrani delivers with humor, grace, and dignity.

Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today's critic at large and an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City. Her criticism appears in RogerEbert.com, Vulture, The Washington Post, Paste, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is co-author, with Robert Joustra, of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World, just out from Eerdmans.

In August of 1975, after meeting at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, members of the Society of New Testament Studies made an excursion to a country house in the Scottish Highlands. As a guide droned on and on about the history and features of the relatively insignificant house, the famous and normally genial Roman Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown was heard to complain, "I'm learning more about this house than I ever wanted to know." In the course of reading The Samaritans, it would be easy to complain similarly, "I'm learning more about these Samaritans, relatively insignificant as they are, than I ever wanted to know." I confess to saying so myself. The innumerable historical, archaeological, political, social, and religious details delineated concerning Samaritans from time immemorial—those details bored me at first. But gradually my boredom turned into admiration of the deep and wide scholarship of the author, Reinhard Pummer. Ultimately, my admiration graduated into fascination with his subject matter. A hard sell for him, but successful. He's to be thanked and congratulated.

Pummer has pursued a study of the Samaritans for the better part of half a century and ranks as probably the world's most knowledgeable student of them. His study has included face-to-face interaction with current Samaritans, participation in their religious rites, examination of their own literature and of literature about them from antiquity till now, and on-site investigation of archaeological remains.

The subtitle of Pummer's book, "A Profile," hints that a recent explosion of information concerning the Samaritans, both past and present, forestalls an exhaustive presentation. But there is enough, even more than enough, for you literate readers of Books & Culture. You will already know Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of Jesus' encounter and conversation with a Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. Avid Bible-readers among you will likely know also about the Samaritans' supposed origin in northern Israel after its inhabitants' deportation into Assyrian exile; about the failed opposition by "the army of Samaria" to Nehemiah's rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem following the Judeans' Babylonian exile; about the Samaritan leper who alone out of a group of ten lepers thanked Jesus for healing; about Jesus' being falsely derided as "a Samaritan" by some of his opponents; about a Samaritan village that failed to show him and his disciples hospitality; and about Philip's evangelizing "the city of Samaria." Visitors to the Holy Land will likely be aware of a few (about 800) Samaritans who still live there and sacrifice Passover lambs annually on Mount Gerizim.

So what more than the foregoing can be gained from Pummer's book about the Samaritans? For a start, arguments have developed over their ethnic and religious origins. According to the Samaritans' own account, a high priest named Uzzi, who had descended from Moses' elder brother Aaron through Eleazar and then Phinehas, was officiating at a sanctuary on Mount Gerizim in north central Palestine. Eli, another priest who had descended from Aaron (but through Ithamar) and become a kind of godfather to the prophet Samuel, tried to arrogate to himself the high priesthood. Failing in the attempt, he settled for his own, illegitimate high priesthood at a sanctuary in Shiloh, a little south of Mount Gerizim. Later, the sanctuary at Shiloh shifted farther south to Jerusalem in Judea, whereas Mount Gerizim remained, and still remains, the focal point of Samaritan religion. Thus the worshipers at Mount Gerizim, i.e. the Samaritans, have always constituted the true and legitimate people of Israel, especially as concentrated in the tribe of Levi and the tribes of Joseph, viz., Ephraim and Manasseh, from which the Samaritans claim to have descended.

According to a traditional Jewish and sometime Christian view, the Samaritans came about much later than the time of Eli and Uzzi, as follows: After taking the northern Israelites captive into exile, the Assyrians replaced them with imported pagan captives who then converted to the worship of Yahweh and thus became the Samaritans but remained ethnically Gentile. Alternatively, these pagans intermarried with some northern Israelites left behind by the Assyrians and then, as in the foregoing version of this view, converted to the worship of Yahweh. Their half-breed offspring became the Samaritans.

Yet another view starts with the assumption that the Pentateuch is a fundamentally Judean and therefore Jewish document. Nevertheless, Samaritans accept the Pentateuch as Holy Scripture. Their version of it differs in some respects from the Jewish version, though, especially as regards the proper location of worship, Mount Gerizim instead of Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Given the above-stated assumption of the Pentateuch as Judean and therefore Jewish, such differences suggest that the Samaritans, being non-Judeans, revised the Pentateuch to justify their differences from Judaism. They were, in other words, a northern, sectarian offshoot from southern Judaism. This view turns upside down the Samaritan belief that Judaism branched off from an original Yahwism represented faithfully by Samaritanism.

Along with some other scholars, Pummer strongly supports a still different view. It is that the Samaritans descended from northern Israelites who worshipped Yahweh and did not go into Assyrian exile or intermarry with pagans imported by the Assyrians. The Pentateuch (even the Jewish version) contains the Israelites' northern traditions as well as the Judeans' southern traditions. At first, the Israelites exceeded the Judeans in population and prosperity. Only later, in the intertestamental period, did the Judeans gain political, military, and religious dominance over the north. Thus it almost looks as though the Jews who returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian Exile, not the people we now know as Samaritans, might better be considered sectarian offshoots (though much later than in the Samaritans' account) from an original Yahwism preserved without interruption in the north.

Prior to the successive Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, King Solomon built a temple for Yahweh in Jerusalem. The Babylonians destroyed the temple, but Judean returnees from exile rebuilt it. Not long afterward the Samaritans—or Samarians, as Pummer prefers to call them at this point in history—built a temple on Mount Gerizim. Though recognizing the rivalry and contentiousness between Samaritans/Samarians and Jews/Judeans that we read about in the Old Testament, Pummer tends to play down that rivalry and contentiousness by treating their outbreaks as episodic rather than continuous, and by treating the two sides' religious beliefs and practices as largely the same. Even though worshiping Yahweh at their own temple on Mount Gerizim, for example, the inhabitants of Samaria were not yet separate from Yahweh-worshipers in Judea. Pummer has to admit, however, that the destruction of the Samaritans' temple in 111/110 B.C. by John Hyrcanus, a Jewish Hasmonean ruler, brought relations to a new and lasting low. Pummer therefore dates the start of Samaritanism as a religion separate from Judaism to the 2nd century BC, but highlights continuing contacts and enduring similarities between the two religions.

As to the Samaritans in the New Testament, Matthew's Jesus prohibits the Twelve from entering any town of the Samaritans. By making this prohibition reflect the lack of a systematic mission to "the Samaritans as a group" (following John P. Meier, emphasis original), Pummer skirts the possibility of Jesuanic antagonism against them as individuals. (Does he think this prohibition stems from Matthew more than from Jesus?)

Christian preachers often make the sermonic point that despite the supposed detour around Samaria which Galilean Jewish pilgrims regularly made because of the Samaritans' hostility to Jews, John's Jesus "had to go through Samaria" to fulfill his Father's will that he convert the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well and her fellow townspeople. Pummer points out, however, that according to the 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus, it was the "custom" of Galilean pilgrims to pass through Samaria. Pummer does not discuss the possibility that mention of the woman's five ex-husbands alludes to the Samaritans' accepting as Holy Scripture only the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch) or to the five locations (Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim) from which the king of Assyria imported pagans into the cities of Samaria.

The fellow townspeople of the woman at Jacob's well gave hospitality to Jesus and the Twelve for two days. Despite citing the refusal of a Samaritan village to give like hospitality, as already noted, Luke-Acts also tells of a parabolic good Samaritan, of a distinctively thankful healed Samaritan leper, and of a Samaritan city that converted to the Christian gospel. So Luke gives the Samaritans a mixed but usually favorable review, as you might expect both from Jesus' inclusion of "Samaria" in Luke's version of the Great Commission (Acts 1:8) and from Luke's overall theme of the gospel's unstoppable progress throughout the world among all classes of people.

So far as early Jewish references to the Samaritans are concerned, Pummer continues to downplay as much as possible—even in the writings of Josephus—the antagonism that has traditionally and popularly been thought to characterize the relations between Samaritans and Jews. Exceptionally, though, Pummer's brief treatment of rabbinic literature does not display this tendency.

Archaeological excavations give evidence of a Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim. So too do various literary sources, including the Samaritans' own chronicles. Yet current Samaritans deny that at any time did a legitimate temple of Yahweh stand on that mountain. Why this surprising denial? Could it be to avoid admitting that the Jews' temple antedated a temple of the Samaritans' own? For the older would have been better. Pummer doesn't venture an opinion.

It may also surprise that, like Jews, the Samaritans had, and continue to have, synagogues. In olden times, Samaritan synagogues were to be found not only at various locations in Samaria but also elsewhere in Palestine and, perhaps most surprisingly, throughout the Mediterranean world—as in Damascus, Delos, Tarsus, Thessalonica, Carthage, Rome, Sicily—from as early as the 2nd century BC and on into Christian centuries. Today the Samaritans have synagogues only on Mount Gerizim, in nearby Nablus, and in Holon, near Tel Aviv.

