God's Marshall Plan is an excellent addition to the growing number of titles in the field of religion and American foreign policy. Recent scholarship by Emily Conroy-Krutz, Lauren Turek, Daniel Hummel, Gale Kenny, Michael Graziano, and Matthew Sutton, among others, has probed the thin line separating state and nonstate Christian actors throughout United States history. Strasburg continues that project. His subject is the fight between ecumenical and fundamentalist-evangelical Protestants to build a “Christian West” (3). Strasburg argues that Germany and Europe were the “proving grounds” for competing versions of a shared vision of a Christian American Century (3). He concludes that the Christian globalism of the ecumenical churches remained rooted in Christian nationalism, whereas the Christian nationalism of the fundamentalists and evangelicals was more global in scope than has often been appreciated (5). In doing so, Strasburg refreshingly establishes the international context for American Protestant identity formation. Conversely, he furthers our understanding of the impact of religious groups and organizations upon statecraft.

Strasburg begins his story of “German-American exchange” (6) during World War I. That was the first time ecumenical and fundamentalist Protestants were in accord regarding the spiritual reconstruction of Germany and the Continent, although fundamentalists tallied individual conversions, while ecumenical leaders championed a new social gospel. American missionaries, on behalf of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), worked with figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rabbi Stephen Wise to advance an ideal of “world Christianity” over and against the insurgent German Christian nationalism supported by Hitler and the “Reich Church” (55). Ecumenical Protestantism was hardly “tri-faith,” however, as exemplified in the ministry to Germany of Stewart Winfield Herman Jr., an American pastor with anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi tendencies. Fundamentalists, meanwhile, worried about the spread of “collectivism” at home and abroad, and so they travelled to Europe to support Hitler ambivalently as a bulwark against Soviet communism.

Both fundamentalist (rebranding themselves “evangelical”) and ecumenical Protestants saw World War II as an opportunity to renew and export their respective types of Christian Americanism to a spiritually broken Europe. Herman played an outsized role in ecumenical circles and the missionary-spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in proclaiming that churches could spark democratic renewal abroad and at home. Herman also joined the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, the latter of whom would guide the OSS into becoming the CIA, in using the World Council of Churches (WCC) in formation to, in Herman's words, “democratize and re-Christianize” Germany (132). Strasburg calls the ecumenical movement a “vehicle of American expansion” (154) and the WCC an “agent of American foreign policy” (185). Nevertheless, ecumenical Protestants’ “spiritual imperialism” consisted primarily of humanitarian work, culminating in their efforts to Christianize the European Recovery (Marshall) Plan. Armed with Karl Barth's critique of the “Christian Marshall Plan” (206), Europeans exposed the American self-interest underlying the “Christian West” ideal. Ecumenical infighting, however, allowed Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer, and their followers to infiltrate the Continent with a Christian libertarian critique of the Marshall Plan. The binary brain of the new evangelicals proved better adapted to Cold War dualism than did the unitive impulse of ecumenical Protestants. Yet, in the end, the strenuous efforts of both groups were more successful in dividing Americans than in unifying Germany and Europe.

Strasburg's concluding material brings his story of Christian nationalist consensus-rivalry up to the present. His title is a bit misleading in a good way: God's Marshall Plan functions as a synthetic narrative of ecumenical and evangelical American Protestantism between World War I and the Trump presidency. The book has great potential as a survey text in undergraduate and graduate classes—and even more so as it casts American religious history in a transnational context. Along the way, Strasburg also brings to light numerous unexplored subjects and people, including the “Christian carloads” program and the “Wooden Church” crusade, but, most importantly, the work of pastor-provocateur Herman.

The one possible shortcoming is that Strasburg turns too quickly to an exclusive American context after 1950 and thus misses what should have been the ironic conclusion of God's Marshall Plan. He reiterates several times Protestant fears of Catholic advances in Europe, and he covers well Germany's Christian Democratic Union which bound Catholics and Protestants against European socialism. Still, the power and proliferation of Catholic-affiliated Christian democratic parties throughout Europe during the Cold War betrayed the weakness of American Protestant work for a “Christian West.” Recent and forthcoming works by Turek and Gene Zubovich suggest that ecumenical and evangelical movements thrived almost everywhere except on the Continent. This is a minor point of contention, however. Strasburg has done a great service in documenting how the “two-party” American Protestant system fought for the conquest of foreign and not just domestic soil.