Chapter 6 The Persian “Boomerang” The Presbyterian Mission in the United States

Christ to Caesar

During the Second World War and Cold War, some former missionaries moved “their service from Christ to Caesar.”¹³ Edwin Wright and Cuyler Young transitioned from missionary educators in Iran during the 1920s and 1930s to national security officials, intelligence operatives, and academics in the United States between the 1940s and 1960s. Neither man had reservations about leaving the church for the state, nor did they have qualms about the United States becoming an interventionist superpower. But there were differences between them. Wright was a modernist missionary who, as a career national security professional, became a foreign policy “scientist” and “hawk” fluent in the languages of Iran and the discourses of geopolitical power. Young, by contrast, had a lot in common with fellow Princetonian Woodrow Wilson, and was a foreign policy “artist” and “idealist” who never shed the curiosity of an academic or convictions of a born-again Christian.¹⁴ Wright and Young were Presbyterian missionaries in interwar Iran, but they were national servants of the American global mission during the Second World War and early Cold War. Because of these shared traits, their subtle differences produced mutually reinforcing variations on the same American mission.

Edwin Wright was from an evangelical family with multigenerational ties to Iran. As he cheekily reflected, “I began my Persian languages study during the gay nineties of the past century.”¹⁵ Edwin was born in 1897 in Tabriz, the son of Martha Evans and John Newton Wright. He and his sister, Sarah (Wright) McDowell, grew up in northwest Iran and were reared on the local languages. It was not until Edwin moved to the United States in the 1910s that he was in an English-speaking environment. Wooster, Ohio was the family’s base in the United States. After graduating from the College of Wooster in 1918, he joined the US Navy during the final months of the First World War. After the war, Wright relocated to Chicago and, in 1921, graduated from McCormick Theological Seminary. As he recalled it, “My father was a missionary and I thought I would need some theological background for work in the field.”¹⁶ However, Wright was not comfortable with theological rigidity, and he was aware that “McCormick was more ‘liberal’ than Princeton,” which in the interwar years had “militant defenders of the medieval dogma of infallibility.” Rather than study at Princeton with J. Gresham Machen, Wright opted to study at McCormick with professors such as Samuel Dickey who embraced the social gospel and other such modern forms of evangelicalism.¹⁷

Cuyler Young was born on August 16, 1900, in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Moosic. Reverend Sylvester Wylie Young moved his family frequently to pastor at various Presbyterian churches between western Pennsylvania and central Ohio. In his youth, Cuyler attended public schools throughout the Rust Belt region, and in 1915 he graduated from a high school in Savannah, Ohio, a short distance from the Wright family homestead in Wooster. He was proud to have been “born and reared in a Presbyterian manse,” and considered himself the “recipient of a priceless spiritual heritage” who could “trace my spiritual genealogy through many generations of devoted Presbyterians and staunch Covenanters.” That line continued, as three of Reverend Young’s four sons, including Cuyler, became ordained ministers. Cuyler Young was an evangelical who, in addition to his time as a minister and missionary, had a profound religious experience—a “second birth”—when he publicly came to Christ in his father’s church. That experience guided his faith and mission throughout life. According to Young, “never once have I questioned the reality of that experience.”¹⁸

Cuyler Young’s education and early career was thoroughly and intentionally Presbyterian. He started his educational career, like Wright, at Wooster, and, from 1918 to 1922, Young was “the virtual student spiritual leader” on campus. Unlike Wright, Young headed to Princeton after graduation. At Princeton, he reached “a new plane of spiritual living” and intellectual life as he read for degrees in theology and languages. After his ordination in 1925, Young was an assistant pastor at a Presbyterian church in New York for two years before leaving for Iran.¹⁹ If future generations of young Americans joined the Peace Corps or worked for nongovernmental organizations, the foreign mission field was expected of young men in evangelical families coming of age after the First World War. As Young explained it, “Most of my school intimates have, or will soon have gone to the foreign field,” and so would he.²⁰ Likewise, Wright “contemplated going to the foreign Mission field ever since I was a kid, as I was born and brought up in Persia.”²¹ Thus, Wright and Young were destined for the same place: Iran.

But they ended up there for different reasons. For his part, Cuyler Young requested to be sent to Iran. Within the context of the PCUSA’s interwar evangelical errand, he understood Iran as “a Mohammadan field, and, I believe, the strategic one.” In addition to these reasons, Young’s sister, Charlotte, taught at the Iran Bethel School in Tehran. While Young at first knew little Persian, he had, by his early twenties, learned various languages. He was eager to learn the languages of Iran and was confident that he had the “preparation and temperament … suited for work with Islam.”²² The PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions agreed, so the churchmen in New York sent Young to Iran. In Edwin Wright’s application to the Board of Foreign Missions, he professed a desire to “carry the Gospel in the East.” He recognized that his family’s history “perhaps accounts more for my decision … than any other fact,” and that “the call has been a growing one and one that has become more insistent with time.” Wright also knew that the Great War left the Christian populations of the Middle East ravaged, and, if he did not help them, he too would suffer by “paying the price of conscience.” In an emotional plea to the board in late 1919, he wrote, “The massacres in Persia and Turkey have come close [to] home to me for it was among those people that I was born and among them that I grew up and it’s there that my heart is today.”²³

