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This chapter considers nine hypotheses potentially explaining the low levels of financial giving by American Christians. It argues that Most American Christians do not give generously for a combination of reasons. The first is that many have not seriously confronted and grappled with the theological and moral teachings of their traditions to give generously — they are only vaguely aware of or perhaps even avoid those teachings. Second, most American Christians do not give generously because many of their churches settle for low expectations of financial giving. Third, some American Christians do not give generously in part because they lack a complete confidence in the trustworthiness of the churches and charitable organizations to which they do or would give money. Fourth, most American Christians do not give generously because, due to the total privatization and lack of accountability of such issues, there are few or no real consequences or costs to stingy, intermittent, or no giving. Fifth, most American Christians do not give generously because most tend to practice giving on an occasional and situational basis, not as a disciplined, structured, routine practice.

This chapter describes a survey of Christian pastors and church members about money and stewardship in order to understand the thoughts, feelings, experiences, and meanings of American Christians that might affect their financial giving behaviors. In-depth, face to face interviews were conducted with twenty-six Christian church pastors and fifty-one church parishioners in Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and California. The interview respondents came from many Christian denominations representing different kinds of conservative Protestant, mainline Protestant, black Protestant, and Catholic churches. The interviews revealed that the issue of financial giving is one that seems to matter to American Christians, yet about which they are not clear and settled but rather uneasy if not uncomfortable. Many American Christians are less than fully contented with the practice and amount of their voluntary financial giving, but most seem content to live with whatever underlying guilt, confusion, or uncertainty they feel about it. Many American Christian pastors also struggle with varying degrees of discomfort and frustration over the issue of giving in their churches.

This chapter focuses on how American Christians can make a difference through generous financial giving. It is estimated that if committed Christians in the United States gave ten percent of their after-tax income — fully but no more than ten percent — that would provide an extra $46 billion per year of resources with which to fund needs and priorities such as churches, organizations, ministries, programs, and global development and relief. If the extra money of the minority who is willing and able to give more than ten percent of their income is added to the faithful ten percent given by ninety percent of committed Christians, there would be an additional $34.6 billion in giving by committed American Christians each year.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the primary goal of this book, which is to better understand and explain American Christians' lack of generosity, from a sociological perspective. It then assesses the claim that people, including Christians, are often selfish and greedy. The chapter then explains how the approach it used to measure the amount of money American Christians give to their churches and charities.

This chapter examines the results of a focused mental experiment wherein a nationally representative sample of American Christians was asked to ponder their response to the idea of their churches raising expectations on the financial giving of Christians. The idea in doing this is that having ordinary Christians all over the United States run this mental experiment in their heads will provide yet another angle on understanding how Christians think and feel about the issue of religious and charitable financial giving. The results showed that American Christians are ready and waiting to give ten percent of their after-tax income if only their churches were to ask them firmly to do so; earning higher incomes does not make American Christians more generous with their money; and racial differences among American Christians influence the matter of raising expectations of financial giving.

This concluding chapter begins with a synthesis of the discussions in the previous chapters. It then offers a set of informed conjectures, based on the findings of the previous chapters, about changes that leaders concerned about generous financial giving might consider implementing in ways appropriate to their situations. The lessons provided by this book that help inform or remind us about the human condition and the social lives of people are then considered.

This chapter argues that many American Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, appear unwilling to take a critical view of an economy and a political culture that not only promise easy prosperity at the cost of an increasingly dehumanizing — and profoundly anti-Christian — atomism but also offer simplistic answers to complex global economic and social problems. These same Christians have thrown their support to leaders who have demonstrated themselves incapable of demanding any kind of real communal work or sacrifice from the American people for the privileges and freedoms they enjoy. Instead, these Christians have devoted their energies to shoring up the culture of easy prosperity and unrestrained power. They have become apologists for an imperialist foreign policy that places heavy burdens on the poor and the working class, while at the same time they press for reactionary solutions to complex social problems like terrorism, abortion, homosexual unions, and immigration.

This chapter narrates the systematic efforts of nationalist leaders in the diaspora to establish a national Korean state in the aftermath of the large-scale 1919 March First uprising. Japan’s brutal suppression of the national uprising in Korea made it necessary for national liberation activities to be carried out from abroad, ushering in a new phase in the nationalist movement as the locus of political activities occurred largely outside the Korean peninsula. These activities resulted in the formation of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in Shanghai, which developed out of multiple ideological and strategic strands within the diaspora. The globalization of American power following World War I empowered the U.S. component of the Korean diaspora to play significant roles, ideologically and organizationally, in defining the vision of a new Korean nation-state that was embodied in the KPG. For the next several years, the activities of the KPG would remain at the center of the national liberation movement.

