The U.S. government and faith-based organizations have worked together since the dawn of the United States. The same Congress that prevented the government from endorsing or becoming too involved in religious activities through the First Amendment also set aside land for churches in the Northwest Territory, later Ohio, in the 1780s. Funds to support recently emancipated people after the Civil War were often channeled through Christian schools and agencies.
In the wake of World War II, faith-based relief organizations worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. government to deliver aid and address hunger, poverty, and displacement around the world. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration created its “faith-based initiatives” program, which made religious social-service providers—including evangelical groups—institutionalized partners of the U.S. government.
But in his second term, President Donald Trump has quickly signaled a drastic shift in this relationship. In executive orders, Trump froze federal grants flowing to religious nonprofits; terminated refugee resettlement programs, most of which are run by religious organizations; and suspended foreign aid pending review. The Trump administration effectively dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which partners with an array of religious charities and communities.
People protest at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 5. Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images
The administration’s efforts face legal challenges on multiple fronts. A federal judge in Washington ordered a temporarily lift to the funding freeze that halted U.S. foreign aid. Meanwhile, religious groups have challenged the administration’s cuts, arguing that they disproportionately harm vulnerable populations. In separate suits, multiple faith-based organizations have challenged what they say is the unlawful suspension of refugee resettlement programs.
Faith leaders fear that such measures are just the beginning of a larger realignment of the U.S. government’s relationship with religious groups toward an aggressive attitude of brute force and domination.
Speaking to Foreign Policy, David Beckmann, the president emeritus of the non-partisan Christian advocacy organization Bread for the World, called on Christians to come together for humanitarianism. “We’ve got to rally, put pressure on members of Congress, to have mercy,” said Beckmann, a Lutheran pastor and former World Bank economist. He appealed particularly to U.S. evangelicals, many of whom supported Trump. “How can you go to church and sit in the front row and support what Trump and his administration are doing to people in poverty and the vulnerable?”
Stan Mooneyham, president of World Vision International, holds a photo of a Korean War orphan in this undated photo. Sygma via Getty Images
Christian aid organizations and the U.S. government found common cause during the Cold War. According to Axel R. Schaefer, professor of North American history at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, Washington always relied on U.S. religious communities to support its bureaucratic, state-building infrastructure. But this relationship expanded significantly after World War II, as federal funds flowed into building religious hospitals, universities, international aid organizations, and social services on a larger scale.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act into law, creating a systematic and sustained foreign aid regime and establishing USAID via executive order the same day. Government officials realized that they could not support aid efforts through public institutions alone. They turned to a wide array of nongovernmental organizations, and the state welcomed religious groups into the institutional fold. As Washington sought to stem the spread of communism worldwide, the government contracted with Protestant nonprofits, Catholic charities, and ecumenical church institutions to build out a social welfare infrastructure at home and abroad.
Church World Service (CWS) was one such ecumenical relief agency. Created in 1946 as a cooperative effort between 17 Christian denominations in the United States, CWS worked to provide food and medical supplies to communities affected by World War II in Europe and Asia. The CWS mission aligned closely with the aims of federal authorities, according to its current president and CEO, Rick Santos. Finding gaps in service provision, organizations like CWS—including Lutheran World Relief and the National Catholic Welfare Council—worked to address the effects and root causes of hunger, poverty, and displacement.
Even more conservative Christians, who previously shirked close cooperation with the federal government and insisted on a stricter adherence to church-state separation, warmed to the idea of collaboration between religion and republic. They were motivated by U.S. evangelicals’ virulent anti-communism but also a concomitant fear that Catholics and more progressive protestants would be over-represented in the post-war state.
Members of the Church World Service gather clothing and supplies for overseas relief in Denver in 1967. Ed Maker/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Bob Pierce, a fired-up evangelical who was hell-bent on saving the world, established World Vision in 1950 after traveling as a missionary with Youth for Christ. World Vision sought to raise funds for missionaries and orphans, using child sponsorship programs and passionate preaching to connect U.S. evangelicals to the world. Pierce led World Vision for nearly two decades before founding another aid organization, Samaritan’s Purse, in 1970. In 2023, Samaritan’s Purse received $53.55 million and World Vision more than $661 million (nearly 45 percent of its $1.5 billion budget) in federal government grants.
Even as evangelicals warmed to the idea of working with the U.S. government around the world, they remained primarily committed to missions and evangelism, said Lauren F. Turek, a history professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Evangelicals were less interested in assisting with structural issues and more committed to conversion and building Christian congregations abroad.
This article is featured in the FP Weekend newsletter, a curation of our best book reviews, deep dives, and other reads that take a step back from the drumbeat of the news. Get the lineup directly every Saturday.
Turek noted that evangelicals would flock to Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa after natural disasters. “Though they were acting as agents of the U.S. federal government in distributing aid and providing disaster relief, they were using these opportunities to evangelize, and explicitly so,” she said. In the process, they became a “de facto representation of American power.”
These evangelicals also became champions for foreign aid in their congregations, communities, and U.S. civil society. “Evangelical leaders, missionaries, and interest groups drew on their political power and the international evangelical network they helped build to shape international relations and national policies,” Turek said. Missionaries returned to their congregations to share their experiences, informing everyday evangelicals about the state of the world.
