Postwar American Evangelicals and World Religions: A Case Study of Intervarsity’s Urbana Student Missionary Conventions

Abstract

This paper traces the major discussions of “world” or “non-Christian” religions in the speeches, promotion, and scholarly texts related to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s triennial “Urbana” Student Missionary Convention, beginning with its 1946 initiation at the University of Toronto and concluding with the final 1960s convention, held in 1967 at the University of Illinois’s Urbana-Champaign campus. The author argues that Urbana sources enlarge the understanding of postwar American evangelicals’ concerns about non-Christian religions by showing that evangelicals assessed the religions’ implications for global evangelization as secondary to those of other geopolitical developments, chiefly Communism, postcolonial nationalism, and internationalism.