Melani McAlister
U.S. evangelicals are human rights actors, although their definitions of rights and approach to international legal regimes frequently place them in conflict with global norms. The situation is even more complex globally, where evangelicals have evoked human rights claims in some situations and national contexts but actively abjure it in others. Overall, since the 1990s they have increasingly, if conditionally, embraced “human rights” as a moral language for analyzing political crises, while often sitting uneasily within—or in opposition to—international human rights institutions.
American evangelicals are leaders in this global evangelical international conversation about rights, and this chapter focuses on their history and practices, with attention to how human rights discourse also facilitates transnational connections. At the same time, evangelicals globally have increasingly operated as part of a larger coalition of conservative Christians, one that is distinctly ecumenical—bringing together Orthodox, Catholics, Mormons, and evangelical Protestants. This new transnational and ecumenical conservatism highlights religious freedom as a primary value, singles out Islam as a threat, and diminishes or denies certain rights that are central to the international human rights agenda, particularly Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ+) rights and women’s reproductive rights. I highlight here three interrelated factors that shape evangelicals’ relationship to human rights discourse: (1) the focus on religious freedom as a primary right; (2) a series of arguments against LGBTQ+ and women’s rights as an impingement on religious freedom; and (3) the emergence of a transnational and ecumenical coalition to pursue these interlocking agendas.
One fundamental context for U.S. evangelicals’ engagement in international conversations about human rights is the reality that evangelicalism is a truly global religious phenomenon—indeed, Americans and Europeans are a minority of this religious subgroup, which has grown tremendously in Asia, Africa, and Latin America over the last four decades.[1] This growth of Global South Christianity, particularly in its Pentecostal and evangelical forms, has meant that the international institutions of evangelicalism—the Lausanne Movement, the World Evangelical Alliance, the Pentecostal World Fellowship—are increasingly led by Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans, even as U.S. evangelicals maintain considerable clout, financial and otherwise. American evangelical leaders, church pastors, even ordinary believers on short-term missions—as well as anybody with an internet connection—have greater contact with like-minded believers around the world than previous generations could have imagined. American Christians have always been missionary-minded, but today’s evangelicals are increasingly (but not uniformly) aware of themselves as just one part of a much larger transnational faith.
This awareness has played a key role in how and when evangelicals have directly involved themselves in U.S. foreign policy. In recent years, a number of historians have documented their role as activists on U.S. foreign policy over many decades: starting as lobbyists in response to the famine and genocide in Armenia at the turn of the twentieth century, to becoming major players fighting communism at home and abroad in the Cold War, to their significant role in pushing for U.S. support for Israel, as well as furthering anti-Muslim sentiment in recent decades.[2] U.S. evangelicals have a range of political views: among white evangelicals, a small number are quite liberal on most issues; many more are moderately conservative; and a large percentage are quite conservative on most domestic and foreign policy issues. Evangelicals of color are more liberal on almost every measure than their white counterparts.[3] Across the board, they have formed a broad range of political organizations and coalitions over the last decades (ranging from conservative groups such as Moral Majority, Stand for Israel, and Alliance Defending Freedom to the more moderate Institute for Global Engagement and the liberal-leaning Evangelicals for Social Action), which sometimes worked for specific legislation, and at other times simply advocated for awareness of signature issues.
It was within this larger context of globalization and an expansive sense of political investment that U.S. evangelicals began to take on human rights as a key issue, frequently (but not solely) through the lens of religious freedom. The impact of human rights as an increasingly accepted moral framework has been multivalent. It has undoubtedly led to a strengthening of the position of the small U.S. evangelical Left, influenced by a similar movement in Latin America, that has argued for greater attention to economic and social rights.[4] But, more significantly, a focus on human rights has also given moral authority to those who argue that Christians in particular are victims of religious persecution and in need of international protection. That focus has reshaped evangelical language and activism, as both U.S. and global evangelical institutions organize themselves around a kind of “human rights as self-defense” model. This sense of embattlement has shaped the ways in which the politics of religious freedom has become deeply embedded with the politics of sexuality and gender. That is, evangelicals across the world have taken positions in opposition to the global human rights consensus on reproductive rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights, defending their positions in the language of religious freedom and rights. They are certainly not alone in focusing more on some rights than on others, but their deep transnational networks have made them unexpectedly effective at furthering their own rights agendas, and, in the process, reshaping the global conversation to highlight religious freedom as uniquely endangered.
Historical Background
Samuel Moyn has famously argued that the modern foundations of human rights were built as much from western European Christian conservatism as from the secular Left.[5] As Christopher Sabatini describes in the introduction to this volume, there are many serious questions about this claim, and it is rightfully debated as an origin story for the modern movement. Certainly in the United States, evangelicals of the 1950s and 1960s had very little traffic with any kind of human rights language and were indeed hostile to its primary institutional home, the United Nations (UN). By the late 1970s and in the 1980s, however, conservative Christian thinkers themselves began to lay claim to the language of human rights, in part through the argument that the idea of rights has a fundamentally Christian foundation. In the 1970s, evangelical publications such as Christianity Today and World Vision often embraced the language of human rights, even as the editors occasionally worried aloud that the “unlovely” concept put people rather than God at the center of moral discourse. In 1984, the internationally regarded, theologically conservative Protestant theologian Max Stackhouse argued that not only did belief in God require a commitment to human rights, but the very concept of human rights was built on theism.
Stackhouse saw in the broad moral appeal of human rights to people around the world something like a presupposition of God, so that “rights talk” was not an alternative to but an argument for monotheism in general and Christianity in particular.
These theological conversations, however, were secondary to the pragmatic ways in which U.S. evangelicals began to take up human rights issues during the Cold War. Tracing this movement requires a recognition that their political visions were never rigidly focused on domestic issues, as scholarship has previously implied. But it also highlights the ways in which they made common cause with Catholics and sometimes even liberal Protestants on a range of issues, from religious freedom to abortion. As Udi Greenberg has shown, a major rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants occurred with Vatican II in 1964, when the Catholic church reversed its policy of trying to limit Protestant evangelism in Catholic-dominated European states.[7] Both Catholics and Protestants were involved in anti-communist religious freedom crusades throughout the Cold War, developing a model of political rights that was also shared with a range of secular conservatives. In the 1970s, conservative Catholics and evangelicals developed an alliance in the anti-abortion movement. The founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, commented that the fight against abortion had taught him to let go of his separatist tendencies and to ally with Catholics who shared his platform.[8]
After Vatican II, U.S. Catholics and Protestants (both ecumenical and evangelical) made religious freedom a signature political issue. During the 1960s and 1970s, evangelical activists were involved in a variety of anti-communist campaigns, focusing frequently on Christian communities in the Soviet bloc. Notably, they joined in supporting the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment that pressured the USSR over Jewish emigration. That same year, the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism, the largest global gathering of evangelicals to date, called upon leaders of all nations “to guarantee freedom of thought and conscience, and freedom to practice and propagate religion in accordance with the will of God and as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”[9]
This public embrace of human rights did not necessarily mean liberalizing politics. As Lauren Turek has shown, many U.S. evangelicals closely allied themselves with conservative Christian politicians guilty of profound human rights violations, particularly in South Africa and Latin America, as was the case with General Rios Montt in Guatemala in the 1980s. If they believed a given regime was good for missionary work, or if the leaders claimed to be conservative Christians, evangelical believers often whitewashed and justified their oppressive behavior, while still decrying government leaders in China, the USSR, and parts of the Middle East who disallowed evangelism or discriminated against Christians.[10]
It is a sign of the capaciousness of human rights language that the framework of human rights could also fit with an emerging liberal ethos in the diverse global evangelical community. Starting in the 1970s, Latin American, African, and Asian members moved more to the forefront of its leadership. Often much more inclined to take seriously issues such as poverty, oppression, and war, they helped expand the traditional religious freedom agenda toward a broader focus on “social concern”—including the language of human rights that now included social and economic rights.[11] In this way, some of these leaders were moved to embrace human rights more fully: there were evangelicals who supported Biafra in the Nigeria-Biafra war, opposed apartheid, fought for the southern Sudanese, and spoke out against the Contras in Nicaragua—all under the rubric of human rights, using the signature language of the human rights movement and what, by the 1970s, had become its standardized visual rhetoric of barbed wire and suffering bodies.[12]
Nonetheless, it was religious freedom that remained the signature human right for U.S. evangelicals, and this focus did not recede with the end of the Cold War. In the late twentieth century, the global movement increasingly began to concentrate on what it saw as a rising threat: Islam. The movement on behalf of “persecuted Christians” became a key form of evangelical internationalism in the 1990s. This sense of persecution was an important driver behind evangelical leadership in the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), which turned religious freedom into an institutionalized pillar of U.S. foreign policy.[13] A younger generation of astute political actors had become fluent in the language of Capitol Hill, as evangelicals formed think-tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that integrated human rights activism. Some of these leaders focused only on the suffering of Christians (often at the hands of Muslims), seeing human rights as a user-friendly language for pursuing a more sectarian agenda on behalf of fellow believers. Out of the IRFA legislation there developed a new U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom and a new ambassador for International Religious Freedom. (The roles of the commissioners and the ambassador were heavily skewed in both the Bush and Trump administrations toward white conservative Christians.) At the same time, IRFA created an opening for more genuinely capacious commitments. By the turn of the twenty-first century, a host of organizations, including think-tanks such as the Institute for Global Engagement, and older evangelical institutions such as Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and World Vision, began to speak about the imperative of support for human rights alongside, and in conjunction with, a primary call to missionary work.