That advocacy, along with efforts by mainline and progressive U.S. religious voices, helped create a political-religious language to talk about why the United States should be feeding the poor, helping in a famine, or providing medical care to people abroad. “It created what is often called the ‘moral imperative’ for a well-off nation to provide for those who have less around the globe,” Turek said.
U.S. foreign and domestic aid continued after the Cold War ended, and religious organizations played an outsized role in delivering it and demanding more. Despite federal efforts to cut costs, religious agencies that banked on government aid saw legislative wins in the 1990s and early 2000s: the Child Care and Development Block Grant in 1990; the “charitable choice” provision in landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation; the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which led to the cancellation of more than $100 billion worth of debt owed by poor countries; and Bush’s faith-based initiatives program, later renamed under President Barack Obama.
Another notable success came in 2003, with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). To date, PEPFAR remains the largest commitment by any country to address a single disease and has saved an estimated 25 million lives worldwide. Bread for the World’s Beckmann said that evangelicals played a critical role in passing PEPFAR, understanding they could not be indifferent to HIV-positive children or let lack of medication access lead to a generation of orphans. In both instances, Beckmann said, the consensus between religious groups and the government helped the United States provide political, moral, and spiritual leadership.
People talk at the Coptic Hospital, which receives PEPFAR funding, in Nairobi, Kenya, on Dec. 2, 2006. Brent Stirton/Getty Images
With the advent of Trump’s second term, that common cause and U.S. global leadership are under threat. When Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on foreign aid, he effectively stopped PEPFAR in its tracks. Though the administration later promised waivers to keep lifesaving treatments going and a judge ordered the aid freeze lifted, evangelical organizations such as World Relief have implored Trump to keep the program. Citing that Trump signed a five-year reauthorization of PEPFAR during his first term, World Relief urged the administration to keep up government and faith-based collaboration on public health.
Deeper currents within U.S. Christianity may explain the threats to this long-held consensus—even from evangelicals themselves. “It’s one thing to see leaders of World Relief and other agencies calling this a disaster and saying this goes against our religious mission or to not approve of the Trump administration as they are doing this,” Turek said. “It’s another to see everyday evangelicals praising Trump and holding up [Elon] Musk as a hero.” Musk has been at the controversial center of the Trump administration’s drastic cuts, including targeting Lutheran aid agencies in a post on his social media platform, X.
But some evangelicals are praising Musk (a formerly avowed atheist who says that he now believes in the “teachings of Christ”), convinced that God is using him as a “prophet-in-chief” to expose who the United States should cut ties with and laying bear what they see as un-Christian priorities in government spending
“What Trump is doing is causing havoc, setting up parallel structures, and creating new norms for U.S. power at home and abroad,” said Schaefer, noting that evangelicals were not always neo-populist right-wingers but have at times been quite progressive, particularly when it came to international aid. At other times, evangelicals have vacillated between pietistic withdrawal and politicization, he said: “We are watching the latter now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if what Trump is doing makes those rifts among them even more evident.”
To account for those rifts and the support that Trump pulls from them, Turek points to a shift among certain U.S. evangelicals that began in the 1980s away from discourses around shared humanitarian commitments and global welfare and toward spiritual warfare and dominion—believing they need to build a literal kingdom of God in defiance of what they see as the supernatural forces behind a demonic and hegemonic global order.
One of them was C. Peter Wagner, who founded the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) as a 1990s religious-political movement and called on his followers to bring the dominion of the “kingdom of God” over “whole cities and regions and states and nations.”
Then-U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to Paula White during a National Day of Prayer service at the White House on May 2, 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Wagner and others of his ilk—such as Paula White, senior advisor of Trump’s White House Faith office—do not think in terms of the traditional “international order,” religious studies scholar Matthew D. Taylor said. Instead, turning to Bible passages that speak to how Christians should preach the Gospel to the “nations” or “peoples” of the earth, they see modern nation-states as God-ordained entities meant to be dominated by the “good news”—not served by it, he said.
On the one hand, Taylor said, “their theology and prophecies tend to enshrine contemporary international borders as God-given and thus, not to be interfered with.” In this way, their perspective underwrites Trump’s more protectionist and isolationist approaches to foreign policy and aid. On the other hand, he said, “there is this expansionist, imperialist strain in their ideology when they see space for it—comfortable with calling the church and the U.S. government a colonizing force from heaven if it suits their aims.”
Either way, for many U.S. evangelicals, the impulse is that if Trump wants to do it, they justify it. “They are almost messianically devoted to the man,” Taylor said. “And so, when he wants to cut off aid to countries or stop funding certain programs once supported by Christians, they are not going to challenge him. … From the perspective of the NAR, those aren’t their Christians and that’s not their aid.”
Instead, these evangelical Christians serve as a spearhead for the far right. According to that kind of theology, foreign aid becomes heresy, empathy a sin, and love an emotion limited for those within one’s tribe, nation, or race. “If that comes at the expense of traditional evangelical institutions and priorities, they don’t care,” Taylor said. “They are not beholden to them at all.”
2025-03-14 18:00:00
Source link
