Transcript: Evangelicals Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy 1970s-1990s
Interviewer: Evangelicals have been active and influential in all parts of the American Experience. For this interview, the term Evangelical is defined as believers who won - have had a born-again experience resulting in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ to accept the full authority of the Bible in matters of faith and conduct of life and three are committed to spreading the gospel by bearing public witness to their faith. Their impact on U.S. Foreign Policy is large, fascinating, and full of experiences with direct bearing on our politics today. This is especially true as Americans look abroad to the Middle East and China. Two places where one, the United States has been actively engaged in the last several decades and two, the culture is wrapped in powerful religious ideas, very foreign to Christianity in general and Evangelicalism in particular. Today, we are grateful to have Professor Lauren Turek with us to discuss her book, "To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights, and U.S. Foreign Relations". The case studies in her book detailed the extent of Evangelical influence on American foreign policy from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Miss Turek is an assistant professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Lauren earned her Doctorate in History from the University of Virginia in 2015 and holds a Degree in Museum Studies from New York University. She is a specialist in U.S. Diplomatic History and American Religious History and is currently at work on a second book project which will explore Congressional debates over U.S. Foreign Aid in the 20th century. Turek has also developed exhibitions at a number of museums, historic sites, and cultural institutions. Lauren, thank you for being with us.
Lauren Turek: Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to talk with you today.
Interviewer: Lauren, would you explain what was happening in the 1960s for Evangelicals that will help frame your book scope for us?
Lauren: Sure. I am actually going to telescope out a little more than that and just talk about what the world was looking like for Christians in that era and the dynamics of world politics at the time. So one of the things that we see if we think about the 1960s, what is happening in the world is there is a process of decolonization that is going on where countries that were formerly under colonial rule by colonial powers are gaining their independence, many have gained independence by the 60s and that is leading to a number of people in these new countries to seek to question a lot of the assumptions about Colonialism to kind of push for kind of Anti-Colonial Nationalist Movements. And because of the important role that religious groups, especially Protestant groups had played in missionary work in the early days of Imperialism and Colonialism, going back to the 19th century, there was a significant critique coming from people living in throughout the Global South about missionary work, critiques that missionary work was sort of inherently, culturally imperialist. And what we saw in many Western countries including the United States among Mainline Protestants was a reaction to that, a concern that they did not want to be contributing to a culturally imperialist model. And so there were changes in the way that the missionary movement approached its goals. So we started to see where a lot of Mainline Protestants started to call people back from the mission field or to redefine their approach to missions to think about how they might do more to solve the problems of poverty or instability abroad to take a more kind of social justice orientation to their work. Evangelicals watching this happen were quite concerned about the redefinition of missionary work to have this broader focus and what they saw as a potential diminishing of the emphasis on spreading the gospel because Evangelicals really firmly believed that they had a responsibility to go out, share the gospel with the entire world in order to make all, uh, you know, spread the news to all of the people of the world. They were concerned that without active missionary work, without an active focus on Evangelism, the folks throughout the Global South would not have the opportunity to hear the gospel. They would be missing out on this and Christians would be kind of forfeiting this key role that they're playing. So we start to see in the 1960s as Evangelicals, especially in the late 1960s, Evangelicals grow increasingly critical of these moves by Mainline Protestants right at like at Uppsala. And they start to articulate new plans for themselves about how they can do more missionary work, how they can do more active missionary engagement in parts of the world where they - not that they weren't active before, but that they could expand their - their involvement there so that they could spread the gospel. So what we see is this flourishing of - of concern of anxiety about the world around them and about these what they say are, you know, two billion souls who have not been saved or two billion people who have not heard the gospels. So there's a real desire to go out and reach the unreached.
Interviewer: Great. And so this - this in the book you define or you don’t, I think there was a - an official term called Mission Crisis. That's what you just described, correct?
Lauren: Yes. Yes. So, folks, there were a number of Missiologists, uh, like, uh, a man named Barrett who - who really wrote extensively about this fear, this anxiety. That there was this crisis of missions that people were leaving the mission fields and that Evangelicals had to do something or all these people would go unsaved, they would - they would not have heard the good news of, you know, Christianity. And there's - it's hard to sort of overstate just how much anxiety this caused for these religious groups. I mean, Billy Graham is looking at a world that seems to be beset by all sorts of crisis. If we think about what's happening, especially in the late 1960s, there are - there's social unrest throughout the world, there are protests in many countries, there's sign of emerging economic challenges, there's a lot of - eventually in the 70s, a lot of political scandals so he’s looking out on a world that seems really, umm, to be affected by a kind of spiritual malaise, but also just sort of a dangerous world and he's worried that, you know, Evangelicals really need to take action. They need to - they need to get involved. They need to do something because first of all, this is an opportunity, right? When people are feeling that there's a sort of spiritual malaise, they might be very receptive to hearing the gospel but also because he feels a responsibility to all of these people that they - that they hear it. And so, this helps us understand the series of conferences that they've start to organize in the late 1960s and to the 1970s to try to bring Evangelicals from around the world together to come up with some sort of strategy. And not a sort of top-down one, but, a collective strategy for how they can go out and effectively reach these two billion people.
Interviewer: Right. So let's - let's move right into the 1970s. Can you give us the why and how the Lausanne Movement which you're referring to here, begun in the mid-1970s and what it meant to Evangelicals and their interactions with the world?
Lauren: Sure. So in 1974, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association held a huge Congress in Lausanne, Switzerland. They brought together twenty-four hundred Evangelicals and some other folks from throughout the world, and it was a really unique event. First of all, what they had done was they made sure not just to invite Evangelicals from the United States or Europe, they made a conscious effort to invite a wide number of delegates from countries in the Global South. So it was, first of all, one of the most diverse gatherings that they had had. And they didn't just invite those delegates to listen, they invited some of these delegates to share papers and to talk about Evangelistic strategy. And the kind of tagline of the conference was, "Let the Earth Hear His Voice," right? So in other words, this is the plan we're going to try to come up with some way to share the gospel with everybody. And the papers that the invited speakers generated their circulated before the Congress so that everybody has a chance to read them and comment on them. There are response papers that are generated. So the Congress is really a big working session and there are a number of working groups put in place. They also draft the Lausanne Covenant, which is a document that most of the Evangelicals who attended sign and it's a statement - essentially a statement of mission or a statement of purpose going forward to lay out how Evangelicals are going to evangelize the world. And I just want to stress Evangelicals are again, it's not a top-down movement, there are lots of different denominations that fall into Evangelicalism and Non-Denominational groups and Parachurch groups. So it's not as though there's one person directing all of this and so a lot of the activity that's happening is to provide some kind of structure for groups that work really independently. But the Lausanne Covenant defines a goal for world evangelization and it's pretty broad in how it talks about its - its objectives. And there's these sets of debates that emerge out of the Congress that reflect some of those challenges of the 1960s and 1970s, the challenges of decolonization that I was just mentioning. There are a couple Evangelical theologians who come from countries in Latin America who share papers that are deeply critical of the Western missionary model, folks like C. Rene Padilla and others who are coming from Latin America who are looking at the situation in their countries and they're saying, "There's no way that we can hope to reach people or hope to share the gospel with people if they are suffering from poverty, if they are suffering from inequality, if they are suffering from threats to their livelihood. So we need to break man’s slavery in the world." Padilla says, "If we're going to be able to evangelize people ..." And he basically calls for a social justice orientation for Evangelicals. And many of the Western, the U.S., the English Evangelicals who respond to Padilla's calls for - he actually calls for a moratorium on Western missions. He says, "We should stop this entirely and let people from these countries focus on these problems and focus on evangelizing themselves," and the response that he gets from Evangelicals in the United States. they acknowledged the problem of cultural imperialism, but there is this anxiety that we see where Evangelicals are so worried that so many of these countries in the Global South don't have any Christians nearby who could be local Evangelists. And so they say, "Well, we can't put a moratorium on missions because then we really won't be able to spread the gospel," and they - they kind of hit back against Padilla and others like him. And they suggest that, "Well, we really just need to focus on Evangelism. Evangelism has to be our primary goal." And it's not that Padilla doesn't want Evangelism, it's just he wants local Evangelism. And so that idea starts to kind of germinate for Evangelicals. And in the Covenant, both - both Evangelism and social action are discussed, but it is very clear in the Covenant that the primary focus is going to be on Evangelism. So there's a kind of a discussion of social justice. It's very clear that they acknowledge that they need to deal with some of these social problems about the ... Evangelism is still at the fore front but those debates continue. And so in the years and decades after that first Congress in Lausanne, there are a number of follow-up meetings and also small regional meetings where groups in the Global South talk about ways in which they can encourage, and it's - what they call sort of Indigenous and Evangelism or Local Evangelism. There are working groups in the United States who are trying to figure out ways to share the gospel message in a way that is perhaps less culturally insensitive, or is more responsive to the individual cultures of each place that they're looking to. And this is where we start to see efforts to create radio programming that is in a given language that really reflects the cultural dynamics of a particular place. So the outcome of this movement is, first of all, a considerable amount more communication between Evangelicals throughout the world. There's a kind of network that emerges where they're talking with each other more, where they're trying to be a little bit more coordinated with their efforts even though they're still pretty dispersed, and where they're very aware of what's going on in these other countries. It doesn't mean that there's no debate or that they don't, you know, disagree about how they should go about evangelizing but it is a really signal moment that brings all of these Evangelicals together and gives them a sense of focus or a sense of purpose to this unified mission.