The wide geographical distribution of Samaritan synagogues tells you immediately that, again like the Jews, the Samaritans had a sizable diaspora. If you expected this diaspora to be accompanied by a division of Samaritanism into different sects, you would be correct. We don't know very much about their various peculiarities. But the members of one of them are said to have prayed standing in water, avoided taking their hands out of their sleeves on the Sabbath, and buried their dead with staff in hand and shoes on feet so as to enable speedy resurrection.

Peaceful relations with non-Samaritans did not always accompany the Samaritans. Under Emperor Justinian I (AD 527-565), to cite but one instance, Samaritans attacked Christians and Jews during an uprising in Scythopolis and burned their estates and churches. But the Samaritans suffered mistreatment in turn. Threats of mistreatment also led many Samaritans to convert to Christianity and, during the Muslim period, to Islam. The Crusader period brought them an interim of some relief. Their total number began to fall precipitously, however, ultimately reaching a low of about 150 between 1806 and 1931. At the same time, not a few Samaritans attained positions of considerable authority even in the Ottoman government. Yet a decree issued in the middle of the Ottoman period (in 1772, to be exact) prohibited Samaritans from wearing garments made of superior materials such as silk or even fine cotton; from riding on horses (rather, only on asses, and then only for urgent business out of town); and from building their houses high or near a Muslim's house (among other prohibitions).

Exacerbating the problem of declining population was the disproportion between males and females among the Samaritans. Males outnumbered females by almost two to one. Consequently, according to a Samaritan high priest, nearly all the girls were promised in marriage before they could speak and were married off at the age of eleven or twelve. By now the disproportion has been erased almost entirely. Also, Samaritan men are presently marrying non-Samaritan women willing to adopt the Samaritan religion. Given the Samaritan practice of patrilineality, the future of Samaritanism therefore looks more promising than it did when observers were predicting its total demise.

As Pummer warns, however, the allurements of contemporary popular culture constitute a threat. Since unlike Jews the Samaritans classify sexual intercourse as "work" and therefore prohibit it on Sabbath days, for example, you wonder whether Samaritans who have grown up in our heavily sexualized culture will maintain fidelity to their religion. Or take the case of twin boys whom the Samaritan Pentateuch required to be circumcised on the eighth day after birth but who needed longer incubation to stay alive. Upon consultation with one another the high priest and his counselors declared the boys' incubator to be an extension of the mother's womb, so that circumcision could be delayed till the eighth day after extraction from the artificial womb. You wonder whether such pilpulism will lead to young Samaritans' disenchantment. But maybe they will revise certain elements of their religion instead of forsaking it altogether.

Do you now know more about the Samaritans than you ever wanted to? I hope not, because there's much more of genetic, demographic, economic, linguistic, artistic, and musical interest both in Pummer's book and in the rich bibliography that he has amassed.

Robert Gundry is scholar-in-residence and professor emeritus at Westmont College. He is the author most recently of Peter—False Disciple and Apostate according to Saint Matthew (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The Babylonian Exile of the Jewish élite in the 6th century BC was a notable alternative to openly neutralizing all survivors of a defeated population through occupation, mass execution, or enslavement. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), British forces on Dutch-African colonists' territory made another such concession that was to prove characteristic for the 20th century and beyond. It was a response to guerrilla warfare, and at the same time an effort to equivocate about the fate of captured civilians, in the face of a growing international concern with human rights. They moved people, in this case to the first concentration camps.

Confined there, Afrikaner women and children could no longer provide material support to men in the field. In the harsh conditions that at the time were usual for actual prisoners of war, many of these noncombatants perished from hunger and disease, and after the war the devastated families and farms made for a weak and suffering body politic and economy—conducive, for a while, to British hegemony in southern Africa. The concentration camps, by extension, fostered the newer colonists' gold and diamond businesses.

Moving people can be a very sinister business. They can be ordered by their own government to "register" their property and turn it over for "safekeeping" before their "evacuation," and they may hurry to comply with the reassuring bureaucracy; once isolated away from their homes, they can be tortured to reveal the location of any hidden valuables.

They can be moved under physical conditions likely to kill them en route, or moved to a place with no resources at all to keep them alive, or to a mine or factory or construction site where they will quickly be worked to death. Or they can simply be marched out of town, shot, and buried, or loaded onto ships, taken out to sea, and drowned.

The first mass displacements to amount to genocide were of the Armenians of the Near East between 1915 and 1923. How efficient a tactic moving people can be, and at the same time how effective a dodge of responsibility, is sickeningly clear from these events. A century later, official Turkish denial and economic and diplomatic pressure have left popular consciousness of the episode dim and piecemeal—though at the time the crisis inspired a popular uproar in America.

Armenians commemorate April 24, 1915, as the beginning. Working from a carefully compiled list, Turkish officials arrested and internally deported around 250 of the most prominent Armenians, decapitating the leadership, most of which was killed. Armenian communities were then systematically dispossessed and removed. Special commandos killed some (men in their prime, by preference) in isolated places nearby, but marched many thousands more to the south and east, beating, plundering, raping, torturing, extorting, and enslaving—and accepting help in all this from populations along the way. A succession of the exiles' improvised camps were destroyed by burning and sacking, under laws that limited the Armenian population's percentage in any given locale. Armenians in the army were shifted from combat duty to slave labor battalions and also transported to progressively rougher and more barren country.

Many of those who did not escape on the way yet survived the march into the Syrian desert were organized for dispatch by gunfire. But desert conditions were so severe, and the deportees by this time so weak and so low on rescued and hoarded possessions to trade, that intervention was hardly needed. To this day, large cairns stand that are structured not by rocks or turf but by bones. The deep inland isolation allowed Turkish officials to tell any story they wished, and for their foreign sympathizers to corroborate it. One high-level American version of events was that the Armenians were enjoying a salubrious vacation climate such as the wealthy traveled to at great expense.

For the first time, a mass deportation drew on the power of modern infrastructure and technology. As during the Holocaust later, cattle cars discretely transported victims in large numbers through populated areas. The new military command and control systems ran with twists, projecting accountability while efficiently dodging it. There was, for example, a regimen of double telegrams: one for the official record, pretending to order a community's protection against localized violence, and a second, to be destroyed immediately, containing the real instructions.

But the key innovation was the semi-automatic, repeating firearm. Deploying it against Armenians long forbidden to own weapons other than hunting rifles, a few gendarmes could empty whole towns, marshal traveling columns of thousands from horseback, form a perimeter guard around large camps, and even control every movement of those who knew they were spending their last hours on earth.

This was also the modern era's first removal of a massive Christian population—probably between one and two million Armenians, the world's oldest Christian nation. (Its conversion dates to AD 301.) This episode marked the point at which dhimmitude, or the legally inferior status (entailing fewer rights and special taxes) in which Christians had been living under Muslim regimes, broke down catastrophically, with Christians seen as ipso facto internal enemies.

Not only Armenian Orthodox Christians, but many Greeks and others, and eventually even Protestants, were driven out or killed. Not only Turks but other Muslims such as Chechens and, most fiercely, Kurds (not yet alienated and insurgent) persecuted them. The deportations were heralded with a fatwa from a leading cleric, billed as a holy war, and accompanied on the ground by the epithets "infidel," "pig," and "dog." The non-Muslim population of Turkey fell from more than 19 percent in 1914 to 2.5 percent in 1927. (It is now around .2 percent.)

The years of the genocide were also a time of significant Christian solidarity, both internal and international. Documentation abounds of pious mutual support and sacrifice among the deportees. Any American missionaries—and there were many such missionaries in the country—who had been intent on delivering Ottoman Christians from the purported errors of Orthodoxy but then witnessed deportations had their priorities starkly rearranged. And the American public, especially through their churches, responded with an outrage that could sometimes trump the material and strategic concerns of their leaders; and sent the first great outpouring of international aid.

But religion combined with other factors, and historians consistently cite oil as darkening the genocide's background. The modern, oil-dependent consumer economy was underway, and modern, oil-dependent military equipment (particularly warships) was standing by for World War I to start in 1914. Oil fields of fantastic size in Mesopotamia (centered in present-day Iraq) and the Arabian peninsula were under the control of the weak, decadent Ottoman Turkish sultanate. For the Western press to call the whole Ottoman Empire the "sick man of Europe" was telling: since the man was part of Europe, the West had a valid interest in his property. When he died, when the empire as such broke up, what new leaders would be powerful, canny, and pragmatic enough to deliver the critical riches of restive, multiethnic territories to whichever of the major Western powers could maneuver quickly and deftly enough?

The modernizing, nationalist, secularist "Young Turks" became the people to deal with, and over a few years they played Europe to their huge advantage, establishing a regime that has lasted until now (though recently taking a more Islamist form and sidelining the army). Turkey was a WWI German ally but never a declared enemy of the US, the deciding force in the war, which maintained a full (and commercially alert and active) diplomatic relationship. Under Young Turk leadership, the Turkish army repelled Russian incursions from the north (across the Armenian homeland, in fact), British efforts at Gallipoli to win control of the vital Dardanelles Strait, and a Greek invasion. The French failed with (among other initiatives) an actual Armenian Legion.

