Lauren Turek's To Bring the Good News to All Nations is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning subfield of the religious history of U.S. foreign relations, bringing to light the poorly understood contours of white U.S. evangelical engagement with U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s and 1980s. Not only so, it also intervenes in the historiography of human rights discourse in the same period, fruitfully bringing the history of evangelical foreign policy lobbying and global human rights discourse into connection (where in fact they historically were). With impressively detailed and careful archival, textual, and other media-related research, Turek breaks clichés, unlocks impasses, and fills misleading silences in conventional narratives of the rise of the Religious Right. Rather than appealing to the familiar story of national political reconfigurations after the 1960s, Turek paints an Evangelical Right impelled by what she calls its “internationalism” (a term neither historicized nor analyzed but meaning something like “global engagement”). That internationalism is in turn constituted, in Turek's portrayal, by evangelicals’ expansive concern for world evangelization and for the kinds of political actions on the part of the United States that would best promote such evangelism—the eternal ends justifying the secular means. Here we see in wonderful panorama baby boomer evangelicals’ primitivism (their imagined sense of recovering original biblical imperatives) in dialogue with their biblically justified pragmatism (innovating with missional form, with technology, and with politics by means deemed most effective) and their apocalypticism (the sense of impending millennial timetables foreshortening imagined temporality). We see these evangelical tendencies, long identified as characteristic of nineteenth-century white U.S. evangelicalism, seeking to shape international politics and foreign policy: a Great Commission-invoking evangelical missiology meeting the complexities of U.S. foreign relations.
The book begins by defining what many white evangelicals perceived to be a fork in the road in the mid-1970s: a choice between prioritizing social action or “pure” evangelism. As Turek shows, by the late 1960s, many of the evangelicals in the Billy Graham network were dissatisfied with what they saw as the mainstream ecumenical movement's abandoning of the tasks of evangelism and global missionary mobilization in favor of protest against racism, economic injustice, and imperialism. At the landmark First International Congress on World Evangelization (ICOWE) held at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, a meeting that Turek does a very effective job at reconstructing, evangelicals associated with Billy Graham and the Church of England's famed evangelical preacher John Stott forged an influential and lasting network of parachurch and church groups around an agenda of prioritizing global evangelism. The logic of preferencing an imagined pure, apolitical evangelism, in which proclamation and conversion of individuals to a state of salvation was set over against “lesser” concerns of political, racial, economic, social, or international injustices is arguably the central and animating idea of the whole book. It is one to which both the historical subjects and Turek as a historian keep returning. At Lausanne, such a logic pitted many of the white leaders of the Global North against those such as Latin American evangelical Samuel Escobar and others who saw the Gospel as inextricably intertwined with the pursuit of justice and liberation: Jesus as anti-imperialist. Interestingly, although unremarked upon by Turek, this 1970s and 1980s debate was a virtual repeat of the same fault-line that emerged in the John R. Mott-connected network of YMCA and World's Student Christian Federation evangelicals in the 1910s through 1930s.
The pursuit of an ostensibly “pure” apolitical evangelical proclamation interacted with evangelicals’ extraordinary talent for innovation and pragmatism. Such a combination comes out especially in what for me is one highlight (among many) of the book: the second chapter on the emergence of independent evangelical global media. Proliferating rapidly in the 1970s, independent evangelical television production houses, satellite broadcast enterprises, and radio stations propelled culturally tailored products—as well as biblical scriptures—behind both bamboo and iron curtains, seeking to reach viewers and listeners in their living rooms. In another highlight of the book, Turek recounts the way recipients in Soviet Russia reported being buoyed by the material they were able to access and by the sense of connection it fostered with fellow believers in the United States.
From here the book takes up a series of case studies in U.S. foreign policy—on Soviet Russia, Guatemala, and South Africa, respectively. On each of these episodes, it comprises an excellent companion book to another excellent recent volume, Melani McAlister's The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (Oxford University Press, 2018). The two books cover similar temporal and geopolitical case studies but from different methodological vantage points: McAlister employs more multi-disciplinary American studies methods, and Turek assiduously follows diplomatic historical methods—persuasively tracing evangelical lobby groups’ messaging to actual voting positions in Congress and to pressure on the White House. That is, Turek evidences the causality of religion on actual foreign policy making.
Turek's devastating reconstruction of evangelical support of the Ríos Montt regime in Guatemala that engaged in mass killings in the countryside—because the leader was not only anti-communist but also a charismatic, evangelical born-again Christian with U.S. connections—makes for a telling case study in where the lack of political and justice-oriented deliberation could lead when Cold War imperatives of being anti-communist and “Christian” were so compelling.
At all times, Turek allies herself with her subjects quite closely, taking their biblical proof texts as just that, proof texts. The strength of this is considerable: it allows a long overdue reckoning with evangelical thinking on foreign relations on its own terms. We are at a stage in the religious-historical turn in U.S. foreign relations (heralded some fifteen years ago by Andrew Preston, William Inboden, and others) where the recovery of religious thought is still valuable and well-needed. But we are also at a juncture, perhaps, where the issue of taking the historical subjects’ own self-narration on its face can be supplemented by some critical engagement. For example, reading this as a “small -e” Australian evangelical, I found it puzzling that the particularly U.S.-American ways of deploying and reading the Bible were simply taken as self-evidently “biblical” (itself a slippery 1970s term). The growing presence of superb reconstructive works such as Turek's invites further intellectual-historical meets political-theological analysis, the kind that neither reduces religion away to structural forces nor takes its self-authenticating claims at face value. Turek's book is highly recommended and an impressive new addition to Cornell's United States in the World series.
