American Evangelicals, the Changing Global Religious Environment, and Foreign Policy Activism

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, US evangelicals have become increasingly globalized in their outlook, building from a recognition that evangelicalism, both nationally and internationally, is no longer centered on white Americans. As a result, the US evangelical community of the last 30 years has become more transnational in its outlook, and active on a variety of foreign policy issues. US evangelical activism on two issues serves to exemplify these changes: first is the persecuted Christians movement, particularly in relation to the civil war in Sudan in the early 2000s, and second is the debate over immigration after 2016.

Keywords:

• evangelicals
• foreign policy
• Sudan
• South Sudan
• immigration
• persecution

The fundamental premise of this article is that, when international issues are taken into account, the history of modern evangelicalism looks different from the dominant stories we have about it: it is more complex, more racially diverse, and more politically ambidextrous.¹ American believers operate on the global stage, as they have struggled to live within God’s kingdom, which they conceive as universal and borderless. And yet evangelicals, like everybody else, have lived in a world deeply divided by national borders, inhabited by refugees and migrants, riven by dramatically uneven distributions of wealth and power, and dominated by the United States as the most powerful state the world has ever known. The tension between what is posited as God’s kingdom and what is lived as the world’s reality is one that animates evangelical life, in the United States and beyond.

As US evangelicals looked outward after WWII, their views were shaped by two contexts. One was the dramatic expansion of US state power during and after the Cold War. Evangelicals operated globally within a broader global political context shaped by the US state and the wars, hot and cold, that opened spaces for evangelizing or created anti-American sentiment that made evangelizing much more difficult. They were never able to fully escape this reality. Often, they did not want to. The US state was a powerful protector when evangelicals went abroad. This did not mean, however, that they were puppets of the US government. They undoubtedly sometimes served as agents or background support for the United States. Indeed, the “civilizing mission” of missionaries had laid the groundwork for expanding imperial power in the colonial era, and there were ways in which American missionaries did the same for the postwar period. Certainly evangelicals, white and black, tended to support the expansion of US influence abroad. Yet evangelicals of various stripes also pushed for changes in US foreign policy, from Congo in the early 20th century to Sudan in the early 21st (McAlister 2018).

Second, after 1960 American evangelicals also worked with an awareness that the global expansion of Christianity was one of the structuring realities of the postwar period. In the last decades of the 20th century, many US Christians (and others) became acutely conscious of the emergence of what Philip Jenkins calls the “next Christendom,” the numerical growth and political power of the evangelical churches of the global South. Millions of people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia had converted to some form of Protestantism. Evangelicals, including Pentecostals and charismatics, made up about 40 percent of the world’s Christians; the rest are other Protestants, Catholic, and Orthodox. In 2010, almost 70 percent of evangelicals lived outside the United States and Europe. By the year 2050, approximately 38 percent of the world’s Christians will live in sub-Saharan Africa (Hackett and Grim 2011; Pew Research Center 2015).

American evangelicals’ activism on foreign policy issues in recent decades has developed in the context of these multifaceted changes, as well as within the changing political landscape of the post-Cold War era. This article begins with an exploration of the demographic realities that are shaping evangelicalism, both in the US and internationally. It then turns to two key issues in which US evangelicals became deeply involved in international issues: the war in Sudan and the creation of South Sudan in 2011, and the debates over immigration in the 2016 elections and since. Overall, I argue that American evangelical politics is fundamentally shaped by an awareness of the global context, and by connections with evangelical believers around the world. These connections have been sometimes a force for pushing evangelical Americans toward more liberal views on some issues, but that is not always the case. In the two examples here, we get some indication of the complexity of US evangelical stances, and the multiplicity of views in this large and diverse community.