Though the main oil sources are outside the contracted Turkish borders, Turkey is still rewarded and protected by the West, not least as a NATO ally and the site of the US Incirlik and Izmir air bases; it would be enormously harder for the US and its coalition partners to weigh in militarily in the Middle East without Turkey's cooperation.

In a Turkish leadership who already saw how high the stakes were, the motivations for the Armenians' removal were to some degree analogous to the motivations for the Holocaust. Tentative liberalization and democratization caused a relatively more educated, cosmopolitan, and commercial group to expect a share in policy development and governance; if they were around at all, they would block authoritarian moves from other quarters; they would stop the leadership from creating and transacting with a new map.

Along with ancient prejudice against them, the dissent and activism of the targeted group—some German Jews were Marxists; past pogroms and other violence and oppression had gone so far as to generate Armenian insurgencies and to spur Armenian enlistment in foreign armies—made them ideal scapegoats for national hardships and upheavals. Quasi-scientific notions of racial purity and ideologies of ethnic destiny served as a gloss on the promise: "If they are gone, you true citizens can have in a sanitized and concentrated form everything that is in their hands now: wealth, culture, influence, control over history; the alien people's elimination will funnel all that up through us, your leaders, and we will redistribute it to you."

Thus the modern economy and the modern nation, new and powerful-looking, could be represented as a fully exploitable, easily manageable machine, like a car or a camera—only one with blocked workings that needed to be cleaned out, unclogged of troublesome elements so that it could do the people's precise will. The old multiethnic and multicultural polity was intolerable, because it wasn't an instrument; it was just itself, in its own right, under the premise that God had made it and maintained it (though various parts of it might well claim special favor), along with everything else. Traditional, almost casual religious sensibility gave way to ideology, the ultimate human invention, meant to displace all the inventions of the sole Inventor's mind.

The surviving Armenians, like the Jews, have prospered strikingly as a diaspora in the West but have had a traumatic time in trying to establish their own homeland. The Republic of Armenia had hardly any time as a safe haven from the genocide before it became a Soviet Socialist Republic, a southeastward buffer the most valuable part of which, the ancient Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Stalin gifted to neighboring Azerbaijan, a Turkic enclave.

The Gorbachev years seemed to offer opportunity to the relatively developed Armenian province, which did achieve independence in 1990. But there was a major earthquake in 1988, and a long war to win back Nagorno-Karabakh, and the landlocked position proved a strategic and economic vise. Armenians living in Azerbaijan were even ejected in grisly pogroms. (The upshot, with Azerbaijanis unable to reside in Armenia, was a little like a miniature of the "exchange of populations" between Greece and Turkey in 1923.) Urbanites, and especially refugees, starved and froze under trade embargoes, and scenes reminiscent of the genocide proliferated: doctors, musicians, and teachers, the confident élite of a few months before, trading heirlooms for bread and burning the furniture.

Significant popular contributions to the historical record have marked the 100th anniversary of the genocide's start. Ronald Grigor Suny's "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else" may prove the indispensable summary. Suny is a distinguished historian who has written other books about the Armenians. To a chorus of praise for his diligence and his instinct for the vivid detail, I add my wonder at his sheer poise. It's hard not to slide into unedifying anger about this topic on the one hand, but on the other it's not easy to tell where to limit contextualizing; the whole story is, after all, thousands of years long; and it's not over.

I recommend equally strongly, however, another account of a different type, Lou Ureneck's The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide, concentrating on a single extended episode and bringing to light an inspired personality. The Reverend Asa Jennings, a Methodist YMCA functionary from upstate New York, arrived with his family in Smyrna, Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast, in 1922. He was not the first choice of the YMCA chapter to which he was assigned; he was a modest man with an obscure background, and for a professional advocate of sports, he was disconcertingly hunched-over and impaired. He seemed to have little going for him but energy and enthusiasm.

But in short order, after the Young Turk commander Mustafa Kemal (later called Ataturk, or "Father of the Turks") repelled a Greek incursion into the interior, the last wave of displaced Armenians, along with the Greek army in flight, poured into Smyrna from there. The unarmed civilians were easily raped, robbed, assaulted, and picked off by Turkish soldiers. Survivors jammed the shore week after week, frantic for rescue, while ships of several nations stood off. Diplomats and many other foreign residents acceded to their own governments' and official Turkish instructions to do nothing, and even to help prevent anything from being done. Meanwhile, refuges were destroyed and the city's settled Armenian population flushed out by a deliberate conflagration.

Admiral Mark Bristol, head of regional American forces from his base at Constantinople, responded to pleas for intervention by, among various connivances, dispatching pet journalists to gather from a distance and transmit as fact the Turkish leaders' hand-crafted rumors of widespread Greek and Armenian atrocities on Turks, as justification for the atrocities on Armenians that the journalists witnessed—and sometimes greeted with racist sneers at the victims' expense. Bristol continued dragging his feet and promoting mass casualties even after public pressure made the evacuation and Washington's condoning of it inevitable.

It was Jennings who hiked painfully back and forth day by day, organizing food and gathering together raped women for sanctuary and medical care. Almost alone at first, he insistently but strategically pushed for a boatlift, and he perpetrated and took responsibility for a few fast ones without which the boatlift could not have happened: it was fully sanctioned only retrospectively, when authorities could not admit that from the beginning they had not meant to allow it. Jennings also took the lead in provisioning the refugees in their jammed and near-desperate havens in Greece. Many of these refugees ended up in the US. (The Hamidian massacres of the 1890s had pushed the first great Armenian-US immigration, so there were established communities waiting.)

Jennings saved hundreds of thousands of lives, for which he never sought credit. Because of the protagonist's self-effacement, Ureneck had to perform prodigies of research to tell the story, but there is no doubt: it was Jennings' legwork, creative and half-official deals, and sheer pig-headedness that turned the handwringing or the temporizing of far more powerful people into the rescue. Not a bad fulfillment of his wife Amy's faith, years before, that he would survive tuberculosis in order to undertake a great witness someday. Not bad, either, as an answer to pop-culture depictions of missionaries. He apparently did all of this without once shouting, "Down on your knees, you sinners!"

Also fascinating is Eric Bogosian's Operation Nemesis, about the international conspiracy (1920-1922) to assassinate the genocide's ringleaders. Bogosian's main story is of Soghom*on Tehlirian. This young Armenian veteran of the Russian army had lost his family to the genocide and was obsessed with retribution. Eventually recruited, trained, and financed for just this purpose by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (based in America), he was positioned in Berlin to shoot the Grand Vizier Talat Pasha, an Ottoman holdover and the genocidaire at the top of the list for dispatch. In a German submarine, Talat had escaped British-sponsored justice in Constantinople.

Tehlirian testified virtually unchallenged at his trial—though with an army of facts and probabilities arrayed against him—that he had escaped from a death march himself and was working alone under the command of his mother's ghost. His acquittal was a sop to German guilt and—I would speculate—precluded far less convenient rapprochements with the Armenian people, which might have made a difference in later history. Hitler, now famously, adduced worldwide obliviousness about the Armenian genocide as the reason he was sure of getting away with invading Poland.

Bogosian is uneasy about the unpunished vengeance and effectively dramatizes the heart of the matter, the absence of international rule of law. There were seven Operation Nemesis assassinations, but not one resulted in a sentence for murder, in spite of a British military trial in addition to the German civil one. (Only a single turn of events approximated punishment: the Soviets rounded up one assassin in a sweep of Armenian revolutionaries, and he disappeared.) The assassins prospered. Arshavir Shirakian emigrated to the US, raised a family, was active in the Armenian community, and wrote an assassination memoir. He had the collector's set of impunity.

Of course, the traditional glory of tyrannicide, the nightmare pity for victims and survivors, and exasperation with the designated role as spectator—all of this shoves a reader toward an "Okay, fine," or even a "Good for them!" But we definitely don't get rule of law as hopeful as Nuremberg's—which supported the German moral revival and rallied assent for Jews' dignity and security—if on a much smaller scale juridical principles break down and we can't even reliably affirm the Bible's "You shall not commit murder."

The Turkish reaction to Operation Nemesis should have discredited terrorism—that's what in essence the undertaking was—forever. The genocidal nation was not going to take the killings as a just reproach, but instead raged over them and memorialized some of the victims as heroes, with results in line with the almost daily news from the Middle East now. A brave and effective advocate of the genocide's recognition and of reconciliation, Hrant Dink, was gunned down in 2007. His killer must have had reasons. Everybody has reasons for everything vile. Everybody's allowed reasons until a credible legal forum stops accepting them and simply asks, "Did you do it or not?" Not coincidentally, the critical admission sought concerning the Armenian genocide is still simply that it happened.

