Freshly slaughtered animal carcasses swung on taught ropes as a stiff breeze pushed through the bullring. The sound of bleating sheep and Brahma steers rustled in the corner alongside bloody horns strewn across the floor.Footnote 1 Outside the arena, a “carnival atmosphere” appeared with “food vendors and bright signs” filling the square.Footnote 2 Nearly ten thousand supporters pushed through turnstiles, filling seats normally reserved for watching a grisly battle. A hush fell over the crowd as a shadow appeared in the matador's entrance; a tall, strikingly handsome American ascended the makeshift stage. Billy Graham's booming baritone voice opened his pathbreaking 1962 tour in South America.
Graham, along with evangelical Protestants, struggled for hearts and minds in Cold War Latin America and they tussled in surprising and overlooked arenas, including in a fetid Colombian bullring. In organizing the tour, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) confronted discrimination and sporadic violence, scrambling to replace their stadium reservation after Catholic pressure forced the local government's hand. The New York Times quoted the mayor saying, “Only the Roman Catholic Church was allowed to propagandize in Colombia.”Footnote 3 The BGEA protested directly to the President of Colombia, Alberto Lleras Camargo, a close ally of the United States.Footnote 4 The request was ignored. This was just the beginning of challenges Graham faced in his tour across the region.
After Graham's crusade, one local Catholic newspaper claimed, “Graham oratory failed to move crowd.” The BGEA blamed the commentary on erroneous expectations of “bull fight enthusiasm.”Footnote 5 As Graham toured Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, he faced significant opposition – media blackouts, canceled reservations, violent protests, and pressure from Catholic leadership. During his Andean tour, Graham, therefore, appeared at once as the bull and the matador – a powerful white American representing a religious minority community. Local coreligionists, however, felt the brunt of anti-Protestant fervor.
The Lleras Camargo administration was well aware of Protestant persecution in Colombia. In January 1959, Lleras Camargo commissioned a report to reveal the extent of violence against religious minorities in the country during La Violencia, a period of widespread political violence between 1948 and 1959. The report concluded, “Between 1947 and 1959 Colombian Catholics had destroyed 88 Protestant churches and murdered 114 Protestants in purely religious violence.”Footnote 6 Even armed with this data, Lleras Camargo was reluctant to address violence against Protestant minorities, fearing that appealing to a tiny minority community would result in the loss of a hard-won political coalition and reignite violence besides.Footnote 7 The US government had also muted its protest at Protestant persecution, as decades of pressure had done little to alter the status quo in Colombia. Ambassador John Moors Cabot, for example, wrote in 1958 that Colombia “flagrantly violated” religious freedom but the US should avoid confrontation with the Colombian government.Footnote 8 Graham thus faced significant restrictions on Protestant evangelistic efforts in Colombia (and similar countries in the region) alongside a reluctant US State Department.
Graham's intervention was particularly salient for Colombian Protestants, as they were often linked to, and portrayed as soft on, communism. Historians, including J. D. Henderson and James Goff, have shown that Protestants often supported liberals at this time, and that Colombian Catholics did not hesitate to link them to communism in an effort to justify violence against them.Footnote 9 This discursive connection helps explain why violence against Protestants could often go unpunished, as in the case of Colombia, as well as in Mexico, Brazil, and others. It also helps explain why Graham's efforts at marshaling support for Colombian evangelicals could have a manifest impact.
In the United States, attempts to portray Catholics as weak on democracy, social order, and communism, while often successful within US borders, would have little staying power on the ground in Latin America, particularly in Spanish publications or among the general public. The Catholic hierarchy in most countries was instrumental in fighting against so-called communist forces (which were often wrongly associated with Protestant minorities) in Latin America. In the case of Colombia, as noted, they were often closely aligned with the US and its goals in the region. Dueling narratives, then, north and south of the Rio Grande, shaped perceptions and coalitions across borders.
Billy Graham's tour of South America reveals hidden networks and negotiations in the story of transnational evangelicalism and its access to global spiritual and political power as well. As Graham gathered information for his tour, the sources – John F Kennedy's US. State Department, US missionaries, and local Latin American Protestant leaders – ushered violence to the front row of his mind. Here, Billy Graham became the barometer of Cold War pressure and a measure of evangelical reach into a transnational public square. But recent studies have also demonstrated that “less powerful entities found innumerable opportunities to harness, reject, manipulate, or accentuate the Cold War in order to advance their particular agendas.”Footnote 10 In the case of Protestant evangelicals, their influence was layered and complex, reflecting the realities of cross-border religious growth. Colombia, as a conservative bastion of Catholic influence, arose as central to these hopes, dreams, setbacks, and challenges.Footnote 11
Of course, Colombia was not alone in creating a hostile environment for Protestantism. Historian Erika Helgen has shown Catholic priestly promotion within the Brazilian church hierarchy tied to the success of anti-Protestant campaigns, including those that used violence.Footnote 12 In Mexico, even during periods of relative peace between church and state, especially under the Ávila Camacho (1940–46) and Alemán (1946–52) administrations, scholars have often taken this as de facto peace between religion and state. But political shifts in fact produced the opposite effect for Protestant minorities. According to historian Todd Hartch, “The regime's decision to pursue better relationships with the Roman Catholic Church … opened the door for a widespread pattern of anti-Protestant violence and intimidation.”Footnote 13 Protestants found themselves caught in the crossfire between radical anticlericalism and Catholic religious fervor. Protestant schools, churches, and pastors were especially targeted, and both administrations failed to protect a Protestant minority during persecution. Both administrations also denied Protestant requests to open new churches. This is simply one example of many where broader scholarly narratives overshadowed the grassroots reality for religious minority communities and relegated violence to the periphery.Footnote 14
What follows is an accounting of grassroots Protestant evangelical pressure on US foreign policy and how this affective material shaped internal understanding of transnational evangelical communities. The focus of this article, while relevant to Colombian area studies, moves beyond localized readings of these events and processes. Evangelical Protestants in the US took real and verifiable violence and abstracted it. Latin American violence was wielded across borders by US actors, especially when framed in the language of religious freedom and extracted and removed of nuance. Most readers and politicians lacked the sufficient knowledge of local and contextual realities that precipitated violence. In other words, violence was not always religiously motivated but could reflect ethnic or class conflicts. A lack of knowledge of contextual realities did not blunt the affect that moved across borders and shaped the views of US evangelicalism.