Demographics Shape Destiny

Evangelicalism is a global movement, with the preponderance of Pentecostal and evangelical believers living outside the US and Europe. American believers, however, remain quite influential in the global context: from the wealth that American Christians bring to the table (with their ability to travel, to donate, and to shape agendas) to the outsized influence of American church leaders from TD Jakes to Rick Warren, there is no question that the global evangelical community has been, and continues to be, shaped by US evangelicalism. Perhaps nothing makes this power more obvious than the ability and eagerness of American Christians to travel abroad: observers estimate that by the early 2000s about 1.6 million American Christians a year were going on some sort of short-term missionary service trip abroad. The Southern Baptist Convention alone sends 30,000 people annually. It is assumed that participants pay their own way, but some people, especially students, gather sponsors to support their trip. The average short-term mission costs between US$2500 and US$3000; multiplied by well over a million people a year, the total financial commitment by American Christians is staggering (see Wuthnow 2010, 170, 126; Priest et al. 2006; McAlister 2018). And of course US television and other media circulate around the world in ways that few other countries can match. Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), for example, is a global media powerhouse, bringing specially curated content to every continent, and reaching (it claimed) as many as 2 billion viewers globally in 2010, including through live internet streaming. (TBN’s star has fallen dramatically since a financial scandal in 2015 and a sexual abuse lawsuit in 2012; see Hamilton and Grad 2017). Books written by American evangelists are global bestsellers: In one survey of Christians in Kenya, respondents were asked to name the authors, Christian or not, that they read most frequently: Joyce Meyer was sixth and TD Jakes was eighth (Frederick 2016, 87–114).

And yet, the center of global evangelicalism and Pentecostalism is unquestionably moving south Nigeria, South Korea, Brazil, and other countries are now host to some of the most vibrant evangelical communities in the world. Some of the largest churches globally are in Seoul and Lagos.² Brazil and South Korea are among the largest missionary-sending countries in the world (Steffan 2013). And the leadership of global evangelical institutions, from World Evangelical Alliance to the Lausanne Movement to World Vision, is increasingly in the hands of people from the global South.

This global diversity has emerged in the context of increasing diversity in the US as well. Within the US, even more than internationally, “evangelical” is a category defined variously by different pollsters, and one not always claimed by the people who go to churches that scholars consider evangelical. (That is, the definition of “evangelical” can be either by self-identification, thus including only people who say they are evangelical, or by scholarly/pollster attribution, with a poll drawing on, say, the National Association of Evangelicals' list of evangelical beliefs and counting anyone who says they agree with them. Still other observers count any member of a certain denomination as evangelical.)

Even with this complexity, it is clear that theologically conservative Protestants are far more racially diverse that most observers realize. In 2018, approximately 65-75% of evangelicals are white, with rapidly increasing numbers of people of color, including black, Asian, and, most significantly, a growing Latino population. By most accounts, 15-22% of US evangelicals are Latino (Jones and Cox 2017; Wong 2018).

Some of this diversity is simply a matter of racially specific churches growing more numerous or larger: churches that are largely white, African American, Arab, Asian American, or Latino remain common. Indeed, most denominations are still populated predominantly by one ethnic or racial group: African Methodist Episcopal Churches are 94% black; Southern Baptists are 85% white. (The SBC elected its first black president in 2012.) But there are increasing numbers of multi-racial churches. Joel Osteen’s 52,000-member Lakewood Church in Dallas, for example, claims to have almost equal numbers of African American, Latino, and white members. The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination, is 66% white, 25% Latino, and 8% black and Asian American (Lipka 2015).³

Even more striking is the diversity of the various parachurch organizations, such as Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, Cru, and World Vision. Many of these organizations are fashioning themselves in self-consciously racially diverse ways with an expressed commitment to racial justice. (Intervarsity forbade racial segregation at its events in 1945. The organization claims that one-half of the participants at its 2015 Urbana conference were students of color.) Evangelicals tend to be more conservative in their views on women’s leadership and LGBTQ+ issues than the population as a whole—and this is true across racial groups.