Cuyler Young’s mission to Iran began on September 24, 1927, when he boarded a ship in San Francisco. After a two-month journey, he was “finally brought … across the borders of Persia.” Within days, he was in Tehran and “ready to enjoy the Christmas season there.” His first few months were “very happily spent.” During that time, his “chief task” was to learn Persian and the more diffuse “language of the spirit” that was “so necessary for communication and fellowship.” He was embraced by his new hosts, especially Iranian students, and Young reciprocated. He “tried to give as much time as possible to their companionship” and felt that “the friendships formed have been worthwhile.” Young was excited about being “transplanted in new soil so different from the old,” and in 1928 he was “looking forward with keen zest” to further “immersion into Persian life, customs, and language.”²⁴ By the 1930s, he considered Rasht “home” and reported that “the interest elicited those first years by all that was new and strange in an oriental country has been replaced by a deeper interest in the mind and heart of its people.”²⁵ All the while, Young’s views remained fluid, as he attempted “to keep such conclusions [about Iran] that may seem to be crystallizing a little while longer in solution.”²⁶

It was serendipitous that, of Wright’s eighteen years as a missionary, he was in Rasht from 1931 to 1935 for the majority of Young’s single term in the field. Wright was principal of the Presbyterian boys’ school where Young taught.²⁷ Mission teaching outside of Tehran was a relatively informal affair; the school for boys lacked many amenities and, for a time, classes were held in an Iranian home.²⁸ Students and teachers mingled in and out of the classroom and, for that reason, Young spent his time “teaching and being taught.” He taught history, ethics, and other subjects, and he practiced the local language by talking to the students in “their racy Persian.” This labor of love was “rewarding and satisfying,” and Young approached his mission each year “with even keener interest and zest.”²⁹ Both men were educational missionaries, but they were also socialites. At work, Wright kept the trains moving, yet “his genial, lovable nature wins many friends” and “an enviable place in the hearts” of his pupils in Rasht.³⁰ It was an enjoyable life along the Caspian Sea, but Young and Wright were, like many of their generation, torn between the old and new missions.

Cuyler Young was a born-again evangelical and a Princetonian who, more than Wright, believed at the time that his “first responsibility” was to the church. In the early 1930s, Young preached multiple sermons per month, almost all in Persian, along with holding chapel sessions at the Rasht school and an occasional class at the local church. He had “a splendid time” discussing such topics as the “Sermon on the Mount,” and evenings were consumed by Bible study groups, prayer meetings, and extracurricular youth work.³¹ He also went on itinerating missions with Iranian Christians outside of Rasht.³² He relished every opportunity to “humbly” live out “the highest privilege the Master has to bestow.”³³ Young self-identified as one of the “sincere seekers after truth, faithful followers of the Christ, [and] courageous comrades in the Way.”³⁴ However, he did not speak of the imminent conversion of the Islamic world to Protestant Christianity. With regard to his students, Young was “unable to reckon” the “effect on their lives” that his teachings might have made. His aim was “to give them sincere, positive and transparent friendship” and leave the rest “in the hand of our Divine Friend and Lord.”³⁵

Wright was among the modernist missionaries in Iran. This got him into trouble on more than one occasion. Years later, Wright recalled that, in 1932, a preacher from Philadelphia “decided to tour the mission field and purge it of heretics.” On that tour, “He found four—and one of the four was Edwin Wright.… He asked me if I believed Moses wrote the Pentateuch. I was honest and told him ‘No.’ ” Robert Speer and the Board of Foreign Missions defended Wright. However, from that point forward, his relationship with the evangelical network soured.³⁶ Five years later, in 1937, when applying for his final furlough, Wright’s superiors lamented that his work had an “intellectual emphasis” and was carried out in “a spirit of friendliness,” without the convictions of an evangelical. Most of Wright’s colleagues tended to “admire him as a teacher,” and even his critics recognized that “his abilities are especially needed in our schools in Iran today.” But, unlike Young, the Presbyterian Mission leadership “avoids inviting him to occupy the pulpit,” reporting that “his preaching is not desired” because of “alarms about his theology.” As a McCormick graduate, he was known to have “very liberal views” and was thought to be “progressive in thought and action.” This was no secret; Wright confessed that his goal “was to tear down the old ideas.” In the late 1930s, champions of the old mission worried that new manifestations of mission “would be fatal to our evangelistic goal.”³⁷