In this story, Billy Graham reflected the views and shifting loyalties of American evangelicals, rather than primarily shaping them himself. For this reason, those orbiting Graham, alongside religious print media and missionary prayer letters, are an important piece in the development of our story. Yet, long before Graham and Kennedy raised the profile of overlooked South American countries in the minds of many Americans, violence in the region filled evangelical prayer letters, print media, and church sermons. This “decade of violence,” as one American missionary in Colombia put it, provides crucial background on both sides of the border.Footnote 15 All types of violence preoccupied evangelicals – Cold War, Catholic, indigenous – each piece providing construction materials to construct and divide the world into friend and foe alike. Using his rising popularity and connections, Graham funneled this violence to John F. Kennedy.
The relationship between postwar evangelicalism and the Cold War state was symbiotic. American evangelical advocacy for persecuted Christians in Latin America mingled with an embrace of US soft power and global humanitarianism. In historian Axel Schäfer's words, evangelicals “learned to stop worrying and love the state.”Footnote 16 As the BGEA planned their tour, overlapping with Kennedy, one associate wrote, “We are in touch with our own State Department officials who deal with Latin American problems and with the National Association of Evangelicals who deal in international problems.”Footnote 17 At times, the lines between evangelicals and the State Department blurred. In an official press release, the BGEA bragged about praise received from “[m]issionaries, state department representatives and other officials.”Footnote 18 While publicly rejecting political language and identification, American evangelicals leveraged relationships with oilmen, politicians, media, and military leadership to advance their goals.
In his antipersecution and anticommunist advocacy, Billy Graham continued an ongoing practice rather than inventing it. According to historian Virginia Garrard, nearly every Protestant evangelical missionary agency manifested anticommunist sentiments in their letters, publications, and sermons beginning in the 1930s.Footnote 19 In her words, “Protestant missionaries for the first time began to intentionally politicize their message by equating Protestant religion with the absolute rejection of godless communism.”Footnote 20 This was not just a local struggle in China, Colombia, or Guatemala, as in Garrard's analysis. These regional disputes began to be applied on a global scale – carving boundaries for religious communities and activism with perceptions of worldwide animus against Christians.Footnote 21
Situating the story in terms of Christianity worldwide, this is also central rather than peripheral. By the 1960s and early 1970s, evangelical Protestant missions “had totally eclipsed” rival mainline Protestant missions in terms of numbers and vitality.Footnote 22 This is a story of the mainstreaming of evangelical religion in the US and the beginnings of a monumental shift in Latin American religion. American evangelicals embraced a tapestry of motivations in the construction of their global imagination, which included primary spiritual considerations: that Latin Americans largely lacked the true Gospel message due to their Catholic religion. In terms of foreign policy, where the evangelical left called for a reexamination of global aims, many on the conservative right responded to real and perceived victimization by advocating for greater interventionism. All of these fueled evangelical advances in Latin America and the United States during the Kennedy administration.
This argument joins with recent Latin American Cold War studies, where an accent mark has been placed on “less powerful countries, groups, businesses, and individuals” who also shaped the trajectory and influence of the Cold War.Footnote 23 As a Cold War site of political and religious production, Colombia provides an ideal context for exploring the US in the world and US global reach.Footnote 24 Understanding Graham's role enhances our understanding of Kennedy's approach to the region as well, building upon the myriad of work on the influence of US corporations in shaping US foreign policy in various parts of Latin America. This is a contiguous and overlapping argument. In the scholarly literature, Graham is more associated with Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon, but this article adds to our understanding of his (and American evangelicalism's) relationship with Kennedy. All of this speaks to the long-term demographic changes in Latin America, a shifting understanding of Graham's political maneuverings and influence, and the intertwining of religious groups with political power.
LATIN AMERICAN PROTESTANT EVANGELICALISM AND COLD WAR PRESSURE
Prior to the First World War, Protestant communities in Latin America were mainly the product of early nineteenth-century immigration.Footnote 25 As the nineteenth century progressed, three realities converged in the fields of politics and religion: the independence of Latin American nations from the colonial powers of Spain and Portugal, early nineteenth-century Protestant revivalism, and increasing interventionism on the part of the United States in the region. Those factors gave rise to new missionary initiatives from the north, with especially an influx of Protestant missionaries from the United States into Latin America.Footnote 26 An increase in religious work coincided with an increasingly aggressive US foreign policy in the region, which reflected the values outlined in the “Monroe Doctrine,” first articulated in December 1823. In his address to Congress, US President James Monroe outlined three core tenets: “separate spheres of influence for the Americas and Europe, non-colonization, and non-intervention.”Footnote 27 Monroe's address was strategically “paradoxical and ambiguous,” placing a rhetorical hedge around perceived European recolonization efforts, but placing no expectations on American actions.Footnote 28 In a sense, it articulated a process that had already begun and would continue in renewed focus, laying explicit claim to influence on the Americas and acting upon this assertion with increasing vigor over the following century. The development and application of the ideas were key to the US moving from disparate colonies to global empire.Footnote 29 Anti-Protestant violence in Latin America is impossible to separate from the political power the US exerted across borders, while remaining not fully explained by US foreign relations.Footnote 30
After the Second World War, political developments accelerated across Latin America alongside an emerging urban religious economy. Domestically, rural–urban migration increasingly shifted populations to the urban centers, stretching cities to their structural capacities.Footnote 31 For the first time in Latin American history, Protestantism began gaining a demographic foothold as urbanization provided a new social context for religious life.Footnote 32 Protestant churches found acceptance at the margins of this new urban environment, growing in places that traditional Roman Catholic structures largely struggled to reach. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants thus arose from local and global realities.