Interviewer: Well, Lauren with that great understanding of the Lausanne Covenant let's move into the chapter where you deal with religious freedom in foreign policy. Let's see how this all played out. So you noted that in the 1970s, as Evangelicals surveyed the world within the framework of the Great Commission, which is Jesus' invitation to go and baptize all people. Communist and Muslim states stood out as hostile to Evangelism in part because Evangelicals define religious freedom as and I'm quoting here from the book, "The freedom to practice and propagate religion in accordance with the will of God." Can you elaborate Lauren, on the ramifications of that definition?
Lauren: Absolutely. So it's really - this goes back to that definition of what an Evangelical is and the sort of third point that you highlighted, a point that comes from an excellent sociologist of religion Mark Shibley - was the really core belief that doing - being an Evangelical involves Evangelism. It involves sharing your faith, and that is a core part of both practice and belief. And so for Evangelicals, if they cannot share their faith, they feel that they are not being able to fully practice their religion, that they are - their beliefs are being imposed upon. And this really is highlighted for Evangelicals in particular in the situation unfolding in the Soviet Union. Evangelicals had long been concerned about religious freedom in the Soviet Union. There's of course lots of rhetoric about godless communism in all of this, but in terms of actual - looking at the actual policies, they're very concerned about religious practitioners who were facing state persecution for practicing their beliefs. And this goes back quite a ways. What changes in the 1970s is that Evangelicals begin to organize more effectively as a political lobby to push the U.S. government, to take particular actions, to try to sanction the Soviet Union, and pressure it to change its policies. The Soviet Union ostensibly had a kind of religious freedom part of its constitution, but obviously was not actually - that wasn't actually in practice. What they see in communist countries, in particular, is not only can people from not so - so first of all, in - in the Soviet Union, it's not that you couldn't belong to a church, right? There were Baptist Churches, but they had to be registered with the State in order to be acceptable. And obviously, in the process of registering with the state, they had to comply with certain sets of rules. And one of the things that they weren't allowed to do, not only were they not allowed to evangelize others, they could not educate their children, in their faith the way that they wanted to. So there was this real sense from Evangelicals, especially those who were practicing in unregistered churches who were trying to practice clandestinely so they would not be kind of under the observation of the State. They were already doing something kind of dangerous by practicing clandestinely by educating their children, by trying to evangelize. And Evangelicals in the United States reading stories or hearing from folks who faced arrest or psychiatric treatments for psychiatric treatments or assaults or long prison sentences for doing what Evangelicals in the West viewed as a kind of core aspect of their practice of faith was very alarming to them. And so in the 1970s, as other religious groups like Jewish groups in the United States were similarly very attentive to religious persecution in the Soviet Union, there's a tremendous amount of persecution against Jewish, Soviet Jews and they were very effective at using the 1974 Trade Act in Congress. So they - they add an amendment to that Trade Act, the Jackson-Vanek Amendment which created a kind of barrier to trade essentially that it said if countries are not going to allow kind of free immigration for their people so that Jews can leave and that sort of thing, we're not going to trade with those countries or we're not going to extend most favored nation status at any rate. So U.S. Evangelicals looking at the success of Jewish interest groups in, first of all, highlighting the threat to their ability to, you know, survive in this in communist Society. They're inspired by that in many ways and they say we should be advocating more forcefully for our co-religionists. And so we start to see similar advocacy in Congress starting in the mid-1970s. They bring up the cases of religious persecution that they hear about, they highlight specific cases of religious prisoners of Evangelical Baptist, Pentecostal prisoners in Soviet labor camps. They call for their release. They really advocate for people in the Soviet Union to have more access to Bibles, to have more access to practice their faith freely. And it is a really effective way to organize because there's a general sense within the Congress, there was a lot of support for Soviet Jews, - then is a lot of support for Soviet Christians, is a very effective way to make an argument that the Soviet Union is restricting not just religious practice, but Human Rights in their country. At a time when there's bipartisan support for pushing back against that and so it becomes a way for this lobby to grow more powerful and more politically effective at this time. And so they're able to actually get some prisoners released. They are able to push to deny trade to certain countries. They are able to kind of keep this in the minds of policymakers where if they're meeting with their Soviet counterparts, they're asking about religious prisoners so that it's never kind of far for people's minds. So that's how it kind of develops in the 70s where they take this concern about religious practice of religious freedom and their anxiety that in some of these countries are not able to spread the gospel and these people are still unreached. And they can actually translate that into actually testifying before Congress, actually writing lots of letters to Congress people and really organizing very effectively around this concern.
Interviewer: Let's - Let's dive a little bit deeper here. So when the National Security Council briefed President Reagan, so now we're moving into the 80s, before the Geneva Summit in November 1985, they highlighted the "Extraordinary burgeoning of religion in the USSR as by far the most dramatic development in Soviet dissent in recent years," and that by the time Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981, Evangelicals had a defined foreign policy agenda, which you spoke about here, that underscored religious freedom. So, can you give us an example or two of how this played out during the Reagan presidency?
Lauren: Sure. So there's actually a few ways of this plays out. I mean, this - so the Siberian Seven, of course, had been - they were a group of two families of Pentecostals who had, uh, kind of taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy in the late 1970s because they were not, - you know, they were facing persecution in the Soviet Union. Um, they - there had not been much they had not been able to be gotten out safely during the Carter Administration. And of course, Reagan was very sympathetic to their plight very concerned about their situation. And so when Reagan met with his counterparts in the Soviet Union when Reagan's, you know, advisors were meeting with their counterparts with the ambassador's we're meeting, the Siberian Seven came up quite often. It came up quite often in the records of their conversations just really pushing the Soviets to let these folks emigrate. The Siberian Seven is - are in some ways, a kind of a different case from what many Evangelicals were sort of hoping for with the Soviet Union because they do essentially want to - to leave and come so they can practice their faith freely. And they do get released during Reagan's presidency. Reagan pursues this in a kind of quiet diplomacy approach, right? He's not publicizing his activities. He's now outwardly criticizing the Soviet Union. He keeps things very quiet as he works the kind of back channels to help support their release. Now, Evangelical activists, a lot of them did not necessarily want to open the floodgates to have Evangelicals in a situation where they're all going to emigrate from the Soviet Union. What many Evangelicals in the United States and the Soviet Union actually want is for policy changes in the Soviet Union so that people who live there can stay and then evangelize their Brethren. So the Siberian Seven is actually kind of interesting case. It attracted a lot of attention. It certainly brought a national attention to the problem of religious persecution in the Soviet Union. But when many Evangelicals were hoping to see were actually ways to use the levers of foreign policy, to pressure the Soviet Union, to change its own internal policies. Which is challenging because of course, the Soviet Union's a Sovereign nation. It really reacted very strongly against the suggestion that it should be changing its internal policies just because the United States didn't like them. These are cold war adversaries that was not something they were keen on, but that's really a lot of what Evangelicals were hoping to see. And some of the folks who are able to immigrate to the United States kind of, uh, say like, "Well, I would like to be able to continue to evangelize my countrymen." It's, it's, that's the kind of desire that exists. So there's that. So - So Evangelicals see Reagan as a potential Champion for their goals, their, you know - he does get the Siberian Seven released. He is very attentive to the problem of religious persecution in the Soviet Union. He speaks about the Soviet Union and its religious repression. So they're certainly happy that he is promoting that particular vision and really embracing the idea of religious liberty or religious freedom as a core human right. That doesn't mean that they always aligned with the Reagan Administration on policy. For example, one of the things that the Reagan Administration was really eager to do in its time in office was to try to chip away at some of the, sort of relationships between the Soviet Union and its clients states or sort of friendly allied states in the Eastern Bloc. And it put in place a policy of differentiation to do that where they would be more receptive to countries that might be willing to have a more independent foreign policy from the Soviet Union. And Romania is a really good example. Romania was also a country that was deeply repressive for Evangelicals. There are reams of testimony that Evangelicals were giving in Congress about how brutally repressive this is the conditions were. That they were, you know - they had all sorts of lurid stories about how they were ripping up Bibles and using the pages as toilet paper and all of these. Just really sort of very, you know, the kind of imagery that would really grab people in Congress. And - And you know, they talk about churches being bulldozed. So there's just this, this sort of imagery there that really grabs people and gets people upset. And meanwhile, the Reagan Administration sees the Romanian government as one that is perhaps going to exercise a bit of independence from the Soviet Union, and so they're eager to extend normalize trading relations with them. And Evangelicals are saying, "Absolutely, not. We don't want you to do that. They're abusing the kind of - They're abusing Evangelicals. They're abusing people's right to practice their religion," and so they end up really pushing hard against Reagan policies there. So Reagan can be an ally but it's, it's kind of - it's sometimes mixed, right? They will push back if they think that he is not pursuing their general goal of pushing for religious freedom in all of these countries that they see as hostile to their faith.