Indeed, missionary work itself was changing. While many missions agencies insisted that they were interested only in furthering the gospel, not in taking any social stands, their impact in any given area almost inevitably had political consequences. This was true in the early 1960s when American missions declared themselves opposed to the Republic of the Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, and in a different way it remained true in 2003 in Iraq, when U.S. missionaries followed behind American troops with care packages stuffed with blankets and Bible verses. Earlier generations of U.S. evangelicals had often been known for refusing to prioritize health and food services over evangelism, but by the 1980s some of the country’s best-known Christian conservatives made “social concern” and human rights their calling cards: the Reverend Franklin Graham as head of Samaritan’s Purse, Rick Warren as leader of a global campaign against human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), and Pentecostal T. D. Jakes of MegaCARE Ministries. In the early 2000s, both Black and white U.S. evangelicals worked politically to gain government support for the Christian population of southern Sudan during Sudan’s civil war, while also sending money to support schools, church-building, and traditional missionary work.[14]
Human Rights Activism in the Twenty-First Century
In today’s environment, evangelical human rights activism is fractured. Liberal or moderately conservative organizations continue to advocate for religious freedom in general, not just for Christians, in conjunction with their advocacy for other social goods such as ending poverty or empowering women. The Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) is exemplary here. A small think-tank with a large footprint, founded by Robert Seiple, the first U.S. ambassador for religious freedom; IGE publishes a journal, Religion and International Affairs and hosts a range of programs that promote interreligious understanding, especially in Asia. Similarly, the humanitarian organization World Vision, which by the 1980s had begun to move from being a missionary organization with humanitarian projects into a full-fledged aid and development organization, also began to take more positions that aligned it with global human rights norms. It officially adopted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1985 and became more actively engaged on issues of social justice and development, and of basic human rights.[15] This openness to human rights norms and language is evident, for example, in the Rohingya Muslim crisis in Myanmar, where IGE, Christianity Today, World Vision, and a range of other evangelical organizations have all taken strong stances.[16]
It is the focus on “persecuted Christians,” however, that remains perhaps the key political vision uniting a broad range of evangelical believers, across denominations, racial identities, and national borders. The idea that Christians are persecuted for their beliefs—by Muslims, by secular states, or by liberal nonbelievers—has become a central component of conservative (and often liberal) Christian political discourse. This view is trumpeted online, at church conferences, in promotional fundraising for humanitarian organizations, and through a range of groups devoted specifically to that issue, such as Persecution: International Christian Concern and Open Doors. The idea that Christians are “the most persecuted group in the world” has become standard language among evangelicals—and increasingly is taken as a given among a range of other Christians, including the Orthodox and Catholics.[17] Using a language of human rights and religious freedom, the “persecuted Christians” movement casts Christian believers as both victims and heroes in a melodrama of steadfastness against evil.[18] It traverses communities divided by denomination or politics: the “persecuted Christian” may be Orthodox or Catholic or Baptist, and the language of concern about their suffering is shared broadly, inflected differently in the liberal Sojourners than the far-right World, but often rather seamlessly eliding political boundaries. Still, those most invested in the discourse of Christian persecution tend to be part of the ecumenical conservative coalition that reemerged from the ashes of the Christian right in the 1990s—a coalition now more expansive in who “counts” as Christian, and far more transnational, than in previous generations.
The Trump administration made religious freedom into a signature issue, designed to appeal to evangelicals and other conservative Christians. The State Department moved its Office of International Religious Freedom (which had been established with the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998) out of the human rights bureau and made it a standalone office.[19] The administration courted evangelicals, not only through its highly visible Evangelical Advisory Board, but also through the appointment of Kansas senator and anti-Shari’a warrior Sam Brownback as the U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom, and the choice of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state. Brownback and Pompeo, both from Kansas, were equally outspoken about their conservative Christian beliefs.[20]
Pompeo then hosted two Ministerials to Advance Religious Freedom in 2018 and 2019 (a third was held in Poland in 2020).[21] Although much of the work was high-minded and perhaps even useful, there were many problematic aspects to these events. They shared with the overall international religious freedom movement a tendency to mischaracterize complex political and ethnic tensions as religious conflicts. And they overtly promoted a U.S.-centric vision of religion-state relations as a global ideal.[22] The goal was to highlight religious freedom not as one important human right, but as the signal and signature right. For example, one concrete outcome of these Ministerials was the International Religious Freedom Alliance: twenty-seven countries committed to upholding “the right to hold any faith or belief, or none at all, and the freedom to change faith.”[23] No other human right received nearly as much sustained attention in the Trump administration, and arguably the same could be said for U.S. foreign policy overall in the past twenty years.[24] Donald Trump’s focus paid off, as bodies ranging from the moderately conservative, such as Institute for Global Engagement and Christianity Today, to the right-wing, such as the American Center for Law and Justice (associated with Pat Robertson’s Virginia-based Regent University) and Family Research Council, hailed the sense that the White House was laser-focused on their issues.[25]
At the same time, Trump’s appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices was applauded by evangelicals, because it was widely believed they would support broad definitions of religious freedom, including the freedom to discriminate against LGBTQ+ patrons and to limit access to abortion. (They were proved partially correct with the narrow decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado.[26]) Crucially, however, none of the justices appointed by Trump is evangelical; two are Catholic and one is Catholic/Episcopal. The key is that conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants (and the much smaller community of conservative Orthodox Christians) are seen, and see themselves, as operating in coalition. This domestic project of expanding the definition and terrain of religious freedom has had a major impact on the U.S. global human rights agenda.
A dual focus on religious freedom and the politics of sexuality is by no means unique to the United States. In Latin America, Catholics and evangelicals may compete energetically for adherents, but they often work together on political issues related to gender and sexuality. In Panama, for example, an ecumenical group released a joint statement rejecting a 2017 Advisory Opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) that promoted the right to self-define gender identity and supported same-sex marriage. “Lately,” the statement proclaimed, “the idea has been forced on us that the defense of marriage and family is discrimination.”[27] In Costa Rica, a ruling by the IACHR in 2018 that all countries in the region should allow same-sex marriage led to a backlash; an evangelical candidate (and Pentecostal journalist and singer) who had been low in the polls surged forward (in a country that is 75 percent Catholic) on the wave of opposition to this ruling, winning the first round of voting.[28] (In the end, Carlos Alvarado, who supports same-sex marriage, won in a run-off, and the country’s Supreme Court lifted its ban on same-sex marriage in May 2020.) As I discuss below, similar political intersections—often influenced by U.S. money and leadership—have shaped human rights conversations in eastern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere.
International Human Rights Instruments:
Two Approaches
In the ecumenical conservative coalition that has formed around human rights in the United States, there are two broad approaches toward engaging with international human rights discourse. The first, and far more common, is to try to narrow the conversation through a focus on religious freedom, which provides a basis for pushing back against LGBTQ+ rights, with the argument that public accommodation of these is a violation of religious freedom. This narrowing-but-not-rejecting approach resonates powerfully with a generation of Americans that has grown up on human rights as a moral vernacular.[29] The second approach, less common but with perhaps a more successful transnational reach, is to embrace the broader range of rights that have been recognized in the international community, but to define the heterosexual nuclear family as inherently necessary for ensuring those rights. The language of human thriving, the rights of the child, and a model of the family as purveyor and custodian of rights have all made an increasing impact in recent years.
First Strategy: Narrowing the Argument
The first, narrowing strategy can also include highlighting other ideas of rights; the language of the “right to life” for the unborn is central. Indeed, although I will highlight here the complexity of debates over LGBTQ+ rights among evangelicals and other Christian conservatives, it is crucial to note that there is essentially no debate around abortion. Both globally and in the United States, evangelicals have been almost uniform in their opposition. Indeed in U.S. polls on this issue, younger evangelicals are even slightly more conservative than their parents, although notably more liberal on gay marriage.[30] This is in part because evangelicals and other Christian conservatives have narrated abortion politics through a human rights lens: convinced that “life begins at conception,” Christian conservatives mobilize an argument for the “right to life” for embryos and fetuses that draws heavily on the logic (even the imagery) of human rights activism and antitorture campaigns.[31] According to this logic, focusing on “fundamental rights” involves excluding LGBTQ+ rights because they are seen to conflict with religious rights, and excluding women’s reproductive rights because they are believed to conflict with the right to freedom from execution.
