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With rich social networks and broadcast ministries, the evangelical world has no match in the capacity to mobilize grassroots pressure. From the mid-1990s onward born-again Protestants have provided the groundswell for initiatives against religious persecution, trafficking, and other abuses. This achievement is a testament to the growing reach and sophistication of evangelical leaders, but it did not come easy and is not necessarily sustainable. Despite the popular media image of a disciplined "Christian Right" drawing millions of evangelicals into its fold, Bible-believers have competing impulses toward politics in general and international engagement in particular. These tendencies had to be overcome during the antipersecution campaign and remain obstacles to sustained pressure for continued action.

One impulse in the evangelical community is to withdraw into personal piety or communal devotions detached from the wider world. Many evangelicals remain focused on the individual dimension of the faith, and their churches respond with spiritual succor, therapeutic ministries, and family support, and in some cases even promise personal prosperity. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam contends that evangelical congregations produce strong bonds among members but do less "bridging" outward.

Contrary to their "fundamentalist" image, most evangelicals are neither militant nor overly focused on politics. Indeed, overt political action often carries the taint of worldly preoccupation, which can distract the faithful from spreading the good news of salvation. Evangelicals can also be hesitant to appear too self-interested in their political efforts. Michael Horowitz found evangelicals apologetic about the past sins of Christendom and sheepish about advocating for their fellow believers abroad.

A second impulse for evangelicals, when they do engage in politics, is to focus on domestic issues. Thus the issue of persecution abroad does not always hit people where they live. Intensely concerned about their children, civic evangelicals invest heavily in battles over education, trash television, or religious rights at home. With popular culture seemingly inhospitable to "people of faith," enormous energies are spent either fighting rearguard actions against degradation of the moral ecology or carving out space for religiously grounded education. At the same time that evangelical leaders were mobilizing for international religious freedom legislation, for example, others were mounting campaigns for a "school prayer" amendment to the Constitution and legislation to broaden the judicial protection of the "free exercise" of faith.

Awareness of persecution against Christians abroad does not necessarily result in political action because a third impulse sees persecution and martyrdom as biblically foretold and even necessary for the faith. Tertullian's famous dictum—"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church"—is often quoted by evangelicals and can be used to justify political quiescence. One can pray for the persecuted, feel inspired by their stories, even prepare for a similar fate. But to expect politics to ameliorate this situation may be fruitless or even counterproductive to God's plan of using martyrdom to build the global Church. This theological justification to eschew political action, in fact, was expressed by some evangelical leaders at the first strategy meetings convened by Freedom House in 1996.

One practical problem with this theological view is that it is naive to think that persecution always results in the growth of the Church. Sometimes the opposite is the case. Thus, the pressure on Christians in the Middle East has resulted in a dramatic decline in their population since the early part of the century. Since the early part of the twentieth century the Christian population declined from 35 percent to 5 percent in Iraq, 15 percent to 2 percent in Iran, 40 percent to 10 percent in Syria, and 32 percent to less than 1 percent in Turkey.

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September (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48