Evangelical Internationalists and Human Rights

Abstract

In 2019 U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched the Commission on Unalienable Rights, a council charged with defining human rights for U.S. foreign policymakers grounded in the founding documents of the United States. Few were surprised with the resulting emphasis on religious freedom and property rights, as announced by Pompeo in a 2020 speech. In the past several years, scholars of religious studies, historians, and political scientists have scrutinized the emergence of “religious freedom” as a signature issue for white U.S. evangelicals in domestic as well as international politics. Lauren Frances Turek’s To Bring the Good News to All Nations offers an essential background through an analysis of the ideology and networks of conservative-leaning white evangelical internationalists in the late-Cold-War era of the 1970s and 1980s. Turek's evangelicals are white Protestants (she focuses primarily on Baptists, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals as well as a number of ecumenical organizations) who, in...