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Freeing God's Children Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights by Allen D. Hertzke Rowman & Littlefield, 2004 440 pages, $27.95

Evangelical Protestants have had an unusually high global consciousness ever since the 19th-century blossoming of the missions movement.  For a century and a half, missionaries' support letters kept North American churchgoers aware of countries and people groups they rarely read about in newspapers. Because of connections to missionaries and relief organizations, we hear about life in places like Mozambique, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda. And when trouble starts brewing in such places, we often hear about it through these connections first.

But while missionaries and relief workers have been a great source of global connectivity—long preceding other factors in the much-ballyhooed phenomenon of globalization—they have often been slow to engage and resist the forces of oppression in the countries where they worked. It makes sense: Missionaries and relief workers serve at the discretion of their host governments. Criticizing political leaders would imperil their ministry.

Allen Hertzke's Freeing God's Children tells the story of how evangelical Protestants in the United States moved from reluctance and ambivalence about confronting persecution to passionate engagement and action. It also tells the story of unlikely alliances—as evangelicals linked arms with Roman Catholics, Jews, secularists, and feminists to address an array of human-rights issues.

In 1995, I got a telephone call from Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan administration lawyer, who was by then installed at the conservative Hudson Institute. Horowitz, a Jew, was passionate about the plight of Christians in certain Muslim and post-Soviet era Communist countries. And the reluctance of mission agencies to speak out publicly against oppression baffled him.

 During the Reagan years, Horowitz served as chief counsel in the Office of Management and Budget, a key position for Reagan's tax and budget revolution. During that time, the Horowitz used his political skills and the sheer force of his personality to keep U.S. pressure on the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate. Hertzke characterizes Horowitz as "brash, blunt, bombastic, supremely confident, relentless in political pursuit." The pressure tactics worked, and Soviet Jews found new freedom.

The Reagan-era logic of confrontation was simple: Tyrannical governments are often weak governments. Their economic and political systems often run by executive fiat and have little resilience. The Soviet Union buckled, and that experience helped shape Horowitz's vision for saving Christians from persecution.

Horowitz phoned and faxed a Who's Who of evangelical leaders. And by January 23, 1996, he had nervous leaders lined up to support a new initiative. On that date, the National Association of Evangelicals hosted a milestone event at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. Delegates listened to impassioned speeches on the need to confront religious persecution, and they approved a Statement of Conscience that laid out principles for future action by various parts of government. While the meeting was going on, evangelical leaders lobbied the White House directly to appoint a special adviser on international religious liberty who would be independent of the State Department.

At the time of the January 1996 meeting, the key players were still few. Most evangelical leaders were still trying to figure our how to get on board. Inexperienced in this kind of work, they needed help, and Horowitz provided them with the partners they needed to be politically effective. Those partners were Jewish and Catholic activists, journalists, and politicians. To name a few, Abe Rosenthal of The New York Times, Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Nina Shea of Freedom House, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas.

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October 2004, Vol. 48, No. 10