Within an increasingly contested religious environment, anti-American sentiment was thick in the air. The United States was often blamed for persistent economic malaise and – perhaps most loudly – for daily atrocities committed by US-backed military regimes. By implication, many Latin American Protestants were often seen as foreigners in their own land – labeled gringos and yankees.Footnote 33 Roman Catholic priests and authorities often viewed Protestant evangelistic efforts as imposing on their religious turf. Priests and religious leaders sometimes played into these fears by stoking up mobs for violence against Protestants. Latin American evangelicals thus shared the sociopolitical context while negotiating a unique path as a religious minority community in an overwhelmingly Catholic continent.Footnote 34
The intense ideological struggle of the Cold War was an extension of European colonialism and an imagined proving ground of ideologies forged in Moscow and Washington.Footnote 35 The rivalry was a global one and Latin America and the Caribbean became a hot spot for their perceived competition. As a result, the US actively intervened within internal Latin American politics through covert CIA operations. These included the 1954 CIA-backed coup and removal of the Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, and Operation Power Pack – the second US invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965. National security concerns brought the United States and Colombia into a closer partnership during the Second World War. After the war, this partnership continued and expanded, eventually forming “the basis of a modern internal security partnership.”Footnote 36 On a governmental level, Colombia was a close ally that aligned with US goals in the region. Similarly, “with the possible exception of Rómulo Betancourt, the Venezuelan president in the early 1960s, Lleras Camargo was the most aggressively anti-Castro, anti-Communist, and pro-U.S. democratic leader in Latin America during this period.”Footnote 37
At a governmental level, by the 1960s “the problems of religious freedom in Colombia had largely disappeared from U.S.–Colombian correspondence.”Footnote 38 If, by the Colombian government's own admission, this violence was widespread prior to the 1960s, what changed? At the intersection of a Colombian government reluctant to help a religious minority community and a US government that needed Colombia to prove the successes of the Alliance for Progress, evangelicals pressed for change.
JOHN THE BAPTIST (JUAN EL BAUTISTA)
“When you go to South America, I will be your John the Baptist.”Footnote 39 With a striking biblical metaphor, US President John F. Kennedy emerged from his private White House office alongside “America's pastor,” Billy Graham. Given their often conflicting religious and political loyalties, what prompted Kennedy's promise to prepare Graham's way in the wilderness, a reference to John the Baptist's role before Jesus Christ in the Gospel accounts? A telephone left off the hook in Kennedy's office, alongside recently unrestricted documents, reveals a tense but generative encounter between the first American Catholic President and an evangelical Protestant constituency jostling for postwar political influence.Footnote 40
Behind closed doors, Graham confronted Kennedy with firebombings, lynchings, stonings, kidnappings, assassinations, and mob violence – raging, anti-Protestant violence in Colombia. Kennedy would not have been surprised by tumult in the region; he often called it “the most dangerous area in the world.”Footnote 41 Yet, according to BGEA associates, Kennedy bristled at Graham's description: “This is a false accusation. I will not buy that. Where are [Protestants] persecuted?” he reportedly replied.Footnote 42 Graham's description of a war against evangelicals did not comport with Kennedy's perception. Kennedy's staff frequently updated him on Latin American religion and politics through memos and curated data. In one instance, Brooks Hayes, special assistant to the President, described a Latin American Catholic bishop who dreamed of a Protestant church in every Latin American town.Footnote 43 Kennedy's staff painted a rosy picture of religious freedom in the region; Graham's account threatened the peaceful veneer.
Former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was also in the room, shared his own story of endemic guerilla violence during his tour the prior year, contributing to the conversation on Latin American violence while mixing in his own fears over communism.Footnote 44 After confirmation of anti-Protestant violence from his presidential aides, Kennedy picked up the phone and directly intervened on behalf of Protestants, calling religious and political leaders regarding religious violence. Kennedy wielded his soaring popularity and most likely threatened to tighten the financial spigot of the Alliance for Progress, connecting religious freedom to financial uplift.Footnote 45 When Graham returned to the White House, Kennedy vowed to end the violence against Protestants in Latin America: “I can assure you that it is going to stop and it's going to stop right now.”Footnote 46 On the political stage, the relationship between American evangelicals and global violence was symbiotic and often overlooked.
Graham's views reflected those of his evangelical Protestant constituency. While Graham had publicly pounded the drum of apoliticism, his private actions belied his conservative politics. Graham also preached a sermon on his Hour of Decision radio program addressing the unfolding crisis of communism in Latin America. Graham wondered aloud whether the Kennedy administration had acted too late and complained that “for years the policy has been to compromise, talk, retreat, and appease.” According to Graham, these events caused the “rose-colored glasses” to be removed but he argued that the US was paying for its naivety and trust of the Soviet Union.Footnote 47 Elsewhere, Graham would explicitly mention the Andes region as crucial in the battle against communism:
In my opinion, there will be an intensification of the battle between Christianity and Communism for the minds and souls of men. In Greenland's icy mountains, along India's coral shores, through the heart of darkest Africa, through the Andes of South America … the outcome will determine what kind of a world the next generation will live in.Footnote 48
Graham was certainly not alone in his anticommunist views. His convictions represented an increasingly influential Protestant evangelical constituency.Footnote 49
Graham's overlapping tours with Kennedy were not his first encounters with Latin America. Graham most famously accompanied Martin Luther King Jr to the Baptist World Alliance in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 1960.Footnote 50 During the Eisenhower administration, Graham backed the government's goals at home and abroad, quickly becoming an ambassador of sorts. This role emerged mostly clearly during his 1960 Safari for Souls tour across the continent of Africa, where a newly postcolonial region was pulled between Moscow and Washington.Footnote 51 If Graham's role emerged during this earlier work in Africa, why not Latin America, a region toward which Americans held even greater fears regarding communist infiltration?