Evangelical political activism on international affairs is carried out under a broad array of different institutions that are themselves diverse in theology, membership, and impact. There are, first of all, transnational evangelical organizations such as the Lausanne Movement, World Evangelical Alliance, and Pentecostal World Alliance. These organizations take political positions on issues of global concern, especially on issues such as persecution of Christians, global poverty, and missionary practice.

Within the US context, activism on political issues, including international issues, is often taken up by denominations. There are scores of evangelical denominations in the US,⁴ which often issue statements on policy issues, and, just as importantly, donate money to support causes that they consider crucial, whether it be HIV-AIDS or to support “persecuted Christians.” Beyond the denominations, most political activism is carried out by parachurch organizations, advocacy groups (including humanitarian organizations), and ad hoc coalitions. These groups inhabit a range of political positions. At the broadest level, it is difficult to describe any major evangelical organization in the US as entirely liberal, since most oppose abortion and many have conservative views on gay marriage or trans rights. But there is a broad spectrum of views about women’s leadership, racial politics, and social inequality, and on these issues, we can demarcate evangelicals (very roughly) as inhabiting a spectrum. As with other religious groups, seminaries and religious colleges can also be forces for promoting liberal or conservative theology that also has political implications. And, starting in the 1990s, think tanks such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, and the Institute for Global Engagement developed research agendas that supported Christian activism, particularly on foreign policy.

On the more politically conservative end of the spectrum there are groups like The Gospel Coalition, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Cru (formerly Campus Crusade), and Samaritan’s Purse, the National Coalition of Religious Broadcasters, and the Southern Baptist Convention. (The SBC would have been considered a moderate organization before the conservative takeover of the 1980s.) On the liberal end of the spectrum we would find the staff of Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, Red Letter Christians, World Vision, The Witness (black Reformed), Fuller Seminary, and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. More or less in the center of the evangelical spectrum stand the National Association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today, the Institute for Global Engagement, and Wheaton College.

Of course, the actual stances taken by any of these organizations are often complex and sometimes shifting, but it is important to note that there is a recognized diversity among evangelicals that is political as well as racial and national. And the reality on the ground is that many political issues that the churches have taken up are hard to categorize politically. Such is the case, for example, with the movement on behalf of “persecuted Christians” in South Sudan.

Persecuted Christians and Southern Sudan

In the last decades of the 20th century, a passionate concern with the persecution of Christians united conservative, liberal, and moderate evangelicals. Christians were being martyred all over the world, they argued, prevented from spreading the gospel and targeted for their faith. Persecution was chronicled in magazines ranging from deeply conservative venues such as World magazine to the moderately conservative Christianity Today to the Left-leaning Sojourners, described in books and on websites, and pictured in the fundraising newsletters and DVDs sold in church basements. The issue was embraced by Catholics as well. Pope John Paul II endorsed the issue with his apostolic letter in 1994: “At the end of the second millennium, the Church has once again become a church of martyrs … The witness of Christ borne even to the shedding of blood has become a common inheritance of Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and Protestants.” The persecuted body—the body, or church, of Christ, and the literal bodies of believers—became an icon of faith and a potent political symbol.

In 1995, Michael Horowitz galvanized the attention of evangelical elites in the United States with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that took aim at Islamic countries for persecuting their Christian minorities. He listed atrocities committed by Muslims against Christians in Ethiopia, Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt, and Iran. Certainly, the stories were horrific. Some were widely known incidents: three Iranian pastors killed in 1994; the routine abduction of children in South Sudan. Other examples seemed pulled from the less-documented folklore of the emerging movement: a pastor in Ethiopia whose eyes were put out by local Muslim officials; Christian students in Egypt “routinely” beaten and called “devils” by their classmates. But the overall argument was that Christians had too long stood by, while “in a growing number of other countries, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism has effectively criminalized the practice of Christianity” (Horowitz 1995). Horowitz was not Christian but Jewish; this, however, only strengthened his credibility, since he was presumably not speaking from self-interest. Both Christians and Jews were morally obligated to respond to persecution, Horowitz said, by challenging immigration and asylum policies within the United States and calling for changes in US foreign policy toward guilty governments (Bergman 1996; Waldman 2004; Castelli 2005).

