Author: Peter Waldman
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: May 26, 2004
A Campaign to Export Values Makes
Legislative Headway Even as It Arouses Critics
Michael Horowitz was named one of
the 10 most influential Christians of the year in 1997 by a Southern Baptist
magazine. The only catch: He's Jewish.
The former Reagan administration
official earned the accolade, on a top-10 list with Mother Teresa and Billy
Graham, for rallying American evangelicals to the plight of persecuted
Christians abroad.
The grass-roots movement Mr. Horowitz
founded, inspired by the specter of Western passivity during the Holocaust,
has galvanized interest in global issues among America's growing ranks
of evangelical Christians. Their rising involvement is being felt from
the pews to the White House, where evangelicals' influence has helped shape
a series of legislative and policy moves, including the invasion of Iraq.
Led in part by the irrepressible
Mr. Horowitz, a neoconservative at the Hudson Institute think tank, evangelicals
are embracing international causes with the same moral fervor they have
long brought to domestic matters. Since 1998, they have helped win federal
laws to fight religious persecution overseas, to crack down on international
sex trafficking and to help resolve one of Africa's longest and bloodiest
civil wars, in southern Sudan.
In so doing, evangelical groups,
once among America's staunchest isolationists, are making a mark on U.S.
foreign policy. They have tipped the balance, at least for the moment,
in the perennial rivalry in Washington between "realists," who believe
the U.S. has limited capacity to change the world and shouldn't try, and
"idealists," who strive to give U.S. conduct a moral purpose.
"This community is saying, 'We're
the most dominant country in the history of humanity. We must move humbly
and wisely, not just for our own economic and strategic interests but for
what is morally right,' " says Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a champion
of evangelical causes on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
For all its power, America cannot
simply impose its will on other nations. In some cases, the values it seeks
to propagate -- democracy and free markets -- boomerang, empowering enemies
and enriching potential rivals. These adversaries exploit the nation's
abiding contradiction: a dependence on the wider world for oil, trade and
credit, set against a widespread and deep-seated desire to be left alone.
In a series of articles this year,
The Wall Street Journal has explored challenges America faces, some of
them inherent in its unique status as a democratically governed superpower.
Reluctant conquerors, Americans have mounted a risky strike, in the name
of the war on terrorism, at the political and cultural roots of zealotry
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet in seeking to democratize ancient
tribal societies through force, the U.S. has found that the process can
be as troublesome for the invader as for the invaded. The traumatic occupation
in Iraq raises a question heard in some other places that have tried U.S.-style
political or economic reforms: How transferrable are American values outside
America?
To one potent segment of U.S. society,
the evangelical Christians, values such as religious, political and economic
freedom aren't just America's norms but God's. The evangelicals' growing
involvement in foreign affairs creates a new constituency for intervention
abroad.
An April Gallup Poll found that
among Americans who go to church at least once a week, 56% agreed that
the "situation in Iraq was worth going to war over." Fewer than 45% of
those who seldom attend church thought so. Evangelicals' diehard support
for Israel helped coax President Bush last month to support Israel's right
to keep settlements in parts of the occupied West Bank, the first time
a U.S. president has extended such a blessing.
A Gallup Poll also shows the evangelicals'
growing numbers, placing them at no less than 43% of the U.S. population.
Organized, motivated and self-confident,
evangelicals are girding for two more foreign-policy battles. They seek
freedom to proselytize in the Muslim lands of Iraq and Afghanistan. And
they want to link any future U.S. aid for North Korea, in case of a nuclear
accord, to progress there on human rights.
"The policies are up for grabs,"
says Mr. Horowitz, 66 years old, a lawyer by training who served as general
counsel to the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration.
Christian activism in America's
foreign affairs dates back to the early 20th century, and included strong
backing among establishment Protestant churches for the foreign-policy
idealism of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the support from
these sects, such as Presbyterians and Episcopalians, tended to be "top-down"
and "elitist," generating little passion in the pews, says Christianity
scholar Martin Marty of the University of Chicago. By contrast, "the genius
of the evangelical movement today, in domestic and foreign affairs, is
its grass-roots appeal," he says. "Evangelicals are much more ready to
claim God's purposes as their own. If God calls us to be the 'righteous
nation,' they act."
