Is there such a thing as “cosmopolitan evangelicalism,” and is it worth talking about? As a historian of American evangelicalism, I can only recall reading the term a few times—in D. Michael Lindsay’s Faith in the Halls of Power (2008), where he gives it some sociological heft; in Lydia Bean’s The Politics of Evangelical Identity (2014) comparing Canadian and U.S. evangelicals; in the epilogue to David Swartz’s Facing West (2020); and in Charlie Cotherman’s recent history of the Christian study center movement, To Think Christianly (2020).
I work at a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so Cotherman’s reference piqued my interest. Sketching the recent history of study centers, which are mostly located on large R1 campuses (like UW-Madison, University of Minnesota, University of Virginia, University of North Carolina), Cotherman warns that the elite status of these campuses threatens to constrict the reach of the study center movement.