Interviewer: We are talking with Professor Lauren Turek about her book, "To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations," which details the extent of Evangelical Influence on American Foreign Policy from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
Lauren, in July of 1990 as the Soviet Union is starting to unravel, Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Western NGOs, including some U.S. religious organizations for advice on making the transition to democracy as well as for aid and fostering civil society in Russia. Can you tell us about this project, Christian Bridge, what it was? What it did including its successes and failures?
Lauren: Sure. So there's this, in the - in the 90s, as, in the late 80s and early 90s, as the situation in the Soviet Union is starting to change and it's becoming increasingly apparent that they're at a transition moment, Gorbachev invites a group of - a group of Evangelicals to come to kind of meet with - with leaders in Moscow. They actually come. They, they - It's a whole group of Evangelicals. They include the sort of executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the editors of Christianity Today, one of the leaders from the National Religious broadcasters, and then a bunch of folks who work on Slavic Missionary Work or who are doing kind of Radio Evangelism. So it's this really kind of high-level group of Evangelicals who go. They're very well connected and they - they go because they get - they get invited to come to Moscow. It seems like this sort of exciting opportunity to go and they meet with the Soviet leaders. I have pictures of them kind of meeting with leaders of the KGB, meeting with, meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and talking about how the kind of religious values that they promote could potentially contribute to shoring up some aspects of Soviet Civil Society. They are - The Evangelicals who go are very wary. I mean, they don't know exactly what's going to happen. They are not sure. There has been this kind of a bit of religious opening in the Soviet Union. They're not sure if that's kind of window that's been opened is going to snap shut, but they go because this might be an opportunity. And what ends up happening is they form this kind of ad hoc group called Project Christian Bridge, which is an effort essentially to kind of advise the Soviet Union on how they can bring these Christian values, these moral principles to bear on improving Soviet Society. And so what they do is they, you know, tthey've got all these participants, they go back home, uh, and they try to figure out ways that they can, you know, help in a post-soviet context, uh, to educate people in the military, to educate the media, and so on and so forth, to try to help folks in those areas. Their main focus of course, is Evangelism. They - They believe that the best way to you know, create Civil Society there is to build up the number of Christians. And so what we see are a lot of efforts back in the United States as part of Project Christian Bridge to develop suggestions for how increased religious freedom in the Soviet Union could actually help with this Project of Building Civil Society. So there's lots of - lots of ways to try to provide aid to the what is by then the kind of former Soviet Union to the Commonwealth of Independent States. They also start to coordinate these visits from Russian officials to U.S. churches. So what see are - for example, some of the big leaders of the army in the former Soviet Union traveling to the United States, traveling actually to Tennessee to meet with leaders in the Pentecostal Church, the Church of God to talk to them about, you know, moral values and instilling moral values and - in their people and so on and so forth, which is just really surprising, right? The idea that the Russian military wants to find ways to instill kind of Christian - Christian ideals among its soldiers, and - and maybe it's officers in the Russian army and they have all these talks if you look, there some newspaper articles from, um, Columbia, Tennessee highlighting the visit of these Russian Military Officers to learn about U.S. Christian or U.S. Evangelical values, U.S. Evangelical practices. And there's a real push to ensure a new laws in the Commonwealth of Independent States in Russia to have more religious freedom. So that what we end up seeing in the aftermath of this is that there's actually this enormous inflow of religious groups from the United States to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's this, it's just - And it's not just Evangelicals, there's an influx of, you know, all sorts of different faiths that come in because there's this new openness that has emerged. Now, the reaction to this in Russia after a few years the, you know, the Orthodox Church in Russia sees this as inherently threatening to their own hold on power, right? Their own grasp of the populace. So they're very concerned that all of these religious groups coming in preaching on street corners, opening institutions in their country that's going to detract from their ability to maintain their hold on their believers. But, what we see is there - is this kind of short period of a few years where all of these religious groups are coming in and trying to evangelize in Russia. Eventually, the Russian Orthodox Church is able to clamp down on some of the freedoms that had been opened up to allow for this but there continued to be of Evangelical engagement through - through groups like Project Christian Bridge and others that were working there to ensure kind of Evangelical presence in - in Russia.
Interviewer: But you have two other case studies I want to get to here in the time remaining. The second case study is Guatemala. Can you tell us about the February 4, 1976, earthquake that struck that country, and what happened religiously to them as a result?
Lauren: Absolutely. So on February 4th, 1976, there's this tremendous devastating earthquake that hits in Guatemala. It causes widespread devastation throughout you know, from - from kind of radiating out throughout the area. I mean, the description of homes that have been destroyed, people, in ...- incredibly injured or folks who died. It - There's just a tremendous amount of devastation. And there's of course, an immediate response from religious groups in general in the United States to go and provide aid to the people who are suffering in Guatemala, to help them rebuild, to help them recover from this devastating event. There was in fact so much aid from religious groups that, um, members of the Presidential Administration we're starting to direct folks directly to those different groups. And it's again, it's Catholic groups, Christian groups. Sorry, Protestant groups, Evangelical groups, etc. so there's just this - this outpouring. Now, there were already a number of Evangelical groups that had been involved in Guatemala. They had been doing missionary work there since the, you know - for a very long time. But the earthquake and the desire to go help after the earthquake was also this tremendous opportunity for Evangelism. And so what we see is that some smaller Non-Denominational Evangelical Churches from the United States go into Guatemala after the earthquake to kind of set up shop to help folks recover, but also to build some Churches. And one of the churches that goes down is a church from California called Gospel Outreach Church. And they are, uh - they actually started as a kind of hippie church in the in this sort of, Days of the Jesus Movement in the 70s, but they had become a more kind of conservative traditional Evangelical Church, by 1976. And they actually, there - the man who goes down and it's a Reverend Carlos Ramirez. He goes down to Guatemala, with a group of folks from the Gospel Outreach Church. They go to help. They go to help people rebuild from this earthquake and they start a new church, there called El Verbo, the Church of the word. And while they're there, they start to build a following. And there have been a lot of, theologians and religious studies scholars who have talked about the ways in which, in the aftermath of the earthquake, the message of Evangelical Christianity, which has kind of apocalyptic overtones which talks about,- which talks about and contextualizes events like an earthquake really effectively that they were able to bring people in impart because of the shock of the earthquake. That their ideas and ideology became really appealing, and so they build this following in Guatemala City. And one of the people who comes to join their church is a man named Rios Montt, Efraín Ríos Montt and he had been a - well, he was a General in the Guatemalan Army. He had at one point, run for president, but because of corruption in the government, he was not able to, - he felt that he had been unfairly treated in the election that he, had been blocked. And so he had kind of spent some time in Spain and had come back, and he was - he was in need of some spiritual help and so he finds the teachings of the Gospel Church very - of El Verbo, very appealing so he becomes a member of this church. Now, fast forward a few years, and he's working at the church. He's actually a director of their Christian Day School. He's, you know, doing his administrative tasks. And he hears on the radio that there has been a coup, the government has been overthrown by a group, a young - a group of young military men, a military, - a sort of military coup and he is being called to the Palace, to the National Palace to come because he's been named as one of the new leaders of government by these - these young military folks. So he consults with Carlos Ramirez with the other Reverends at the church and he actually gets their blessing. They kind of they, you know - there's some news articles or news coverage from the time and they say they kind of laid hands on him. They prayed and they came to the view that he had been chosen by God to lead Guatemala into a new kind of become - to become a kind of model of Christianity in this area, and so he goes. And although he was only one of three people that the coup plotters had kind of put in charge, there were two other military leaders so they have this Military Junta, he very quickly marginalizes the other two military leaders and declares himself the sole leader of Guatemala within a short period. And this is all taking place in early 1982. And he makes all of these speeches on the radio where he talks about how he's going to turn Guatemala to God. Now, Guatemala. of course, is a nominally Catholic country at this time, it's you know - it's not as though there had not been a lot of missionary work there already, but he says he's going to turn the country to God by which he means he's going to support in particular Evangelicals and the particular type of Protestant Christianity that he practices. What actually happens is he kind of vows to end corruption and do all of that and he does make some changes in the urban areas. So the kind of urban Guatemalans, the middle and upper-class, they do sort of see him as helping them. But, he identifies "communist insurgents" quote-unquote, communist insurgents, in rural areas as a threat not only to his leadership but as a threat to his desire to spread his Christian vision throughout his country, right? Because he sees in the same way that - that other Evangelicals do communism as kind of inherently threatening to religious freedom and religious practice. So he unleashes the army on indigenous people, the Mayans and other indigenous groups who are living in the highlands in Guatemala, in this - in this sort of deeply devastating counterinsurgency campaign, where they're literally putting people into strategic hamlets and model villages, what they call the Model Villages, but they're essentially strategic hamlets to, break up communities or put them in this kind of refugee camps and then, they kill or disappear just thousands and thousands of people. They essentially engage in genocide. But there's that language and rhetoric of religious freedom and so he also at the same time is trying to cultivate a close relationship with the Reagan Administration. He's playing on the language of Human Rights, he's saying, "We're going to bring Christianity. We're going to promote an end to corruption," and he's asking for U.S. aid to do that. He's asking in particular for military aid to help him put down this insurgency of what he terms an insurgency. He invites Evangelical leaders from the United States down to come and tour the country, to meet with him, to pray with him, to see some of these strategic hamlets, and they pledged a tremendous amount of aid to him. Pat Robertson goes on the 700 Club and calls for U.S. citizens, U.S. watchers of his show to not only call their Congresspeople and push them to provide military aid to this regime, but to support private fundraising that they're doing to try to send whatever material they can to help him in his goals. And the Reagan Administration encounters a lot of pushback, right? There are members of Congress who are watching what's happening in Guatemala. They're hearing from Secular Human Rights Organization saying that this is a really devastating Human Rights situation. People are being killed. And they're unwilling to provide that aid, and so we end up in this situation where Evangelicals are pushing very hard to have that aid extended. The Reagan Administration is trying to find ways to work around Congressional resistance to this, and eventually, they are able to offer the sale of some helicopter parts, but Evangelicals, Rios Montt is not necessarily keen on that. He wants - He wants the aid to be provided to him. Evangelicals help him secure the helicopter parts that he needs from sources in Canada and Israel. So they are able to actually materially help him with his efforts. Now he's later ousted in another coup. A lot of the military men were not super thrilled that he was kind of emphasizing the religious dynamics. He was constantly using religious rhetoric and his speeches. They ousted him in part because they're frustrated with that and with the incredible influence that his church members have - his church advisors have on his leadership. But it's this remarkable, moment where we see the Confluence of Evangelical concern, U.S. Evangelical engagement with this region, U.S. Evangelical concern about spreading the gospel and some of this communist and anti-communist rhetoric that we're seeing. So he's - it's a tremendously interesting case study.