American evangelicals planted spiritual seeds in the tilled ground of American foreign policy. The proximity between violence, anticommunism, and evangelical salvation was often intimate. Chuck Ward, Graham's director of arrangements for the 1962 South American crusade, shared his view of this American cocktail and Latin American readiness in January of that year: “In this suddenly awakened continent are people who have enjoyed their ‘siesta’ for centuries. Now they are ready for revolution. They are aroused – ready to receive any new ‘Messiah’ who will promise to satisfy their gnawing hunger … There is no barrier to communism but the Gospel of the risen Redeemer.” Ward then turned to his American readers with striking military language: “Won't you go with us in your prayer and in your support on this spiritual invasion? This is the hour of Gospel opportunity.”Footnote 52
Violence in Latin America was also a crucial lens through which American evangelicals viewed the Kennedy candidacy for President. Billy Graham and the BGEA rode the coattails of Kennedy's soaring popularity: many Latin Americans posted Kennedy's picture in their homes and embraced him as the answer to growing inequality and violence. The first Catholic US President, John F. Kennedy, aggressively courted Latin America especially through the Alliance for Progress, a robust financial and diplomatic outreach announced in his 1961 inaugural address.Footnote 53 This outreach can be quantified in real economic terms. Under Harry Truman, the US distributed only 3 percent of its foreign aid to Latin America. Eisenhower tripled the percentage to 9 percent. Under Kennedy, Latin America soared to 18 percent of the foreign-aid budget.Footnote 54 Graham and Kennedy's tours took place immediately after a transformed Colombia and US relationship. Colombia had received $500 million in US economic assistance between 1957 and 1960. Under Kennedy between 1961 and 1965 Colombia received $833 million in US economic assistance through the Alliance for Progress.Footnote 55 Overall, between 1961 and 1969, Colombia was the second-highest aid recipient in the region. Kennedy hoped Colombia would prove the successes of the Alliance for Progress.Footnote 56
Billy Graham also needed Kennedy's reach: his handsome face, diplomatic efforts, and Catholic identity. While Graham was increasingly popular in the United States, even a household name, he was almost entirely unknown in Latin America. As a result, when they planned Graham's 1962 tour, the BGEA actively paired Kennedy and Graham by placing a photograph from their recent meeting on billboards and promotional material, describing their friendship and cooperation in intimate terms. One advertisement for the Asunción, Paraguay rally (27 September to 4 October 1962) showed a picture of Graham and Kennedy shaking hands and smiling from the prior year. Emblazoned on the front was the John the Baptist quote mentioned above – Kennedy promising to prepare Graham's way in the wilderness. The advertisement concluded, “Dr. Graham and President Kennedy have had long conversations on spiritual and moral matters and have built up a strong friendship between them. They are both of nearly the same age.”Footnote 57 This was intentional marketing on the part of the BGEA. Robert Savage, American missionary to Latin America and then vice president of World Radio Missionary Fellowship, played a key role here. He wrote to Graham and Charlie Ward, the BGEA Latin America Office director, saying, “Copies of the picture with Billy and President Kennedy would be of inestimable value.”Footnote 58 As a key contact for the BGEA, Savage was also intimately aware of anti-Protestant violence from his time in Colombia – one of many contacts who channeled a context of violence to Graham, carefully sifting data for his image of the region. In the estimation of the Colombian government (the Lleras Camargo administration), much of this violence did, indeed, take place, though the stories would be abstracted and applied in disaparate ways.Footnote 59
These violent stories in Latin America took place at the edge of Vatican II and the heart of the Kennedy presidency. Not least, this story provides key background to Kennedy's famous Catholic speech and lingering anti-Catholicism in American politics. Kennedy inadvertently opened doors for evangelical Protestants on both sides of the border, polishing Protestantism's image in Latin America. After his victory over Graham's preferred candidate in Nixon, evangelicals worked with Kennedy's administration – an overlooked story of symbiotic church and state. With the United States so intimately connected to Protestantism in the minds of most Latin Americans, rehabilitating one saved the other as well. While Kennedy did not reshape the image entirely, or intentionally, he helped soften views of US religion by his outreach and popularity. Jaqueline Kennedy also played a key role here, speaking fluent Spanish to cheering crowds. The Kennedy administration took time to learn and respect the intricacies of local cultures and customs. While the Alliance for Progress was a failure in terms of policy goals, it paved wider avenues for religious advance – in this case, Protestantism. Perhaps more importantly, Catholic violence in the global South shaped views of American Catholics. This provides crucial background to evangelical opposition to Kennedy's 1960 campaign and Protestant evangelical understandings of US foreign policy in the region. None of this was possible without a longer history of evangelical engagement with Latin America and with violence in the region.
MARKETING COLOMBIAN VIOLENCE
After the Second World War, US missionaries injected energy, tension, and money directly into the spiritual bloodstream of Latin America. East Asia and Africa had long dominated evangelical Protestant missions, locations desired by aspiring American missionaries. Yet shifting political winds and a renewed sense of spiritual opportunity pushed personnel into Latin America in the postwar period. One precipitating factor was from the Chinese government, which had expelled all Protestant missionaries from the country by the year 1953. Former missionaries to China overwhelmingly chose Latin America as their new home and so-called mission field.Footnote 60
As Cold War competition accelerated, Americans flooded the market. Internal conversations within evangelical religious publications reflect this reality. Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of conservative evangelicals founded by Billy Graham in 1956, published a surplus of op-eds and articles on the pressing need for and fruit of evangelistic efforts in Latin America in the late 1950s.Footnote 61 American evangelicals would not wait or defer to the Catholic Church. On the contrary, the Catholic nature of countries like Colombia only served to motivate them. “Unlike many former Protestant leaders,” the Methodist C. Stanley Lowell wrote in Christianity Today after a visit to Colombia in 1960, evangelicals “do not regard Latin America as a Roman Catholic preserve where her ‘no poaching’ signs must be respected. They believe that freedom of religion should be a universal concept, and view every nominal Catholic – and every practicing one, too – as the legitimate object of their appeal.”Footnote 62 American evangelicals were not ashamed of their broad scope; they knew whom they wanted to target and embraced American religious freedom as justification of their advance.
Catholic officials often fiercely resisted the advance of Protestantism. In the country of Colombia, where Kennedy began his tour in 1961, violence was a preferred and continuous method for Protestant removal; the entire preceding decade was bloody for Protestants. Colombia lagged behind other Latin American countries who had taken concrete steps toward religious freedom, even maintaining an official concordat with the Vatican. The Colombian concordat signed in 1928 divided the country into mission territories, provided government funds for Catholic missions, and placed the entire educational structure under Catholic control. This calcified Catholic power and provided massive backing for their religious goals. Protestant missionaries, with their schools and churches, were quite literally imposing on Catholic religious turf. By the time of Graham's tour, the grassroots reality for Protestant minorities had significantly improved in Colombia, but the history of violence spoke strongly to the context in which he found himself.