Dawn Anahid MacKeen's grandfather, Stepan Miskjian, was a young Armenian peddler and courier before the genocide, and he wrote memoirs of his life then, of his excruciating trek south with a military labor battalion and with civilian deportees, and of his escape. He in fact reports several escapes and recaptures. At last, slipping away within hours of a mass shooting in which he would have been included, he fled across the Syrian desert and eventually found comfortable refuge with a powerful sheikh. Slipping away from there too, he made his brilliantly resourceful and incredibly tough way back to his home town to find his entire family alive, their house reclaimed as the persecutions waned. But there is little extraordinary about the aftermath of emigration to the US, hard work, and the rise of the second and third generations.

In reviewing Anahid MacKeen's The Hundred-Year Walk, I'm in a tough place, and resentful of the author for having put me there. Exiles from a genocide deserve every benefit of the doubt; and if their grandchildren in America are raised in such comfort and security as to turn out insensitive to the enormities of history, that's an ironic glory of our polity. But then again, the question of truth in this connection can be disturbing. Soghom*on Tehlirian in the German courtroom, mesmerizing, titillating, satisfying his audience in the end, comes jarringly to mind.

No humane reader could blame Stepan Miskjian for romanticizing in a story that's demonstrably true in outline and understandably blurs his role as a trader and fixer, which was the smooth evolution of his boyhood propensity for schmoozing, practical jokes, and a general eye to the main chance: in the crisis he was useful to a variety of people, not just to his fellow deportees, which must have been the substantial reason for his survival. He is repeatedly shown leaving a camp on a private errand and returning. Twice he goes to town to find a repairman for the wheel of a cart he drives on salary for a wealthy deportee. Once he even takes a hike to patronize a bathhouse.

But it's distressing that Anahid MacKeen redoubles the self-mythologizing on her own authority. In her third-person version of her grandfather's story there is a great deal—pictorial, digressive—that he is unlikely to have even hinted at; and the divisions between the two authors' words are often not indicated. Is the self-actualization journalese hers alone?

Moreover, as to what (in outline, anyway) he plainly did write, her credulity is jaw-dropping. Did a false pitiful tale of Stepan's really turn one hardened gendarme against another (" 'What's happened to you?' 'This time, my heart wants me to save' ") in a death struggle for the escapee's sake ("the sympathetic gendarme stepped forward and blocked the barrel of the gun with his own chest")?

Stepan leaped to his feet and took off. "May the Lord give you long life," he screamed. His dua, his prayer. Even as he fled, he was astounded at the turn of events. Spinning a yarn out of nothing had always been his talent, and persuading others of his sincerity had helped him survive. But this—where had that tall tale come from?

Hmm—couldn't there be tall tales in Stepan's memoir? Anahid MacKeen isn't curious. Worse, she crowds into the biography with her own New-Agey story: her move back to her parents' house in suburban California and how awkward but still nice that was; travels in Turkey (the crazy drivers! the quaint provincial people!); the scary crossing into pre-war Syria, and the creepy surveillance—all this and much more precedes and is wedged in with Stepan's adventures.

Seated with the Arab clan she identifies as his climactic rescuers and hearing that their adopted Armenian had blue eyes (Stepan didn't), she wonders whether she's in the right place; but as a counterbalance to her doubt, she's enraptured by the fuss being made over her, not attributing it merely to the ravenous hospitality of the region. The later moment of exaltation in a stunning landscape, the sense of everything being okay, is strictly hers.

I recognized, with a sigh, the master plan. There is to be a film version of inter-spliced, equally important journeys. The goal will be not only immediate "inspiration" but an eventual small industry, including a dedicated nonprofit for "raising awareness." I'm guessing that the author and the promoters will not deem The Hundred-Year Walk a success unless it at least leads to talk show appearances and chatter over clothes and healthy eating (concerns which were, believe it or not, fairly prominent in the narrative). Yeah, yeah, I'm an irritable reviewer, I know, but this time is special. While setting old newspapers, magazines, and cardboard scraps under logs in the fireplace in lieu of kindling one night this winter, I could hardly take my longing eyes off this book.

Rudyard Kipling, who at the time of the genocide was still the leading apologist for the British Empire, was enthralled by the Great Game, the maneuvers for influence and control in Central Asia, and he seems actually to have believed in the validity of the metaphor. Like a genius contemplating a chess board, leaders could figure it all out, make the moves—including moves of entire populations, and the flicking of major actors off the board—that would balance and counter-balance power, no matter how complex the situation, winning wealth and glory for their own people, and for the losers the valuable consolation prize of more stability and general well-being than they could have hoped for on their own, more than they really deserved. But the Middle East is the classic site of such games, and many nations besides Britain have played.

To collate romantic fictions like Kipling's with the realities of the Armenian genocide is to see the West (of which I'm a professed fan) in a harsh, depressing light. The solemn calculations of the so-called Great Powers, and the outcomes so wretchedly contrasting, in humanitarian terms, with the public declarations, suggest a bar fight rather than "chess" without rules on a board without divisions or limits.

The impulse is to deplore stupidity and to try imagining better strategies. Did American statesmen bother to think a few moves ahead, let alone calculate what kind of ally a country that had gotten away with genocide with our complaisance would make if we ourselves were ever facing murderous fanatical ideologues in a nascent state?

But to get any "great game" right, to calculate many steps ahead and achieve what the good of everyone will be then, would be like shaking glass fragments in a kaleidoscope into a desired pattern as determined by a worldwide survey conducted with the help of a time machine. Blame has tended to draw toward our treatment of other peoples as toys; toward our frivolity and exploitation. But now the fundamental problem is bigger and more horrifying: we think that we can, if we try hard enough, know what God knows and predict what God predicts; and that we can act with godlike power and godlike benevolence in our globalized foreign policy.

The growth of international rule of law should be shrinking these pretentions. Domestically, we've had a very good experience with asserting that crime is just crime, which can be isolated from the vast complexes of history, culture, and personality we can't do much to influence. In that isolation, crime can be prevented, stopped, and punished. If we can vindicate that principle in concert with more of the world, there will be hope.

Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Brown University. She recently finished translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The Face of the Water: A Translator on the Beauty and Meaning of the Bible is forthcoming from Knopf.

Books Discussed In This Essay:

"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide. Ronald Grigor Suny (Princeton Univ. Press, 2015)

Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide. Eric Bogosian (Little, Brown, 2015)

The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide. Lou Ureneck (HarperCollins, 2015)

The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey. Dawn Anahid MacKeen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

To observe that evangelicalism underwent significant developments in the 1970s and '80s seems only to repeat the obvious. Readers of Books & Culture might think first of the politicization that attracted many evangelicals to the Republican Party or perhaps about the widely publicized controversies over terms like "inerrant" or "inspired" to describe the character of Scripture. We might also consider highly visible figures (Billy Graham, Bill Hybels, Jerry Falwell, et al.) who have received so much attention in the American media.

Evangelicals Around the World, a richly informative handbook commissioned by the World Evangelical Alliance, asks us to think again. While the volume includes much on matters that many of us in North America would instinctively consider the main developments of recent evangelical history, most of its pages open up subjects, spotlight individuals, and explore situations that are all but unknown in the United States.

There is for example the remarkable resurgence of evangelical Christianity in Cambodia—where churches begun by Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries were all but wiped out in the genocide orchestrated by Pol Pot in the late 1970s. Remnants of those churches straggled into Thai refugee camps, where they hung on until allowed to return. Today more than 200,000 Cambodian evangelicals enjoy flourishing churches while also dispatching missionaries into unevangelized villages. Cambodian evangelicals also provide the main support for Ratanak International, an NGO founded by Brian McConaghy, a former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Ratanak combats sex trafficking under the leadership of individuals like Reaksa Himm, whose family was killed by the Khmer Rouge; he obtained training as a psychologist in Canada before returning as a missionary to his own native people.

In an exaggerated variation of tensions also experienced in North America, South American evangelicals during the 1970s and '80s cultivated sharply contrasting attitudes toward theological education. In Chile, some of that country's thriving Pentecostal churches looked with deep suspicion on any of its laypeople or ministers who sought formal theological training. Across the Andes in Argentina, by contrast, serious theological education began with informal gatherings among Pentecostals during the dark days of a military dictatorship, which then later blossomed into regular instruction. For this expanding approach to theological training, key leadership came from figures like Norberto Saracco, one of the first Argentinean Pentecostals to earn a PhD, who happened also to participate in a Buenos Aires prayer circle that included the Catholic Bishop Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I.