Interviewer: No, I agree. Very interesting. Before we leave it and go to South Africa and Apartheid, I want to - to note from your book I learned that before the earthquake, uh, Guatemala had a seven percent Protestant population. And by 1982, so six years later, they had flipped it. They were then twenty-two percent Protestant. And as you say they were ...
Lauren: And they just grew from there.
Interviewer: Okay, right. That's what you said. So, um, just from the missionary aspect, also very very fascinating, let's move to South African Apartheid. So, can you explain how Mainline Protestant religious leaders and Evangelical religious leaders differed in their approach to Apartheid in South Africa, which was a major U.S. Foreign Policy issue in the 80s and 90s?
Lauren: Sure. So this is when I think about the case study is that I chose, one of the things that I was trying to do was look at the wide array of ways in which Evangelicals might have influenced policy. So the case of the Soviet Union, we see them being very effective at using the language of religious liberty to - to get particular legislation and particular policies. We see an on-the-ground effectiveness in Guatemala and congressional resistance in - in that case. South Africa, there's a tremendous variation in terms of not just Evangelical perspective in the United States about the problem of Apartheid but Evangelical perspective in South Africa about what the response should be to Apartheid. And then of course, there is the kind of what we see the perspective from Mainline Protestants and many Catholics where there's a huge amount of religious-based activism to try to end Apartheid in the country of South Africa, right? So there's a lot of protestant activism on that, both in the United States and in South Africa. And in fact, in South Africa, it's, it's you know, folks like Desmond Tutu, and other sort of really well-known religious leaders. They tend to be like Anglican or other Mainline Protestant churches. So they are advocating for an end to the Apartheid regime and all of the you know, racist policies that that entailed and the tremendous amounts of Human Rights abuses which were, just increasing regularly throughout this - throughout the 70s and 80s. So it was a seriously bad situation. Plus of course, this very racist regime. Now, Evangelicals in United States, when interviewed, many of them particularly, very conservative ones would say that they were deeply opposed to the racist policies of the Apartheid regime. So they would say we are opposed to Apartheid, but they were worried that if the Apartheid regime was removed, that the new leadership that would come in might come from folks from the African National Congress, which they viewed as a Communist Organization or at least inspired, you know, or in potentially influence by Communism. So they were worried that what would happen would be with the removal of Apartheid leaders in an immediate way, ANC leaders would come in and maybe South Africa would fall to Communism. And if that happened. it would take what they saw as one of the most Christian countries in - on the continent of Africa and maybe create a situation where religious freedom would be restricted. So that was the perception. Now, there was a lot of debate right there, were - there were whole group of Southern Baptist in the Southern Baptist Convention who were calling for a much more kind of progressive response to Apartheid. They were much more supportive of movements that Mainline Protestants and Catholics and Secular Organizations in the United States were advocating for at the time which is they wanted the United States to disinvest from South Africa. They wanted them to sanction the government in order to put pressure on the Apartheid regime to end Apartheid. Those groups in the Southern Baptists were marginalized though because there were these more powerful conservative voices who pushed them out of positions of leadership and really advocated for a different approach. And so, what they were calling form was rather than bringing justice to South Africa rather than an immediate end to Apartheid. They were calling for a kind of gradualism and they were very opposed to the efforts to impose sanctions or to disinvest, or to divest, to have corporations divest. And a lot of it is rooted in this language of religious liberty and the fear that they have that a communist government was going to come in and that would be the end of that. And so they're playing on those anxieties and fears. And, so when there is a movement in Congress to pass legislation, to pass this Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act that would involve some of these four policy levers applied to the Apartheid government, Evangelicals in the United States along with some conservative Evangelicals from South Africa who have a kind of - who are also worried about Communism. They mount this campaign to resist the passage of this legislation and they go on TV, and they write letters, and they do all of this stuff to try to make their case. And we see you know, quite a bit of an effort to bring some of these more conservative South African Evangelicals to speak about what they see as the potential threats of an immediate end to an Apartheid and they kind of call for a gradual end. Now, they are not successful in blocking the comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and in fact, advocates in Congress who support the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act are able to ensure that it gets enforced even though the Reagan Administration, does not approve of it, tries to - tries to sort of veto it and everything. So tthey are not successful in this case unlike in some of the other cases I talked about. What's important though is that there is this focus on again, preventing - it's preventing a certain government change in that country and there isn't as much of a focus on justice. And it is only later that we see in South Africa, South African Evangelicals feeling a sense that they have really messed up, that not focusing on justice, that by focusing only on their desire to continue to evangelize, and so on and so forth, that they have really done harm. And so there's an effort to engage in a kind of reconciliation process there. And so we see some South African Evangelicals who play a key role in that reconciliation process later in the 1990s. U.S. Evangelicals, their thoughts about Apartheid evolved after the end of Apartheid, but it's - but they were certainly, again, not all of them, right? There's a lot of difference of opinion, but - but the core group that are advocating against the - the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, they are slower to kind of have their views about the situation involved over time.
Interviewer: I want to, uh, quote from your book about these South African Evangelicals looking back on their approach as you just brought it up. It was very moving, uh, profound I should say, what they said and I'm quoting here, "In South Africa, I'm quoting from them. In South Africa, we hear more and more that no price is too high to pay for our religious liberty. The fact is that genocide is too high, high a price, and no one, not even Evangelicals, not even for the highest ideals have the right to take measures that might destroy millions of innocent non-combatants." So I think that's, related to what you just said.
Lauren: Absolutely. And it also again, it just - it highlights this ongoing disjuncture between a social justice orientation and this - the Primacy of Evangelism, right? So this is a kind of ongoing discussion and also the definitions of Human Rights. When we think of Human Rights, is it just religious liberty, or is it a broader search for justice?
Interviewer: Right. Lauren, you end the book with this statement, "Evangelicals' impact on U.S. Foreign Relations is a testament to the power of religiously inspired individuals, united in a common cause to shape national politics as well as the international order." Do you want to add anything to that here as we close?
Lauren: I think we're still seeing today a lot of the rhetoric and ideas of this group, from the sort of rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s still shaping U.S. Foreign Policy in insignificant ways even today. So this was a grassroots movement. They managed to build a large global network and they were able to make significant interventions into U.S. Policy. And so, you know, in terms of thinking broadly about how - how grassroots - grassroots groups can be very influential. I think sometimes we have this perception that only - only kind of elites or the foreign policymakers are the one shaping policy, and grassroots activism doesn't matter, but it does, right? And we can - we can have a range of perspectives and views about whether we think that these policies, that these particular groups put in place were beneficial or not, I won't give my personal opinion, but we can certainly have a range of opinions about that. But it is very clear that religious belief united this group. They're set of beliefs united this group and made them or contributed to their ability to organize very effectively and shape the world around them in really profound ways.