This South American country with a tiny Protestant population, and the grueling spiritual work of US and Latin Americans there, provides crucial background to the rise of evangelical rhetoric surrounding global violence. Violent encounters abroad shaped American evangelicals as they grasped for custodial control of US culture at home. This transnational existence allowed competing paradigms to operate in their minds: they could be persecuted and thriving, shaping culture while losing their rightful place in the American public square.Footnote 63
The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), founded in 1942 as the lobbying and public-policy arm of nearly fifteen evangelical denominations, wielded these violent stories to exclude Catholics from kinship in a global family of Christianity. In one instance, US Congressman Carl Curtis of Nebraska wrote to Donald McAlpine, NAE assistant secretary of affairs, sharing “vivid stories of the known persecution in Colombia.” But McAlpine worried that the accounts would not be accepted as credible due to exaggeration and “supernatural phenomena.”Footnote 64 The NAE curated violent stories for a watching public, shaping testimonies to fit religious and political ends. In the case of Latin America, Graham maintained constant contact with the NAE, appointing its leaders to key positions in the BGEA, and using them as sources of information.
American missionaries experienced, packaged, and exported images of religious violence to a rapt audience across the border. They pushed major media outlets to cover the story, and with the spotlight, they demanded that the US government intervene. Time magazine picked up the story in April 1950, as violence raged against Protestants: “The Roman Catholic Conservatives had been systematically trying to drive the Protestants out by beatings, bombings, arson and intimidation.”Footnote 65 In the district of Cali, ten churches had recently been burned and their local pastors thrown in jail. Time also described beatings and police intimidation that were endemic to the country. The article also cited remorse from some local Roman Catholics, “The … dynamiting of the church in Dabeiba has led ... numbers of people of Dabeiba, many of them Catholics, [to express] their regrets at what happened and testify that they are not in sympathy with such violence.” Later articles in Time described violent protests against the opening of new Protestant churches, mainly mobs whipped up by local priests. In many cases, stones were thrown through the newly installed stained-glass windows. In one particular case, the signs among the mob read, “Colombia is Catholic,” and “We will not be robbed of our religion.”Footnote 66
Outside the spotlight of major print media, evangelical prayer letters brimmed with violence. That year, 1950, Ken Strachan, head of the Latin America Mission, close friend of Billy Graham, and one of the most influential missionaries in Latin America, wrote a prayer letter focussing on violence in Colombia.Footnote 67 The following year, Strachan updated American evangelical supporters again on the Colombian work:
From the human standpoint, things looked black in Colombia. With stories of evangelical chapels destroyed, congregations scattered, burning, looting, killing, schools being closed, entry to new missionaries forbidden, and restrictions increasing daily, perhaps it was excusable that we should have been thinking in terms of retrenchment, defensive measures, and hanging on until the storm lifted.
Strachan utilized military language to speak of the threat of discouragement. But his conclusion was a stark contrast to doom and gloom: “Last year we saw the highest number of new members baptized in the entire history of the work.”Footnote 68 The organic connection between violence and church growth was the expected pattern of evangelical testimonies. In another prayer letter, Strachan reflected on the violence: “It helped me realize again that beyond our talents, time or money, we have to give ourselves.”Footnote 69 American evangelicals gazed across the border and filled their minds with motivation for religious activism. The “we” in Strachan's letter expanded through trial and tribulation. While American missionaries often suffered alongside, most of the violence was against local adherents themselves. But this violence, too, circulated through American bodies – physically through missionary involvement and emotionally through US religious readership.
Local Latin Americans experienced the brunt of violence while American missionaries curated the stories, interweaving their own. In a 1987 interview, Robert Savage, an influential American missionary to Latin America, key BGEA contact, and then vice president of World Radio Missionary Fellowship, reflected on his missionary experience in Colombia, including “pots of urine dumped in [the] doorway to show … antipathy toward us,” polemical tracts written and distributed against them, and verbal abuse. In a moment of somber recollection, Savage concluded, “Surprising, the number of close missionary colleagues we've had who have suffered martyred … martyred deaths.”Footnote 70
Vivid accounts of violence were not just buried in an archive, but shared at churches, in sermons, and in missionary prayer letters. Evangelical stories of suffering were also often meticulous in their macabre details. The Confederación Evangélica de Colombia (CEDEC) compiled a list of those “killed in Colombia 1949–1958 because of their religion.” CEDEC was an interdenominational organization comprising a wide range of evangelical Protestant denominations.Footnote 71 Their eleven-year toll was 116 martyrs.Footnote 72 Documented cases were staggering in their detail, with names, method of death, and location: “Sr. Boadilio Isaza, while kneeling in prayer shot through chest by Conservative Catholics in attack on his home, San José del Palmar, Choco.” American missionaries sought to capture each bloody detail: “Exposure and starvation”; “shot after ears cut off”; “burned to death in her home”; “shot during massacre of Protestant family”; “while kneeling in prayer shot through the chest”; “shot and throat cut out in home of Protestant pastor by police & Conservative Catholics in massacre of 4 Protestants”; “Shot in his home … in massacre of 7 members of a Protestant family”; “seized by police as they broke up Protestant religious service; beaten in the chapel; taken to jail, where he was beaten with gun buts, stabbed with bayonets and drowned in a tank of cold water.”
The reply from Catholic authorities around the world was nearly univocal: accounts were exaggerated or even fabricated.Footnote 73 In a guest editorial, the Catholic Bulletin shared their own story: “In one instance, for example, these crusaders were poking fun at Catholics during a Marian parade. The natives became agitated, picked up stones and threw them at the intruders. The American missionaries cried, ‘persecution.’”Footnote 74 While doubting Protestant accounts of violence, the editorial wished more Protestants would act like Billy Graham, “who never once … has attacked the Catholic church.” In part due to the doubt of American Catholics, the National Association of Evangelicals carefully edited these stories, deciding not to share certain stories, such as castrated boys and womb removal, which they reported as too fanciful to be believed; they were clearly concerned with the reception of these stories back in the United States.Footnote 75
For many American evangelicals, violence against their religious family abroad confirmed their fears of Catholics at home. Some questioned whether Catholics were able to participate in a modern democracy with religious freedom at its core – of course, a freedom for especially Anglo-Saxon Protestant forms of religion. None questioned whether Catholics needed to be converted to their form of Christianity. When a lack of religious freedom threatened their conversionistic goals, American evangelicals turned to the government to enforce their homegrown values. They claimed to be apolitical, eschewing public displays of partisanship. But behind the scenes they embraced the power of the American state, pushing for intervention south of the border. Perhaps surprisingly, this also opened the door for evangelicals to later collaborate with a Catholic President in Kennedy. What matters here in terms of internal impact was how this story was received by US readers, how it motivated their missionary efforts and shaped their language as they lobbied their government – more than the lack of nuance in their minds or particular context of any given Latin American country.