Wright was therefore pushed and pulled out of the evangelical network. Wright certainly felt that he was pushed out. He reminded anyone who would listen about how, when “a group of ‘Fundamentalists’ took it upon themselves to stop the spread of ‘heresy’ to the mission field” in the 1930s, “I was one of its victims.” Wright admitted that “I found ‘theology’ irrational and largely based on myths.”³⁸ But he was also pulled away from the Presbyterian Mission by his academic interest in the Middle East. To Wright, “the longer one stays out here the less interesting are the external differences between East and West and the more attractive are the essential similarities.” After all, “Psychology, the senses of need, elation, depression, joy and sadness are just the same in Persia as in America, only they come dressed up in different form.” For that reason, Wright told friends, “I’ve quit being surprised and I’ve started studying ‘why.’ ”³⁹ His curiosity grew, and in 1937 he began a graduate program in history and languages at Columbia University. Reza Shah’s educational nationalization decree, which was announced in 1939 and implemented in 1940, closed the Presbyterian Mission school in Rasht where Wright worked and was the final sign that his professional future was in the United States. Rather than return to Iran, he resigned from the Board of Foreign Missions.⁴⁰ From that point forward, Wright recalled, “the rest of my life was in secular work.”⁴¹

Cuyler Young was not pushed out of the evangelical network, but he was pulled away by the allure of studying Iran. After serving in Rasht from 1927 to 1935, Young informed the Board of Foreign Missions in February 1936 that he planned to leave the Presbyterian Mission to study the Old Testament and “Christianity and Islam as found amongst the Hebrews.”⁴² Others later concurred that Young’s experience as an evangelical in Persia compelled him to “seek the roots of Irano-Islamic culture in the academic study of its past.”⁴³ After returning to the United States, he began graduate school and earned a doctorate from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago in 1936. It was an exciting time to be at the Oriental Institute, as it was then leading the archaeological excavation of Persepolis, but in 1938 he took a professorship in Near Eastern languages and history at the University of Toronto.⁴⁴ For different yet similar reasons, both Young and Wright retired as missionaries in the late 1930s.

Because Young and Wright knew Persian, had lived in Iran, and did graduate work related to the Middle East, they were considered area studies experts in the United States. Prior to the Second World War, Orientalists trained in the history and languages of the Middle East were not necessarily pertinent to US foreign policy. However, their knowledge became valuable to the US government during the Second World War.⁴⁵ This was especially true for Iran, which became a major noncombat theater in the Second World War. The members of the Del Be Del network were generally aware of what their own did during the war. It was public knowledge, for example, when someone entered the government or joined the military. There were, of course, gaps in knowledge and details unknown to family, friends, and the public, especially regarding intelligence work. In her brother Edwin Wright’s case, Sarah McDowell informed readers of the Del Be Del newsletter that “we shall have to wait until after the war for the story of their activities and experiences.”⁴⁶ Since McDowell wrote these words in 1944, governments released records, participants published memoirs, and historians have written about US intelligence during the Second World War.

When the war started, there were reportedly six American scholars with knowledge of the Persian language.⁴⁷ These Persianists, like other area experts, were founding members of the US intelligence community. The Coordinator of Information, established in 1941 by President Franklin Roosevelt prior to the attacks on Pearl Harbor, was rebranded the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in June 1942. William “Wild Bill” Donovan directed operations and was supplied with reports from the Research and Analysis (R&A) branch in Washington. Early information came from research at the Library of Congress, and reports were for White House consumption. With the establishment of OSS came different clients, such as the US military, and a more sophisticated intelligence net to inform wartime strategy. R&A was divided into regional branches, and Iran was in the Near East section. Edwin Wright was an early analyst, and Cuyler Young was the longest-serving Persianist in Washington during the war years.⁴⁸

OSS attracted young academics to Washington, DC, for work. From 1941 to 1943, Wright combed through the Library of Congress holdings on Persia and wrote reports to inform the Allied occupation of Iran. His first report on the Iranian rail system so impressed his superiors that, as Wright boasted, they “immediately offered me a captaincy in Intelligence.”⁴⁹ For his part, Young took leave from the University of Toronto and went to Washington to be an analyst with R&A.⁵⁰ Upon Wright’s departure from Washington, former missionary colleagues learned that “Cuyler Young took up the work Edwin laid down.”⁵¹ Until 1944, Young analyzed sources and authored reports to inform the American war effort. Generally, Young’s reports tended to be on political affairs and were more synthetic than Wright’s targeted reporting on specific items such as the railway.⁵² Despite the reputation that US intelligence agencies acquired during the Cold War, OSS provided idealists with an opportunity to hitch their missions to the affairs of state during the Second World War. As a missionary in the early 1930s, Young got on well with those who thought that Americans in Iran might “solve the Depression and set the world at rights.”⁵³ As an intelligence analyst in the early 1940s, he admired government men in Washington who possessed “a real social vision and idealism which I find congenial.”⁵⁴