The chronicle of evangelical developments in sub-Saharan Africa has become far too diverse for easy summary. Yet material in this book would support a strong case that for the Christian future, African developments are more significant than anything occurring in the old evangelical homelands. In East Africa, as an example, 53 organizations have joined to create the Tanzania Evangelical Fellowship. In Nairobi the African International University now offers—to be sure, with some faculty still from North America—doctoral training in Scripture, theology, missions, and Islamic studies. In Nigeria, the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), an offshoot of earlier efforts by the Sudan Interior Mission, now includes over 5,000 congregations with six million adherents, while sponsoring two seminaries, eight Bible colleges, fifteen theological training centers, four hospitals, one hundred medical clinics, an HIV/Aids ministry team, and a school for nurses and mid-wives. And this is not even to mention the huge variety of rapidly expanding health-and-wealth, charismatic, and Pentecostal churches that promote a bewildering spectrum of theological views and day-to-day practices.

When using the term "evangelical," it is now imperative to consider the entire world.

Attention to Africa also underscores the social and economic challenges that many of the world's evangelicals now encounter: poverty instead of prosperity, rapid social transformation instead of social stability, perpetual confrontation with violence instead of only the fear of violence from far away—but also daily joy in the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit, existential reliance on God for the provision of daily needs, and the local congregation as a center of personal security.

Evangelicals Around the World is directed to a popular readership with the aim of expanding general awareness of what evangelical Christianity now means around the globe. Yet as it accomplishes that task, the book also raises important questions for deeper analysis.

One of these concerns the angle of vision from which this work has been produced. Two of the four editors are Canadians (Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance; and Karen Stiller, who edits the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada's Faith Today magazine), as is Debra Feiguth, a writer who authored many of the book's vignettes highlighting specific evangelical churches, organizations, or individuals. The two other editors are an Australian (Mark Hutchinson, associated with the University of Western Sydney and the Scots College) and an American (Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary). From these positions the editors still can offer full treatment of what's going on in Britain and the US, long acknowledged as the centers of world evangelicalism, but now set within the context of a genuinely global story.

As an instance of the book's distinctive perspective, John Stott comes up regularly in its pages, but not for his ministry in England. Instead, it is for his leadership in writing the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, which recognized social service as an essential partner of evangelism, and for the foundation he established to provide advanced theological education for students from the Global South. In its early phases, that effort funded students who came to the West for their study, but now it supports more students who receive their advanced training at institutions in their own, non-Western locations.

Another issue raised in the book is the neuralgic but still pressing question of who counts as "evangelical." Rather than trying to adjudicate this always tricky problem, the book acts as an equal-opportunity-enumerator by using definitions supplied by both Gordon-Conwell's World Christian Database and Operation World, the country-by-country reference and prayer guide now published by InterVarsity Press. While the former classes as "evangelicals" the adherents of evangelical or partially evangelical denominations, the latter uses theological descriptors to estimate the number of evangelicals in whatever church they are found. With its approach, the Database presents a total of about 300 million, while Operation World counts about 550 million. By offering results from both of these valuable—and very careful—enumerations, the book gets on with its task of providing useful information rather than punching the tar baby of definitional precision.

The book also does good service in advertising the World Evangelical Alliance itself. Although the WEA coordinates the efforts of 150 member organizations in 129 countries, it remains under-appreciated in the US, where we luxuriate in countless evangelical, evangelical-like, and evangelical-derived organizations. An insightful essay on the history of the WEA by Ian Randall, who divides his time between Spurgeon's College in London and the Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague, helpfully describes an organization rooted in 19th-century pan-evangelical efforts, but with a modern structure that emerged after World War II.

In typical evangelical fashion, the WEA is a voluntary organization supported only by the good will of its members and friends. It does not, in other words, represent all who might be considered evangelical in the way the Vatican functions as an icon of organization for Roman Catholics. Yet in its efforts to link the often strongly individualistic segments of world-wide evangelicalism, the WEA is worthy of more recognition and support than it usually receives.

Many other important questions emerge from the pages of Evangelicals Around the World. Among the most interesting is to consider the change of perspective when the roster of noteworthy evangelicals from the past includes, as this book does, Mojola Abegbi, founder of the first indigenous church in what is now Nigeria, and Peter Ambuofa, a Solomon Islander who led the South Seas Evangelical Mission, alongside William Carey, Jonathan Edwards, or D. L. Moody.

However such questions are answered, the message powerfully communicated in this book is entirely clear: when using the term "evangelical," it is now imperative to consider the entire world. Whatever system is used for counting, more evangelicals now live in Nigeria and Brazil, when taken together, than in the US. More evangelicals are now found in each of those two countries—and also in each of China, Kenya, South Korea, India, and Indonesia—than in any of the European homelands from which evangelicalism emerged. And today the most evangelical nations in the world, when measured by proportions of national population, are not the United States, England, Scotland, or Canada—but Vanuatu, Barbados, the Bahamas, Kenya, the Solomon Islands, South Korea, and the Central African Republic.

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In her 1846 poem "The Missionary," Charlotte Brontö offered a perfect summary of the impulses that drove missionaries to spread the message of Christ, no matter how overwhelming the perils might appear:

Still, with the spirit's vision clear,
I saw Hell's empire, vast and grim,
Spread on each Indian river's shore,
Each realm of Asia covering o'er.

And I—who have the healing creed,
The faith benign of Mary's Son;
Shall I behold my brother's need
And, selfishly, to aid him shun?

At the time, British and Continental European Christians envisioned Christianity as a possession of their own, to be shared with the outside world's benighted masses, in Asia and Africa. Today, though, many millions of the world's Christians see Europe itself as a primary target for mission enterprise, however thoroughly those wealthy northern people appear sunk in sin and indifference. Across Europe, we now find representatives of countless Global South denominations, marked by fervent faith and a commitment to ecstatic worship and spiritual warfare. The story of "South-North" evangelism is one of the most powerful and moving in contemporary Christianity.

As in earlier epochs, we have to be careful with the language of "mission," with its implications of planned and intentional ventures into the pagan darkness. On occasion, that is indeed the model by which religion spreads, but by no means always. Never underestimate the power of happenstance, or dare we call it Providence? Commonly, ordinary people move from one area or another, sometimes reluctantly, and they take their religion with them, with no particular intention of sharing it beyond their own community. They might move as migrants, or even (in bygone times) as slaves and deportees. The Aquila and Priscilla we meet in Acts would never have lived in Corinth had they not been thrown out of Rome. Yet however humble the conditions in which they arrive, such people create a bridgehead for their faith. They build churches, originally to serve the highly practical needs of their own communities, but over time those congregations attract interested seekers from the wider host community. After some years, the same thriving churches become the bases for newly arrived and more committed believers, who define themselves explicitly as missionaries. Believers arrive first, and the missionaries follow.

Allowing for local variations, that is the story of how African churches have become so firmly established in so many European cities, not to mention in such US centers as Houston and Atlanta. Today, African churches are a bustling concern throughout Europe—some of them in what seem highly unlikely settings. The most spectacular example is the Kiev-based Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God, founded and pastored by Nigerian-born Sunday Adelaja, which claims some 50,000 followers in Ukraine alone. In Britain, Africans pastor the nation's four largest megachurches, while the Nigerian Redeemed Christian Church of God operates in dozens of countries. In French-speaking lands, Congolese pastors and missionaries are as ubiquitous as are Nigerians and Ghanaians in the Anglophone world. Today, some African-founded churches in Europe are even reaching out with new missions to the African homelands of their parents. Can we call this double-reverse mission, or should we abandon all such directional descriptors and call it "mission" pure and simple?

Scholars have published widely on these diaspora communities, including such distinguished figures as Afe Adogame and the late Ogbu Kalu. Multiple volumes now offer case-studies of immigrant churches in First World cities, usually based on ethnographic observation, and by now, such case-studies have become almost clichéd: "A Study of the [insert name of exotic African church] Congregation in [insert legendarily white European city.]" So common are such accounts that we clamor for more comprehensive and analytical coverage, which makes it a delight to turn to Annalisa Butticci's excellent and highly readable African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe.

Butticci describes communities in Italy where Africans are a well-known presence, but are also subject to much negative stereotyping. In popular parlance, the word "Nigerian" is almost synonymous with a street criminal or drug dealer, while racist humor portrays Africans in general as savages only newly emerged from the jungle. (Incidentally, the common Italian term for a maid or domestic is a "Filipina"). In response to such hostility, African communities of necessity turn in on themselves, and they naturally seek assistance from their religious congregations. Exact numbers of such groups are debatable, but a rough estimate suggests that Italy has some five hundred Nigerian churches, and 350 more Ghanaian. It gives some idea of the religious environment we are dealing with that in calculating such figures, scholars use a rough guideline of one church per one hundred Nigerians. Most of these churches follow distinctive models of worship familiar from their homeland, and several major denominations work extensively in Europe. These include the Ghanaian Church of the Pentecost and two Nigerian movements, the Deeper Life Christian Ministries and the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries. Those three groups in particular form the subject of Butticci's book.

