Abstract
To Bring the Good News to All Nations provides unique insights and information into a little-known corner of American engagement abroad. Whether it is good news or bad, of course, depends on the reader’s point of view. Either way, Lauren Frances Turek’s research into the annals of the global evangelical movement makes it an essential read for understanding the evolution of US foreign policy on religious freedom and human rights.
Turek focuses on the period from the early 1970s, starting with Billy Graham’s call for a global effort to evangelize, through the mid-1990’s collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of South African apartheid. She documents the exit of evangelicals from the World Council of Churches and the creation of the Lausanne Movement over differences in emphasis—the WCC’s postcolonial focus on justice, and the LM on spreading the gospel during a time of unprecedented openness and technological advances. As someone who spent a career engaging with both entities and attending churches affiliated with each, I found her discussion enlightening on the break and its aftermath.
Next, Turek examines the 1980s and 1990s, noting in particular the support for missionizing efforts from the United States and partnerships with local churches abroad. Turek highlights several examples of American evangelicals working in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe to fulfill the biblical mandate for global evangelism. She focuses on their experiences working with the church in Romania, Guatemala, and South Africa. She also discusses the “Evangelical Foreign Policy Lobby,” which supported them in Washington, DC, through a network of influential conservative Christians and politicians called “The Fellowship.” Through these relationships, instrumental human rights legislation passed Congress while the group reached out to world leaders, even the most unsavory. Others have told these stories and at greater length, such as Jeff Sharlet’s The Family, which later became a Netflix mini-series, but the author’s account provides helpful supporting context.
The studies of Romania, Guatemala, and South Africa provide captivating examples of the positives and negatives of evangelical engagement in Washington and in foreign capitals. Positively, evangelicals helped bring attention to the horrific persecution wrought by Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania, an otherwise forgotten country on the edge of Eastern Europe. In Guatemala, Turek tells a cautionary tale of American evangelicals’ willingness to overlook the sins of fellow believer Efraín Ríos Montt, who briefly ruled Guatemala with an iron fist. Finally, her chapter on South Africa shows the maturing of evangelicals in foreign policy and the tension they felt about denouncing apartheid without assisting the spread of atheistic communism.
Turek’s book is well researched and heavily footnoted, chronicling an overlooked yet influential part of the history of American foreign policy. Are evangelicals well-meaning but naive? Did they provide a moral compass for American engagement abroad, or did they lead the nation astray? Were they overly focused on foreign missions and winning souls, to the detriment of other parts of the faith focused on justice? These questions are left to the reader to answer.