EXPORTING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
Embodying the persecution of global Christians was simply one piece in the construction of a global evangelical imagination. Violence also carved lines of spiritual affiliation, speaking of family and foe in the same breath. While anti-Catholicism had long characterized many evangelical communities, this story in the global South confirmed many fears. It also confirmed in many evangelical minds their role as managers of America's spiritual and political compass. Violence, then, fueled evangelical political ambitions alongside a changing internal discourse about the contours of their community.
As postwar violence persisted in Colombia, Clyde Taylor wrote to Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State under Harry Truman.Footnote 76 Taylor was the secretary of affairs for the NAE and executive secretary of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (EFMA), as well as a former missionary to Latin America from 1925 to 1941 in both Peru and Colombia. Taylor was far from a marginal figure. When Billy Graham sought to understand Latin America, he turned to Taylor as one of his main sources. During his tenure at the NAE, Taylor fixated on violence against Protestants, and the complicity of Catholic authorities in these acts. Taylor wrote to Acheson protesting unabating violence against Protestants.Footnote 77 Taylor concluded one letter to Acheson with an incredulous tone: “Why did it take Bogotá officials so long to answer the urgent call for police protection of American lives and property, from the official of the United States Department of State?”Footnote 78 Taylor attempted to arouse the American government to defend their interests and US Protestants in the region.
Taylor's activism with the NAE and EFMA provides crucial background to the beliefs of American evangelicals leading up to Kennedy's candidacy for President. As the violence continued seemingly unabated, Taylor and the NAE were frustrated by the lack of intervention by the US State Department, so they tried a different strategy. The following year, on 19 January 1952, Taylor and the NAE took out a full-page advertisement in the Washington Evening Star directly appealing to American Catholics to stop the “persecution” of Protestants in Colombia. Taylor's connection of American Catholics to violence in Colombia reflected his deeply held anti-Catholicism and the broader fears in the American public of Catholics in public life. From his experience in the global South, Taylor turned toward the role of Catholics within American democracy. In a New York City speech that year, Taylor connected the persecution of Protestants in South America to the threat of American Catholics in the American public square. Catholics were wolves in sheep's clothing, he argued, only appearing as allies in a global fight against communism. “What would you do,” Taylor asked, “if such a thing happened in America? Some of the proof of these things can be observed in Washington, D.C. I am not an alarmist.” He then concluded, “If we just sleep a little longer, we will lose our freedom here too!”
While Billy Graham did not publicly share these anti-Catholic views, he trusted Taylor and turned to him for advice at crucial points in the story. When Graham planned influential global gatherings – Berlin in 1966, the Latin American Congress on Evangelization (CLADE, Congreso Latinoamericano de Evangelización) in 1969, and Lausanne in 1974 – he turned to Taylor for the planning committee.Footnote 79 Taylor was also on the board of World Vision, a massive global evangelical humanitarian organization, and was later promoted to general director of the NAE in 1963.Footnote 80 On 7 June 1961, Taylor planned a month-long fact-finding tour of Latin America and the BGEA saw an opportunity for strategic planning for their future crusades. Personal letters reveal Graham's concern regarding tumult in the region and requests for more information from BGEA sources.Footnote 81 Taylor stepped into this gap, filling minds with images of violence. As a result, Taylor, alongside other tour members, produced “country descriptions” that were widely distributed in the BGEA organization. Characteristic of Taylor's style, they shared dangers, fears, opportunities, and a sense of Catholicism's lostness in the region. Colombia proved crucial to perceptions of Latin America as a region in need of US intervention – politically and spiritually. BGEA planning memos and private correspondence described Colombia as including “highly organized physical persecution.”Footnote 82 The BGEA would later enter a “maelstrom of persecution” that had recently descended on “evangelical schools, Bible Institutes and Churches … [which were] closed, burned or bombed out of existence.” The culprits? “Bands of Romish fanatics, many times led by priests, attacked evangelical Christians … thousands of pages of documented evidence testify to atrocious beatings, rapings and killings.” This violence was generative, both for local evangelicals in the region and for Americans watching intently from across the border. When threatened with violence by a newspaper in neighboring Ecuador, the BGEA called evangelicals there “the Lord's despised few.”Footnote 83 They counted themselves among the few. Taylor's views provided a central piece of Graham's picture of the region. Taylor became a key confidant, wielding his experience in Latin America as a cudgel.
Evangelical print media and prayer letters brought random acts of violence into the consciousness of everyday American Christians. Competing paradigms arose in many minds: sanctifying persecution and identifying with violence, while lobbying the state to intervene. In other words, American evangelicals could claim political neutrality, while pushing political intervention. No other evangelical leader from this era embodied this as clearly as Billy Graham.
IN THE BULLRING
Billy Graham's encounter with Latin American violence shaped his own view of the region and, through him, US evangelical views of how to respond. Graham put a face on persecution for Catholic authorities and a watching public. In doing so, he accelerated shifts in public opinion in major Latin American cities as many voters became embarrassed by the daily discrimination that Protestants faced. In this way, Graham's tour reverberated across the region.
