Walter and Ingrid Trobisch and the Globalization of Modern, Christian Sexual Ethics

Walter and Ingrid Trobisch played a major role in shaping a transcultural conversation about love, sex, gender identity, and marriage during the mid-twentieth century. The Trobisches are most well known for Walter's book I Loved a Girl (1962), which he wrote while teaching at Cameroon Christian College. Within a decade, one million copies of the book were in circulation, it was translated into seventy languages, and Trobisch had received ten thousand letters from African and American readers of the book asking for relational advice. The Trobisches founded an international marriage-counseling ministry to answer these letters. While the Trobisches held paternalistic attitudes common among western missionaries of their generation, their vision of sexuality helped Christians in Africa and the United States to navigate changing sexual norms of the mid-twentieth century.