This article examines the life and ideas of Josef Schmidlin, the founder of Catholic ‘missionary science’ and the most influential German Catholic missionary theorist of the first half of the twentieth century. An admirer of the German Protestant missionary theologian Gustav Warneck, Schmidlin often appears in the historiography as a forerunner of the Protestant–Catholic ecumenical collaboration that emerged after the Second World War. Yet a close examination of his writing reveals a vigorous critic of Protestantism and the Protestant ecumenical movement. A sceptic of transnational missionary organizations, he remained a firm supporter of the German nation and imperial project. This article gestures towards both the continuities and the discontinuities between the early attempts at fostering confessional cooperation between Protestants and Catholics and the later iterations. It also examines how nineteenth-century entanglements between missions and empire shaped the ideas of Catholic missionary theory during the interwar years.

Building on recent research into the religious aspects of the Cold War and the humanitarian efforts of the American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in early twentieth-century Europe, this article locates the historical origins of religious anti-communism in late imperial Russian reactions to the revolution of 1905–07. It explores the interactions of Russian Orthodox Christian intellectuals, especially Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, with prominent YMCA leaders such as Donald A. Lowrie and Paul B. Anderson, both of whom were mainline Protestants. Using Russian and US archives, the article documents the networks and mechanisms through which Berdyaev influenced his YMCA contacts. It shows that he shaped their efforts to fight communism in the interwar period and early Cold War through the promotion of religious values, or what Anderson referred to as ‘a Christian solution to international tension’. This concept was derived from early twentieth-century Russian ideas about the opposition between Christianity and ‘nihilism’ or ‘humanism’ as integral worldviews.

This article explores the attitudes and policies of the International Missionary Council (IMC) concerning Africa and African Americans. It aims to revise historical scholarship that views the ecumenical missionary movement as originating in white Western missions and guided by the goals of post-war internationalism. It argues that the IMC, founded in 1921 as the central institution for coordinating Protestant missions around the world, developed an ecumenical definition of pan-Africanism. This definition cast African Americans from the US south in the role of ‘native’ leaders in the formation of indigenous churches in Africa. With this racialized version of Christian indigenization, the IMC excluded African Christian groups that sought to form their own churches. It promoted, instead, European colonial projects and missionary societies that aimed to use African American missionaries to counter the incendiary ideas of pan-Africanism.

This article uses the early thought and career of the Indian Mar Thoma Christian and Marxian theologian M. M. Thomas to investigate the connections between ecumenism’s theology of communism and its engagements with anti-colonial politics and decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s. The article situates Thomas’ efforts to reconcile Marxian doctrine with Christian faith within the movement’s institutional practices for combating the entropic effects of modern secular civilization and Cold War polarization. Tracing Thomas’ ascent from Christian Marxist youth circles in south India to leadership positions in the World Student Christian Federation and the World Council of Churches, the article highlights the central role of his theology in establishing ‘revolutionary’ postcolonial social transformation as the object of Christian global governance in the post-war era.

This article contributes to the historiography on human rights and (religious) internationalism by tracing how the ecumenical movement in the post-war decades sought to protect the religious freedom of its co-religionists in Catholic and Muslim countries, specifically Italy, Nigeria, and Indonesia. In cooperation with local actors, the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs worked to anchor international human rights in the domestic sphere through constitutional provisions. These activities constituted a significant strand of Christian human rights engagement from the 1940s to the 1960s, which intersected with the Cold War and decolonization. The article then contrasts this with the turn to a more pluralistic and communitarian conception of human rights in the 1970s, animated by liberation theologies. As the World Council of Churches embraced a ‘revolutionary’ tradition and worked to resist military dictatorships in Latin America, racism, and global inequality, it gravitated towards Marxism-inflected and anti-colonial strands of human rights discourse.

The article looks at the entanglement of the international ecumenical movement and Latin American Protestantism in the ‘long 1960s’. It investigates the influence and significance of Latin American liberation theology for the churches and theology around the world. During this period, it was particularly the World Council of Churches (WCC), a worldwide fellowship of Christian churches, which strengthened the efforts of churches from the ‘Third World’ to identify their own theological issues and questions. In this way, the WCC strongly supported Latin American Protestant church leaders and theologians in giving specific attention to their own context. The article argues that the ‘boom’ of Latin American Protestantism within the WCC in the 1960s and early 1970s brought into the global ecumenical movement both new theological concepts, such as revolution and liberation, and individuals exiled from Latin America. Yet this contextual and emancipatory approach revealed at the same time fundamental differences and conflicts between churches of the North and South.