The timing was either impeccable or fortuitous: many Latin American cities had doubled and tripled in size over the preceding decades. Lima City, for example, contained nearly 300,000 inhabitants, according to the November 1931 government census.Footnote 84 Less than a decade later, the population had increased nearly twofold to over 500,000 inhabitants in 1940. This trend only continued, as Lima's population reached over 800,000 in 1950. Protestant churches sprouted at the edge of these sprawling urban areas, places that traditional Roman Catholic structures struggled to reach or ignored altogether. Protestants were thus ascendant and hopeful, while increasingly aggressive in their evangelistic campaigns. This was a crucial advantage against Catholic lay believers, who were increasingly admonished to evangelize their neighbors, but in an overwhelmingly Catholic continent the target was unclear.Footnote 85
When Billy Graham's plane touched down on Venezuelan soil, he was at once a diplomat, fund-raiser, and religious actor. Graham sent out an “urgent plea for definite prayer” for his tour as the Organization of American States met concurrently in Uruguay – raising Graham's awareness of the political situation surrounding him.Footnote 86 And while he launched his Latin American crusade in the highly symbolic space of a bullring in the capital city, Caracas, he was also never far from American power; he threaded a needle of religious hostility and fragile foreign relations, fronted by John F. Kennedy's aggressive effort at mending relations between the United States and Latin America. As Graham's tour wove through Latin America, the bullring followed him.
To his closest confidants, Graham expressed hesitation, amid concerns of anti-American sentiment in the region.Footnote 87 His closest staff deliberated, constantly aware of the place of the American state in the region. Even while noting anti-US sentiment, Chuck Ward, BGEA director of arrangements for the South American Crusade, wrote to Jerry Beavan in 1961, “These meetings will be the greatest thing that South America has ever seen in the spiritual realm.”Footnote 88
By April, Graham still did not share Ward's optimism. Graham wrote to James Savage, one of the most prominent American missionaries in Latin America, gauging the impact of canceling the crusades. Savage responded, “Dear Billy: Thank you for your recent word concerning the situation in Latin America resulting from the Cuban crises. All of us are keenly aware of the disturbing factors not only in Latin America but around the world.” Savage then urged Graham to press on, “continue to make plans for reaching this lost world as long as the doors are open before us,” he argued.Footnote 89 Graham persisted but with major reservations. He planned to enter the heart Latin America preaching a gospel of evangelical salvation and political stability.
Privately Graham spoke often of Kennedy and these neighborly relations, while publicly denying any political motivations or affiliation. Graham was also constantly aware of the potential for violence. In Graham's retelling, one Catholic newspaper captured it well at the time: “Never once, at least in our memory, has [Billy Graham] attacked the Catholic Church … In view of past history [in South America], where violence has so often prevailed, it is well to remember that the slightest disturbance could easily make tempers flare again. Billy Graham seems to sense this.”Footnote 90 Graham's tour created a sense of expectation and worry, all at the same time.
In his public ministry, Graham often operated in close proximity to wealth and power, even in the global South. Graham always made time for political figures and governing bodies; he was invited to speak in Maracaibo to the state legislature, where he braced himself for a “very volatile” political situation.Footnote 91 As Graham stood up to speak in the legislative assembly, he noticed soldiers unloading weapons from a truck outside. A mob of protestors had formed, chanting anti-American slogans. As he glanced out of the window, a rock shattered the glass in his face. Newsweek said Graham hid under a table, “praying the Lord’s prayer,” narrowly escaping through a back alley. “Yankee no, Castro yes!” they reportedly chanted. In Graham’s autobiography, he recalled his escort’s chilling advice: “If anyone starts shooting at you, just stop. Don’t move: they’re very poor shots, and if you start moving, they might hit you!”Footnote 92 In private BGEA memos, associates thought the protests did not involve Graham but were simply coincidental. Once again, the BGEA sought State Department advice for their tour. But the State Department was also careful to avoid an official recommendation, which would provoke protests in the region.Footnote 93
Religion was not the only disagreement between the Kennedy administration and the BGEA. Conflict over Colombia would also arise over US foreign policy and evangelical expansion on both sides of the border. For Kennedy's State Department, Colombia was also a sore spot on Graham's tour, as they sought to manage the tenuous and complex political alliances that had been forged. But to the BGEA, Colombia became their proudest accomplishment. The Colombian crusade, however, almost did not happen. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association maintained open communication with the Kennedy administration as they planned their tour, while also withholding crucial information at critical points. On 1 August 1962, Brooks Hayes, special assistant to the President, wrote to Billy Graham, “I know [the President] will be particularly interested in your forthcoming trip to the four countries in South America.” The only problem was that Graham was planning five countries. Graham and the BGEA had carefully omitted Colombia from their letters to the administration. Kennedy's State Department wrote forcefully to ask them to reconsider after the official itinerary reached their desks.Footnote 94 Telegrams arrived in October and again in November, urging cancelation. After Kennedy's own tour in the prior year, the administration made diplomatic strides in Colombia and feared that a firebrand evangelical preacher might revive religious tensions between a perceived Catholic Latin America and a Protestant United States. But in personal letters the BGEA staff were adamant: Colombia must remain on the schedule.
Violence motivated and scared evangelicals, creating a cocktail of missionary motivations. Violence was also a seed planted in the ground, whose fruit Graham could harvest:
In spite of the persecution, the Church in Colombia has grown dramatically during the past twelve years. There are a reported 65,000 evangelicals today whereas at the beginning of the violence there were only 12,000. Many of the stories in regard to Christian witness and heroism during this time read like another chapter in the Book of Acts.Footnote 95
Inside the BGEA, many were convinced that violence and the spreading of the evangelical message were organically connected. The specter of violence loomed over even hopeful accounts. Americans gazed at Colombian Christians who had persevered through significant attacks and discrimination, longing for their faith.Footnote 96
After the Andes tour, the BGEA could not resist a victory lap aimed toward donors in the United States. At times, associates drifted into stereotypes as they shared their jubilation: “The siesta is over. Yesterday's ‘sleeping peon’ that was South America has come to life … they have thrown over the institutions and traditions of the past. They are ready for revolution. What a climate into which to introduce the revolutionary message of Jesus Christ.”Footnote 97 North of the Rio Grande, Graham's Decision magazine shared, “There was never anything like it in the history of the great sub-continent and there may not be again.”Footnote 98 Billy Graham estimated that a quarter of a million people attended their crusades, with nine thousand “decisions” for Christ. While Graham noted that this was not as large as others around the world, in The Hour of Decision he would recall, “I have never seen such spiritual hunger in all of our travels around the world.”Footnote 99 Beyond a spiritual harvest, evangelical access to political power rose on both sides of the border as well. Luis Palau, perhaps the most influential Latin American Protestant evangelist today and then BGEA associate evangelist, reflected on the broader implications of Graham's crusade. While Palau did so unintentionally, in 1978 he pondered the symbiotic relationship between political power and evangelical conversion, arguing that Graham taught Latin American evangelicals “Christian statesmanship” through his tour.Footnote 100
The affect of violence from Latin America shaped how evangelicals spoke to and lobbied the US government. North of the Rio Grande, Graham pushed evangelicals to flex their expanding political muscles. When Graham returned from his South American tour, he pressed John F. Kennedy on dealing with Cuba (more on this below). We can also observe shifts in Graham's thinking. Writing from a hospital bed in Hawaii that year, Graham wrote to the Kennedy administration, urging them to “settle” the “Cuban affair,” warning that inaction would hurt the President politically. “I do not believe the American people will tolerate a Communist military base only a few miles from our shores,” Graham concluded.Footnote 101 While Graham commented on the foreign policy of the United States, he also pondered out loud his future in the political sphere:
However, I am not speaking out on these issues at the moment as I do not want to hurt or hinder the President in any way. I am thinking more and more that my job is to preach the gospel and to leave the affairs of the state to those who are responsible to conduct them.