This activism harks back to another
world power that struggled to balance ambitions for gold and God: the British
Empire. Though driven in its early years by slave traders and other rogues,
the British Empire later was increasingly influenced by evangelicals --
who in 1807 succeeded in abolishing the global slave trade. Fifty years
later, the "Christian element" was hotly debated in London, when some critics
blamed a mutiny by colonial Indian troops on heavy-handed Christian moralizing.
Religion played a role in Britain's push into the Mideast later in the
19th century, too, after William Gladstone, a deeply Christian prime minister,
railed against a massacre of Bulgarian Christians by Ottoman Turks.
As in today's Washington, Britain's
imperial evangelicals made common cause with the neoconservatives of their
era, known as liberals. The liberals' mission was spreading representative
government and free trade. ("The two pioneers of civilization, Christianity
and commerce, should be inseparable," said David Livingstone, the famous
explorer of Africa, in 1857.) Mr. Horowitz says U.S. evangelicals are driven
by the same "tough-minded Christianity" that propelled Britain's empire.
His critics reply that America,
by melding morality with foreign policy, is courting the same sort of backlashes
the British faced. "By emphasizing one set of values -- that of evangelical
Christians -- you alienate yourselves from the multi-religious, multi-civilizational
world," argues David Little, a professor of religion and international
affairs at Harvard Divinity School.
Another concern is that if overseas
religious conflicts arise, a U.S. president could face pressure to come
to the aid of Christians at the expense of America's strategic interests,
says Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University, author of a book
on global Christianity. He cites the example of Nigeria, where Christians
and Muslims warred in the 1960s. If their conflict again flared into widespread
fighting, he says, an administration would face overwhelming pressure at
home to help the embattled Christians, although Muslim-majority Nigeria
is an important U.S. ally and oil supplier.
Mr. Jenkins says the same issues
could arise over Indonesia, where Muslim militants have brutalized Christians
for years, and even over China, whose leadership is believed to view with
alarm the growth of organized religion, including Christianity. "It's only
a matter of time," Mr. Jenkins predicts, "until persecution and religious
conflict become hot-button issues in the U.S."
As for U.S. policy in Iraq, President
Bush, himself a born-again Christian, has sometimes invoked a notion of
America's latter-day manifest destiny. "I believe freedom is the almighty
God's gift to each man and woman in this world," Mr. Bush said at his news
conference last month. According to Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack,"
Mr. Bush, when asked if he consulted his father, said, "You know, he is
the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father
that I appeal to."
More born-again Christians work
in this administration than in any other in modern history, says Richard
Land, a top executive with the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's
largest Protestant church. They include National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose denomination, the Assemblies
of God, is especially active overseas.
Mr. Horowitz experienced his own
Christian awakening of sorts in 1994. He befriended a household laborer
from Ethiopia who said that nation's former socialist regime, and later
militant Muslims, had persecuted him for preaching Christianity. Mr. Horowitz
says he consulted a lawyer but was told the man wasn't eligible for U.S.
asylum. "Radical Muslim? Ex-communist? OK. But a Christian, forget about
it," Mr. Horowitz says.
He wrote a stinging commentary on
the policy, and on the plight of Christian minorities in several Muslim
countries, which ran in The Wall Street Journal's opinion pages in 1995.
It drew little reaction, he says, and some Christian leaders told him raising
a fuss could only make matters worse for the persecuted. That logic, Mr.
Horowitz says, reminded him of when the late New York Times publisher A.H.
Sulzberger, in 1938, led a group of prominent Jews in urging President
Roosevelt not to name a Jew to the Supreme Court for fear of exacerbating
anti-Semitism.
"The Christian community could not
make the same mistake that American Jews made" in neglecting signs of the
Holocaust, Mr. Horowitz says.
