University of Virginia

Graduate Student, History

Thesis Title: To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelicals, Human Rights, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1969-1994

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    My dissertation, entitled “To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelicals, Human Rights, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1969-1994,” examines the growth and influence of Christian foreign policy lobbying groups in the United States beginning in the 1970s. I focus on the connections between evangelical organizations, overseas missionary work, human rights concerns, and U.S. foreign relations. During the late twentieth century, rapid economic change, innovations in communication technology, urbanization, mass migration, and Western corporate penetration into the Global South contributed to the expansion of evangelical Christianity throughout the world.  The relationships that American Christians forged abroad through their evangelistic work helped to shape their opinions about foreign affairs and at times impelled them to political action. Evangelical lobbying efforts influenced congressional and presidential decision-making on a number of interrelated foreign policy initiatives, including legislation related to human rights, religious freedom, and foreign aid in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.
    I examine evangelical involvement in Guatemala following the 1976 earthquake and during the ascendance of evangelical dictator Ríos Montt in 1982, in late apartheid-era South Africa, and in the Soviet Union during the late 1970s and 1980s. In part, I assess the effectiveness of Christian efforts to attain foreign aid for favored regimes and to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on those nations they deemed problematic. I also gauge the influence that evangelical involvement and American policy had on society and politics in Guatemala, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. My case studies thus illuminate the extent of Christian influence on American foreign policy in these regions, the affect of these policies on the ground, and the seemingly paradoxical support that evangelicals lent to repressive authoritarian regimes in the name of human rights.

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