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A New York Timesop-ed piece last week by columnist Nicholas D. Kristof argued that the "destructive" religious right of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, which sought to "battle Satan with school prayers and right-to-life amendments, is on the ropes." In its place, he says, a new school of evangelicals is saving lives and reshaping American foreign policy. Kristof calls these American evangelicals the "new internationals."

Kristof begins by noting the January/February issue of Worldwide Challenge, a magazine published by Campus Crusade for Christ. The cover story focused on the poverty of rural Cameroon.

Kristof says the magazine's focus illustrates what he calls "a broad new trend": activism by American evangelicals in fighting sex trafficking, slavery, AIDS and religious persecution in forgotten parts of the globe.

But is evangelical international activism really a new trend?

"Evangelicals have been active in foreign policy really since the beginning of the Christian right," says John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. "The development activities that he rightly praises have been going on a long, long time. My response to this piece was, 'Where have you been?'"

Various scholars told Christianity Today that although the umbrella observation that evangelicals are internationally minded may not be breaking news, Kristof's article does provide insight for evangelicals to consider.

"This is a new recognition of something we've been aware of for a while," says Dwight Gibson, North American director for World Evangelical Alliance. "But it tells me how much of a ghetto we as evangelicals have put ourselves in for a key journal like The New York Times to print this and for it to be news to many."

Edith Blumhofer, director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, says that the interest in foreign policy may be news to those outside evangelicalism because it has only recently been communicated.

"This interest is characteristic of evangelicalism at least since American foreign policy went international, and probably even before," she told Christianity Today. "But it used to circulate more in the churches and in the subculture. Now it is out there. It is up on the Web. It is in glossy formats like a Campus Crusade magazine cover. It is more accessible to other people."

Cultural factors also contribute to this evangelical interest becoming more noticeable, Blumhofer says. For example, modern travel and prosperity have made it easier for evangelicals to do work abroad.

She says that missionary and church denomination publications from the 19th century show an interest in learning about and addressing problems such as poverty, weak agriculture, and cost of living in other countries. But it was harder then to act on this impulse, Blumhofer says. Now churches often send members overseas for short-term missions trips.

In addition to an interest in the conditions of people around the world, Robert Seiple, president and founder of the Institute for Global Engagement and former U.S. ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom, says that evangelicals have long influenced American foreign policy.

"Nongovernment organizations have always had substantial amounts of influence in the world and substantial amounts of power in terms of leveraging policy back in the states towards that world," he told CT. "It might very well be true that when the history books of the evangelical movement are written, the greatest contribution is the engagement of people to be involved outside our borders, and then reporting back on the situations we find in those most difficult parts of the world."

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May (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46