This book examines the progress that Protestant missionaries had made around the world in the years before the U.S.–Mexican War. It discusses the efforts of American foreign missionaries to convert the world to God's kingdom and to make American Christians aware of the world outside of their own country. It considers the role played by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in 1810, in these efforts. It also explores Christian imperialism as the ideal of American missionaries and their supporters in the United States, and situates it within the concept of civilization. Finally, it evaluates American missionaries in a range of imperial contexts as they sought to determine how the American foreign mission movement should relate to political institutions in general and to empire in particular.

This chapter chronicles the history and development of the sister church model of mission in North America, exploring how this model reflects the religious landscape of North America as well as trends in mission among North American Christian bodies.

This chapter considers the centrality of supernatural traditions of Conjure in the African American spirituality, presenting examples from various historical contexts. Conjure is a magical tradition in which spiritual power is invoked for various purposes, such as healing, protection, and self-defense. From slavery days to the present, many African Americans have readily moved between Christianity, Conjure, and other forms of supernaturalism with little concern for their purported incompatibility. During the slavery period, persons believed to possess special powers were present in black populations throughout the United States, and African American practitioners of Christianity often mingled unusual practices with their traditions. African American testimonials describe how some slaves believed that the power of charms and amulets provided them with protection from abuse and racial subjugation by white slaveholders and affliction such as sickness and destitution. Supernatural practitioners often adopted symbols from Christian traditions for use in their own practices and rituals, such as protective charms and Christian accoutrements.

This chapter recounts the challenges faced by the American Christian Palestine Committee (ACPC), including opposition from the American Council on Judaism and the American Friends of the Middle East, as well as the myriad tensions brought about by the Cold War. The organization's purpose was to arouse Christian concern in pointing out the plight of European Jewry during and after the war and acknowledge their desire to go to Palestine. Additionally, it tried to note the historic ties of the Jewish people to Palestine—something which many American Christians had forgotten, overlooked, or not even known. Fortunately, the ACPC—the most powerful pro-Israel Christian organization in the United States—had, on the whole, succeeded in its mission to develop a solid grass-roots basis for Protestant support for Israel in the United States.

American Christians have writ the modern ideological hegemony of the two-sex model (that humans naturally come in two genetic sexes) into the corpus of scripture, controlling both its meaning and the terms by which morally legitimate sex is determined. This chapter “outs” the unsettlingly androgynous and queerly erotic body of Christ harbored within the Pauline corpus, thereby implicitly challenging Anders Nygren's representation of the apostle Paul as the poster child of an agapically asexual theology while also explicitly challenging more contemporary invocations of Paul that support the oppressive politics of heterosexism. The chapter argues that the inscription of the two-sex model into scripture as a warrant for heterosexuality is destabilized at its scriptural foundation in the Pauline corpus. Paul depicted the Christian practice of communal sex, seminally incarnated in the androgynous body of Christ, as disruptive of stable gender identities.

Drawing on archival research, this chapter outlines multiple imagined Holy Lands in the Halbwachsian sense: the collective representations in Sunday school lessons, travel narratives, and news media that have colored American Christians' impressions since childhood. Few studies of contemporary pilgrimage offer the overview given here, but it seems an obvious place to begin since this book is an interdisciplinary endeavor and thanks to historians, there is a particularly rich set of sources detailing the production and circulation of Holy Land images between Europe, North America, and Palestine before World War I. The chapter also introduces a discussion about the role of tour industry producers: US companies, the Israel Ministry of Tourism, and local guides.

This chapter explores how the liberal Protestants sought to unite in an effort to restore their influence. While some of these cooperative endeavors led to the establishment of institutions that included Catholics and Jews, these efforts were hindered by obstacles. The majority of these projects involved only Protestants, and even in these limited efforts longstanding theological barriers could not always be transcended. One point of contention was whether or not to include Unitarians, the most liberal of America's Christian churches, in city federations. In the end, someone was always left out of cooperative efforts. If theological liberals ran the organization, they might include Unitarians, Universalists, and even Catholics and Jews at the expense of more theologically conservative Protestants. When more traditional evangelicals took charge, non-evangelicals and their liberal allies were left out.

This chapter talks about other movements and encounters that have branched off from the mainline Fourth-Day movements. While technically not part of the Fourth-Day movement proper, the offshoots share in the major aims and goals of the Cursillo weekend encounters that inspired them. The proliferation of Fourth-Day movements and their offshoots indicates the depth of desire by contemporary American Christian men and women to encounter Christ, experience healing and renewal, and become part of a new community. These offshoots also signal something else that is peculiarly American—the pluralism of Christianity. In part because of the disestablishment clause, American religious history—in this case Christian—is replete with instances of sectarian movements. It would be historically inaccurate to say that America has a “Christian history.”