Doing research in Washington was one thing, but joining the US military was another, and that was what Wright did. He spent the latter years of the war whisking about the Middle East as an officer with US Army intelligence. His first deployment was to Iran in 1942. But he was quickly recalled when the Soviets, nervous about his linguistic abilities undermining Russian secrecy and security in their occupation zone, opposed the assignment on grounds that Wright was “an American spy and a dangerous character.”⁵⁵ The Army pulled him back to Cairo, the hub of the Anglo-American war effort in the region. The Del Be Del network knew that he was with the US Army, and old friends and new acquaintances stopped by Lieutenant-Colonel Wright’s office at “the crossroad of the East” to share information and a meal before continuing on to their respective missions “somewhere east of Suez.”⁵⁶ In Cairo, Wright oversaw a team of agents, many of whom worked in the region’s languages.⁵⁷ Reports came from two sources—Washington and the field—and Wright was, at different points during the war, on both ends of the intelligence chain.

Despite protestations from Moscow about “anti-Soviet activities by American representatives in North Iran,” the United States kept active agents in the country throughout the entirety of the war.⁵⁸ The first two OSS field agents in Iran were specialists in art history and archaeology. The first to arrive in September 1941 was Joseph Upton of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; OSS deployed Donald Wilber in May 1942. They were not former missionaries, but their Orientalist training and in-country contacts from years living in Iran gave them much to discuss with people such as Edwin Wright. At first, agents in Iran wrote directly to the United States, usually on subjects that dealt with the German military advance. However, in late 1943, the Cairo station became the middleman between Tehran and Washington. As the German threat receded, reports passing through Cairo prioritized Iran’s political affairs and Soviet intentions.⁵⁹

Through the OSS network, the American mission in Iran shifted to containing communism between 1944 and 1946.⁶⁰ Edwin Wright told an interviewer later in life that, while being stationed in Cairo was “the way we had to do it … I made frequent trips there.”⁶¹ This was a veiled reference to the revival of his clandestine activities in Iran in August 1944. With the Cold War looming, his return to Iran signaled a more aggressive, anticommunist US mission, and a diminishing concern about appeasing the Soviet Union in what was, to that point, its sphere of influence. While Upton and Wilber were two of the eight “positive-intelligence” agents in Iran, Wright and a fellow Army officer were “active OSS espionage agents” embedded in the Persian Gulf Command and tasked with monitoring the Soviet Union. Because of his language skills and familiarity with the country, Wright was an agent “of the highest possible calibre” whose reports from Iran were “exceedingly valuable” to colleagues in Cairo and Washington. However, there were dangerous implications to this anticommunist crusade. According to the historian Adrian O’Sullivan, “the intelligence Cold War actually began in Persia in the long hot summer of 1944.”⁶²

After the war, Wright was among the wartime area specialists who stayed with the government and infused US national security strategy with an anticommunist mission.⁶³ He was discharged from the Army as a lieutenant-colonel in February 1946, but not before receiving the Legion of Merit award for his “untiring efforts” in analyzing and generating “political and economic [Middle Eastern] intelligence of great value.” In Cairo, he was praised for the context he brought to the analysis of intelligence, which “made it possible for him to amplify and supplement … the fragmentary reports produced in the field.” In Iran, he was commended for working “without consideration for his own comfort or safety” during his “frequent trips to remote localities.” After his discharge from the military, he took a civilian post in Washington. This was the job description forwarded to his sister for the Del Bel Del newsletter: “Foreign Service Official in the Policy Branch, State Dept., Middle Eastern Division.”⁶⁴ For a time, Wright was in the “specialist corps,” a select group of experts, most all former OSS hands, which gathered knowledge on all parts of the world. He briefed secretaries of state, wrote reports on subjects such as oil, and talked geopolitics with “the creme de la creme in the State Department.” It was Loy Henderson, the future ambassador to Iran, who ultimately brought Wright from the Pentagon to the State Department to be a floating “sharpshooter on anything that happened” in the Middle East.⁶⁵

With Edwin Wright in the United States working to expand the national security architecture, Cuyler Young went back to Iran in 1945–46 as the Cold War ratcheted up. In early 1945, the Del Be Del community learned that “Cuyler is the latest ex-Irani to return to the ‘old country.’ ” This time, “He is addressed in care of the American Embassy,” rather than the Presbyterian Mission’s Central Compound.⁶⁶ His title was “public affairs officer,” but, given that his most recent employer was OSS and not the Foreign Service, he was likely with the intelligence community during this stint in Tehran.⁶⁷ Word of his return spread through the city, and, as Young reconnected with old friends, he realized that he had “an interesting piece of work to do.”⁶⁸ What began as an attempt, toward the end of the Second World War, to polish America’s image, which was sullied during the occupation, ended as an exercise in Cold War crisis management. As Wright and Young attempted to balance their professed love for Iran with their professional work in diplomacy and intelligence, their missionary friends could only speculate about how they would fare. “The last I heard of him he had seen my brother Edwin,” Sarah McDowell wrote. “Good luck, Cuyler, in your ‘tight rope walking.’ ”⁶⁹