He wrote to 140 evangelical groups
saying he was "pained and puzzled" by their silence. Then he organized
a conference on religious persecution, sparing none of the gruesome detail
of torture, rape and church burnings from around the globe. After that,
the largest evangelical organizations adopted a "Statement of Conscience,"
which Mr. Horowitz drafted, expressing outrage. Persecution abroad became
a hot topic on Christian radio and television.
"Before I met Michael seven years
ago, I had no idea it was so bad," says Mr. Land of the Southern Baptist
Convention. "He's a provocateur, a real voice of conscience."
Mr. Horowitz helped launch an annual
day of prayer for persecuted Christians. One Sunday each November, organizers
say, some 100,000 churches hold events with slides, speakers and, if possible,
witnesses to Christian suffering abroad.
At the latest "national service"
for the persecuted church in November, held at Calvary Church in Grand
Rapids, Mich., a missionary recounted the story of Pindongo, a young Indonesian
who lost both arms when Muslims bombed his church. Slides showed verdant
rice paddies, burning churches and an oddly happy man with stubs instead
of elbows. "Pindongo has forgiven his attackers," the missionary explained.
Another speaker told of meeting a woman named Han in China, who related
that her husband, Lee, was in prison for preaching Christianity, yet remained
"quite happy" because his jailers let him keep his Bible.
Next up was a bony teenager from
southern Sudan named Jacob Ray, who told of surviving on crumbs after troops
from the Muslim-run government ransacked his Christian village. "Today,
I'm full of life, can't you see?" he beamed, to wild applause.
"Thank the Lord for this lost young
man who is found in Jesus!" exclaimed day-of-prayer leader Luis Bush, a
distant cousin of President Bush who has spent years charting "unreached"
peoples for evangelization.
In recent years, record numbers
of evangelicals have fanned out across the globe on short-term missions
to proselytize and bear witness, often returning acutely aware of oppression
and poverty. Nearly 350,000 Americans undertook such missions through major
Protestant missionary agencies in 2001, eight times the number in 1996,
says Scott Moreau, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. That doesn't
include uncounted missionaries sponsored by individual churches, especially
Pentecostal congregations, the U.S.'s fastest-growing Christian sect. Many
churches have become strong advocates for international human rights.
For example, Cornerstone University,
a Baptist college in Grand Rapids, dispatches a dozen missions a year overseas
-- to help the deaf in Jamaica, care for orphans in Romania and Mexico
and sing gospel music in Italy. Donations to major Protestant missionary
agencies totaled $3.75 billion in 2001, up 44% in five years, according
to Mr. Moreau.
Mr. Horowitz initially faced stiff
opposition to the evangelical coalition's legislative agenda. Business
groups and the Clinton State Department opposed the proposed International
Religious Freedom Act because it threatened economic sanctions against
some big U.S. trading partners, such as China and Saudi Arabia. A compromise
weakened the bill's punitive powers but beefed up its fact-finding and
reporting requirements. President Clinton signed it into law in 1998.
Mr. Horowitz found his next cause,
fighting global trafficking in sex slaves, in an article he read about
Russian women forced to work as prostitutes in Israel. He cobbled together
a coalition of evangelical groups, feminists and human-rights advocates
to win passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which
obliges governments to crack down or face a cutoff of U.S. aid.
To push for the Sudan Peace Act,
Mr. Horowitz linked evangelical campaigners with African-American groups.
The law, passed in 2002, threatens a series of diplomatic actions against
Sudan's Islamist regime if it doesn't end its civil war against Christian
and animist tribes in the country's south.
Mr. Horowitz persuaded churches
in Mr. Bush's hometown of Midland, Texas, to lead the grass-roots drive.
Protesting the war in Sudan, he got himself arrested by handcuffing himself
to the country's embassy (after notifying police). Eventually, President
Bush took up the cause, assigning a personal envoy to the conflict. The
warring parties are negotiating a peace treaty in Kenya.
The views of evangelicals and neoconservatives,
long aligned in some ways, grew more so after Sept. 11, 2001. Spreading
democracy and religious freedom became not just a moral cause but a national-security
one. In some Christian circles, evangelizing to Muslims acquired a higher
priority, even though strict Islamic law provides that a Muslim's conversion
to another faith is punishable by death. "A lot of evangelicals perceive
Islam, in its militant forms, as the new antichrist," says Mr. Marty of
the University of Chicago.