This narrow version of rights activism was exemplified by the formation of the Commission on Unalienable Rights under President Trump in 2019. This Commission, announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, was designed to create a “framework” for a “proper understanding of human rights.” Just before his announcement, Pompeo explained his rationale in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the “cacophonous call for ‘rights’ ” had replaced a focus on fundamental freedoms.[32] He wanted the Commission to look back at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) for basic rights, but also at the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, for a proper understanding of universal rights, which was, for Pompeo, also distinctly linked to U.S. norms.
Pompeo did not concoct this argument himself. Indeed, any understanding of the formation of the Commission, its makeup and agenda, or its entirely predictable final report requires attention to the coalition-building around rights talk among a range of religious conservatives over the previous decades. Starting in the early 2000s, this loose coalition of thinkers crafted a shared understanding of their key political issues: religious freedom, support for “the sanctity of life,” and promotion of “traditional marriage.” These agenda items were certainly not new, but the consensus-building that brought them together as the ecumenical conservative trifold agenda of the 2010s was distinctive.
This conglomeration of issues had been named and defended a decade before, with the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto signed initially by more than 150 religious leaders, including prominent evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians. The declaration uses the phrase “human rights” only once, but it is infused with claims about human dignity, freedom of religion, and rights of conscience. It focuses on three major topics. First, it argues that Christians are commanded to respect human dignity and that this command requires opposition to abortion and euthanasia. Second, it insists that “the impulse to redefine marriage” to include same-sex couples is just one symptom of the larger, more insidious “erosion of marriage culture.” Finally, it focuses on religious liberty, as the “cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience.” It decries what it claims are the contemporary norms in the United States that restrict freedom of conscience in the service of the (unjustified) freedoms of others:
Positioning religious conservatives as victims—and heroes—the Manhattan Declaration discusses the willingness of Christians to defy the U.S. state when it demands that Catholic adoption agencies place children with homosexual couples or for being forced to provide services they deem immoral.
The Manhattan Declaration is a domestic document—that is, it does not particularly speak to or about the global institutions of human rights enforcement. But it lays out the first and most powerful of the two approaches to international human rights norms: the winnowing of rights talk to a few privileged agenda items, which at the same time includes in those rights the right to fetal life. The Declaration was crafted primarily by Catholic constitutional scholar and political philosopher Robert George, professor at Princeton and coauthor of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life.[34] George has served on the board of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an interdenominational conservative think-tank that is “dedicated to apply the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” He also served as a member of the U.S. Commission on International Freedom. George’s influence is more than philosophical, however; he is said to have played a pivotal role in advising Mike Pompeo to form the Commission on Unalienable Rights and in shaping its membership.[35]
The Commission was viewed by some observers as a performative pandering to Trump’s evangelical base. Indeed, since the group was announced at the beginning of the second Ministerial on International Religious Freedom, the timing was surely designed to link the Commission’s work on defining “fundamental” rights to the ongoing and vibrant evangelical conversation about persecuted Christians that was evident at both Ministerials. But, as with those meetings themselves—which highlighted the suffering of Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Protestants, as well as non-Christian religious groups including Rohingya Muslims, European Jews, and Tibetan Buddhists—part of the work of the Commission was to turn religious freedom with a Christian edge into an ecumenical issue on a global scale. Chaired by Mary Ann Glendon, a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and professor at Harvard Law School (where she had been a mentor to Pompeo), the Commission comprised Catholics, Jews, one Mormon, and a couple of secular conservatives. The only person who could rightly be described as evangelical was also the sole African American on the panel, Jaqueline Rivers. A sociologist, founder of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies (housed under the conservative Witherspoon Institute), Rivers has been outspoken on all three key issues for religious conservatives: abortion, lesbian and gay marriage, and religious freedom. The Seymour Institute’s open letter to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign tied together the last two with a rhetorical flourish that suggested that LGBTQ+ rights activists were racially motivated: “A well-financed war is now being waged by the gay and lesbian community in the U.S. and abroad on the faith of our ancestors.”[36]
The formation of the Commission received pushback. More than four hundred leaders of NGOs and former government officials signed a letter to Pompeo questioning its necessity.[37] The final report, issued a year later, was entirely in line with the new norms of respectable rights-narrowing. In scholarly language, the report makes a robust argument for the moral importance of centering human rights and calls for U.S. action: “[W]e are of one mind on the urgent need for the United States to vigorously champion human rights in its foreign policy.”[38] But the document also turns to the 1947 UDHR as if it were the full and final statement of the extent of human rights, reading it much as strict constitutionalists read the U.S. Constitution for the intent of the Founding Fathers. It ignores or downplays subsequent and binding human rights treaties. This was part of the larger project of opposing “rights proliferation.” One Heritage Foundation panel made this point in an explicitly partisan fashion when attorney Benjamin Bull complained that “the activist left” was using “newly manufactured human rights to crush” the “traditional human rights” and “natural rights.”[39] The Commission’s members tended to be more circumspect but made similar arguments. Peter Berkowitz, for example, asserted that “the proliferation of rights claims has obscured the distinction between fundamental rights that are universally applicable and partisan preferences that are properly left to diplomacy and political give-and-take.”[40]
What rights should be open for such political negotiation was sometimes made explicit—do we really think that people can meaningfully be said to have a “right to peace?,” the Commission’s rapporteur asked.[41] But many observers felt that the concern about “rights inflation” was less about too much focus on peasants or health care than about attention to LGBTQ+ issues. Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch reported that “when I testified before the commission, its members seemed less concerned with, say, the treaty on the rights of people with disabilities . . . than with interpretations of human rights law to protect reproductive freedom and the rights of LGBT people.”[42] When the report was finally released in 2020, more than one hundred NGOs criticized both the report and Secretary Pompeo’s strategic use of it.[43]
Second Strategy: Focusing on the Family
A second form of engagement with international rights norms by religious conservatives is in some ways the opposite of the first. Instead of downplaying social and economic rights as secondary in the way the “rights inflation” activists do, the family-first approach argues that the (heterosexual nuclear) family is a rights-bearer, building on the UDHR’s plank on the family: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”[44] The World Congress of Families and the UN Family Council are both religious conservative organizations that have transnational reach, and both claim UN norms as their mandate, even as they have engaged actual UN institutions ambivalently and sometimes with hostility. As the think tank Political Research Associates summarized it, this religious conservative agenda is “aimed at cementing a patriarchal and heteronormative family structure as the fundamental unit of society, and then using that as a tool to advance conservative, right-wing social policies through the UN and other international organizations.”[45]
Buss and Herman argue that, in the 1990s, the U.S. Christian right moved away from a vilification of the United Nations, which had been its dominant stance during the Cold War, toward seeing the UN as a potentially useful and necessary forum for forwarding a conservative agenda on “the family.” Beginning with the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, where NGOs played a large role, Christian activists began to see a possibility of countering what they saw as the institutional bias of the UN toward secularism, feminism, and reproductive freedom. A relatively small number of conservative Christian groups, deeply opposed to the inclusion of homosexual rights or reproductive rights as part of the UN agenda, nonetheless believed that the United Nations itself could become a vehicle for protecting and promoting a more conservative vision of the family.[46]
At the same time, the end of the Cold War brought a rush of American (along with European, African, and South Korean) Christian missionaries into the territories of the former Soviet Union. Campus Crusade, Focus on the Family, and a range of other missionary organizations saw an unprecedented opportunity not only to evangelize in the former communist world but also to shape conversations about social and political issues. In the last twenty years, U.S.-based Christian organizations have spent a great deal of money in Europe—approximately $51 million, according to openDemocracy—including in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Russia. How much of this money is for traditional church-building and evangelism, how much for social services, and how much for political activism is unclear, since organizations are not required to report these specifics for funds spent abroad. But some of the largest spenders are also activist groups operating at the nexus of religious freedom and sexuality: the American Center for Law and Justice, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Focus on the Family, and the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, as well as the Catholic Human Life International.[47]