In March 1946, when Iran—more specifically, the communist-controlled separatist provinces in Iranian Azerbaijan—became the first major test of the Cold War, Young in Tehran and Wright in Washington helped the US government navigate the crisis. During the Azerbaijan crisis, Young was at the US embassy in Tehran. He witnessed firsthand that the Soviet Union was prepared to utilize “every device of unscrupulous propaganda” at its disposal to accomplish its strategic aims, and he concluded that “American information services have an extremely important task to perform” in countering communism.⁷⁰ When the crisis hit, Wright was at the Iran desk of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. He wrote reports and traveled between Washington and New York to attend the United Nations deliberations on Iran. He also briefed US cabinet officials. When asked by Secretary of State James Byrnes about Soviet intentions, he was frank in his response: “There can be no doubt.” The Soviets wanted to make Iran “a satellite state.” Wright called for action to let the Soviet Union know, “You’re not fooling us.”⁷¹ For various reasons, the Red Army withdrew from northwest Iran. Despite their differences, Young and Wright were, like their friends in the Del Be Del network and their colleagues in the US government, anticommunists who viewed the Soviet Union as an existential threat to their respective missions.

After 1946, Edwin Wright and Cuyler Young took different paths. For his part, Wright remained in Washington and was the quintessential national security professional. He spent most of his working hours at the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Wright was a champion of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and, as such, helped to institutionalize the Greek, Turkish, and Iranian desks in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.⁷² On one occasion, he was “loaned” to Voice of America “to set up their new program of broadcasting to the Middle East and Greece.”⁷³ Outside of government, he cofounded the Middle East Institute, lectured at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and engaged in a range of other educational and defense-related work in and around the Beltway prior to his retirement in 1966.⁷⁴ By contrast, Professor Cuyler Young spent his postwar career in academia, beginning in 1947 at Princeton University, where he ran one of the first interdisciplinary programs in Middle Eastern studies in the United States.⁷⁵ Rather than become a government careerist with a role in US policy making, Young’s lasting contribution was to the academic field of Iranian Studies.⁷⁶

After their early work as Presbyterian missionaries in Iran, Wright and Young had second careers in the United States. In and around the nation’s capital, they were the Persianist fulcrum of the knowledge-power axis in US-Iran relations during the Second World War and early Cold War. Despite their similarities, there were subtle differences between them. Young, who spent most of his career in academia, retained the idealism from his missionary days and worried about “the problem of westernization in modern Iran.” Wright, a modernist within the context of the Del Be Del network, was a realist who thought about “conflicting political forces” for the US government.⁷⁷ During the early 1950s, they had different views about Mohammad Mosaddeq and Iranian nationalism. After the 1953 coup, those differences became more pronounced, and Cuyler Young was unique in the Del Be Del network in openly opposing the Pahlavi government during the 1960s.⁷⁸ The geopolitical boomerang that followed Wright and Young from Rasht to Washington, DC, incorporated all the contradictions of the US global mission.

Alborz College in America

Alborz College operated in Tehran for fifteen years from 1925 to 1940. Walter “Buddy” Groves (at Alborz from 1925 to 1940) and Ralph Cooper “Hutch” Hutchison (1925–31) taught philosophy, ethics, and religion. Each also held deanships, as did Herrick “Ricky” Young (1927–38), an English literature professor and residential director.⁷⁹ After Alborz College closed in 1940, these three men became presidents of Presbyterian liberal arts colleges in the United States. Hutchison was in Easton, Pennsylvania, managing Alborz’s longtime sponsor, Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Groves and Young were in the Ohio River Valley, only three hours apart at Centre College in Kentucky and Western College in Ohio, respectively. In the United States, each former missionary addressed two challenges. The first was particular to their educational mission: the meaning of “the Christian tradition in the liberal arts college.”⁸⁰ The second was the “American dilemma,” or racial segregation in the United States.⁸¹ As in Iran, the new mission had sociopolitical implications in the United States, where veterans of Alborz College attempted to align the Christian liberal arts with mainline Protestantism’s understanding of civil rights.

Groves and Hutchison were, unlike many missionaries, from lay families. Groves was born in 1898 and grew up in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with an English mother and a father from what later became Northern Ireland. He graduated from the City of Philadelphia’s Central High School and started at Lafayette College in 1915. In college, Groves was a noncommissioned officer in the Student Army Training Corps, and he was confronted with the possibility of deployment to Europe in 1918. Because he was “near-sighted and wearing spectacles” and “didn’t want to get engaged in any hand-to-hand combat,” Groves opted for Army Field Artillery. The war ended when he was in training camp and, when given the choice, he “chose to go back home as fast as possible.” After the war, Groves graduated from Lafayette and attended Princeton Theological Seminary before turning to doctoral studies in education at the University of Pennsylvania, which he completed in 1923.⁸² Hutchison grew up across the country in Colorado, where his father was a medical doctor. He graduated from a high school in Denver in 1914 and, after two years at a college in Kansas, transferred to Lafayette, where he met and befriended Groves. Hutchison graduated in 1918 with a degree in English literature and joined Naval aviation during the final months of the war. Like Groves, he never saw combat, and Hutchison likewise received his ordination from Princeton in 1922 and doctoral degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1925.⁸³