Interviewer: We have been talking with Professor Lauren Turek about her book, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations". Thank you, Lauren, so much for being with us. It has been very enlightening and I believe helpful to me and all listeners.
Lauren: Thank you so much for having me. It was wonderful to get to talk to you.
Lauren Turek: Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to talk with you today.
Interviewer: Lauren, would you explain what was happening in the 1960s for Evangelicals that will help frame your book scope for us?
Lauren: Sure. I am actually going to telescope out a little more than that and just talk about what the world was looking like for Christians in that era and the dynamics of world politics at the time. So one of the things that we see if we think about the 1960s, what is happening in the world is there is a process of decolonization that is going on where countries that were formerly under colonial rule by colonial powers are gaining their independence, many have gained independence by the 60s and that is leading to a number of people in these new countries to seek to question a lot of the assumptions about Colonialism to kind of push for kind of Anti-Colonial Nationalist Movements. And because of the important role that religious groups, especially Protestant groups had played in missionary work in the early days of Imperialism and Colonialism, going back to the 19th century, there was a significant critique coming from people living in throughout the Global South about missionary work, critiques that missionary work was sort of inherently, culturally imperialist. And what we saw in many Western countries including the United States among Mainline Protestants was a reaction to that, a concern that they did not want to be contributing to a culturally imperialist model. And so there were changes in the way that the missionary movement approached its goals. So we started to see where a lot of Mainline Protestants started to call people back from the mission field or to redefine their approach to missions to think about how they might do more to solve the problems of poverty or instability abroad to take a more kind of social justice orientation to their work. Evangelicals watching this happen were quite concerned about the redefinition of missionary work to have this broader focus and what they saw as a potential diminishing of the emphasis on spreading the gospel because Evangelicals really firmly believed that they had a responsibility to go out, share the gospel with the entire world in order to make all, uh, you know, spread the news to all of the people of the world. They were concerned that without active missionary work, without an active focus on Evangelism, the folks throughout the Global South would not have the opportunity to hear the gospel. They would be missing out on this and Christians would be kind of forfeiting this key role that they're playing. So we start to see in the 1960s as Evangelicals, especially in the late 1960s, Evangelicals grow increasingly critical of these moves by Mainline Protestants right at like at Uppsala. And they start to articulate new plans for themselves about how they can do more missionary work, how they can do more active missionary engagement in parts of the world where they - not that they weren't active before, but that they could expand their - their involvement there so that they could spread the gospel. So what we see is this flourishing of - of concern of anxiety about the world around them and about these what they say are, you know, two billion souls who have not been saved or two billion people who have not heard the gospels. So there's a real desire to go out and reach the unreached.
Interviewer: Great. And so this - this in the book you define or you don’t, I think there was a - an official term called Mission Crisis. That's what you just described, correct?
Lauren: Yes. Yes. So, folks, there were a number of Missiologists, uh, like, uh, a man named Barrett who - who really wrote extensively about this fear, this anxiety. That there was this crisis of missions that people were leaving the mission fields and that Evangelicals had to do something or all these people would go unsaved, they would - they would not have heard the good news of, you know, Christianity. And there's - it's hard to sort of overstate just how much anxiety this caused for these religious groups. I mean, Billy Graham is looking at a world that seems to be beset by all sorts of crisis. If we think about what's happening, especially in the late 1960s, there are - there's social unrest throughout the world, there are protests in many countries, there's sign of emerging economic challenges, there's a lot of - eventually in the 70s, a lot of political scandals so he’s looking out on a world that seems really, umm, to be affected by a kind of spiritual malaise, but also just sort of a dangerous world and he's worried that, you know, Evangelicals really need to take action. They need to - they need to get involved. They need to do something because first of all, this is an opportunity, right? When people are feeling that there's a sort of spiritual malaise, they might be very receptive to hearing the gospel but also because he feels a responsibility to all of these people that they - that they hear it. And so, this helps us understand the series of conferences that they've start to organize in the late 1960s and to the 1970s to try to bring Evangelicals from around the world together to come up with some sort of strategy. And not a sort of top-down one, but, a collective strategy for how they can go out and effectively reach these two billion people.
Interviewer: Right. So let's - let's move right into the 1970s. Can you give us the why and how the Lausanne Movement which you're referring to here, begun in the mid-1970s and what it meant to Evangelicals and their interactions with the world?
Lauren: Sure. So in 1974, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association held a huge Congress in Lausanne, Switzerland. They brought together twenty-four hundred Evangelicals and some other folks from throughout the world, and it was a really unique event. First of all, what they had done was they made sure not just to invite Evangelicals from the United States or Europe, they made a conscious effort to invite a wide number of delegates from countries in the Global South. So it was, first of all, one of the most diverse gatherings that they had had. And they didn't just invite those delegates to listen, they invited some of these delegates to share papers and to talk about Evangelistic strategy. And the kind of tagline of the conference was, "Let the Earth Hear His Voice," right? So in other words, this is the plan we're going to try to come up with some way to share the gospel with everybody. And the papers that the invited speakers generated their circulated before the Congress so that everybody has a chance to read them and comment on them. There are response papers that are generated. So the Congress is really a big working session and there are a number of working groups put in place. They also draft the Lausanne Covenant, which is a document that most of the Evangelicals who attended sign and it's a statement - essentially a statement of mission or a statement of purpose going forward to lay out how Evangelicals are going to evangelize the world. And I just want to stress Evangelicals are again, it's not a top-down movement, there are lots of different denominations that fall into Evangelicalism and Non-Denominational groups and Parachurch groups. So it's not as though there's one person directing all of this and so a lot of the activity that's happening is to provide some kind of structure for groups that work really independently. But the Lausanne Covenant defines a goal for world evangelization and it's pretty broad in how it talks about its - its objectives. And there's these sets of debates that emerge out of the Congress that reflect some of those challenges of the 1960s and 1970s, the challenges of decolonization that I was just mentioning. There are a couple Evangelical theologians who come from countries in Latin America who share papers that are deeply critical of the Western missionary model, folks like C. Rene Padilla and others who are coming from Latin America who are looking at the situation in their countries and they're saying, "There's no way that we can hope to reach people or hope to share the gospel with people if they are suffering from poverty, if they are suffering from inequality, if they are suffering from threats to their livelihood. So we need to break man’s slavery in the world." Padilla says, "If we're going to be able to evangelize people ..." And he basically calls for a social justice orientation for Evangelicals. And many of the Western, the U.S., the English Evangelicals who respond to Padilla's calls for - he actually calls for a moratorium on Western missions. He says, "We should stop this entirely and let people from these countries focus on these problems and focus on evangelizing themselves," and the response that he gets from Evangelicals in the United States. they acknowledged the problem of cultural imperialism, but there is this anxiety that we see where Evangelicals are so worried that so many of these countries in the Global South don't have any Christians nearby who could be local Evangelists. And so they say, "Well, we can't put a moratorium on missions because then we really won't be able to spread the gospel," and they - they kind of hit back against Padilla and others like him. And they suggest that, "Well, we really just need to focus on Evangelism. Evangelism has to be our primary goal." And it's not that Padilla doesn't want Evangelism, it's just he wants local Evangelism. And so that idea starts to kind of germinate for Evangelicals. And in the Covenant, both - both Evangelism and social action are discussed, but it is very clear in the Covenant that the primary focus is going to be on Evangelism. So there's a kind of a discussion of social justice. It's very clear that they acknowledge that they need to deal with some of these social problems about the ... Evangelism is still at the fore front but those debates continue. And so in the years and decades after that first Congress in Lausanne, there are a number of follow-up meetings and also small regional meetings where groups in the Global South talk about ways in which they can encourage, and it's - what they call sort of Indigenous and Evangelism or Local Evangelism. There are working groups in the United States who are trying to figure out ways to share the gospel message in a way that is perhaps less culturally insensitive, or is more responsive to the individual cultures of each place that they're looking to. And this is where we start to see efforts to create radio programming that is in a given language that really reflects the cultural dynamics of a particular place. So the outcome of this movement is, first of all, a considerable amount more communication between Evangelicals throughout the world. There's a kind of network that emerges where they're talking with each other more, where they're trying to be a little bit more coordinated with their efforts even though they're still pretty dispersed, and where they're very aware of what's going on in these other countries. It doesn't mean that there's no debate or that they don't, you know, disagree about how they should go about evangelizing but it is a really signal moment that brings all of these Evangelicals together and gives them a sense of focus or a sense of purpose to this unified mission.