Russia has been of particular interest, despite the fact that official representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church were frequently wary of, or showed outright hostility to, Protestant evangelism. Nonetheless, the break-up of the USSR brought a broad range of new transnational Christian connections. Out of these emerging networks, the World Congress of Families was born. In 1995, American professor Alan Carlson, then head of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society (Rockford, Illinois) began meeting with several Russian partners, including one Orthodox priest.[48] According to Casey Michael, their meeting led to the earliest iteration of the World Congress of Families (WCF) in 1997. In time, WCF would host American conservatives in Russia and Russian officials in the United States and would also rope in Russian oligarchs—including at least one who is now sanctioned—as reported funders. It would also become the most wide-ranging organization dedicated to rolling back LGBTQ+ rights and, in the final years of the Obama administration, Russia’s main entrée to American social conservatives.[49]
The WCF developed ties with a number of U.S. organizations on the religious Right, including the Alliance Defense Fund, Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, and the Catholic Family and the Human Rights Institute. It went on to host a number of meetings in Russia (and elsewhere) focused on the demographic “threat” posed by lower birth rates in the former USSR and the United States. At first the Russian Orthodox church leadership was not particularly interested in networking with American conservatives on political issues, focused instead on revitalizing and defining the church’s identity in the postcommunist era. Over time, however, the WCF’s Russian supporters made close contacts with the Moscow Patriarchate. As Putin became increasingly invested in an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, passing one antigay law after another in the 2000s, the WCF continued to encourage support for the “natural family,” “protecting children,” and “traditional values.”[50]
As Alex Cooley discusses in chapter 4 of this volume, the WCF also reached out more broadly, helping to construct a coalition “for the family” that went well beyond U.S. evangelicals and the Russian Right. Its second congress, held in 1999, brought two thousand delegates together in Geneva; sponsors included the Mormon NGO Family Voice, and the opening speaker was Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, president of the Vatican’s Council for the Family.[51] As Carlson described it, the group aimed to “forge a truly international profamily movement . . . embrac[ing] all religiously grounded family morality systems around the globe, without descending into the banal.”[52]
In 2003, the WCF’s parent body obtained Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) consultative status at the UN. There, it became part of a rapidly expanding network of primarily religious organizations aimed at changing or eliminating UN positions on human rights that they believe are in opposition to the “natural family.” These included not only American and transnational Protestant organizations (including the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council) but also Catholic Women for Faith and Family, Family Watch International, and the Doha Institute for Family and Development. The vast majority were based in the United States.[53] But many members of the network believed that they had natural allies in the countries of the Global South. At a follow-on in 2000 to the Beijing conference on women, an anonymous flyer circulated stating: “If the West would stop pushing homosexual and abortion ‘rights’ on unwilling countries, the document would be done. Don’t blame the developing countries with the courage to defend their values and their right to self-government!”[54]
In 2004, the Doha International Conference on the Family was held to mark the tenth anniversary of the International Year of the Family. The coordinating committee, including the Brigham Young University’s World Family Policy Center (Latter Day Saints [Mormon]), the Family Research Council (evangelical), and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, all convened “under the patronage and generosity” of the Sheikha of Qatar, Moza bint Nasser Al-Missned.[55] The conference was designed to have the hallmarks of international human rights and humanitarian conferences: it was endorsed by a UN resolution, with regional meetings to prepare in advance for the agenda, including hundreds of attendees. Its final document, the Doha Declaration, quoted the UDHR on the “right of men and women” to marry and the family as the natural unit of society.[56]
The UN Family Rights Caucus pursues a similar strategy of bringing together diverse religious constituencies into UN-style meetings to issue declarations that borrow human rights language for anti-LGBTQ+ ends. The Caucus is sponsored by Family Watch International, a Mormon-led organization that holds an annual invitation-only global policy forum that often includes testimonials from people “cured” of homosexuality. The Caucus claims to have 160 individual and organizational members (which it does not name), and it is expert at drawing upon the “positive” rights that are part of the UN mandate:
In 2014, at the Palais des Nations, the Caucus organized a ceremony in which children read aloud “A Declaration on the Rights of Children and Their Families.” Designed to echo, but very much to dissent from, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this new declaration argued, again quoting from the UDHR, that the family is the natural unit of society, and went on to state that the child has the right to be protected, “including appropriate legal protection before, as well as after birth.” It goes on to say that children have the “right to a married father and mother.”[58] This expansive statement of “positive” rights is worlds away from the claims of the rights narrowers, who focus on political and civil rights, but in one key way it has a similar impact: LGBTQ+ people are treated as beyond rights norms.
These efforts came to fruition in 2015 when the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution on the protection of the family (HRC/RS/29/22) that was initiated by some of the members of the UN Group of Friends of the Family, which includes Bangladesh, Egypt, the Holy See, Qatar, and Russia, among others. The previous day, the UNHRC had created an independent expert position charged with investigating and reporting on violence against LGBTQ+ people. Then, immediately afterward, it voted on the family protection resolution that rejected efforts to ensure inclusive language about diverse forms of family.[59]
Under President Trump, this vision of “the family” had U.S. sanction. Valerie Huber, senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, spoke at the event “It Takes a Family” in May 2019, which was cosponsored by the UN Family Rights Caucus. A few weeks later, UN Women issued its report Families in a Changing World that embraced broad definitions of family and outlined the ways in which heterosexual marriage often reinforces traditional gender roles for women.[60]
Uganda: A Case Study
The complex workings of transnational and interdenominational religious networks can be seen in the fight over LGBTQ+ rights in Uganda over the last twenty years. In that context, American evangelicals were deeply involved in a debate over the 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda, which called for the death penalty for any Ugandan convicted of “aggravated homosexuality,” meaning homosexuals who “recruited” young people or HIV-positive people who had homosexual sex. Lesser sentences, such as life imprisonment, could be meted out for merely engaging in homosexual activity. Supported strongly by Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, the bill was decried by human rights activists globally.
The debate over the proposed law was indicative of the precarious status of LGBTQ+ people in Uganda, but it also showed how U.S.-based evangelicals adopted disparate positions on the law, with some implicitly or explicitly supportive and others strongly opposed. In Uganda, itself, a coalition around conservative sexual politics brought together an otherwise disparate and even competitive range of religious leaders.
Some observers blamed the antigay environment in Uganda on U.S. influence. They noted, correctly, that for years American evangelicals had been holding antigay workshops and conferences in the country. Dr. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian cleric who has published widely on LGBTQ+ rights, was one of the first people to analyze the ties between conservative American evangelicals and conservative Christians in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa.[61] The World Congress of Families, for example, had an active presence in East Africa in the early 2000s. According to the Human Rights Campaign, at the WCF’s first official event in the region in 2009, its communications director Don Feder “urged activists to do the opposite of whatever the West suggested.”[62] In this way, antigay activists—including those from the United States—often positioned themselves as anti-imperialist spokespersons, helping to shore up “tradition.”[63] One of the most notorious of these American anti-LGBTQ+ activists was Scott Lively, a Far-Right militant; head of Abiding Truth ministries; and author of The Pink Swastika, which blamed the Holocaust on gay men.[64] Lively, although not well-known in the United States at the time, also had ties with the World Council of Families: he seems to have done a speaking tour of Russia associated with the WCF in 2006–2007, took some credit for Russia’s 2013 law outlawing “homosexual propaganda,” and later claimed to have had a role in planning the 2014 WCF meeting in Moscow.[65]
Lively’s claims for his role and influence are notoriously unreliable,[66] but there is no question that he traveled to Uganda in 2009 for a conference on the “Gay Agenda” organized by the Reverend Ssempa. This three-day event, with an audience numbering in the thousands, was hosted by Ssempa and Stephen Langa of Uganda’s Family Life Network. The three speakers were Lively and two evangelical advocates of “conversion therapy.” With Ssempa’s support, Lively also managed to get an invitation to speak for several hours to Uganda’s Parliament. He later described the visit as a “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.”[67] There were other examples, including Lou Engle, the right-wing Pentecostal pastor of the International House of Prayer (based in Oklahoma), who preached a strong antigay message in Uganda while the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was under consideration.[68] In 2009 and 2010, these were only a few American pastors who spoke enthusiastically to Ugandans about the importance of their “righteous” stance. Indeed, at first it can seem hard to argue with the summary offered by National Public Radio: “U.S. Exports Cultural War to Uganda.”[69]