Out of the activism of Horowitz and many others, including the (Catholic) author Nina Shea (In the Lion’s Den), writer Paul Marshall (Their Blood Cries Out), as well as organizations like Freedom House, Voice of the Martyrs, Open Doors, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, and numerous others, emerged a multi-faceted movement organized to protect Christians globally. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the successes of this movement included the founding of the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, crucial support for the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, and a broad mobilization of organizations and individuals around the idea that Christians around the world were suffering for their faith.

The persecuted Christians movement had many different interests and investments, but none was more immediate than US policy toward Sudan, and it was in the context of Sudan that the movement had its most direct and significant impact. The Sudanese civil war, which pitted the government in Khartoum against a shifting coalition of rebel organizations in the southern part of the country, had reignited in the mid-1980s and remained a major conflict for 20 years. Starting in the 1990s, Sudan entered US evangelical consciousness as a site of Christian persecution and a space of solidarity, religious and racial. By the end of the decade, it became what one observer has called the “abiding international preoccupation” of US evangelical activists, black and white (Higham 2004). Among these believers, no part of the world other than Israel garnered as much attention. And, just a decade after the divisions over anti-apartheid activism had highlighted racial and political divides among theologically conservative believers, the moral claims of the southern Sudanese brought black and white US evangelicals together as little else had.

Those evangelicals joined the mid-1990s social movement on behalf of southern Sudan, which became one of the most successful and broad-based political coalitions on international issues since the anti-apartheid movement. Other activists included the conservative partisans at National Review, the liberal ecumenical churches and human rights organizations like Amnesty International, as well as African American activists including members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

A changing politics of race was also central to the work on Sudan. At the turn of the century, white and black evangelicals were deeply moved by a situation in which southern Sudanese, whom they understood to be “black” as well as Christian, were oppressed by northern Sudanese, who were understood to be Arab as well as Muslim. In this context, Arab stood as an analogue for white. Sudan was one space in which a changing American evangelical community forged new coalitions across the bounds of race within the United States. Support for African Christians provided a key point of solidarity, one that made globalizing faith the ground for domestic reformulations of a multiracial religious community.

Both trajectories of turn-of-the-century evangelical politics—persecuted Christians in general and Sudan activism in particular—drew upon the political power of suffering. They constructed what Wendy Brown has described as “injury politics” (1995). Once again evangelicals focused their energies on the “persecuted body”—the body or church of Christ, and the literal bodies of believers—which became a potent symbol of their identity as Christians. As members of a suffering community, evangelicals asked that the US state both recognize their grievances and represent their global ideals. Sudan was the lodestar for this movement: both black and white evangelicals, thinking race and religion together, saw in the plight of the southern Sudanese a symbol of their own overlapping concerns.

By 1996, the existence of slavery in Sudan was widely reported in the US media, from investigative reports in the Baltimore Sun to a special edition of “Dateline NBC” (Lewthwaite and Kane 1996; Goodman 1996; Ringle 1996; Press 1987a, 1987b). Journalists in both the Christian and the secular press recognized that the civil war in Sudan had led to kidnapping of people from Southern villages by northern militias. The captives were then taken to the north and forced into labor in northern Sudanese homes. Nat Hentoff of the Washington Post wrote regular columns on Sudan and slavery, attacking those who refused to admit its existence and extolling activists and journalists who reported it (Hentoff 1996; Hentoff 1998).

Black pastors had a particular role to play because they could and did speak to both racial and religious connections. Activist ministers like Rev. Walter Fauntroy and Rev. Al Sharpton went to southern Sudan in 2000 and 2001 to perform “slave redemptions” and to learn about the situation on the ground (Jones 2001). They, like others, gave interviews to the media and spoke at rallies and at their churches. One group of African American pastors wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus to demand more leadership on the issue of slavery in Sudan (Davis 2001; Hentoff 2000; Hertzke 2004). In the spring of 2001, Fauntroy and Madison, along with Michael Horowitz (who had been central to the campaign for the International Religious Freedom Act in the mid 1990s), were arrested after they handcuffed themselves to the doors of the Sudanese embassy. The act was designed to resonate with the scenes of people getting arrested in the anti-apartheid protests outside the South African embassy in the 1980s. The goal, the Sudan activists said, was to launch a national grassroots movement (Mufson 2001).