Interviewer: Well, Lauren with that great understanding of the Lausanne Covenant let's move into the chapter where you deal with religious freedom in foreign policy. Let's see how this all played out. So you noted that in the 1970s, as Evangelicals surveyed the world within the framework of the Great Commission, which is Jesus' invitation to go and baptize all people. Communist and Muslim states stood out as hostile to Evangelism in part because Evangelicals define religious freedom as and I'm quoting here from the book, "The freedom to practice and propagate religion in accordance with the will of God." Can you elaborate Lauren, on the ramifications of that definition?
Lauren: Absolutely. So it's really - this goes back to that definition of what an Evangelical is and the sort of third point that you highlighted, a point that comes from an excellent sociologist of religion Mark Shibley - was the really core belief that doing - being an Evangelical involves Evangelism. It involves sharing your faith, and that is a core part of both practice and belief. And so for Evangelicals, if they cannot share their faith, they feel that they are not being able to fully practice their religion, that they are - their beliefs are being imposed upon. And this really is highlighted for Evangelicals in particular in the situation unfolding in the Soviet Union. Evangelicals had long been concerned about religious freedom in the Soviet Union. There's of course lots of rhetoric about godless communism in all of this, but in terms of actual - looking at the actual policies, they're very concerned about religious practitioners who were facing state persecution for practicing their beliefs. And this goes back quite a ways. What changes in the 1970s is that Evangelicals begin to organize more effectively as a political lobby to push the U.S. government, to take particular actions, to try to sanction the Soviet Union, and pressure it to change its policies. The Soviet Union ostensibly had a kind of religious freedom part of its constitution, but obviously was not actually - that wasn't actually in practice. What they see in communist countries, in particular, is not only can people from not so - so first of all, in - in the Soviet Union, it's not that you couldn't belong to a church, right? There were Baptist Churches, but they had to be registered with the State in order to be acceptable. And obviously, in the process of registering with the state, they had to comply with certain sets of rules. And one of the things that they weren't allowed to do, not only were they not allowed to evangelize others, they could not educate their children, in their faith the way that they wanted to. So there was this real sense from Evangelicals, especially those who were practicing in unregistered churches who were trying to practice clandestinely so they would not be kind of under the observation of the State. They were already doing something kind of dangerous by practicing clandestinely by educating their children, by trying to evangelize. And Evangelicals in the United States reading stories or hearing from folks who faced arrest or psychiatric treatments for psychiatric treatments or assaults or long prison sentences for doing what Evangelicals in the West viewed as a kind of core aspect of their practice of faith was very alarming to them. And so in the 1970s, as other religious groups like Jewish groups in the United States were similarly very attentive to religious persecution in the Soviet Union, there's a tremendous amount of persecution against Jewish, Soviet Jews and they were very effective at using the 1974 Trade Act in Congress. So they - they add an amendment to that Trade Act, the Jackson-Vanek Amendment which created a kind of barrier to trade essentially that it said if countries are not going to allow kind of free immigration for their people so that Jews can leave and that sort of thing, we're not going to trade with those countries or we're not going to extend most favored nation status at any rate. So U.S. Evangelicals looking at the success of Jewish interest groups in, first of all, highlighting the threat to their ability to, you know, survive in this in communist Society. They're inspired by that in many ways and they say we should be advocating more forcefully for our co-religionists. And so we start to see similar advocacy in Congress starting in the mid-1970s. They bring up the cases of religious persecution that they hear about, they highlight specific cases of religious prisoners of Evangelical Baptist, Pentecostal prisoners in Soviet labor camps. They call for their release. They really advocate for people in the Soviet Union to have more access to Bibles, to have more access to practice their faith freely. And it is a really effective way to organize because there's a general sense within the Congress, there was a lot of support for Soviet Jews, - then is a lot of support for Soviet Christians, is a very effective way to make an argument that the Soviet Union is restricting not just religious practice, but Human Rights in their country. At a time when there's bipartisan support for pushing back against that and so it becomes a way for this lobby to grow more powerful and more politically effective at this time. And so they're able to actually get some prisoners released. They are able to push to deny trade to certain countries. They are able to kind of keep this in the minds of policymakers where if they're meeting with their Soviet counterparts, they're asking about religious prisoners so that it's never kind of far for people's minds. So that's how it kind of develops in the 70s where they take this concern about religious practice of religious freedom and their anxiety that in some of these countries are not able to spread the gospel and these people are still unreached. And they can actually translate that into actually testifying before Congress, actually writing lots of letters to Congress people and really organizing very effectively around this concern.
Interviewer: Let's - Let's dive a little bit deeper here. So when the National Security Council briefed President Reagan, so now we're moving into the 80s, before the Geneva Summit in November 1985, they highlighted the "Extraordinary burgeoning of religion in the USSR as by far the most dramatic development in Soviet dissent in recent years," and that by the time Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981, Evangelicals had a defined foreign policy agenda, which you spoke about here, that underscored religious freedom. So, can you give us an example or two of how this played out during the Reagan presidency?
Lauren: Sure. So there's actually a few ways of this plays out. I mean, this - so the Siberian Seven, of course, had been - they were a group of two families of Pentecostals who had, uh, kind of taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy in the late 1970s because they were not, - you know, they were facing persecution in the Soviet Union. Um, they - there had not been much they had not been able to be gotten out safely during the Carter Administration. And of course, Reagan was very sympathetic to their plight very concerned about their situation. And so when Reagan met with his counterparts in the Soviet Union when Reagan's, you know, advisors were meeting with their counterparts with the ambassador's we're meeting, the Siberian Seven came up quite often. It came up quite often in the records of their conversations just really pushing the Soviets to let these folks emigrate. The Siberian Seven is - are in some ways, a kind of a different case from what many Evangelicals were sort of hoping for with the Soviet Union because they do essentially want to - to leave and come so they can practice their faith freely. And they do get released during Reagan's presidency. Reagan pursues this in a kind of quiet diplomacy approach, right? He's not publicizing his activities. He's now outwardly criticizing the Soviet Union. He keeps things very quiet as he works the kind of back channels to help support their release. Now, Evangelical activists, a lot of them did not necessarily want to open the floodgates to have Evangelicals in a situation where they're all going to emigrate from the Soviet Union. What many Evangelicals in the United States and the Soviet Union actually want is for policy changes in the Soviet Union so that people who live there can stay and then evangelize their Brethren. So the Siberian Seven is actually kind of interesting case. It attracted a lot of attention. It certainly brought a national attention to the problem of religious persecution in the Soviet Union. But when many Evangelicals were hoping to see were actually ways to use the levers of foreign policy, to pressure the Soviet Union, to change its own internal policies. Which is challenging because of course, the Soviet Union's a Sovereign nation. It really reacted very strongly against the suggestion that it should be changing its internal policies just because the United States didn't like them. These are cold war adversaries that was not something they were keen on, but that's really a lot of what Evangelicals were hoping to see. And some of the folks who are able to immigrate to the United States kind of, uh, say like, "Well, I would like to be able to continue to evangelize my countrymen." It's, it's, that's the kind of desire that exists. So there's that. So - So Evangelicals see Reagan as a potential Champion for their goals, their, you know - he does get the Siberian Seven released. He is very attentive to the problem of religious persecution in the Soviet Union. He speaks about the Soviet Union and its religious repression. So they're certainly happy that he is promoting that particular vision and really embracing the idea of religious liberty or religious freedom as a core human right. That doesn't mean that they always aligned with the Reagan Administration on policy. For example, one of the things that the Reagan Administration was really eager to do in its time in office was to try to chip away at some of the, sort of relationships between the Soviet Union and its clients states or sort of friendly allied states in the Eastern Bloc. And it put in place a policy of differentiation to do that where they would be more receptive to countries that might be willing to have a more independent foreign policy from the Soviet Union. And Romania is a really good example. Romania was also a country that was deeply repressive for Evangelicals. There are reams of testimony that Evangelicals were giving in Congress about how brutally repressive this is the conditions were. That they were, you know - they had all sorts of lurid stories about how they were ripping up Bibles and using the pages as toilet paper and all of these. Just really sort of very, you know, the kind of imagery that would really grab people in Congress. And - And you know, they talk about churches being bulldozed. So there's just this, this sort of imagery there that really grabs people and gets people upset. And meanwhile, the Reagan Administration sees the Romanian government as one that is perhaps going to exercise a bit of independence from the Soviet Union, and so they're eager to extend normalize trading relations with them. And Evangelicals are saying, "Absolutely, not. We don't want you to do that. They're abusing the kind of - They're abusing Evangelicals. They're abusing people's right to practice their religion," and so they end up really pushing hard against Reagan policies there. So Reagan can be an ally but it's, it's kind of - it's sometimes mixed, right? They will push back if they think that he is not pursuing their general goal of pushing for religious freedom in all of these countries that they see as hostile to their faith.