In reality, however, the debates over homosexuality and human rights in Uganda had far more complex histories; they were not created by injections from the U.S. evangelical Right. Indeed, Ugandans were quite sensitive to any claim that they were being tutored in either theology or politics by Westerners. By 2009, a number of Ugandan church leaders had already been involved for over a decade in the debates over homosexuality that fractured the global Anglican community in the 1990s. At the 1998 Lambeth meeting—a once-in-a-decade conclave for deciding Anglican policies and positions worldwide—the evangelical wing of the Anglican church, based largely in Africa and Asia, with strong support from conservative U.S. Episcopalians, had supported a strongly worded resolution that defined marriage as “between a man and a woman in lifelong union” and rejected “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture.”[70] The Church of Uganda joined several other African churches in boycotting the Lambeth meeting ten years later over a perceived upsurge in support for gay ordination. American pastor Rick Warren spoke out in favor of the boycott. Though a Southern Baptist, he had developed a number of ties with conservative Anglican bishops in Uganda and felt no compunction about opining on Anglican politics. Declaring homosexuality an unnatural way of life, he stated that “the Church of England is wrong, and I support the Church of Uganda.”[71]
Rather than injecting U.S. positions into “unsuspecting” Ugandans, the 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill was the result of years of networking and connections among a denominational range of global Right activists in multiple locations. Uganda had been deeply shaped by the infusion of funds from the U.S. PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief), starting in 2005. These funds were skewed toward supporting abstinence and chastity as AIDS-prevention strategies, thanks largely to activism by U.S. Christian conservatives, both evangelical and Catholic.[72] In addition, the money itself created an environment in which activists such as Ssempa promoted a vision of the devastation caused by HIV/AIDS as a call to radical moral reform. In 2007, Ssempa led hundreds of people through the streets in Kampala to demand arrest and punishment of gay activists (or, as Ssempa described them, “homosexual promoters”).[73] The rush of money for fighting AIDS went to a broad range of organizations in Uganda, including a number of Christian conservative groups, as well as transnational groups that set up shop. As anthropologist Lydia Boyd has argued, the flood of new NGOs and the influx of money also fueled anxiety about the presence of American and European humanitarians, many of whom were assumed to hold the same liberal positions on homosexuality that Ugandan Anglicans had countered in the Anglican community.[74]
The 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill proposed a seven-year jail term for homosexual acts and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” which included having sex with a minor or a person with disabilities if the offender was HIV-positive. Ssempa led marches in favor of the bill, and President Yoweri Museveni’s government immediately embraced it. The international outcry began immediately. The Swedish government threatened to withhold $50 million in aid. Human Rights Watch and the international news media produced one withering condemnation after another.[75] Rick Warren, who had supported the boycott of the Anglicans’ Lambeth meeting, spoke out against the bill, calling it “unchristian.”[76] Even the head of Exodus International, the U.S.-based organization that claimed it was possible to “recover” from homosexuality, wrote to President Museveni opposing the proposed law.[77]
The external pressure against the bill in some ways only strengthened its support in the Ugandan Parliament. This is not surprising, given the populist and nationalist tenor of the debates (see Gerald Neumann’s discussion in chapter 6). Indeed, the calls for cuts in funding or the denunciations by groups such as Human Rights Watch, although appropriate and necessary from a human rights perspective, provided another opportunity for supporters to show their independence; anti-LGBTQ+ activists had been using the claim of colonialism since at least the distribution of the flyer at the Beijing+5 follow-on event in 2000. The sense among some Ugandans was that the West was launching an offensive, “with the tip of the spear being NGOs and human rights activists.”[78]
Uganda’s churches had a mixed view of the bill. Its supporters claimed to have the mass of Christians on their side, and there was evidence of that. A meeting of two hundred members of the Interreligious Council of Uganda, which included Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim representatives, came out in support of the bill, urging Parliament to resist foreign pressure to abandon or moderate it. Ssempa organized his Pastors’ Task Force, which included Anglican, Pentecostal, Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim leaders. Uganda’s Catholic Church remained notably quiet. “They may not like the harsher elements of the bill,” one observer commented, “but they also share the suspicion that Western forces are trying to cram a liberal social agenda down Africa’s throat, and they don’t want to discourage efforts to defend African values.”[79] The Anglican Church of Uganda issued a statement opposing the use of the death penalty and also expressing concern at the provision that required clergy, doctors, and teachers to report homosexuality. It agreed, however, that homosexuality should not be a human right, and it commended the law’s objective of defining marriage as between a man and a woman.[80]
Ultimately, international pressure did have an impact. Representative David Bahati withdrew the original Anti-Homosexuality Bill and introduced a revised version in February 2012. This removed the death penalty but added a clause that would prohibit any organization that supported gay rights from working in Uganda. That clause could potentially shut out the development arms of many foreign governments.[81] A revised bill was passed by Parliament and signed into law on February 24, 2014. Almost immediately, the tabloid Red Pepper published a list of Uganda’s “Top Gays.”[82] In the following months, attacks on LGBTQ people once again increased.
In June 2014, President Barack Obama enacted largely symbolic sanctions, which banned individual Ugandans who had been involved in human rights abuses against the LGBTQ community from entering the United States. The sanctions also provided for discontinuing or redirecting funds for a few of the programs that had been planned with the Ministry of Health and other agencies. But administration officials made it clear that Uganda was one of the most important military allies the United States had in Africa, and that both countries would continue to work together to fight the Lord’s Resistance Army, along with al-Shabab in Somalia, and in coordinating antiterrorism strategies for East Africa in general. The sanctions did not prevent Sam Kutesa, Uganda’s foreign minister, from traveling to the United States to take up his position as president of the UN General Assembly.[83]
In August 2014, the Anti-Homosexuality Law was nullified by the Ugandan Supreme Court on procedural grounds. The ruling happened just as President Museveni was about to lead a delegation to the United States, and many observers thought the ruling was a political maneuver designed to save him from embarrassment. On his return, Museveni promised to reintroduce the law yet again, but perhaps without penalties for consenting adults. This, he hoped, would be a law that would escape international outrage. “We agreed to come up with a new version,” said one supporter, something that “protects” Ugandans but “that doesn’t hurt our Western friends.”[84]
For several years afterward, nothing much happened. Queer people in Uganda continued to suffer great oppression, but, legislatively, there was no serious attempt to reintroduce the bill. In the fall of 2019, some members of Parliament threatened to reintroduce legislation, even as several LGBTQ+ activists were attacked in their homes; four people died. One of those killed, Brian Wasswa, worked for the Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum, a Ugandan NGO that advocates for marginalized and at-risk populations. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the calls for new legislation quickly fell by the wayside.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Human rights language and commitments have deep and broad resonance among American Christians, including conservatives. It is a sign of the resiliency and potency of that language that so much of the discussion—about religious freedom, U.S. foreign aid, LGBTQ+ rights, and even abortion—is conducted in terms that resonate with the fundamental statements about the dignity of the human person that form the basis of human rights politics globally. Evangelicals have taken human rights concerns seriously in Sudan, South Africa, China, as well as in various parts of Latin America and the Middle East, and there is a strong moderate contingent among American evangelicals whose input and insight should be cultivated. Indeed, work on global religious freedom issues has generally increased the awareness that Americans have about the other issues faced by individuals beyond U.S. borders. For an American believer, learning about religious freedom issues for Copts in Egypt might also involve learning about challenges of poverty or environmental degradation. Advocating for Christians in Myanmar can teach Americans about the situation of Rohingya as well. We see this cross-fertilization in a great deal of the work done by organizations such as World Vision, the Institute for Global Engagement, the Lausanne Movement, and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. These organizations do not always get the headlines, but they are integrating global visions that include a sense of respect and dignity for all people. If the human rights community aims to advance a universal agenda that also reaches a broad population, including evangelicals, it needs to recognize this diversity and engage those who already see themselves as advocates of rights that go beyond (but include) religious freedom.
Even among the most conservative wing of evangelicals (and Catholic and Orthodox adherents), there are principled differences that the human rights community should be aware of. There are serious differences of opinion about LGBTQ+ rights, for example. Pew Research has shown that almost every religious group in the United States, including evangelicals, is growing more accepting of such rights.[85] Younger generations are distinctly more comfortable with gay marriage and queer politics, and there is every reason to believe that U.S. Christian organizations will shift over time as younger generations take leadership. One indication of the split was the 2014 crisis at evangelical-led World Vision, one of the world’s largest charities. In March that year, its president announced that the nonprofit organization would begin hiring Christians who were in same-sex marriages, saying that gay marriage, like divorce, was a matter that Christians could reasonably disagree over. After an outcry from funders, this decision was reversed just two days later, only for a key board member to resign in protest at the reversal.[86] All of this indicates that there is far less evangelical consensus on LGBTQ+ rights than can be revealed by narratives focusing only on the global Right.