During college, the two young men became lifelong confidants. “I have been very close to Hutchison for the last six years,” Groves wrote in 1922 about their time together as fraternity brothers at Lafayette and at Princeton, where they were “always rooming near enough to be in very intimate contact with one another.”⁸⁴ He remembered the late Hutchison in the early 1980s as a “long-time colleague, friend, and everything.”⁸⁵ Each was an evangelical, with Groves’s Presbyterianism rooted in the old world and Hutchison’s on the American frontier. Both were also products of the American Progressive Era and involved with groups such as the Intercollegiate Prohibition Association.⁸⁶ While Hutchison had the occasional conflict with an “ultra-pious individual,” he was a moralist who frowned on the “low-side of things.” He was, to Groves’s estimation in the early 1920s, “a Christian whose [beliefs] and aims are in many respects the same as my own.”⁸⁷ Despite their religiosity, Groves and Hutchison were less connected to Presbyterian churches than to Presbyterian schools, abroad and at home, and they were among the first generation of Americans to earn doctorate degrees in education.⁸⁸

Herrick Young maintained a degree of separation from Groves and Hutchison but nonetheless shared in the same educational mission. Born into a ministerial family in Wisconsin, Young graduated from Indiana University and was a journalist for the Associated Press, a job that took him to Iran and instilled in him a desire to understand the world. He studied for a master’s degree in Middle Eastern literatures and languages at Columbia University with A. V. Williams Jackson and, similar to his Alborz College colleagues, earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. While Groves and Hutchison were professional educationalists, Young was a trained Orientalist. Wherever he was, colleagues knew that “Dr. Young finds an outlet for his international interests.” Usually administrative outlets, he worked with the New York International House, the Student Volunteer Movement, and the Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students, among other organizations prior to the Second World War.⁸⁹

All three men worked at Alborz College. Samuel Martin Jordan labored for years to build and staff Alborz College, and, to faculty recruits like Groves and Hutchison, it appeared that “Jordan sometimes builds his air castles a little too rapidly.”⁹⁰ Yet this castle materialized. By 1923, “Dr. Jordan … has seen both of these men and has been especially interested in getting them out to Persia … since he wants to staff the college as far as possible with Lafayette men.”⁹¹ Groves’s appointment was all but assured because “the students at Lafayette have raised $1500 toward ‘Lafayette in Persia,’ and would like to send Mr. Groves out as their representative under this fund.” It was clear to all that Groves “desires to go directly to Dr. Jordan’s school.”⁹² Hutchison’s fate was in the hands of the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions, which Jordan pressured to secure the appointment.⁹³ In summer 1924, Groves and Hutchison received their marching orders.⁹⁴ They would, along with Herrick Young and Jordan’s other recruits, begin at Alborz College for its first semester in fall 1925. While faculty members came and went, some were at the college for its entire existence. Groves was at Alborz to the end, well after Hutchison and Young had gone home.⁹⁵ Alborz College closed in 1940, and their cohort “was mid-wife at its birth and priest at its funeral.”⁹⁶ Afterward, Groves, Hutchison, and Young were trustees on the US-based Alborz board, and in 1947 they sponsored the Alborz Foundation in Tehran to carry on the college’s name and legacy. Moreover, their experiences in Tehran informed their presidencies at Presbyterian liberal arts colleges in the United States.

Institutionally, Centre, Lafayette, and Western represented different traditions within America’s parochial system of higher education prior to the coeducational turn in the 1970s.⁹⁷ At Centre College in Kentucky, Groves administered an institution with male and female campuses that did not integrate until after his presidency. He once raised the possibility of gender integration, and, to Groves’s recollection, “I was tromped on so emphatically that I didn’t bring it up again.”⁹⁸ At Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, Hutchison continued on Alborz College’s masculine elitism. Alborz brochures branded the college as “a factory in Teheran where they manufacture men.”⁹⁹ Hutchison carried on this educational mission, which aimed to cultivate civic “manhood,” at Lafayette, one of the many private schools in the northeastern United States that were historically reserved for elite American young men.¹⁰⁰ As a parallel to Lafayette’s masculine model, Western College’s mission was based on the idea of “noble womanhood.”¹⁰¹ The women’s college in Ohio had female and male presidents prior to its incorporation into Miami University in the 1970s. At midcentury, during Herrick Young’s presidency, the college upheld traditional notions of gender but also provided opportunities for women’s advancement in the political and professional spheres.¹⁰² Whatever the institutional or regional context, the new mission from Alborz College informed the vision of all three presidents as they handled the educational affairs and social responsibilities of their respective colleges in the United States.

