Empire of Healing: South Africa, the United States and the Transatlantic Zionist Movement

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My research will investigate the history of a twentieth-century Protestant faith healing movement called Zionism. It originated in the town of Zion, Illinois, in the largely white Midwest of the USA, travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, and became one of the most important influences in black communities of South Africa - today 30% of black South Africans are Zionists. In charting this still little-known story, my research aims to provide a new perspective on the dramatic twentieth-century expansion of Christianity in Africa. The shift of Christianity from Europe and North America to Africa in the twentieth century has been widely commented upon by scholars in religious studies, history and anthropology. Many interpretations emphasized the role of regional, continent-specific factors in the growth of Christianity in Africa. Scholars have pointed to Christianity's saliency for African nationalist movements and its resonance with indigenous African cosmologies. By contrast to these localized interpretations, my research will pioneer a transnational approach to Zionism in South Africa. Charting for the first time the history of Zionist exchanges between South Africa and the USA, I will seek to show that Christianity's rapid growth in Africa occurred via linkages between Africa and different parts of the globe. In order to do this, I will use the notion of an 'Empire of Healing' to probe the dynamic translation of Zionist faith healing practices between Zion, Illinois and South Africa. In particular, I will focus upon the frequent arguments carried out between these disparate geographical sites. This theory of religious development occurring across geographic, cultural and linguistic borders will highlight both the utility and the limitations of the nation-state for understanding the movement of religious individuals, institutions, practices and texts. My approach will scrutinize links across terrestrial and oceanic regions, alert also to the socio-political and religious constraints that undermined efforts to build transregional religious communities.My method is novel in two respects. First, Zionism in South Africa has long been treated as a regional religious movement, detached from its origins in North American Protestantism. My comparative approach will conduct historical and ethnographic research in both South Africa and the United States. I will seek to bring these two bodies of data into critical dialogue with each other, analyzing Zionism in its different sites as tightly-related components of a single phenomenon. Second, little historical scholarship exists on Zionism, both in its North American and South African contexts. My approach will be rigorously historical, using archives, printed material and oral traditions in South Africa, the USA and Sweden. In this way, I aim to illuminate the hitherto-untold story of Zionism's origins as a faith healing movement emerging in the late nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon world, as well as the complex processes by which it was transmitted to South Africa. Through designing a transnational, comparative approach to Zionism - one which I aim to be applicable to other religious movements - I will seek to develop my intellectual leadership in the study of religion in Africa and North America. These skills will be enhanced by my mentoring relationship with a senior colleague researching related topics, and by building interdisciplinary collaborations with an international Advisory Group. I will undergo training in management skills and public engagement strategies. My findings will be disseminated to academic and non-academic beneficiaries in the UK and internationally by high quality research outputs (a monograph, peer-reviewed articles and an edited volume) and through network and public engagement activities. These will include an international workshop in the UK, public exhibitions in South Africa and the USA, and a public talk at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.