There is, however, a global divide over homosexuality that has serious consequences for any policymaking. Public opinion about whether it should be “accepted by society” is sharply divided, with the Americas and western Europe noticeably more positive than countries in eastern Europe, Africa, or most of Asia and the Middle East. The Philippines is an exception, with 73 percent of those polled saying homosexuality should be accepted. And yet in many parts of the world, the rise in acceptance over the last ten years is striking. In Kenya, only 1 percent of people in 2002 said homosexuality should be accepted; in 2020, it was 14 percent. This is still a stunningly low number, but it speaks to a trend that is repeated in countries rich and poor, in the Global North and Global South. In general, wealthier countries are more welcoming than poorer ones, which suggests that economic development and human rights agendas are profoundly intertwined.[87] The reality remains, however, that neocolonialism continues to be a powerful argument against the global human rights institutions, and the strange bedfellows of recent years mean that those who argue for “the family” as a rights-bearer are often able to draw on anticolonial arguments that present LGBTQ+ or women’s rights as a foreign imposition. It is important, then, for supporters of these rights to highlight that all parties to the debate have transnational ties, and Christian conservatives are as likely to be “funded by the West” as are liberal secular NGOs; equally, liberal expansions of rights are supported by many people around the world, as the ultimate victory for gay marriage in Costa Rica indicated. That said, there is far less room to navigate the politics of abortion, which has itself been framed in the language of human rights by a large swath of Christian conservative movements.
The rise of the right-wing populist movements across the world suggests strongly that, while there are important links between religious conservatives and populist uprisings (as in the case of the attack on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021 or the evangelical support for the populist Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro), there is also significant fracturing of views. Some reports in the United States indicate that the number of people who identify as evangelical is declining notably (although this focuses only on white evangelicals, and not on the significant percentage of American evangelicals who are Black, Latinx, or Asian).[88] It is also important to recognize that the language of human rights does have meaningful traction among a broad swath of evangelicals, in the United States and beyond. There are important distinctions—indeed, wide differences—among evangelical communities, and focusing only on those who inhabit the Far Right ignores the potential openness among others. As the Biden administration develops its own human rights policy, it will do well to attend to the recommendations of a recent Brookings report by E. J. Dionne and Melinda Rogers, which highlighted the importance of listening carefully to the concerns of religious communities in forming U.S. policy. It is vital, they point out, not to assume an absolute divide between “people who support religious freedom” and “people who support LGBTQ+ rights,” since many people in the LGBTQ+ community are religious, and many religious people, whatever their orientation, support their rights. The conversation has become difficult, but it is clear that one way forward is conversation: the more people know an out LGBTQ+ person, the more open they are.[89] The same is true at the institutional level: both the Biden administration and international human rights NGOs need to include evangelicals in the conversation, without assuming their inevitable hostility. There are no easy answers to the dilemma of fundamental differences in moral frameworks, but cultivating an awareness of the points of common ground among stakeholders, and recognizing the moral power of human rights discourse across a broad spectrum of Christian conservatives, can help construct approaches that are both principled and consensus-seeking.
Notes
1. Conrad Hackett and Brian J. Grim, “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, December 2011, www.pewforum.org/christian/global-christianity-exec.aspx; Pew Research Center, “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region,” November 13, 2014, www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/; Melani McAlister, “American Evangelicals, the Changing Global Religious Environment, and Foreign Policy Activism,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17, 2 (April 3, 2019), pp. 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2019.1608652.
2. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012); Heather D. Curtis, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid (Harvard University Press, 2018); Melani McAlister, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2018); Lauren Frances Turek, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2020); Mark R. Amstutz, Evangelicals and American Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2014); William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
3. Janelle S. Wong, Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018).
4. David C. Kirkpatrick, A Gospel for the Poor: Global Social Christianity and the Latin American Evangelical Left (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
5. Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
6. Max L. Stackhouse, “Theology, History, and Human Rights,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 67, 2 (1984), pp. 191–208.
7. Udi Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism,” American Historical Review 124, 2 (April 1, 2019), pp. 511–38.
8. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 173.
9. “The Lausanne Covenant,” in Let the Earth Hear His Voice, edited by J.D. Douglas (Minneapolis, Minn.: World Wide Publications, 1975), pp. 3–9.
10. On evangelicals and human rights in this period, see Turek, To Bring the Good News to All Nations; Preston, Sword of the Spirit; Andrew Preston, “Evangelical Internationalism: A Conservative Worldview for the Age of Globalization,” in The Right Side of the Sixties: Reexamining Conservatism’s Decade of Transformation, edited by Laura Giffod and Daniel Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 221–42; McAlister, Kingdom of God. Preventing evangelism was a serious issue of contention between U.S. evangelicals and Israel at several points in the 1960s and 1970s.
11. Kirkpatrick, A Gospel for the Poor; Swartz, Moral Minority.
12. On human rights rhetoric in this period, see Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Sarah B. Snyder, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018); Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2014).
13. McAlister, Kingdom of God, ch. 9; Elizabeth Castelli, “Praying for the Persecuted Church: US Christian Activism in the Global Arena,” Journal of Human Rights 4, 3 (September 2005), pp. 321–51.
14. Melani McAlister, “US Evangelicals and the Politics of Slave Redemption as Religious Freedom in Sudan,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 87–108.
15. David P. King, God’s Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 191–215.
16. For example, Morgan Lee, “Love Thy Neighbor: South Asia Christians Advocate for Rohingya Muslims,” Christianity Today, October 27, 2017, www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/october/christians-aid-rohingya-muslims-myanmar-bangladesh-pakistan.html; “Rohingya Refugee Crisis: Facts, FAQs, and How to Help,” World Vision (blog), June 12, 2020, www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories/rohingya-refugees-bangladesh-facts; Institute for Global Engagement (IGE), “IGE Co-Convenes ‘Peace, Security and Co-Existence’ Conference in Myanmar,” https://globalengage.org/updates/view/ige-co-convenes-peace-security-co-existence-conference-in-myanmar.
17. Melani McAlister, “The Persecuted Body: Evangelical Internationalism, Islam, and the Politics of Fear,” in Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective, edited by Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 133–61; Candace Lukasik, “Human Rights and Persecution Economies,” Public Orthodoxy (blog), October 13, 2020, https://publicorthodoxy.org/2020/10/13/human-rights-and-persecution-economies/; Amy Fallas, “Religious Liberty Shouldn’t Come at the Expense of Human Rights,” Sojourners, July 24, 2019, https://sojo.net/articles/religious-liberty-shouldn-t-come-expense-human-rights.
18. On the political work of melodrama as a genre, see Elisabeth Robin Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2014).
19. The Trump administration actually closed another office started under Obama, the Office of Religion and Global Affairs, and folded its staff slots into the new Office of International Religious Freedom. Shaun Casey, “How the State Department Has Sidelined Religion’s Role in Diplomacy,” Religion and Politics, September 5, 2017, https://religionandpolitics.org/2017/09/05/how-the-state-department-has-sidelined-religions-role-in-diplomacy/.
20. For years, Pompeo attended a Presbyterian church in Wichita that was part of the ecumenical Presbyterian Church (USA). In 2011, his home church left the denomination and joined the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a relatively new evangelical and Reformed denomination. Brownback, on the other hand, grew up as a Methodist but converted to Catholicism in 2002. However, he now attends the nondenominational Topeka Bible Church.
21. On the Trump administrations IRF policy, see Jeffrey Haynes, “Trump and the Politics of International Religious Freedom,” Religions 11, 8 (August 2020), pp. 1–20, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11080385. On the Ministerials, see Sarah Posner, Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2021), p. 240; Fallas, “Religious Liberty Shouldn’t Come at the Expense of Human Rights”; Jacob Lupfer, “The Politics of Religious Freedom under the Trump Administration,” Religion and Politics, August 14, 2018, https://religionandpolitics.org/2018/08/14/the-politics-of-religious-freedom-under-the-trump-administration/. On the Evangelical Advisory Board, Rob Boston, “All the President’s Men and Women: Members of President Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board Are Hard at Work Changing Public Policy—But They’d Rather You Not Know about It,” Church and State (Silver Spring, Md.: Americans United for Separation of Church and State, October 2018).
22. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “What’s Wrong with Promoting Religious Freedom?,” Foreign Policy (blog), June 12, 2013, http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/12/whats_wrong_with_promoting_religious_freedom?wp_login_redirect=0.
23. “Declaration of Principles for the International Religious Freedom Alliance,” United States Department of State (blog), February 5, 2020, www.state.gov/declaration-of-principles-for-the-international-religious-freedom-alliance/; Judd Birdsall, “Will Biden Demote Religious Freedom in US Foreign Policy?,” ChristianityToday.com, November 17, 2020, www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november-web-only/religious-freedom-biden-trump-ministerial-rights-article-18.html.
24. Gregorio Bettiza, Finding Faith in Foreign Policy: Religion and American Diplomacy in a Postsecular World (Oxford University Press, 2019).
25. Melani McAlister, “Evangelical Populist Internationalism and the Politics of Persecution,” Review of Faith and International Affairs 17, 3 (September 2019), pp. 105–17.