First Baptist Church of Rome, Ga.,
besides sending medical missionaries to Honduras, dispatches undercover
evangelists to Muslim North Africa. Calvary Church in Grand Rapids targets
heavily Muslim Uzbekistan for evangelization. And some Christian groups
have their eye on Iraq, though U.S. authorities have discouraged evangelizing
there. Iraqi gunmen murdered a Baptist missionary from Rhode Island on
Valentine's Day.
At their pastor's suggestion, Seattle
residents Craig Johnson and Michael Jones went to Iraq last June to explore
business opportunities "and see how we could help rebuild," says Mr. Johnson,
a manager for a natural gas utility. They don't proselytize. Rather, they
typify a new breed of global evangelical religiously motivated to spread
America's good fortune to other lands.
"Someday, I'm going to stand before
God and he's going to say, 'What did you do to help my people?'" says Mr.
Jones, a technology consultant. "If I just sit here in Seattle earning
lots of money..., how am I going to answer that?" Messrs. Jones and Johnson,
who returned to the U.S., are planning to lead a group of 10 other professionals
back to Baghdad as soon as they get clearance to travel from the Southern
Baptists' International Missions Board.
Other evangelicals plan a much more
controversial battle to enshrine religious freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan,
"including the right to change religions," says the Southern Baptists'
Mr. Land. He contends that U.S. public support for rebuilding those invaded
nations will ebb without guarantees of religious liberty.
North Korean oppression, particularly
of Christians, is also a hot issue among evangelicals. The U.S. is committed
to multilateral talks with Pyongyang aimed at opening its nuclear sites
to inspection. Sen. Brownback is pushing a bill that would bar U.S. funds
for any nuclear-inspections agreement the U.S. might reach with North Korea
if it doesn't ensure progress on human rights. He says Secretary of State
Colin Powell has expressed reservations about the bill because it limits
U.S. options. But Mr. Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, says President
Bush is "right there with us." The State Department and White House declined
to comment.
Mr. Horowitz likens the campaign
for human rights and democracy abroad to the work of William Wilberforce,
an evangelical British politician of two centuries ago who spent decades
shaming Parliament into outlawing the slave trade.
Wilberforce drew scorn from pragmatists
who felt his moralism would weaken the British Empire. Instead, Mr. Horowitz
maintains, its power and prestige surged after it abolished the slave trade.
His coalition is working on legislation to make promoting democracy and
"the implosion of dictatorships" core elements of U.S. foreign policy.
"The impulse for human freedom is not some mushy thing -- it's a shrewd
view of how to protect American interests," he argues.
In 1997, Mr. Horowitz became the
only non-Christian given the annual William Wilberforce prize awarded by
Prison Fellowship, an evangelical group founded by Watergate felon Charles
Colson. At the ceremony, Mr. Colson, now a Christian radio broadcaster,
paid Mr. Horowitz a lofty compliment. "God sent a Jew into the world for
the Gentiles to know God and be at peace with God," Mr. Colson said, referring
to Jesus. "He sent a Jew into our midst in 1996 to awaken us, a sleeping
church."
Whether this awakening propels the
U.S. on further moral crusades in coming years, or Americans recoil from
foreign adventures after Iraq, remains to be seen. America's global ascendancy,
unassailable since the collapse of the Soviet Union, faces no serious national
rival and probably won't for years. No matter how severe the problems in
Iraq, the war there -- unlike earlier conflicts in Vietnam or Korea --
seems unlikely to boost any alternative global power.
All the same, America still struggles
with a host of threats and dependencies. Many are generated by its own
unique status: a nation singularly powerful yet inescapably reliant on
other countries for energy and commerce; a nation able to conquer with
ease but hard put to cope with the tasks that follow conquest; a nation,
in short, that has the power and idealism to lead the world but, as a democracy
ultimately focused on its own affairs within its own borders, one that
has neither the inclination nor the capability to rule it.
