To Bring the Good News to All Nations

Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations

Lauren Frances Turek

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501748912, 9781501748912
• eBook ISBN: 9781501748929
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

When American evangelicals flocked to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century to fulfill their Biblical mandate for global evangelism, their experiences abroad led them to engage more deeply in foreign policy activism at home. Lauren Frances Turek tracks these trends and illuminates the complex and significant ways in which religion shaped America's role in the late–Cold War world. In To Bring the Good News to All Nations, she examines the growth and influence of Christian foreign policy lobbying groups in the United States beginning in the 1970s, assesses the effectiveness of Christian efforts to attain foreign aid for favored regimes, and considers how those same groups promoted the imposition of economic and diplomatic sanctions on those nations that stifled evangelism.

Using archival materials from both religious and government sources, To Bring the Good News to All Nations links the development of evangelical foreign policy lobbying to the overseas missionary agenda. Turek's case studies—Guatemala, South Africa, and the Soviet Union—reveal the extent of Christian influence on American foreign policy from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Evangelical policy work also reshaped the lives of Christians overseas and contributed to a reorientation of U.S. human rights policy. Efforts to promote global evangelism and support foreign brethren led activists to push Congress to grant aid to favored, yet repressive, regimes in countries such as Guatemala while imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on nations that persecuted Christians, such as the Soviet Union. This advocacy shifted the definitions and priorities of U.S. human rights policies with lasting repercussions that can be traced into the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1

A Global Shift in Missionary Christianity

In a 1974 article published in Christianity Today, Billy Graham issued a call to evangelicals throughout the world to join together and renew their commitment to global evangelism. Humanity teetered on a precipice, he suggested, and only Christian salvation could prevent it from toppling into the abyss. Casting his gaze over the events and transformations of the two preceding decades, Graham saw a world increasingly open to evangelism, yet also beset by structural crises, natural and manmade disasters, and spiritual malaise. Citing rampant inflation, wars, poverty, floods, and famine, not to mention the cultural revolutions that shook Western societies in the 1960s as well as the 1973 oil shocks and the Watergate scandal, he warned his readers that “our world may be standing at the very brink of Armageddon.”1 For Graham and like-minded evangelicals who viewed such social ills through the lens of apocalyptic biblical prophecies, these changes and challenges made the evangelistic mission of the church seem especially urgent. As he exclaimed in the article, “God is giving his people an opportunity for world-wide witness—perhaps a last chance!”2 Graham also acknowledged that a serious rift within Christianity itself threatened to undermine this core spiritual duty.

Through the 1960s, evangelical leaders had grown increasingly concerned about what they perceived as a trend toward secularization and liberalization (theological as well as political) within the major Protestant denominations, the Catholic Church, and interchurch organizations such as the World Council of Churches (WCC). This trend grew out of a constellation of political, social, economic, and religious forces that led Western church leaders to question the efficacy and morality of traditional modes of evangelism. The movements for self-determination and decolonization in the Global South that followed World War II, with their attendant critiques of Western colonialism and imperialism, also contributed to a “crisis of missions” by the mid-1960s.3 As indigenous church leaders called for greater autonomy and liberal theologians rejected the “imperialist” nature of Western missionary work, a sharp divide emerged between those who sought to broaden the mission of the church to promote social justice and self-determination and those committed to the primacy of sharing the gospel. Liberal and mainline Protestants tended to embrace this more socially aware redefinition of the church’s mission. Western evangelicals did not deny the importance of social action, but they did perceive the reorientation from evangelism to social justice as “a radically changed view of the mission of the Church” that threatened their efforts to advance Christianity throughout the world.4

This debate crystallized at the Fourth Assembly of the WCC, which convened in Uppsala, Sweden in 1968. The theme of the assembly, “Behold, I make all things new,” and the major program sections, titled “renewal in mission,” “world economic and social development,” and “towards justice and peace in international affairs,” left no doubt as to the perspective and objectives of the WCC leadership. Evangelicals voiced strident opposition to the working drafts and final statement on the mission that the World Council produced. In the article “Will Uppsala Betray the Two Billion?,” Fuller Theological Seminary professor Donald McGavran argued that forsaking the traditional evangelistic mission of the church would condemn “inconceivable multitudes [to] live and die in a famine of the Word of God, more terrible by far than the sporadic physical famines which occur in unfortunate lands.”5 Despite their efforts to influence the drafting process, evangelical leaders did not believe that the World Council’s “Final Pronouncement on Mission” placed adequate emphasis on the imperative of global evangelism.6 They decried the WCC for its determination “to subordinate evangelism to service.”7 As John Stott, one of England’s leading evangelical thinkers, noted:

The assembly was preoccupied with the hunger, poverty, and injustices of the contemporary world. I myself was deeply moved and challenged by it. And I do not want to see it diminished. What worried me is that I found no comparable compassion or concern for the spiritual hunger of the unevangelized millions.8

The outcome of the Uppsala Assembly and the trajectory of the debate over the crisis of missions left evangelicals feeling besieged and anxious to reassert the primacy of what they viewed as their biblical mission to spread the gospel. The actions they took in response forged a new internationalist outlook and activist sensibility among evangelicals.

The break between mainline and evangelical Protestants on questions of theology and the nature of world missions came amid significant demographic changes within the major churches. Lutheran, Episcopalian, and other mainline denominations in the United States experienced a steady decline in membership over the course of the twentieth century.9 These churches, which had engaged in extensive missionary work during the nineteenth century, grew increasingly critical of foreign missions by the 1960s and participated actively in the WCC meeting at Uppsala. According to historian Dana Robert, as these denominations “attempt[ed] to shift from paternalistic to partnership models of mission, they began cutting back on Western missionary personnel.”10 This reduction in missionaries helped to dissociate indigenous Protestant churches from the Christian colonizers of the past, which allowed local evangelization to flourish.11 Meanwhile, the more theologically conservative evangelical churches such as the Southern Baptists and Pentecostals grew exponentially—both in the United States and abroad.12 Pentecostalism in particular spread rapidly through Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the result of missionary fervor from Pentecostals in the West and burgeoning indigenous evangelism coupled with explosive population growth.13 The population boom in these regions, which significantly outstripped the growth rate in the West, made the Global South a particularly appealing mission field for U.S. evangelicals, who moved in quickly as mainline missionaries moved out.14

Against this backdrop of perceived missionary crisis and opportunity, evangelical leaders began an effort in the early 1970s to establish a global and interdenominational network of evangelicals to work together toward the goal of bringing the Christian gospel to all unreached peoples. Although the aim of achieving world evangelization through ecumenical collaboration did not originate in this period—the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference had initiated the movement for Protestant cooperation in evangelism decades earlier—the 1970s represented a turning point in the history of evangelical missions, a moment when cooperative internationalization became paramount. Though some evangelical leaders had held conferences in the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to develop a unified response to the crisis of missions, before the 1970s most of these efforts remained uncoordinated and small in scale. Indeed, in his memoirs, Billy Graham recalled that “part of the problem was that there was no real worldwide network—formal or informal—of evangelicals or evangelists” at that time.15

In 1966, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and Christianity Today began the process of rectifying this problem by organizing a World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. This event, though U.S.-led, brought evangelical leaders from around the world together for the first time, and signaled, but did not fulfill, the latent potential of an internationalist evangelical network.16 The fragile unity that the Berlin congress and subsequent regional conferences inspired helped precipitate the evangelical break with mainline Protestants at the 1968 WCC assembly in Uppsala and led to calls for more serious efforts to foster world evangelical cooperation. At the 1971 meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Graham reiterated the need for a global “evangelical superstructure” to fulfill the Great Commission.17 By then, the world situation and the perceived crisis of missions lent even greater urgency to the task. Evangelicals responded with several overlapping initiatives, some church or denomination specific, some interdenominational, and, in keeping with the tremendous expansion of independent evangelical churches in this period, some nondenominational. Beginning with the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization (ICOWE), the ongoing Lausanne Movement that it generated, and the resurgence in missions and outreach activity from churches, mission boards, and nondenominational evangelical organizations, a loosely connected, but significant internationalist evangelical network took hold.18