26. Mark Satta, “Why You Can’t Sell Your Cake and Control It Too: Distinguishing Use from Design in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, July 10, 2019, https:// harvardcrcl.org/why-you-cant-sell-your-cake-and-control-it-too-distinguishing-use-from-design-in-masterpiece-cakeshop-v-colorado/.
27. María Angélica Peñas Defago, José Manuel Morán Faúndes, and Juan Marco Vaggione, “Religious Conservatism on the Global Stage: Threats and Challenges for LGBTI Rights,” Global Philanthropy Project, November 4, 2018, p. 22, https://globalphilanthropyproject.org/2018/11/04/religious-conservatism-on-the-global-stage-threats-and-challenges-for-lgbti-rights/; “Inter-American Court of Human Rights Affirms Rights Related to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression,” ESCR-Net, www.escr-net.org/caselaw/2018/advisory-opinion-gender-identity-equality-and-non-discrimination-same-sex-couples-2017.
28. Gustavo Fuchs, “Is Costa Rica on the Path to Evangelical Theocracy?,” New Internationalist, February 9, 2018, https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2018/02/09/costa-rica-theocracy.
29. Mark Philip Bradley, “American Vernaculars: The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination,” Diplomatic History 38, 1 (January 1, 2014), pp. 1–21.
30. Jeff Diamant, “Young Evangelicals Are More Liberal Than Their Elders on Some Issues” (Washington: Pew Research Center), May 4, 2017, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/04/though-still-conservative-young-evangelicals-are-more-liberal-than-their-elders-on-some-issues/.
31. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13, 2 (1987), pp. 263–92, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177802; R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
32. Michael R. Pompeo, “Opinion | Unalienable Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/unalienable-rights-and-u-s-foreign-policy-11562526448.
33. “Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” November 20, 2009, https://www.manhattandeclaration.org/.
34. Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (New York: Doubleday, 2008). George is profiled in David D. Kirkpatrick, “The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker,” New York Times, December 16, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/magazine/20george-t.html.
35. Pranshu Verma, “Pompeo’s Human Rights Panel Could Hurt L.G.B.T. and Women’s Rights, Critics Say,” New York Times, June 23, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/us/politics/pompeo-state-human-rights.html.
36. Anita Little, “Sexist, Homophobic Representatives of ‘The Black Church’ Just Want to Make Black America Great Again,” Religion Dispatches (blog), November 3, 2016, https://religiondispatches.org/sexist-homophobic-representatives-of-the-black-church-just-want-to-make-black-america-great-again/. The text of the letter is archived at https://www.seymourinstitute.com/open-letter.html. The organization’s site is now at https://thedesignorator.wixsite.com/seymourinstitute.
37. Aleandra Schmitt, “5 Questions about the Commission on Unalienable Rights,” Center for American Progress, October 31, 2019, www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/news/2019/10/31/476632/5-questions-commission-unalienable-rights/.
38. Commission on Unalienable Rights, “Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights” (U.S. Department of State, 2020), p. 7.
39. Posner, Unholy, 240.
40. Peter Berkowitz, “Criticisms Illustrate Need for State Dept. Human Rights Panel,” Real Clear Politics, September 15, 2019, www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/09/15/criticisms_illustrate_need_for_state_dept_human_rights_panel_141238.html.
41. Cartwright Weiland, “Pompeo’s Critics Misrepresent the Commission on Unalienable Rights,” Foreign Policy, September 22, 2020, http://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/22/critics-misrepresent-commission-unalienable-rights/.
42. Kenneth Roth, “Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights Will Endanger Everyone’s Human Rights,” Foreign Policy (blog), August 27, 2020, http://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/27/pompeos-commission-on-unalienable-rights-will-endanger-everyones-human-rights/.
43. Center for Justice and Accountability, “United States: Human Rights Coalition Rejects Report Issued by State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights—CJA,” July 30, 2020, https://cja.org/united-states-human-rights-coalition-rejects-report-issued-by-state-departments-commission-on-unalienable-rights/.
44. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.
45. Cole Parke, “Whose Family? Religious Right’s ‘Family Values’ Agenda Advances Internationally,” Political Research Associates, July 16, 2014, www.politicalresearch.org/2014/07/16/whose-family-religious-rights-family-values-agenda-advances-internationally.
46. Doris Buss, Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
47. Claire Provost and Adam Ramsay, “Revealed: Trump-Linked US Christian ‘Fundamentalists’ Pour Millions of ‘Dark Money’ into Europe, Boosting the Far Right,” openDemocracy, March 27, 2019, www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revealed-trump-linked-us-christian-fundamentalists-pour-millions-of-dark-money-into-europe-boosting-the-far-right/. This study is useful in terms of providing an accounting of absolute dollars spent by a range of organizations, but it does not explain how the money was spent, and lumps together groups that are explicitly activist (the Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF, for example) with groups that likely spent most of their money on traditional evangelism, such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which had by far the largest spending in Europe—almost half of the total—at $23.3 million. A more recent study by openDemocracy provides a broader global picture but is marred by its inclusion of groups that are clearly not Christian, such as the libertarian Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation. Claire Provost and Nandini Archer, “Revealed: $280m ‘Dark Money’ Spent by US Christian Right Groups Globally,” openDemocracy, October 27, 2020, www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/trump-us-christian-spending-global-revealed/.
48. The WCF began as the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, but since 2016 has become the International Organization for the Family. The World Congress of Families is its signature event and the most commonly used name for the organization as a whole. Kristina Stoeckl, “The Rise of the Russian Christian Right: The Case of the World Congress of Families,” Religion, State and Society 48, 4 (2020), pp. 223–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2020.1796172.
49. Michael Casey, “Russians and the American Right Started Plotting in 1995. We Have the Notes from the First Meeting,” ThinkProgress (blog), June 19, 2018, https://archive.thinkprogress.org/history-of-christian-fundamentalists-in-russia-and-the-us-a6bdd326841d/.
50. Stoeckl, “The Rise of the Russian Christian Right,” pp. 227–29. Hannah Levintova, “These US Evangelicals Helped Create Russia’s Anti-Gay Movement,” Mother Jones (blog), February 21, 2014, www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/world-congress-families-russia-gay-rights/; Melani McAlister, “Why Putin Is an Ally for American Evangelicals,” The Conversation, September 4, 2018, http://theconversation.com/why-putin-is-an-ally-for-american-evangelicals-101504; James Kirchick, “Why American Conservatives Love Anti-Gay Putin,” Daily Beast, August 1, 2013, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/01/why-american-conservatives-love-anti-gay-putin; UNHRC, “Exposed: The World Congress of Families” Human Rights Campaign, August 2014, http://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/ExposedTheWorldCongressOfFamilies.pdf.
51. Alexander Cooley, “Same Blueprint, New Norms: Regional Organizations, Illiberalism, and the Rise of Contested Global Governance,” ch. 4 above; Gordon Urquhart, “That’s Not Faith, That’s Provocation,” The Guardian, November 12, 1999, www.theguardian.com/world/1999/nov/12/catholicism.religion.
52. Allan Carlson, “A History of ‘the Family’ in the United Nations,” 2000, quoted in Clifford Bob, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics, Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 42.
53. For a list of the major religious conservative organizations working on family issues at the UN, see María Angélica Peñas Defago, José Manuel Morán Faúndes, and Juan Marco Vaggione, Religious Conservatism on the Global Stage: Threats and Challenges for LGBTI Rights, Global Philanthropy Project, November 2018, https://globalphilanthropyproject.org/religiousconservatismreport/.
54. Scott Long, “Anatomy of a Backlash: Sexuality and the ‘Cultural’ War on Human Rights,” Human Rights Watch, 2005, p. 14, www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k5/anatomy/anatomy.pdf.
55. Physicians for Life, “Report on the Doha International Conference for the Family (11/2004),” APFLI, September 15, 2005, www.physiciansforlife.org/report-on-the-doha-international-conference-for-the-family-112004/.
56. Bob, Global Right Wing, p. 55.
57. “About Us,” U.N. Family Rights Caucus, 2014, http://unfamily.wpengine.com/about/.
58. Austin Dacey, “At the UN, Conservative Christian Agenda Cloaked in Human Rights Language,” Religion Dispatches, September 23, 2014, https://religiondispatches.org/at-the-un-an-attempt-to-re-cast-childrens-rights-as-family-rights/.
59. Peter Montgomery, “International Backlash,” Political Research Associates, Fall 2016, www.politicalresearch.org/2016/11/14/international-backlash-the-religious-right-at-the-un.
60. Anne Marie Goetz and Jenaina Irani, “Is the UN Taking a Position in Today’s ‘Culture Wars’?,” OpenDemocracy, June 25, 2019, www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/is-the-un-taking-a-position-in-todays-culture-wars/; Shahara Razawi, “Progress of the World’s Women,” UN Women, June 25, 2019, www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/progress-of-the-worlds-women.
