In June 1949 the Soviet state arrested seven farmers from the village of Bila Tserkva. Not wealthy or powerful, the men were unknown outside their community, and few had ever heard of their small, isolated village on the southwestern border of Soviet Ukraine. Nevertheless, the state decided they were dangerous traitors who threatened to undermine public order, and a regional court sentenced them to twenty-five years of imprisonment for treason. In To Make a Village Soviet Emily Baran explores why a powerful state singled out these individuals for removal from society. Bila Tserkva had to become a space in which Soviet laws and institutions reigned supreme, yet Sovietization was an aspiration as much it was a reality. The arrested men belonged to a small and misunderstood religious minority, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and both Witnesses and their neighbours challenged the government's attempts to fully integrate the village into socialist society. Drawing from the case file and interviews with the families of survivors, Baran argues that what happened in Bila Tserkva demonstrates the sheer ambition of the state's plans for the Sovietization of borderland communities. A compelling history, To Make a Village Soviet looks to Bila Tserkva to explore the power and the limits of state control - and the possibilities created by communities that resist assimilation.

Standing Against the Whirlwind is a history of the Evangelical party in the Episcopal Church in nineteenth-century America. A surprising revisionist account of the church's first century, it reveals the extent to which evangelical Episcopalians helped to shape the piety, identity, theology, and mission of the church. Using the life and career of one of the party's greatest leaders, Charles Pettit McIlvaine, the second bishop of Ohio, Diana Butler blends institutional history with biography to explore the vicissitudes and tribulations of evangelicals in a church that often seemed inhospitable to their version of the Gospel. This gracefully written narrative history of a neglected movement sheds light on evangelical religion within a particular denomination and broadens the interpretation of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism as a whole. In addition, it elucidates such wider cultural and religious issues as the meaning of millennialism and the nature of the crisis over slavery.

In recent decades, Christianity has acquired millions of new adherents in Africa, the region with the world's fastest-expanding population. What role has this development of evangelical Christianity played in Africa's democratic history? To what extent do its churches affect its politics? By taking a historical view and focusing specifically on the events of the past few years, Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa seeks to explore these questions, offering individual case studies of six countries: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, and Mozambique. Unlike most analyses of democracy which come from a secular Western tradition, these contributors, mainly younger scholars based in Africa, bring first-hand knowledge to their chapters and employ both field and archival research to develop their data and analyses. The result is a groundbreaking work that will be indispensable to everyone concerned with the future of this volatile region.
Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa is one of four volumes in the series Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South, which seeks to answer the question: What happens when a revivalist religion based on scriptural orthodoxy participates in the volatile politics of the Third World? At a time when the global-political impact of another revivalist and scriptural religion -- Islam -- fuels vexed debate among analysts the world over, these volumes offer an unusual comparative perspective on a critical issue: the often combustible interaction of resurgent religion and the developing world's unstable politics.