The issue of slavery was emotionally wrenching, and the promise of freeing slaves was powerfully affecting, but it was not the only vector through which Americans engaged the civil war in Sudan. There were other activists, including those who came from the humanitarian organizations that aimed to bring in food and supplies in the war zone.

In fact, it is impossible to fully understand the politics of the north–south conflict in Sudan without attention to the role of international aid agencies. Many of the smaller evangelical organizations that came to operate in Sudan believed that the secular humanitarian groups had sold out. The larger organizations were so committed to “neutrality” and safety that they refused to fly aid into situations where it was dangerous, or when the government of Sudan decided to forbid it. Groups like Christian Solidarity International, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, and Samaritan’s Purse made it clear that they would continue to fly no matter what the official agreements said or the conditions on the ground were (Bar-Illan 1995; Thackray 1998).

For its part the Khartoum government seemed to make a point of alienating evangelical humanitarian agencies. Samaritan’s Purse had an 80-bed hospital in the southern Sudan town of Lui that had opened in 1997. In the winter of 2000, the hospital was bombed by Sudanese government planes four times in a single month. One patient and several people who lived near the hospital were killed in the attacks (Christianity Today 2000). The head of Samaritan’s Purse was Franklin Graham, who would pray at both inaugurations for President George W. Bush, and he soon became an important activist voice on behalf of southern Sudanese. In the spring of 2000, Graham published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. He demanded that policymakers pay attention to events in Sudan, where, he said, the “Muslim government is waging a brutal war against Christians.” How was it, he wondered, that the international community had (rightly) responded to the plight of Muslims in Yugoslavia, but had not tried to help the southern Sudanese? Perhaps Christians were being ignored where Muslims had been heard. Or maybe the hesitation was due to racism: “[A]re the lives of Europeans more valuable than those of Africans?” Graham asked. It was time to end the silence; it was “vitally important that Christians in Sudan be granted basic human and religious rights” (Graham 2000). Graham, drawing on the legacies of IRFA and the persecuted Christians movement, claimed Christians as the group most in need of protection.

In March of 2001, members of Congress introduced the Sudan Peace Act into the House and Senate for the second time. The initial bill, put forth in 1999, had died in committee. This time, hopes were much higher for a bill that might successfully “encourage” a peace settlement between the government of Sudan and the rebels (Diamond 2003). Then, as the bill was still being debated in the early fall of that year, the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington pushed other news off the table. Soon Congress was convinced to pull the Sudan Peace Act from consideration, as the Bush administration worked hard to bring Sudan into the “war on terrorism.” There was a “major shift” in the relationship. As one official explained shortly after 9/11, “cooperation on the intelligence level is quite good” (Sipress 2001).

The struggle for sanctions was not over. The Sudan Peace Act itself was eventually revived. Despite the pressure to ease up on Sudan, the US Committee on International Religious Freedom kept the pressure on, as did evangelical media like Christianity Today, which published a furious analysis of the failure to pass the Sudan Peace Act (Moore 2001). John Danforth, President Bush’s special envoy to Sudan, put forth a series of confidence-building measures designed to shore up tentative moves toward peace on the ground in Sudan (Danforth 2002). Some evangelicals were doubtful. The international director of Samaritan’s Purse argued that any negotiations with Khartoum were based on “trying to create a reality out of fantasy—that the government of Sudan will be an honest broker” (Belz 2003). But events in Sudan were moving forward, as the Sudanese rebels and Khartoum worked haltingly toward a peace agreement. Activism in the US continued apace. In October 2002, the Sudan Peace Act finally passed resoundingly in both houses and was signed by President Bush.⁵