Groves was, for most of his US career, an advocate of the Christian liberal arts at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Groves’s first stateside job was at Centre, as a professor of religion and philosophy from 1940 to 1942. For the next five years, he was at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, but in 1947 he returned to Danville as president of Centre.¹⁰³ In his inaugural address, President Groves outlined the model of the Christian liberal arts that he acquired in Tehran and hoped to apply in Danville during the next decade. According to Groves, “The long struggle between rationalistic deism and the Christian faith for the control of higher education in America” had taken on new proportions. He and other evangelicals were alarmed by Harvard University’s report on “General Education in a Free Society.” Published after the Second World War, the report went beyond parochial schools to evaluate the broader “American scene.” Given the diversity of educational models in the United States, the authors “did not feel justified in proposing religious instruction as part of the curriculum.” To evangelicals, this view was “candid enough, but singularly weak.” In his commentary from the dais in Danville, Groves argued that “the secularism which has prevailed for the last generation” was unnecessarily pitted against “an educational philosophy which is Christian through and through.” He and other evangelicals believed that the Christian liberal arts could “revolutionize and revitalize American education,” and that the modern sciences had a place alongside religion in the curriculum, as they had at Alborz College. However, according to this view, the disciplines should be studied “to know God’s will for men” and to decipher “the ultimate values of the universe.” More broadly, Groves used his inaugural address to make the case for the transformative potential of the Christian liberal arts.¹⁰⁴

Groves and Hutchison had different views on the place of God in American higher education. Hutchison’s educational mission linked civic education with the needs of government and industry. In the early 1930s, at the age of thirty-three, he leveraged his experience in Tehran to become “one of the youngest college presidents in the country.” His first post was at Washington and Jefferson, a Presbyterian college southwest of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. During the Second World War, Hutchison moved to the state capital, Harrisburg, to direct the Pennsylvania State Council of Defense. In this position, he worked alongside people of power and influence and established himself as a leading link between academia, government, and industry.¹⁰⁵ After the war, Hutchison was the president of Lafayette from 1945 to 1957. By this point, he did not believe that religion had a place on campus. Groves later recalled that, during his Centre College presidency, Hutchison “thought I was wrong” and that “our relationship with the church was too close.”¹⁰⁶ Hutchison was the outlier, as Groves and Young considered religion the bedrock of a liberal education.

At Western College in Ohio, Herrick Young put forward a model of the global liberal arts. Prior to becoming Western’s president, Young was an administrator with the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions in New York. He never severed faith from his professional life, but he was a modernist during his presidency at Western College from 1954 to 1969.¹⁰⁷ To materialize his educational vision, Young modernized the Western College curriculum. After discovering that students could graduate without reading Charles Darwin, he asked faculty to create a course on the theory of evolution and “the contribution of science to world culture.” In addition to science, the new administration steered away from the Eurocentric model of the liberal arts. Young believed that knowledge “should not begin and end in Europe,” and he urged the faculty to erase “traditional lines” and ensure courses were “taught in a world framework.” By the 1960s, the women of Western could major in subjects across the humanities and the sciences and participate in a first-class study abroad program. To Young, the “starting point” was to acknowledge that “the Christian college cannot and must not be an ivory tower.” The goal of such colleges was to graduate “Christian citizens of the nation and of the world.”¹⁰⁸

This meant that, in addition to meeting the curricular and extracurricular mark, each president confronted racial segregation at their colleges and in society writ large. The “separate but equal” precedent from the Jim Crow era held through most of the “golden age” of American higher education.¹⁰⁹ This was true even after the Supreme Court declared segregation illegal in graduate and legal education in 1950, and in K-12 education in 1954. In some cases, colleges ignored court rulings, and, in others, institutions merely updated admissions and hiring policies without changing practices. It was not until well after the 1964 Civil Rights Act that serious moves toward integration began on most college campuses across the United States.¹¹⁰

Nearly two decades earlier, in 1946, the PCUSA embraced the call of the ecumenical Federal Council of Churches (after 1950, the National Council of Churches) to create a “non-segregated church in a non-segregated society.” The PCUSA established a commission on race, and various factions of Presbyterians racially integrated their synods in the 1950s. The pace toward racial equality within the church quickened after 1958. The UPCUSA elected its first Black moderator in the 1960s, and there were Presbyterians in the north and the south who pressed for racial equality and contributed to the Civil Rights Movement.¹¹¹ Nevertheless, desegregation was uneven across the Presbyterian college network, which was an important testing ground for interracial education. As the scholar Dafina-Lazarus Stewart explained of liberal arts colleges: “Institutions were either inclusive and affirming, open but ambivalent, or closed and threatening.”¹¹² Alborz College in America, as understood through the case studies of Lafayette, Centre, and Western Colleges, provided examples of all three approaches.