This global and transnational network flowered in the 1970s. A series of international conferences brought evangelicals from all continents together to debate the theological basis for foreign missions and to develop new strategies for cross-cultural outreach. As evangelical leaders and church members from the United States deepened their engagement with their brethren abroad through cooperative missionary and humanitarian aid ventures, prayer, and the social, political, and theological disputes that unfolded at these conferences, they cultivated enduring connections with Christians from all over the world. These connections affirmed their belief in the biblical mandate to proclaim the gospel to all nations and their aspiration to achieve this Great Commission within their lifetimes. The renewed sense of missionary urgency and millennial expectation, the rapid expansion of evangelical denominations in the Global South, and the creation of a global evangelical network fostered a robust, focused internationalist outlook among U.S. evangelicals.19 This nascent evangelical internationalism sowed the seeds for the emergence of a powerful body of U.S. evangelical Christian activists focused on global issues and foreign affairs by the late 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, the debates about mission and social justice that occurred within the context of this process helped to shape evangelical conceptions of human rights, religious freedom, and the world order.

Confronting the Crisis of Missions

On August 25, 1972, after several days of deliberations with religious leaders hailing from every continent, Billy Graham announced plans to hold an ICOWE in 1974 to expand on the work initiated at the 1966 Berlin Congress.20 Graham anticipated that this event, one of five major conferences on Christian evangelism slated for that year, would “bring evangelicals of all denominations to a new obedience that would result in worldwide evangelization,” and asserted, “it is my prayer that this meeting will . . . lead to the evangelization of every person on earth before the end of this century.”21 The flurry of excitement and publicity surrounding the ICOWE and other international evangelical gatherings, such as Campus Crusade for Christ’s Explo ’74 in Seoul, South Korea—which attracted well over a million attendees—led the Los Angeles Times to declare that “world evangelization is in vogue this year.”22 Still, commentators singled out the ICOWE Planning Committee’s effort to foster evangelical unity by including representatives from a broad array of countries and organizations as unprecedented.23 Reporters emphasized that the upwelling interest in evangelization stemmed from global Christian demographic changes as well as from the traditional biblical mandate to spread the gospel.24 The efflorescence of interdenominational conferences on cross-cultural evangelism also reflected roiling fears that the foreign mission model faced an existential crisis.

Overseas evangelistic work had long provided U.S. Protestants a window to the wider world, forging connections between missionaries, converts abroad, and brethren at home. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, missionaries had served as conduits of cultural exchange between evangelists and evangelized, as well as between mission-sending and receiving nations. Evangelists from the United States sent news about their overseas experiences home, educating other Americans about the people and cultures of foreign nations, not to mention the domestic and international issues that affected them.25 Information exchange notwithstanding, much of the transmission of culture flowed in one direction. As Andrew Preston and other scholars note, missionary efforts to introduce Christianity abroad also tended to propagate U.S. cultural, political, and economic values.26 Critiques of this tendency as cultural imperialism triggered the debates over mission that caused Graham and others such anguish about the future of evangelism.

Seeking to reconcile the realities of a rapidly changing postcolonial world with their biblical imperative to spread Christianity, evangelicals in the 1970s worked to change the dynamics of the intercultural relationships they built through missionary work. At international conferences, they consulted with indigenous Christians to develop appropriate means for sharing what they perceived as a universal message of salvation across national and cultural boundaries. These collaborative efforts to reach unreached peoples and share in international fellowship did not eliminate the charges or reality of cultural imperialism. They did, however, deepen relationships between evangelical leaders in the United States and abroad, enhancing the web of connections that made up the nascent world evangelical network.

The sense of embattlement, angst, and opportunity that surrounded the crisis of missions and inspired the organization of international conferences on evangelism reflected the powerful pull that the core theological and eschatological tenets of evangelical Protestantism exerted on its adherents. With their...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Defining and Defending Rights
• 1. A Global Shift in Missionary Christianity
• 2. The Communications Revolution and Evangelical Internationalism
• 3. Religious Freedom and the New Evangelical Foreign Policy Lobby
• 4. Fighting Religious Persecution behind the Iron Curtain
• 5. Supporting a “Brother in Christ” in Guatemala
• 6. The Challenge of South African Apartheid
• Conclusion: Evangelical Foreign Policy Activism Ascendant
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index