61. Kapya Kaoma, “Globalizing the Culture Wars: US Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia,” Political Research Associates, November 2009; Kapya Kaoma, “How US Clergy Brought Hate to Uganda,” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 17, 3 (June 2010), pp. 20–23.
62. UNHRC, “Exposed: The World Congress of Families.”
63. Lydia Boyd, “The Problem with Freedom: Homosexuality and Human Rights in Uganda,” Anthropological Quarterly 86, 3 (2013), pp. 697–724.
64. Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (Springfield, Mass. Veritas Aeterna Press, 2017).
65. Jeremy Hooper, “Scott Lively Stirring Russia’s Pot: A Timeline,” GLAAD, May 5, 2014, www.glaad.org/blog/scott-lively-stirring-russias-pot-timeline; “Anti-LGBT Activist Scott Lively Returns to Russia,” Southern Poverty Law Center, October 13, 2013, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2013/10/18/anti-lgbt-activist-scott-lively-returns-russia; Scott Lively, “Report from Moscow,” Scott Lively Ministries (blog), October 18, 2013, www.scottlively.net/2013/10/18/report-from-moscow/.
66. For example, the WCF press release does not include Lively in its list of members of the International Planning Committee for the 2014 meeting. Don Feder, “International Planning Committee Meets in Moscow to Plan World Congress of Families VIII (September 10–12, 2014)—Christian Newswire,” Christian Newswire, October 23, 2013, http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/7114773046.html.
67. Lively and Abrams, The Pink Swastika; Abby Ohlheiser, “Uganda’s New Anti-Homosexuality Law Was Inspired by American Activists,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2013, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/uganda-passes-law-punishes-homosexuality-life-imprisonment/356365/; Jeffrey Gettleman, “After US Evangelicals Visit, Ugandan Considers Death for Gays,” New York Times, January 4, 2010; Kapya Kaoma, “The US Christian Right and the Attack on Gays in Africa,” Political Research Associates, October 2009, www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n4/us-christian-right-attack-on-gays-in-africa.html.
68. Michael Wilkerson, “Lou Engle’s ‘The Call Uganda’ Rallies Support For Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” Religion Dispatches, May 4, 2010, http://religiondispatches.org/american-supports-ugandan-anti-gay-bill/. See also Josh Kron, “In Uganda, Push to Curb Gays Draws U.S. Guest,” New York Times, May 2, 2010; Waymon Hudson, “The Call Uganda: Anti-Gay American Evangelical Going to Inflame Hate in Uganda,” Huffington Post, June 30, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/waymon-hudson/thecall-uganda-anti-gay-a_b_558890.html. This analysis is drawn from my longer discussion of the Ugandan case in chapter 14 of Kingdom of God.
69. Barbara Bradley Hagerty, “U.S. Exports Cultural War to Uganda,” NPR, January 15, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122572951.
70. Anglican Consultative Council, The Lambeth Conference: Resolutions Archive from 1998 (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2005), p. 9, http://www.anglicancommunion.org/. Miranda Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism (Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 95–98.
71. Evelyn Lirri, “Uganda: Gay Row—Pastor Rick Warren Supports Country on Boycott,” Virtue Online: The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism, March 28, 2008, www.virtueonline.org/uganda-gay-row-us-pastor-rick-warren-supports-country-boycott. See also Kaoma, “Globalizing the Culture Wars,” p. 10.
72. John Dietrich, “The Politics of PEPFAR: The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” Ethics and International Affairs (Fall 2007), p. 277–92.
73. Waymon Hudson, “Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ Bill Goes XXX?,” Bilerico Project, January 26, 2010, http://www.bilerico.com/2010/01/ugandas_kill_the_gays_bill_goes_xxx.php; Max Blumenthal, “Rick Warren’s Africa Problem,” Daily Beast, January 7, 2009, www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-07/the-truth-about-rick-warren-in-africa/; Epstein, “God and the Fight against AIDS”; Xan Rice, “Gay Activists Attack Ugandan Preacher’s Porn Slideshow,” The Guardian, February 18, 2010; “Uganda Gay-Porn Stunt ‘Twisted,’ ” BBC News, February 18, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8522039.stm.
74. Boyd, “The Problem with Freedom”; Lydia Boyd, “What’s Driving Homophobia in Uganda,” The Conversation, November 20, 2019, http://theconversation.com/whats-driving-homophobia-in-uganda-126071.
75. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Intercontinental Divide: Global Pressure Mounts for Uganda to Defeat Anti-Gay Bill,” Christianity Today, February 1, 2010, 17–19; Human Rights Watch, Press Statement, “Uganda: ‘Anti-Homosexuality’ Bill Threatens Liberties and Human Rights Defenders,” www.hrw.org/news/2009/10/15/uganda-anti-homosexuality-bill-threatens-liberties-and-human-rights-defenders; Human Rights Watch, Press Statement, “UN: Landmark Meeting Denounces Rights Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity,” www.hrw.org/news/2009/12/11/un-landmark-meeting-denounces-rights-abuses-based-sexual-orientation-gender-identity.
76. Rick Warren, “Letter to the Pastors of Uganda,” December 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jmGu9o4fDE.
77. Bailey, “Intercontinental Divide.”
78. John L. Allen Jr., “Why Catholics Aren’t Speaking Up in Uganda about Anti-Gay Bill,” National Catholic Reporter, December 16, 2009, www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/why-catholics-arent-speaking-uganda-about-anti-gay-bill.
79. Lillian Kwon, “Uganda Pastors Chide Rick Warren; Defend Anti-Gay Bill,” Christian Post, December 21, 2009, www.christianpost.com/news/uganda-pastors-chide-rick-warren-defend-anti-gay-bill-42372/. The task force had members from the National Fellowship of Born Again Churches, Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Orthodox Church in Uganda, Roman Catholic Church in Uganda, Islamic Office of Social Welfare in Uganda, and Born Again Faith Federation. On the Catholic response, see John L. Allen Jr., “Anti-Gay Bill in Uganda Challenges Catholics to Take a Stand,” National Catholic Reporter, November 27, 2009, www.ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/anti-gay-bill-uganda-challenges-catholics-take-stand.
80. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Church of Uganda Recommends Amending Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” Christianity Today, February 9, 2010, www.christianitytoday.com/news/2010/february/church-of-uganda-recommends-amending-anti-homosexuality.html.
81. Josh Kron, “Resentment toward the West Bolsters Uganda’s New Anti-Gay Bill,” New York Times, February 29, 2012.
82. Deadly Intolerance,” The Economist, March 1, 2014, p. 42.
83. Peter Baker, “Uganda: Anti-Gay Law Draws Sanctions,” New York Times, June 19, 2014; Ty McCormick, “Is the US Military Propping Up Uganda’s ‘Elected’ Autocrat?,” Foreign Policy, February 18, 2016, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/18/is-the-us-military-propping-up-ugandas-elected-autocrat-museveni-elections/.
84. Elias Biryabarema, “Uganda’s Museveni Wants to Water Down Anti-Gay Law,” Reuters, August 9, 2014, http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-uganda-gay/ugandas-museveni-wants-to-water-down-anti-gay-law-lawmaker-idUKKBN0GC0YG20140812.
85. Caryle Murphy, “More U.S. Christians OK with Homosexuality,” Pew Research Center, December 18, 2015, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/18/most-u-s-christian-groups-grow-more-accepting-of-homosexuality/.
86. Celeste Gracey and Jeremy Weber, “World Vision: Why We’re Hiring Gay Christians in Same-Sex Marriages,” ChristianityToday.com, March 24, 2014, www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/march-web-only/world-vision-why-hiring-gay-christians-same-sex-marriage.html; Eyder Peralta, “Two Days Later, World Vision Reverses Policy That Allowed Hiring Of Gays,” NPR, March 26, 2014, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/03/26/294945076/two-days-later-world-vision-reverses-policy-that-allowed-hiring-of-gays; Associated Press, “World Vision Board Member Quits over Gay Marriage Hiring Ban,” The Guardian, April 3, 2014, www.theguardian.com/society/2014/apr/03/world-vision-board-member-quits-gay-marriage-hiring.
87. Jacob Poushter and Nicholas Kent, “Views of Homosexuality around the World,” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project (blog), June 25, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-on-homosexuality-persists/.
88. Aaron Blake, “Analysis: The Rapid Decline of White Evangelical America?,” Washington Post, July 8, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/08/rapid-decline-white-evangelical-america/; Janelle S. Wong, Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018).
89. Melissa Rogers and E. J. Dionne, “A Time to Heal, A Time to Build,” Brookings (blog), October 21, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-time-to-heal-a-time-to-build/.