(A project parallel to hers could focus on West African Muslims, who are also widespread in southern Europe. While Christians turn to Pentecostal churches, Muslims favor the tolerant Sufi traditions of the African-based Muridiyya order, and images and paintings of the movement's saintly founder, Sheik Ahmadou Bamba are very common in the streets of Rome, Milan or Madrid. One way or another, African religious patterns are decisively moving northward.)

The interaction of "African" styles with Catholic Europe is central to Butticci's work. Obviously, a great many Italians do not share anti-African prejudices, and they do their best to accommodate the new churches. One exemplary contact zone is Padua's Temple of Peace, where a hospitable Catholic parish has made its facilities available to African congregations; that experience provides the basis for many of the interviews and observations in this volume. There is also a rewarding and provocative documentary made by Butticci herself, together with Andrew Esiebo, entitled Enlarging the Kingdom.[1]

So how do African and Italian Christians interact? In some ways, the encounters are quite predictable. Unlike the US, Italy does not have a strong or widespread tradition of native charismatic and Pentecostal faith, so that Italian Catholics are both surprised and bemused by African enthusiasm. They clearly do not know what to make of the claims of miracles and divine healings that are the everyday currency of those churches. Africans in turn are shocked by European irreligion and indifference, and by the lack of young and even middle-aged people in Italian churches. Repeatedly, their comments on Italian Catholic practice sound as if they could have come from generations of American evangelicals. Catholics, they often say, hold an empty and formal faith, which offers salvation in exchange for the fulfilment of ritual chore. There is no heart-religion, and little joy. We also hear very familiar Protestant suspicions about the allegedly idolatrous veneration of the Virgin and saints. Given African Christian nervousness about anything suggesting the worship of ancestors, Catholic devotion to bodily relics, to "holy bones," is particularly upsetting, even appalling.

By all rights, then, the Italian-African encounter should be chilly at best, and disastrous at worst, but happily, the story is nothing like so grim. Partly, this is a matter of personalities and cultures, as individual decency overcomes theologically grounded doubts. Time and again, we find both sides showing tolerance and benevolent inquisitiveness about fellow-Christians, not least in the willingness of Italian believers to open their properties to host African newcomers. One funny scene in the documentary shows an ordained African woman pastor in her clerical collar reporting how she once brought an Italian airport to a halt when the staff and security people flocked to ask her if she was in fact a female priest. How could such a thing be? A naïve inquiry, perhaps, but the curiosity was well-intentioned, and the pastor in question reports the affair in high good humor.

In other ways too, the different sides have surprising commonalities, and it is in this area that the book makes its greatest contribution to the literature on migrant religion. Far more than most of her predecessors working in this area, Butticci is fascinated by the role of aesthetics in religion and the different forms it takes. Italian Catholicism is, of course, eminently sacramental, with a profound sense of the sacred quality of material objects—of medals and statues, of holy water and oil. African Pentecostals distrust idolatry, but they too are value the numinous. Pentecostals also know well the holiness inherent in places, and they cherish the blessed quality of material things, including holy oils for anointing. Pentecostal faith is thoroughly physical and embodied, with a whole ritualized language of physical actions and gestures.

The book's subtitle invokes "The Politics of Presence": the African presence in Italy, in the first place, but also the presence of the holy in the material world. Pentecostals practice "the sacramentality manifest in the conflation of spirit and matter that generates perceived real presences of divine and supernatural powers pulsating in the material world, in nature, objects and substances, as well as in the human body." The one-word description for that quality is "catholicity," small-c.

The surprising harmony between Italian Catholic and African catholic emerges most strongly in a remarkable chapter about an African church that has chosen to highlight in its sanctuary a massive reproduction of Raphael's painting of the Transfigured Christ. As the author argues, the altarpiece "becomes inextricable from the religious aesthetics and everyday spiritual and social needs of the congregation." Her chapter is intriguingly entitled "Afro-Pentecostal Renaissance."

I began by quoting Charlotte Brontö's imaginative portrayal of a Victorian English evangelical called to the mission field in the early days of the great Protestant movement into the wider world. In light of recent experiences such as the African migrations northward, it is startling to revisit such early works, and to recall the sense of spiritual warfare that originally motivated such believers, their sense that their greatest foes were what the letter to the Ephesians termed the principalities, the powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in high places. The spiritual combat would be fierce:

I know how Hell the veil will spread
Over their brows and filmy eyes,
And earthward crush the lifted head
That would look up and seek the skies;
I know what war the fiend will wage
Against that soldier of the cross,
Who comes to dare his demon-rage,
And work his kingdom shame and loss.

From a 21st-century perspective, this sounds awfully—well, awfully African. Perhaps what is happening in places like Padua and Kiev should make us revise our assumptions about that early missionary impulse.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author most recently of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels (Basic Books).

1. www.pentecostalaesthetics.net/documentary/

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Confession: I tortured some of the Korean students in my classes by asking repeatedly if they had ever heard of University Bible Fellowship (UBF) as I began to read Rebecca Y. Kim's The Spirit Moves West: Korean Missionaries in America. My students responded "no" regardless of how I framed the question. One of my current research projects, utilizing primary sources and social network analysis software, concerns the burgeoning of Protestantism in Korea at the turn of the 20th century. My first doctoral dissertation (in sociology) was a case study on second-generation Korean American ethno-religiosity. Confession: Before reading Kim's book, I had never heard of UBF, which turns out to be "the largest nondenominational missionary-sending organization in South Korea." Accordingly, I was intensely curious to see how Kim would connect UBF with one of her central questions: "How did a small country where only 1 percent of the population was Protestant a century ago, become a Protestant powerhouse sending missionaries across the globe, including the United States?"

The Spirit Moves West provides an interesting perspective on reverse missions within the context of the de-Christianization of the West or the de-Europeanization of Christianity. These themes are familiar to those who have read Philip Jenkins, Mark Noll, Scott Sunquist, Andrew Walls, Stephen Warner, or the 2013 report from Gordon Conwell's Center for the Study of Global Christianity, "Christianity in its Global Context, 1970-2020."[1] Kim claims that whereas during the 20th century almost all missionaries were from Western nations, today more than half are from the global South.

Kim is correct to note that "American missionaries were instrumental in the modernization of Korea" at the end of the 19th century. The impact of the first Protestant American "missionaries" such as H. N. Allen cannot be overstated. Although the particulars of the Shufeldt Treaty and opening of the Hermit Kingdom were not the focus of Kim's research, a familiarity with these contexts, as well as with the subsequent impact of international expansionism and the unintended consequences of the 1965 Immigration Act, will help readers to grasp the continuities, paradoxes, and juxtapositions of the UBF inflows into America. As Kim suggests, Korea was perhaps close to 0 percent Protestant about 125 years ago and is about 24 percent Protestant (and Buddhist) today. Further, roughly 50 percent of Korean emigrants to America are Protestant, and their post-immigration rates hover around 75 percent.

Kim contends that Korea has become "the number two missionary-sending country in the world" behind only the US. In 2008, there were about 600 UBF missionaries in the US; in 2012, the top four receiving countries of the 26,669 Korean missionaries were China (3,775), the US (2,697), Japan (1,347), and the Philippines (1,290). Perhaps this is why Kim focuses on one Korean missionary agency, UBF, as a case study to address her thesis: "South Korean missionaries who came to the United States from the 1970s to proselytize and 'bring the gospel back' to Americans, particularly white Americans, evangelized Americans as hyper-Korean evangelicals." According to UBF's website, these mission inflows began as a student movement in 1961 which focused on converting American college students and teens.[2] The first UBF missionaries to the US were medical doctors and nurses in the 1970s.

Kim's insider access is the book's greatest strength. She reveals that the early UBF missionaries had a "white complex." White college students were privileged for the sake of "cross-racial" ministry. It seems that these ideologies and practices stemmed from the UBF founder, Samuel Lee, who "commonly referred to Koreans as 'ugly' and Americans as 'handsome.' " Lee forbade Koreans to speak in their ethnic language at UBF worship meetings, and they were not allowed to attend if they did not bring white students. There were also dietary restrictions, replacing Korean with American foods since the former could be offensive (regarding "odors") to white Americans. Lee supposedly ate at least one hamburger per day. In sociological terms, Lee was a Weberian charismatic leader who exacted high costs and fostered pressure-cooking assimilation to launch UBF as a sect.

Unfortunately, Kim's intriguing questions and insider access did not entail a systematic investigation. I was a bit disappointed by the book in general and with chapter 6 and the "Research Methods" in Appendix A in particular because there was no respective data analysis. Kim's central point is that UBF missionaries from Korea during the 1970s and 1980s were "hyper-Korean evangelicals." What does "hyper" mean? Compared to whom and in which contexts? Kim connects "hyper-Korean" speciously with ethnicity by precluding a nexus with immigrant self-selection. First-generation immigrants in general and the Korean American postwar generation in particular are more likely to be "hyper" regarding their ethnic retention. Therefore, what Kim notes as UBF's "soldier spirit" unsurprisingly atrophies over the generations. Given the nuances of "strictness" within religion theories, it is also to be expected that ethno-religious inter-generational transmission wanes over time. I was not convinced that there is something sui generis about her "hyper-Korean" subjects.