From there it was a long and difficult road to Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Act (CPA), signed in January 2005. Rather remarkably, the CPA included the provision that southern Sudan would be able to have a referendum on independence in six years. Many US evangelicals delighted in what they believed to be a validation of their work and the beginning of real hope for the south. “This is truly an answer to the fervent and frequent prayers of Christians around the globe,” said Carl Moeller, President of Open Doors-USA, one of the organizations that had been deeply involved in the persecuted Christians movement (Baptist Press News 2004). The referendum was held in January 2011. The official vote count was that 98 percent of the south had voted for independence, and South Sudan became an independent nation in 2012.

After 2012, South Sudanese Christians, long lionized by Americans, were now working through the unglamorous process of nation building, and doing so in conjunction with Muslims and followers of African traditional religions who lived in the south (Salomon 2011; Zahar 2011). The messy reality of power politics meant that many evangelicals (and most other Americans) paid less attention. South Sudan was less interesting because the issues no longer mapped on emotionally salient evangelical categories. Still the legacy of US activism was crucial to the formation of this new nation. The country’s founding was filled with hope, but South Sudan would soon find itself embroiled in its own horrifically costly civil war between different factions of what had been the SPLA. In 2018, it remained one of the most undeveloped and war-torn countries in the world.

Immigration

In November 2016, 81 percent of white self-identified evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the US presidential election (Cox 2016). They did so in the face of a candidate whose personal behavior and stated values were very different from those proclaimed by evangelicals. In fact, in the Republican primaries in the winter and spring of 2016, most US evangelical leaders—from James Dobson of Focus on the Family to Russell Moore of the SBC—had encouraged evangelicals to support someone else in the primaries: Ted Cruz, or perhaps Marco Rubio, or even, for a while, Ben Carson, all three of whom represented the non-Anglo future of evangelicalism. But people in the pews ignored that advice, as a plurality voted for Trump even with those avowedly conservative Christians in the race. Trump soon had his team of well-known evangelical supporters, with Jerry Falwell Jr. an early endorser, and by the time he was the presumptive Republican nominee, he had an evangelical “advisory board” that included not only Falwell but also Bishop Harry Jackson, the African American author and pastor of a megachurch outside of Washington, DC; Pentecostal televangelist Paula White; James Dobson, who found his way over to Trump once Cruz was defeated; and a dozen other televangelists, authors, and megachurch pastors from New York to Dallas to California.

Many leading evangelicals of color, however, were outspoken supporters of Clinton, or at least opponents of Trump. The day after the vote, TD Jakes, no liberal, described African Americans as “traumatized” by Trump’s election. Others said that the election had opened a racial wound among US evangelicals that would not be easily healed. Right after the election, Jenny Yang of World Relief, the aid organization sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals told Christianity Today:

Many people of color are feeling incredibly vulnerable at the prospect of a Trump presidency while trying to heal from the trauma of this past year. It is not easy to overlook such barbed attacks on your identity as immigrants, minorities, or the disabled. (Lund 2016)

Immigration was an issue that evangelicals (and everyone else) knew would be front and center of the Trump presidency. First up was the so-called Muslim ban, as the administration tried, from the earliest days, to limit Muslim immigration to the United States. The first two attempts were overturned by the courts, but the third, issued by executive order, was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018.

This approach to Muslim immigration to the US emerged in the context of a continuing focus on the persecution of Christians. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity recently released a report estimating that 90,000 Christians had been martyred from 2005 to 2015. The team used a broad definition, which included any Christian who died in communal violence or genocide, whether or not they were killed specifically for their faith. That kind of capacious approach was designed to show “Christian Martyrdom as a pervasive phenomenon” (Johnson and Zurlo 2014). But it did little to explain the long and complex histories that placed Christians, Muslims, and others in situations of violent conflict, terrorism, and war. When Christian thinkers and activists construct Christian persecution as religiously-based discrimination rather than seeing it as part of a larger set of political and cultural issues, they give greater traction to those who want to present Muslims as a global threat. It lends implicit and sometimes explicit support to those who argue for a Muslim ban, or who agitate against a non-existent threat of Shari’a law in the US, or who try to prevent mosques from being built or Muslim candidates for winning public office (see Marzouki 2017; Shakman Hurd 2015).

