With his focus set on foreign missions, McGavran believed that these evangelistic strategies were not relevant to the “modern” societies of Western Europe and the United States.30 As American elites declared opportunity for all as a national creed and imagined a consensus in American life on everything from labor and capital to religion and patriotism, it was easy for McGavran to assume the United States had moved beyond the intense communal bonds and prejudices of so-called premodern peoples.