Though Kim does mention the sect-church thesis, a clearer connection with this concept and more attention to the nuances of immigrant selection-bias would have provided a more accurate depiction of UBF than "hyper-Korean evangelicals." Even Kim notes that in 2011, UBF officially became a "church." A recent book by Lee and Min (2015), The Asian American Achievement Paradox, does an excellent job operationalizing "hyper-" and "hypo-selectivity" (particularly for Chinese and Vietnamese inflows). I wonder if this use of "hyper-selectivity" better depicts the early UBF inflows (especially of medical doctors and nurses).

Based on linear thinking, some have speculated that Korea will pass the US as the #1 missionary-sending nation.[3] Kim fuels such speculations, claiming that "on a per capita basis, South Korea sends out the most missionaries in the world." If Kim is correct that Korea has become the #2 missionary-sending country in the world, this would be a remarkable feat, since Korea failed to be one of the top ten Christian-populated countries from 1970 to 2010. But we should be wary of simplistic demographic projections. Just as predictions of a massive "silent exodus" from the church among Korean Americans proved to be greatly exaggerated, so too have projections of the mission outflow from Korea. Not only did Korean immigration to the US peak in the 1980s (when viewing the decennial inflows from 1940 to 2010), but the fertility rate in Korea also plummeted from 4.5 during the 1970s to about 1.1 today.

The 2013 report from Gordon Conwell's Center for the Study of Global Christianity includes a listing of "Missionaries sent and received, 2010," in which Korea is tied with Italy as the fifth largest missionary-sending country and is the fifth in missionaries sent per capita. The discrepancy with Kim's reckoning may be related in part to matters of definition. In any case, the results suggest caution about predictions. Further, as Kim noted concerning the two UBF churches she visited in Chicago and Los Angeles, the services averaged around 380 and 142 persons, respectively. Given my bi-cultural self-identity and those modest numbers, my unfamiliarity with UBF made sense. Confession: now I can torture my students with different questions.

Henry Kim is associate professor of sociology at Wheaton College.

1. www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/research/documents/ChristianityinitsGlobalContext.pdf

2. http://ubf.org/about

3. I urge these forecasters to move away from "y = mx + b" thinking to non-linear iterations, such as "f(x) = rx(1-x), 0 < x < 1, 0 < r < 4" where the r value may evince a fixed point, bifurcation(s), or chaotic region(s).

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

My family history reads like headlines: Thousands of Christians displaced from their homeland by an expansionist Islamic state seeking to set up a worldwide caliphate. That's what happened to my ancestors in the 1460s and '70s. The pressure came not from ISIS/ISIL but from the Ottoman Empire. The land they left was not Syria but Albania. And their destination was not Germany but Sicily. Still, it feels remarkably contemporary.

University of Toronto historian Nicholas Terpstra points to the late 15th century—when the same powers that welcomed my ancestors also purged Iberia of Muslims and Jews—as the beginning of the Reformation. It wasn't Luther's cheeky challenge to Rome, but mass migrations of religious exiles that changed the face of Europe.

For Terpstra, the real drama of the Reformation is not built on theological disputes but on a fear of contagion and the practice of socio-political preventive medicine. The cities of medieval Christian Europe aspired to be unified bodies of virtuous believers whose families and guilds thrived under the Virgin Mary's protection. Civic religion bound the community together by blending what we now consider life's secular aspects with religious festivals and the communal memory of local saints and martyrs. Medieval city-states made little distinction between the body politic and the body of Christ. The health of both bodies demanded a (metaphorically) medical solution: they had to protect the body from any source of contagion.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, a threatening shadow crossed this Christian landscape: the aggressive expansion of Islam, which conquered the seat of the Christian Byzantine Empire in 1453 and unsettled Europe's patchwork of kingdoms and city-states.

Alfonso the Magnanimous—king of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples—supported the Albanian general Skanderbeg, who successfully resisted the Ottoman expansion for 25 years. In return, the Albanians helped Alfonso put down armed rebellion in Naples. Alfonso and his successors prosecuted a war against Islam in their own territory. In 1492, Alfonso's nephew Ferdinand made a generous treaty with the conquered Emirate of Granada, creating a framework for coexistence. But high-handed clergy provoked a Muslim rebellion, and Ferdinand gave the Moors an ultimatum: convert to Christianity or leave.

If Muslims were a political threat, Jews were perceived as a contagion. Jews could infect the new Spain with a spiritual sickness. The right treatment was an emetic: Spain had to vomit up her poisonous Jews. And so, in the year that Ferdinand made a treaty with the Muslims, he expelled all Jews from Iberia.

Terpstra reports that the cities that received religious refugees and found paths to peaceful co-existence (though not toleration in the modern sense) prospered.

Venice treated its Jews better. In 1516, it quarantined them in the first-ever Jewish ghetto. What began as a way to protect Jews from hostile soldiers soon became a means for Venetians to isolate themselves from a source of contamination. By 1621, Venice also created a Storehouse of the Turks, to quarantine merchants arriving from Ottoman lands while also serving as hostel, warehouse, and market. As a city-state devoted to art and commerce, Venice was filled with merchants and artists, printers and writers. To expel foreign élites with their foreign religions would undermine Venetian prosperity. Thus it chose quarantine over amputation.

Terpstra documents the Jewish and Muslim migrations that were triggered by Christian fears. Many Jews went to Salonika in the 1490s. Sultan Bayezid II invited them, and within a couple of decades the city's population had tripled to 30,000, with half the population being Iberian Sephardim. These Jews brought trading connections and capital that transformed Salonika into a wealthy port.

Nearly 10,000 Iberian Muslims went to Algiers in North Africa. These Iberian Moors brought with them strange customs that prevented their mixing with local Berbers and Bedouins. A large number of Muslim converts from Christianity also arrived. The converts' cultural adaptability made it possible for them to integrate and take key posts in government and the military.

These Jewish and Muslim migrations were both religious and ethnic. But the birth of Protestantism created a different reality. Both John Calvin and Martin Luther became religious refugees—victims of the same purifying impulse that had expelled Jews and Muslims. Fortunately, the shifting political realities of their time gave them shelter.

These new religious controversies created a market for polemic and for publishing. The years 1520-1529 saw "a tsunami of popular religious titles," with many of the books and pamphlets coming from the pen of Luther—and the vast majority of those were polemics. It was not so much that the printing press enabled the Reformation, as conventional wisdom has it, but that the Reformation created a market for printers, Terpstra argues.

This worked to the disadvantage of Rome. Although key publishing centers Europe were in Catholic cities—Venice, Paris, Cologne—Catholic authorities were opposed in principle to lay discussion of doctrine. Thus Catholic polemic did not flourish.

After that wave from Luther's pen, publishing continued to be overwhelmingly religious, but the tone shifted from polemical to devotional—volumes of sermons, vernacular Bibles, devotional commentaries, and catechisms. Catechisms and creeds, of course, had been around since the early years of Christianity, but until the Reformation, these were largely aimed at literate clergy. Now catechisms became public documents that allowed each new religious community to spell out its beliefs about how one belonged (baptism or profession of faith), how one experienced the divine presence, and who or what served as a source of religious authority. There came a quick succession of new creeds: the Anabaptist Schleitheim Confession (1527), the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530), the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), the Calvinist Belgic (1561) and Helvetic (1566) Confessions. Each of these communities produced teaching materials that allowed parents to teach the faith to their children. Catholics, at first, resisted promulgating any new statement of faith, but by 1564, Pius IV issued a new profession of faith to sum up the responses of the Council of Trent to the rapid fracturing of Christendom.

While these new confessions were supposed to be spiritual documents, they everywhere "became standards of citizenship" and instruments of exclusion. Christian Europe, though more fractured than ever, had not yet lost the idea that a society should be religiously hom*ogeneous in order to flourish politically and economically. Thus Geneva welcomed religious refugees whose views were agreeable to its Calvinist confession, but (as the notorious burning of Michael Servetus shows) mere disagreement with Catholic teaching did not create fellow feeling. English proto-Puritans were welcomed, but other religious outcasts were forced to move along.

Activists, such as the volatile preacher Martin Luther, the Anabaptist prophet Jan of Leiden, or the Grand Inquisitor Cardinal Ximenes, "framed the legitimating discourse that preceded and incited violence, or that might even be used to justify or explain violence which had just happened." Their rhetoric seems to presage the divisiveness that has invaded American politics, "as friends are described as purely good and enemies as purely evil. This kind of black and white contrast," writes Terpstra, "was the staple of popular religious rhetoric of the period, and did much to shape popular attitudes to religious others."