While Graham may have personally questioned his own role in the “bullring” of politics, many American evangelicals were just beginning to throw their weight into political advocacy.
CONCLUSION
For US evangelical Protestants, the imagined space of Latin American religion and politics provided tools to shape the world in their image. Billy Graham and influential US evangelical leaders viewed Latin America as an opportunity to define their Christian identity through violence and persecution, conceiving of the region as dangerous but an opportune location for the growth of evangelical Protestantism. Evangelical discourse on worldwide persecution edited images and experiences of Christians, stoking fear at home and intervention overseas. In this wider rhetoric, Christianity became the primary victim of violence worldwide and religious freedom the language of opportunity and intervention. Politicians in the West could then weaponize the affect of anti-Christian violence, channeling emotive responses towards both national and international political ends by garnering support on behalf of their Christian constituents’ beleaguered coreligionists.Footnote 102 When viewed in this way, anti-Christian violence facilitates the imagination of a global Christianity where American evangelicals played an outsized role.
No one had greater influence on this immediate story than the American Baptist preacher Billy Graham. Graham drove evangelical advances on both sides of the border, fueled by the affect of violence in Latin America. During the Kennedy administration, Graham arose as a metaphorical matador, fighting for persecuted global evangelicals and embodying their suffering. In the global bullring, American evangelicals could flex their growing political muscles, while operating as a religious minority community – “the Lord's despised few,” in the BGEA's words.Footnote 103 Here, Graham's life, alongside the leaders in Graham's ever-growing orbit, allow for preliminary conclusions in multiple directions. To the north, Graham constructed a framework for American evangelicals to perceive worldwide persecution and identify themselves in the narrative. This, of course, derived from actual, indisputable violence against evangelicals in certain Latin American countries. But US evangelicals abstracted it, broadening its appeal, and providing flexibility for geopolitical goals. In other words, when Graham identified with the suffering of global South Christians, he also paved wider paths for evangelical advocacy within US foreign policy. Graham mirrored the hopes, fears, and political aspirations of a growing white evangelical constituency. An “evangelical internationalism” arose alongside American global hegemony, synthesizing humanitarianism with the evangelical offer of salvation. In historian Andrew Preston's words, “As the planet itself was undergoing revolutionary changes, evangelicals had adopted a thoroughly global consciousness that wedded a belief in America's global manifest destiny with a faith in the redemptive power of world Christianity.”Footnote 104 Violence is a crucial piece here, but one that is often overlooked.
To the global South in Latin America, Graham put a face on persecution for Catholic authorities and a watching public. Graham's fame and stature changed everyday life for this religious minority community in Latin America and, through them, American evangelical politics. Perhaps more importantly, Graham's tour was one of the most important events in the rise of Protestantism as a religious and political force in the region. Graham's efforts in opening up media avenues and shaming the marginalization of Protestants is crucial here. Scholars are still grappling with how this minority religious community has seized demographic and political power from Guatemala to Brazil.Footnote 105 The rise of Latin American evangelicals from persecuted religious minority to political power today remains a subject of fierce debate.
Graham was a powerful and recognizable actor, but he was not the only one. Widely overlooked is the everyday experience of American missionaries who were impacted alongside their Latin American coreligionists. This explains why the influence of missionaries continued well after postcolonial waves lapped on the shores of a revolutionary region. While power and politics hold a degree of explanatory potential, violence and the shared experience of it are just as, if not more, important. A space of solidarity for missionaries and local converts developed in the first half of the twentieth century, helping move the needle from a foreign imported religion to a widely accepted one. The work of white evangelicals in the global South is a salient piece in the construction of their global religious hegemony. Historian Todd Hartch clarified, “Because they had endured the costs of conversion, including social stigmatization and violent persecution, Protestants were especially committed to their faith.”Footnote 106 I argue that we can also expand this analysis into the construction of Protestant evangelical community and its contours. In other words, anti-Protestant violence confirmed the faith of evangelical adherents and often the exclusion of Catholics from their global spiritual family. American political power also played a parallel role alongside crucial ecclesiastical developments such as the Second Vatican Council, which softened rhetoric against Protestants.
In the postwar period, Latin America represented a strategic political region for American foreign policy and increasing focus for the spiritual mission of American evangelicals. The Latin American sociopolitical tumult – including violence – caused Graham to rethink his political partisanship as well.
In the present literature, Graham was fiercely political prior to the Nixon Watergate scandal. It was there that he was caught with his hand in the metaphorical cookie jar. But Graham was already questioning his political engagement under Kennedy, beginning to embrace what is now a common evangelical refrain: focussing on spiritual, not political, themes. This arose most prominently in the civil rights debates, where evangelicals often claimed to be apolitical in the face of growing calls for racial justice. Violence in the global South showed American evangelicals that they could embrace state intervention while claiming nonpartisanship in their spiritual activities. Anti-Protestant violence, then, illuminates a hidden history at the intersection of US foreign relations and Graham's global ministry.
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