Interviewer: We are talking with Professor Lauren Turek about her book, "To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations," which details the extent of Evangelical Influence on American Foreign Policy from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
Lauren, in July of 1990 as the Soviet Union is starting to unravel, Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Western NGOs, including some U.S. religious organizations for advice on making the transition to democracy as well as for aid and fostering civil society in Russia. Can you tell us about this project, Christian Bridge, what it was? What it did including its successes and failures?
Lauren: Sure. So there's this, in the - in the 90s, as, in the late 80s and early 90s, as the situation in the Soviet Union is starting to change and it's becoming increasingly apparent that they're at a transition moment, Gorbachev invites a group of - a group of Evangelicals to come to kind of meet with - with leaders in Moscow. They actually come. They, they - It's a whole group of Evangelicals. They include the sort of executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the editors of Christianity Today, one of the leaders from the National Religious broadcasters, and then a bunch of folks who work on Slavic Missionary Work or who are doing kind of Radio Evangelism. So it's this really kind of high-level group of Evangelicals who go. They're very well connected and they - they go because they get - they get invited to come to Moscow. It seems like this sort of exciting opportunity to go and they meet with the Soviet leaders. I have pictures of them kind of meeting with leaders of the KGB, meeting with, meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and talking about how the kind of religious values that they promote could potentially contribute to shoring up some aspects of Soviet Civil Society. They are - The Evangelicals who go are very wary. I mean, they don't know exactly what's going to happen. They are not sure. There has been this kind of a bit of religious opening in the Soviet Union. They're not sure if that's kind of window that's been opened is going to snap shut, but they go because this might be an opportunity. And what ends up happening is they form this kind of ad hoc group called Project Christian Bridge, which is an effort essentially to kind of advise the Soviet Union on how they can bring these Christian values, these moral principles to bear on improving Soviet Society. And so what they do is they, you know, tthey've got all these participants, they go back home, uh, and they try to figure out ways that they can, you know, help in a post-soviet context, uh, to educate people in the military, to educate the media, and so on and so forth, to try to help folks in those areas. Their main focus of course, is Evangelism. They - They believe that the best way to you know, create Civil Society there is to build up the number of Christians. And so what we see are a lot of efforts back in the United States as part of Project Christian Bridge to develop suggestions for how increased religious freedom in the Soviet Union could actually help with this Project of Building Civil Society. So there's lots of - lots of ways to try to provide aid to the what is by then the kind of former Soviet Union to the Commonwealth of Independent States. They also start to coordinate these visits from Russian officials to U.S. churches. So what see are - for example, some of the big leaders of the army in the former Soviet Union traveling to the United States, traveling actually to Tennessee to meet with leaders in the Pentecostal Church, the Church of God to talk to them about, you know, moral values and instilling moral values and - in their people and so on and so forth, which is just really surprising, right? The idea that the Russian military wants to find ways to instill kind of Christian - Christian ideals among its soldiers, and - and maybe it's officers in the Russian army and they have all these talks if you look, there some newspaper articles from, um, Columbia, Tennessee highlighting the visit of these Russian Military Officers to learn about U.S. Christian or U.S. Evangelical values, U.S. Evangelical practices. And there's a real push to ensure a new laws in the Commonwealth of Independent States in Russia to have more religious freedom. So that what we end up seeing in the aftermath of this is that there's actually this enormous inflow of religious groups from the United States to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's this, it's just - And it's not just Evangelicals, there's an influx of, you know, all sorts of different faiths that come in because there's this new openness that has emerged. Now, the reaction to this in Russia after a few years the, you know, the Orthodox Church in Russia sees this as inherently threatening to their own hold on power, right? Their own grasp of the populace. So they're very concerned that all of these religious groups coming in preaching on street corners, opening institutions in their country that's going to detract from their ability to maintain their hold on their believers. But, what we see is there - is this kind of short period of a few years where all of these religious groups are coming in and trying to evangelize in Russia. Eventually, the Russian Orthodox Church is able to clamp down on some of the freedoms that had been opened up to allow for this but there continued to be of Evangelical engagement through - through groups like Project Christian Bridge and others that were working there to ensure kind of Evangelical presence in - in Russia.
Interviewer: But you have two other case studies I want to get to here in the time remaining. The second case study is Guatemala. Can you tell us about the February 4, 1976, earthquake that struck that country, and what happened religiously to them as a result?
Lauren: Absolutely. So on February 4th, 1976, there's this tremendous devastating earthquake that hits in Guatemala. It causes widespread devastation throughout you know, from - from kind of radiating out throughout the area. I mean, the description of homes that have been destroyed, people, in ...- incredibly injured or folks who died. It - There's just a tremendous amount of devastation. And there's of course, an immediate response from religious groups in general in the United States to go and provide aid to the people who are suffering in Guatemala, to help them rebuild, to help them recover from this devastating event. There was in fact so much aid from religious groups that, um, members of the Presidential Administration we're starting to direct folks directly to those different groups. And it's again, it's Catholic groups, Christian groups. Sorry, Protestant groups, Evangelical groups, etc. so there's just this - this outpouring. Now, there were already a number of Evangelical groups that had been involved in Guatemala. They had been doing missionary work there since the, you know - for a very long time. But the earthquake and the desire to go help after the earthquake was also this tremendous opportunity for Evangelism. And so what we see is that some smaller Non-Denominational Evangelical Churches from the United States go into Guatemala after the earthquake to kind of set up shop to help folks recover, but also to build some Churches. And one of the churches that goes down is a church from California called Gospel Outreach Church. And they are, uh - they actually started as a kind of hippie church in the in this sort of, Days of the Jesus Movement in the 70s, but they had become a more kind of conservative traditional Evangelical Church, by 1976. And they actually, there - the man who goes down and it's a Reverend Carlos Ramirez. He goes down to Guatemala, with a group of folks from the Gospel Outreach Church. They go to help. They go to help people rebuild from this earthquake and they start a new church, there called El Verbo, the Church of the word. And while they're there, they start to build a following. And there have been a lot of, theologians and religious studies scholars who have talked about the ways in which, in the aftermath of the earthquake, the message of Evangelical Christianity, which has kind of apocalyptic overtones which talks about,- which talks about and contextualizes events like an earthquake really effectively that they were able to bring people in impart because of the shock of the earthquake. That their ideas and ideology became really appealing, and so they build this following in Guatemala City. And one of the people who comes to join their church is a man named Rios Montt, Efraín Ríos Montt and he had been a - well, he was a General in the Guatemalan Army. He had at one point, run for president, but because of corruption in the government, he was not able to, - he felt that he had been unfairly treated in the election that he, had been blocked. And so he had kind of spent some time in Spain and had come back, and he was - he was in need of some spiritual help and so he finds the teachings of the Gospel Church very - of El Verbo, very appealing so he becomes a member of this church. Now, fast forward a few years, and he's working at the church. He's actually a director of their Christian Day School. He's, you know, doing his administrative tasks. And he hears on the radio that there has been a coup, the government has been overthrown by a group, a young - a group of young military men, a military, - a sort of military coup and he is being called to the Palace, to the National Palace to come because he's been named as one of the new leaders of government by these - these young military folks. So he consults with Carlos Ramirez with the other Reverends at the church and he actually gets their blessing. They kind of they, you know - there's some news articles or news coverage from the time and they say they kind of laid hands on him. They prayed and they came to the view that he had been chosen by God to lead Guatemala into a new kind of become - to become a kind of model of Christianity in this area, and so he goes. And although he was only one of three people that the coup plotters had kind of put in charge, there were two other military leaders so they have this Military Junta, he very quickly marginalizes the other two military leaders and declares himself the sole leader of Guatemala within a short period. And this is all taking place in early 1982. And he makes all of these speeches on the radio where he talks about how he's going to turn Guatemala to God. Now, Guatemala. of course, is a nominally Catholic country at this time, it's you know - it's not as though there had not been a lot of missionary work there already, but he says he's going to turn the country to God by which he means he's going to support in particular Evangelicals and the particular type of Protestant Christianity that he practices. What actually happens is he kind of vows to end corruption and do all of that and he does make some changes in the urban areas. So the kind of urban Guatemalans, the middle and upper-class, they do sort of see him as helping them. But, he identifies "communist insurgents" quote-unquote, communist insurgents, in rural areas as a threat not only to his leadership but as a threat to his desire to spread his Christian vision throughout his country, right? Because he sees in the same way that - that other Evangelicals do communism as kind of inherently threatening to religious freedom and religious practice. So he unleashes the army on indigenous people, the Mayans and other indigenous groups who are living in the highlands in Guatemala, in this - in this sort of deeply devastating counterinsurgency campaign, where they're literally putting people into strategic hamlets and model villages, what they call the Model Villages, but they're essentially strategic hamlets to, break up communities or put them in this kind of refugee camps and then, they kill or disappear just thousands and thousands of people. They essentially engage in genocide. But there's that language and rhetoric of religious freedom and so he also at the same time is trying to cultivate a close relationship with the Reagan Administration. He's playing on the language of Human Rights, he's saying, "We're going to bring Christianity. We're going to promote an end to corruption," and he's asking for U.S. aid to do that. He's asking in particular for military aid to help him put down this insurgency of what he terms an insurgency. He invites Evangelical leaders from the United States down to come and tour the country, to meet with him, to pray with him, to see some of these strategic hamlets, and they pledged a tremendous amount of aid to him. Pat Robertson goes on the 700 Club and calls for U.S. citizens, U.S. watchers of his show to not only call their Congresspeople and push them to provide military aid to this regime, but to support private fundraising that they're doing to try to send whatever material they can to help him in his goals. And the Reagan Administration encounters a lot of pushback, right? There are members of Congress who are watching what's happening in Guatemala. They're hearing from Secular Human Rights Organization saying that this is a really devastating Human Rights situation. People are being killed. And they're unwilling to provide that aid, and so we end up in this situation where Evangelicals are pushing very hard to have that aid extended. The Reagan Administration is trying to find ways to work around Congressional resistance to this, and eventually, they are able to offer the sale of some helicopter parts, but Evangelicals, Rios Montt is not necessarily keen on that. He wants - He wants the aid to be provided to him. Evangelicals help him secure the helicopter parts that he needs from sources in Canada and Israel. So they are able to actually materially help him with his efforts. Now he's later ousted in another coup. A lot of the military men were not super thrilled that he was kind of emphasizing the religious dynamics. He was constantly using religious rhetoric and his speeches. They ousted him in part because they're frustrated with that and with the incredible influence that his church members have - his church advisors have on his leadership. But it's this remarkable, moment where we see the Confluence of Evangelical concern, U.S. Evangelical engagement with this region, U.S. Evangelical concern about spreading the gospel and some of this communist and anti-communist rhetoric that we're seeing. So he's - it's a tremendously interesting case study.