The Radicals, after their failed millennial kingdom in Munster, were forced to find new homes—small, rural, voluntary, and self-sufficient communities in Moravia, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. And as new groups multiplied over the next few centuries, migrations to Europe's more hospitable cities (Amsterdam, for example) were followed by visions of new world cities set upon a hill. But even these used their newly minted confessions as engines of exclusion and created their own religious refugees.

Terpstra reports that the cities that received religious refugees and found paths to peaceful co-existence (though not toleration in the modern sense) prospered. Amsterdam and Salonika are prime examples. (The bitter fate of Salonika in the 20th century lay in the distant future.) One of my favorite tourist sites in Amsterdam is the "secret" Catholic church known as "Our Dear Lord in the Attic." Between 1661 and 1663, when open Catholic worship was still illegal in Amsterdam, the prosperous merchant Jan Hartman joined three adjacent attics to create a narrow nave with two balconies that would seat 150 people. It must have been an open secret. The construction activity itself would have made the project obvious. Amsterdam's Protestant city fathers developed a strategy of "tacit toleration" for Catholics, Jews, and Anabaptists. As long as they didn't practice their religion too publicly, difference was tolerated, and Amsterdam flourished culturally and economically.

Cities that were devoted to purity, like Basel, Munster, Geneva, and the Massachussetts Bay Colony, closed their doors to refugees who were not like them, and thus became monocultural and "were left with smaller populations and economies." Creative misfits were expelled and brought their new energies to other places.

The United States, France, Germany, and England are all struggling with questions of cultural and (to a lesser extent) religious identity as floods of migrants from the world's hot spots knock on their doors. Terpstra's account of early modern Europe suggests a calculated tilt in favor of exploiting the opportunities for economic and cultural vitality these migrant populations offer.

David Neff is the retired editor in chief of Christianity Today magazine.

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Here is The Year of the Runaways in a nutshell: the primary runaways' names are Randeep, Avtar, and Tochi, and the year belongs to the recent past. These three young men begin the novel shacked up with ten others in an almost unfurnished house in Sheffield, England, from which a bully with a van delivers them, daily, to punishing construction jobs. Each is an Indian citizen. And each an illegal immigrant, give or take (Randeep and Avtar carry specious visas, at least).

Then again, Narinder is a runaway of a sort, too. She—an English citizen—aids Randeep in obtaining his specious visa for reasons of her own; their pretended wedding opens the loophole through which he flies toward Britain and its touted opportunities. On arrival, though, Randeep does not settle into the arduous-but-worthwhile experience he's counted on. Instead, he goes hungry and stays lonely. He earns little money and pays for every arbitrary disadvantage. He compromises his morals. He hunkers down; he scrapes by. Just like those his life intersects with—like Avtar and Toshi and Narinder and like all their fellows. So there you have it: Sanjeev Sahota's second novel, shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, in a nutshell.

Except this novel refuses to fit entirely in the nutshell into which one can, just barely, cram its plot. Rather, The Year of the Runaways is dehiscent, a seed that frees itself.

To begin, this fiction exceeds a tidy rendition of its plot thanks to its narrative devices. Sahota swells his book's alleged year with his characters' backstories. He follows Tochi, the untouchable, at a little distance, abridging his adolescence but methodically documenting his short-lived career as a driver (half-chauffeur, half-cabbie) right through its catastrophic finish. The Punjabi Avtar and Randeep, in turn, the novelist treats like younger brothers, first describing their teenaged exploits fondly, familiarly, and later giving an empathetic account of the troubles that spur their migration. Finally, Sahota renders Narinder's devout Sikh childhood in incandescent snippets, as if he were a little awed by her, just like everyone else. And the novel pulls in a little of its characters' futures, too, transgressing against its namesake year with an epilogue.

Alongside its narrative devices, other literary stratagems add to its bandwidth. Take, as one example, Tochi's last glance at India. As his plane taxies onto the runway, "he look[s] at the dirty white span of wing veering away and beyond … to the floodlit luggage men playing cards on the bottom step of a mobile staircase." The understated symbolism here is brilliant, starting with "the dirty white span of wing veering away," an emblem of colonialism in reverse. But, as the "dirty white" implies, to reverse colonialism is not to undo it; it is, rather, only to promise a broader staging ground for less strident injustices—meaning that Tochi can watch "the dark sky ope[n,] becko[n], and [feel] a sense of being freed, of freedom" even as he travels to new bigotries and a different poverty. He is, after all, despite his ticket to Europe, no freer than the "luggage men playing cards on the bottom step of a mobile staircase." He is—as they are—playing long odds from a low position. What's more, even if he or they rise, more likely than not, the staircase will move and everything shift underfoot, felling them.

Unfussily, Sahota insets such symbols and parables throughout The Year of the Runaways. The book's literary devices, then, will not snag or stagger readers' attention unless they slow to look for them. Indeed, this fiction is a story first, absent any distracting polemic, so that even as its causes and effects overlap with ethical and political realities, Sahota's story never sidles into oratory. Each trope or metaphor lies flush with the smooth surface of the story itself, and this is one of its key virtues.

Its cardinal virtue, however, is that its characters—even merely glimpsed—cannot be confined by the novel; indeed, Randeep and Avtar, Tochi and Narinder will intrude on your thoughts when the book is closed.

That said, I cannot pinpoint just how these characters earn their long and vivid half-lives in the reader's mind. Certainly, they owe Sahota's knack for description a great deal. Consider the two sentences in which he depicts Narinder's mother as she makes her annual ascent to a high, holy place in Anandpur Sahib:

It was an amazing sight for the young Narinder waiting at the top: the giant white expanse of the steps triangulating away from her, and, alone in the centre of it, as true as bread, her mother in quiet standing prayer, her chunni pinned over her turban so it wouldn't slip each time she bent down, her feet pressed together at the heels, as they should be. It took her nearly an hour in that crucifying heat to reach the shade at the top, yet to her daughter she didn't seem made at all hot or bothered by the effort.

In less than a paragraph, Narinder's mother becomes an amazing sight for me, too. Even more, though, I find it amazing to edge so close to Narinder that I can crib off her sense of sight, its geometric perspective blurred by heat, its frame a rubric for veneration but its center the four words "as true as bread." And I can crib off her ear for English as well, its innocent allusion to Christ ("crucifying"), its slant handling of an idiom ("made at all hot or bothered"). All of which conspire to let Narinder draw breath beside me, when I'm reading and when I'm not.

The same is true for Randeep and Avtar when, almost at the end of hunger, they scrutinize a stolen chicken's insides, "nostrils doing the opposite of flaring." And of Tochi, too, when Narinder gently advises him that grade school crossing guards are not police; he cannot help sighing, embarrassed, relieved.

Nor does the writer stop at bringing his four central characters to life. On the contrary, he lets several carefully made secondary characters and fistfuls of extras crowd his clan of runaways—each of whom comes across as human enough that the reader intuits how many urgent, untold stories exist alongside the ones that Sahota gets to tell. And good readers will further intuit, without any clumsy prodding from the book itself, the faint but unmistakable exponent for these fictional figures' hardships: the unpretended and largely unimagined hardships of boys really named Avtar, of girls really named Narinder. Or Gurpreet or Savraj or Navjoht.

Now, of course, one could fill a small library with books whose good stories their characters seem to outlive and a medium-sized church with those fictional people who have siblings in the real world, and the fact that this is true matters. After all, having such books, such characters, means having more room to practice compassion.

But because many of the characters in my medium-sized church resemble me or people I already love, I know that whatever of my compassion derives from reading, I am still practicing it too provincially. It's not that I don't prize the company I already have: John Ames, of Gilead, Iowa, who rests his elbows on the bench in front of him, and Oskar Schell, of New York City, who sits in a pew, dangling his short legs, his boots heavy; the Brothers K and Scout Finch, who file in, cowlicks in their hair, and Mrs. Dalloway, who pushes a hairpin deeper into her chignon. I do prize them, but that doesn't mean it's not a relief to count Avtar and Randeep and Narinder and Tochi as new arrivals to this overly Anglo congregation. (And perhaps it relieves them, a little, to see that there's also a delegation from Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance in attendance.)

Nonetheless, my particular congregation of undying characters remains too white, too American. I blame myself, in part, for that. I'm not guiltless, either, when it comes to the fact that most of the characters I find capable of breath speak unbroken, standard English; that most of them wear familiar clothes; and that, by and large, they and I direct our belief or skepticism to the same God. At the same time, I would guess that you, too, rarely hear the breath of those from far away, measure the distance as you will: by means of history or atlases, in terms of culture or caste. And, what's worse—for all of us—is that the known antidotes for implicit bias remain both slow-acting and imperfect.

Do not think, then, I'm going to hawk The Years of the Runaways as good medicine, as an unbitter pill. If anything, it is a germ, a grain, but there is, at least, this: I suspect it of being perennial.

Jane Zwart teaches literature and writing at Calvin College and, with co-director Jennifer Holberg, leads the newly launched Calvin Center for Faith and Writing.

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