In early September 2017, the Trump administration began to highlight immigration issues relating to Latinos, and announced it would phase out the DACA program, which had protected approximately 800,000 undocumented people who had been brought to the US as children. Trump insisted that some version of immigration reform could protect the so-called DREAMers, but the legislation would also have to fund the border wall that he had long demanded, along with other provisions (NPR 2017).

The outrage from many people in the United States, including evangelicals, was intense and immediate. Evangelicals of color, including Latinos, were especially outspoken. Gabriel Salguero, founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, said that he and others supported the DREAMers not only because it was the right thing to do, but because they saw many of them as fellow believers. “These are our brothers and sisters, worshipping in our churches, going to our Sunday schools,” Salguero told NPR. “They’re the playmates of our sons and daughters.”

For much of the previous two decades, Salguero and other Latino evangelical leaders had often described Latino voters as “the ultimate swing vote,” saying that neither Democrats nor Republicans should take them for granted. Samuel Rodriguez, founder of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, is more conservative than Salguero, but he makes a similar argument: He sees Latinos in general as the possible middle ground, as people who will, for example, embrace the war on terror as long as it is accompanied by a war on poverty. “Brown Christians,” he wrote for Yale Reflections magazine in 2008, “particularly Hispanic evangelicals, are poised to redraw the moral map with a commitment to reconcile both sides, working within a framework of righteousness and justice.” Rodriguez went on to criticize white evangelicals, saying that many of them “seem to adhere more to the rhetoric and philosophies of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Lou Dobbs than to the Biblical guidance of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John” (Rodriguez 2008).

Rodriguez is typically conservative—he is part of President Trump’s evangelical advisory council—but he has argued that there was no point in being beholden to Republicans.

If you ask the typical American citizen what an evangelical looks like, they will say white, middle class, probably from a Southern state, male. But the reality of what we have is a Mexican-born woman at a megachurch in the Bronx,

Rodriguez told the Tribune. That evangelical, he said, is one who “will not submit to being the extension of one political party” (Ramirez 2008).

However, not all Latino evangelicals agreed. Rodriguez was immediately called upon to support the president, and, initially, he did, saying that the president’s policy would not affect law-abiding people.

If you’re God-fearing and you’re hardworking and you’re here, even though you entered illegally … we’re not going to separate families. That’s not who we are as a country. It’s not Christian. It’s not American. So we’re not going to deport them. (Faithfully Magazine 2017)

But as time went on, and as it became clear that the administration was, in fact, rounding up ordinary, “hardworking” people for deportation, Rodriguez became more critical. In January, he chastised both the White House and Congress for “playing politics” with DREAMers. “They can’t be bargaining chips in a deal. I mean, these kids lost their status. And they’re living in perpetual limbo … . It’s morally reprehensible to even have them in this current state” (Martin 2018).

Over the course of the spring of 2018, President Trump continued to dangle the possibility of a deal for DREAMers, and even some conservative white evangelicals began to insist on a deal for protecting DACA. The members of the Evangelical Immigration Table, as well was leaders of many of the major evangelical organizations (the National Association of Evangelicals, World Vision, World Relief, etc), offered recommendations for a path to citizenship for DREAMers.

