Description
Book SynopsisJoel Cabrita tells the story of Zionism, which began in a utopian community near Chicago in 1900. Its faith-healing spiritualism, uplifting pan-racialism, and missionary zeal resonated with marginalized urban working-class whites and blacks in both the United States and Southern Africa. Today Zionism is Southern Africa’s largest religious movement.
Trade ReviewThe People’s Zion is an outstanding book, and the topic it explores—the origins and evolution of so-called ‘Zionist’ churches in South Africa—is important and remarkably under-studied. Original, well researched, conceptually sophisticated, and just very, very smart. -- James T. Campbell, Stanford University
Cabrita has produced a meticulously researched and engagingly written piece of scholarship. It is to my knowledge the first work to pull together the entire Zion movement from its origins in mid-nineteenth-century Australia to turn-of-the-twentieth-century America to twentieth- and twenty-first-century southern Africa.
The People’s Zion promises not only to be an important contribution to Southern African Studies, but to open up new roads of inquiry for scholars and general readers alike. -- Stephen W. Martin, King’s University, Edmonton, Canada
Drawing on archives in South Africa, Swaziland, Sweden, and Illinois, this remarkable book tells an altogether unlikely story. It features an Australian preacher who, in the late nineteenth century, established a Christian utopia in tiny Zion, Illinois, a town which was to be the launching pad for one of southern Africa’s leading Christian movements.
The People’s Zion brings to light a whole network of textual, intellectual, and theological exchange that drew American midwesterners into close dialogue with co-travelers in southern Africa. In so doing, Cabrita places African Christians at the center of the history of global Christianity. -- Derek Peterson, University of Michigan
Offers an amazing wealth of details on the Zionist movement, covering three continents and several decades…A must-read for all scholars interested in the history of Christianity in South Africa as well as those interested in global networks of Holiness Christianity and nonconformism, their institutional expansion and social adaptation. -- Katharina Wilkens * African Studies Review *
Offers several explanations [for Zionism’s popularity in Johannesburg], such as its appeal to the poor, its disavowal of racial and ethnic differences, and its use of faith healing at a time of skepticism towards mainstream medicine. * The Economist *
