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Conservative fundamentalists with close ties to President Bush are planning a new missionary push in Iraq -- and they might already be converting U.S. troops to their cause.
Apr 15, 2003 | Now that the Big Brother busts of Saddam Hussein are crashing to the ground from Basra to Kirkuk and widespread looting and violence have filled the power vacuum, Iraq remains tense and its future is murky. There, people are more concerned with things like water and medical care than the abstract world of politics. But in the West, a growing corps is squabbling over the spoils of war. While winners and losers in bids for reconstruction contracts and humanitarian opportunities are still being sorted out, one group seems certain to gain an avenue into the country: Southern Baptist Convention ministers prominent in the galaxy of the religious right. Among them is Charles Stanley, the former two-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention, a close ally of former President George Bush and a fervent supporter of the current president's war on Iraq.
Stanley serves as pastor at Atlanta's First Baptist Church, a 15,000-member congregation, and is the founder of In Touch Ministries, which claims to broadcast his sermons in 14 languages to every country in the world, and which, according to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has $40 million in assets. Since Stanley founded In Touch in 1974, he has not shied from using his ministry's resources to bring his voice to bear in the political arena. His most recent example of activism came in February when he delivered a sermon titled "A Nation At War," placing him among a minority of mostly Evangelical Christian leaders to endorse Bush's plans for an attack on Iraq.
"The government is ordained by God with the right to promote good and restrain evil," Stanley said in his sermon. "This includes wickedness that exists within the nation, as well as any wicked persons or countries that threaten foreign nations ... Therefore, a government has biblical grounds to go to war in the nation's defense or to liberate others in the world who are enslaved." And sampling from a scattershot of biblical passages to inform his argument, Stanley warned that those who oppose or disobey the U.S. government in its drive to war "will receive condemnation upon themselves."
Though Stanley's bellicose sermon targets an American audience, it was almost certainly heard across the Arab world, as his sermons are translated into Arabic by In Touch and beamed from Benghazi, Libya, to Tehran, Iran, each week by satellite TV and radio. But while Saddam maintained his iron grip, In Touch could broadcast to Iraq only by shortwave radio; now that the regime has fallen, the ministry could be presented with a bevy of opportunities. The opportunity for broadcast expansion in postwar Iraq is "phenomenal," says Don Black, vice president of communications at In Touch. "It would be one of our goals to be able to have a platform to tell the truth as we understand it, as any communicator should have the right to do."
Even before victory has been formally declared, In Touch is just one phalanx in an army of Christian soldiers who see Muslim Iraq as an extraordinary new marketplace for their theology. Already, churches and ministries on the religious right are poised to send in missionaries and to amp up broadcasts to the region. Like advance troops before the invasion, some U.S. military officials in Iraq have already staked out the country as a natural place to spread the Christian Gospel.
Officially, the Bush administration has taken no position on the campaign for converts. But foreign policy experts -- and even some moderate Christian groups -- are already warning that efforts by the conservative Christians to capitalize on the fall of Saddam could inject a decidedly religious tone into Bush's stated plan to democratize Iraq. And unless the administration takes a strong stand against that campaign, some say, the missionaries may provoke a deep, damaging backlash there and throughout the Muslim world.
Christian groups' proselytizing in Third World countries is nothing new, but critics of In Touch allege that the ultrapatriotic nature of Stanley's sermons render its plans to expand operations in Iraq dangerous and insensitive to the country's complex and fragile social fabric. Many Muslims worldwide have accused the U.S. of waging a "crusade" and consider the prospect of Christians proselytizing in Iraq a revelation of the U.S.'s nefarious agenda. In the past, anti-Islamic comments made by Southern Baptists allied with Stanley, like Jerry Falwell, have stoked the rage of the Muslim world and made life dangerous for Middle Eastern Christians and Western missionaries operating in the area. But Stanley and his compatriots remain fiercely committed to winning the souls of the Iraqi people, even if it undermines the work undertaken by U.S. troops and civilian administrators to win their hearts and minds.
According to Amy Hawthorne, Middle East specialist and associate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Southern Baptists planning to proselytize in Iraq should expect to be greeted with exceptional suspicion, not only because of the presence of American troops but also because of the country's history. "These people [Southern Baptists] are active in other parts of the region, including southern Lebanon, a heavily Shiite area, so it's not without precedent," she told Salon. "But Iraq is a country that's been sealed off from the rest of the world, and even to an extent from its own region, for a long time. So these are not communities that are used to having lots of foreigners amongst them ... This is a very sensitive issue throughout the Arab world, but the context of Iraq may be more sensitive because this is not a country with a long history of internal tolerance and pluralism."
Charles Kimball, a Baptist minister and director of religious studies at Wake Forest University, is more blunt: Stanley and other luminaries of the religious right who wrap God in an American flag are "whipping up a kind of Christian nationalism," he says, and that could severely complicate America's credibility there and in the Muslim world at large.
"Anything that prominent Christian leaders do and say that gets a lot of press attention and says 'America's right' and 'God is on our side' or 'Islam is evil' is not lost on the world," says Kimball, author of "When Religion Becomes Evil." "All of these folks (on the religious right) in their certainty and arrogance are doing considerable harm by what they are preaching. They have to realize that these words reverberate around the world and are being used by Muslim extremists to whip up a frenzy."
Kimball also accuses Stanley of insensitivity to the 14 million to 16 million Christians who live in the Middle East. "He's saying, 'If you don't want to go to war, God will punish you, and by the way, God wants us to go to war,'" states Kimball. "If I were sitting face-to-face with Charles Stanley, I'd say: 'You're saying the exact opposite of what the vast majority of Christians in the world are saying. Where is your certainty coming from?'"