Interviewer: No, I agree. Very interesting. Before we leave it and go to South Africa and Apartheid, I want to - to note from your book I learned that before the earthquake, uh, Guatemala had a seven percent Protestant population. And by 1982, so six years later, they had flipped it. They were then twenty-two percent Protestant. And as you say they were ...
Lauren: And they just grew from there.
Interviewer: Okay, right. That's what you said. So, um, just from the missionary aspect, also very very fascinating, let's move to South African Apartheid. So, can you explain how Mainline Protestant religious leaders and Evangelical religious leaders differed in their approach to Apartheid in South Africa, which was a major U.S. Foreign Policy issue in the 80s and 90s?
Lauren: Sure. So this is when I think about the case study is that I chose, one of the things that I was trying to do was look at the wide array of ways in which Evangelicals might have influenced policy. So the case of the Soviet Union, we see them being very effective at using the language of religious liberty to - to get particular legislation and particular policies. We see an on-the-ground effectiveness in Guatemala and congressional resistance in - in that case. South Africa, there's a tremendous variation in terms of not just Evangelical perspective in the United States about the problem of Apartheid but Evangelical perspective in South Africa about what the response should be to Apartheid. And then of course, there is the kind of what we see the perspective from Mainline Protestants and many Catholics where there's a huge amount of religious-based activism to try to end Apartheid in the country of South Africa, right? So there's a lot of protestant activism on that, both in the United States and in South Africa. And in fact, in South Africa, it's, it's you know, folks like Desmond Tutu, and other sort of really well-known religious leaders. They tend to be like Anglican or other Mainline Protestant churches. So they are advocating for an end to the Apartheid regime and all of the you know, racist policies that that entailed and the tremendous amounts of Human Rights abuses which were, just increasing regularly throughout this - throughout the 70s and 80s. So it was a seriously bad situation. Plus of course, this very racist regime. Now, Evangelicals in United States, when interviewed, many of them particularly, very conservative ones would say that they were deeply opposed to the racist policies of the Apartheid regime. So they would say we are opposed to Apartheid, but they were worried that if the Apartheid regime was removed, that the new leadership that would come in might come from folks from the African National Congress, which they viewed as a Communist Organization or at least inspired, you know, or in potentially influence by Communism. So they were worried that what would happen would be with the removal of Apartheid leaders in an immediate way, ANC leaders would come in and maybe South Africa would fall to Communism. And if that happened. it would take what they saw as one of the most Christian countries in - on the continent of Africa and maybe create a situation where religious freedom would be restricted. So that was the perception. Now, there was a lot of debate right there, were - there were whole group of Southern Baptist in the Southern Baptist Convention who were calling for a much more kind of progressive response to Apartheid. They were much more supportive of movements that Mainline Protestants and Catholics and Secular Organizations in the United States were advocating for at the time which is they wanted the United States to disinvest from South Africa. They wanted them to sanction the government in order to put pressure on the Apartheid regime to end Apartheid. Those groups in the Southern Baptists were marginalized though because there were these more powerful conservative voices who pushed them out of positions of leadership and really advocated for a different approach. And so, what they were calling form was rather than bringing justice to South Africa rather than an immediate end to Apartheid. They were calling for a kind of gradualism and they were very opposed to the efforts to impose sanctions or to disinvest, or to divest, to have corporations divest. And a lot of it is rooted in this language of religious liberty and the fear that they have that a communist government was going to come in and that would be the end of that. And so they're playing on those anxieties and fears. And, so when there is a movement in Congress to pass legislation, to pass this Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act that would involve some of these four policy levers applied to the Apartheid government, Evangelicals in the United States along with some conservative Evangelicals from South Africa who have a kind of - who are also worried about Communism. They mount this campaign to resist the passage of this legislation and they go on TV, and they write letters, and they do all of this stuff to try to make their case. And we see you know, quite a bit of an effort to bring some of these more conservative South African Evangelicals to speak about what they see as the potential threats of an immediate end to an Apartheid and they kind of call for a gradual end. Now, they are not successful in blocking the comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and in fact, advocates in Congress who support the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act are able to ensure that it gets enforced even though the Reagan Administration, does not approve of it, tries to - tries to sort of veto it and everything. So tthey are not successful in this case unlike in some of the other cases I talked about. What's important though is that there is this focus on again, preventing - it's preventing a certain government change in that country and there isn't as much of a focus on justice. And it is only later that we see in South Africa, South African Evangelicals feeling a sense that they have really messed up, that not focusing on justice, that by focusing only on their desire to continue to evangelize, and so on and so forth, that they have really done harm. And so there's an effort to engage in a kind of reconciliation process there. And so we see some South African Evangelicals who play a key role in that reconciliation process later in the 1990s. U.S. Evangelicals, their thoughts about Apartheid evolved after the end of Apartheid, but it's - but they were certainly, again, not all of them, right? There's a lot of difference of opinion, but - but the core group that are advocating against the - the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, they are slower to kind of have their views about the situation involved over time.
Interviewer: I want to, uh, quote from your book about these South African Evangelicals looking back on their approach as you just brought it up. It was very moving, uh, profound I should say, what they said and I'm quoting here, "In South Africa, I'm quoting from them. In South Africa, we hear more and more that no price is too high to pay for our religious liberty. The fact is that genocide is too high, high a price, and no one, not even Evangelicals, not even for the highest ideals have the right to take measures that might destroy millions of innocent non-combatants." So I think that's, related to what you just said.
Lauren: Absolutely. And it also again, it just - it highlights this ongoing disjuncture between a social justice orientation and this - the Primacy of Evangelism, right? So this is a kind of ongoing discussion and also the definitions of Human Rights. When we think of Human Rights, is it just religious liberty, or is it a broader search for justice?
Interviewer: Right. Lauren, you end the book with this statement, "Evangelicals' impact on U.S. Foreign Relations is a testament to the power of religiously inspired individuals, united in a common cause to shape national politics as well as the international order." Do you want to add anything to that here as we close?
Lauren: I think we're still seeing today a lot of the rhetoric and ideas of this group, from the sort of rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s still shaping U.S. Foreign Policy in insignificant ways even today. So this was a grassroots movement. They managed to build a large global network and they were able to make significant interventions into U.S. Policy. And so, you know, in terms of thinking broadly about how - how grassroots - grassroots groups can be very influential. I think sometimes we have this perception that only - only kind of elites or the foreign policymakers are the one shaping policy, and grassroots activism doesn't matter, but it does, right? And we can - we can have a range of perspectives and views about whether we think that these policies, that these particular groups put in place were beneficial or not, I won't give my personal opinion, but we can certainly have a range of opinions about that. But it is very clear that religious belief united this group. They're set of beliefs united this group and made them or contributed to their ability to organize very effectively and shape the world around them in really profound ways.
Interviewer: We have been talking with Professor Lauren Turek about her book, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations". Thank you, Lauren, so much for being with us. It has been very enlightening and I believe helpful to me and all listeners.
Lauren: Thank you so much for having me. It was wonderful to get to talk to you.