Then, in May 2018, the Trump administration began enacting its “zero tolerance” policy of separating migrant families at the US-Mexico border. The Evangelical Immigration table issued a letter of protest, asking Trump to reverse the policy. Even Franklin Graham, a staunch Trump defender, said he found the policy “disgraceful.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions quoted Romans 13 to defend the separations, saying that people were to obey the government because God has ordained it. Christians from a broad variety of backgrounds cried foul over Sessions’ mobilization of a Scripture passage that had been used to defend both slavery and apartheid. Salguero was among them, saying that a fuller reading of Scripture brought one to a different conclusion. “Overwhelmingly Scripture causes us to defend families,” Salguero told the Washington Post. “The Bible calls us to be pro-family, and I personally find it deeply lamentable that we are separating children from their parents at the border or anywhere” (Tam 2018).

For some evangelicals in the United States, then, the spectacles of family separation at the borders were deeply wrenching, and many evangelical leaders, including white evangelical leaders, were outspoken about the horrors of a policy that broke apart families. But white evangelicals in the pews remained supportive of the president on immigration, including on the issue of border separations (Boorstein and Zauzmer 2018).

Conclusion

Since the 2016 elections, evangelicals of color have been increasingly distinguishing themselves—politically but also in some ways religiously—from white evangelicals. In April of 2018, Gabriel Salguero was one of the co-chairs of a meeting held at Wheaton College that was designed to provide an alternative voice to the white pro-Trump evangelical leadership (Beaty 2018). Attendees included AR Bernard, the African American pastor who was the only person to resign from Trump’s evangelical advisory council over Charlottesville. According to reports from the meeting, there was something of a divide, with the largely older, white contingent stressing unity and a need to reach beyond partisanship, while the largely younger contingent of people of color were more likely to ask for repentance from white evangelicals. Some, like New York pastor Tim Keller, bemoaned the divisions, the “red evangelicalism” and “blue evangelicalism.” But Salguero said that the meeting made him hopeful: He appreciated the diversity of the group, the willingness to disagree. “As evangelicals, we struggle with a whole host of issues,” he told Religion News Service. “Maybe we can do better together in conversation” (Miller 2018).

It remains to be seen how the global context of evangelical life will shape the racial self-definition of American believers. As Latinos, Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterns are an ever-growing proportion of the global evangelical population, there is no question that white believers are in a global minority. Whether white evangelicals embrace or resist their minority status will shape the contours of US evangelical life over the next generation, but it will not change the demographic reality. The question is whether white American evangelicals can craft a politics made to the measure of the world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melani McAlister

Melani McAlister is Professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University. A historian of the US in the World, she has recently completed The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (2018). She also authored Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East (2005, o. 2001), and is in the process of co-editing volume 4 of the Cambridge History of America and the World, among other projects.

Notes

1 This article was commissioned by the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies (CIRIS) on behalf of the Transatlantic Policy Network on Religion and Diplomacy (TPNRD). CIRIS’s role as the Secretariat of the TPNRD is generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of CIRIS, Clare College, the Luce Foundation, the TPNRD Secretariat, or any TPNRD-participating government.

2 The largest church by membership is Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination. It had 800,000 members in 2018, with 200,000 attending the weekly service at its main site. Four churches in Lagos alone have more than 40,000 attendees each week, with the largest being Deeper Life Christian Ministry. The second largest in weekly attendance, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, has churches in 196 countries, including the US. On The Redeemed Christian Church of God overall, see Ukah (2008); Marshall (2009); Obadare (2018). On RGGG in the US, see Rollin (2010) and Rice (2009). The church website is http://rccg.org/.

3 Assemblies of God claims that its membership is even more diverse, saying that in 2017 it was 56% white, 23% Latino, 10% black, and just over 10% other, including Asian, Native American, and mixed race. See https://ag.org/About/Statistics.

4 The largest evangelical denominations are the Southern Baptist Convention, Church of Christ, Assemblies of God, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and Church of God. The largest historical black church is the National Baptist Convention and the Church of God in Christ. See http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-1-the-changing-religious-composition-of-the-u-s/pr_15-05-12_rls_chapter1-03/.

5 See “Sudan Peace Act,” Pub. L. No. 107–245 (2002), Section 6, paragraph 2, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/19897.pdf. See also Callahan (2002).