Though limited, racial barriers were broken during the Hutchison administration at Lafayette. He took an early position on racial integration, albeit a cautious one in an old Union state and at an institution whose namesake was a French abolitionist.¹¹³ The discourse of masculinity that pervaded Hutchison’s worldview and the Lafayette campus made for elastic racial boundaries. The admission of two Black students in 1947 was potentially less controversial to opponents of racial integration upon learning that both were veterans of the Second World War and members of the Tuskegee Airmen before matriculating at Lafayette. One of the students played on the football team. Problems arose when—months after the end of the 1947 baseball season, in which Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier in professional sports—Lafayette’s football team was informed by the hosts of a bowl game that no Black players could take the field in Texas. Hutchison protested, petitioned the White House, and ultimately rejected the offer to play in the game. In these ways, the Hutchison administration used the platform of an elite northern school with an international profile to move toward desegregation.¹¹⁴ However, gradual change at a Little Ivy was not the same as desegregating a private parochial college in the Jim Crow South.

Groves encountered the biggest obstacles to racial integration. The national feud over school desegregation ripped through the border state of Kentucky during the 1940s and 1950s, much like the conflict over slavery had a century earlier. In 1866, with the Civil War over, a Kentucky court divided the state’s Presbyterian colleges between the PCUSA and the Southern Presbyterian Church; Centre College went to the PCUSA.¹¹⁵ In a reflection on the college’s divided history, Groves observed that Centre’s administration and faculty were “largely composed of Northern men,” but “the students were mainly Southern, many from the ‘Deep South.’ ” A comparable division ran through the college board of trustees during the Groves presidency. In his reading of history, Groves searched for a template for navigating the old and new lights of his day without getting burned.¹¹⁶

When Groves called for desegregation, some college leaders, trustees, and community members reacted with hostility. Kentucky’s “Day Law,” which in 1904 made integrated education illegal, was amended in 1950 to allow Black students to attend institutions of higher education in the state. With this change, in May 1950, Groves asked the Centre trustees to revise the college’s segregationist policies. Groves supported the admission of a Black student to summer courses in 1950, but the board demurred, despite the fact that the majority of the faculty and student body had few qualms with integration. In 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education, the PCUSA and Southern Presbyterian Church called for schools in their respective networks to admit students of all races. Pressure to desegregate now came from the US government, Presbyterian churches, and, at least at Centre, the college president’s office. Notwithstanding these sources of pressure, a Black applicant in summer 1954 was informed of “the present policy of Centre College to refuse admittance to Negroes.” At this point, as college historians noted, “Groves was placed in the difficult position of advancing his personal views against the resistance of some members of the Board of Trustees.” The PCUSA informed Groves that “Centre stands alone now in our group in the uncompromising attitude that is taken on the matter.” In fall 1956, he helped to get a Black student into an evening class, and in early 1957 the board attempted, but failed, to force Groves from office. He resigned on his own terms in April 1957. This was more than one year before Centre changed its policies, and four years before the first Black student formally enrolled at the college.¹¹⁷

All sides involved understood that Groves was ideologically out of step with the other powers that be at Centre College. Local reporters found that, in the mid-1950s, “the old Bluegrass town of Danville has been stirred to its historic foundations.” The reason was because Presbyterian church leaders were attempting to “whittle away at trustee opposition to desegregation” as locals in Danville complained that “Dr. Groves is ‘just too liberal.’ ”¹¹⁸ Within a year of that report, President Groves tendered his resignation. To Groves, “This whole affair is as incomprehensible as it is regrettable.” Hutchison knew that his friend’s resignation ended an “intolerable” situation that “arose out of the general irritation on the segregation issue.”¹¹⁹

The situation was different at Western College, where Herrick Young, long a proponent of African American civil rights, was president. In 1946, as an administrator with the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions, Young articulated a “Christian global strategy” that linked the religion’s standing in the world with the resolution of racial injustices in the United States. “What happens in Georgia or anywhere else in our country on the racial front quickly spreads to other parts of the world,” Young preached from the pulpit of New York’s West End Presbyterian Church.¹²⁰ He took these views to Western College, whose international student body included young women from Africa.¹²¹ Similar to the gendered dynamics of desegregation at Lafayette, Western’s international model of women’s education hastened integration on campus and informed broader conversations about racial equality. In 1964, the campus in Oxford, Ohio, was a staging ground for the Civil Rights Movement’s voting drive in Mississippi.

Shortly after the end of the spring semester in 1964, Western hosted a two-week training seminar for the volunteers of the “Mississippi Freedom Summer” voting drive. The event was coordinated in Mississippi by the Council of Federated Organizations, but it was organized by the National Council of Churches in cooperation with other religious and secular organizations. It took a national effort to get between seven hundred and eight hundred predominantly white northern college students recruited, trained, and deployed to Mississippi. As other college presidents distanced themselves from the movement, Young, according to Western College archivist Jacqueline Johnson, “made the bold and controversial decision” to host. “As an institution with a Christian emphasis and an integrated student body,” Young explained in his announcement in early June, “The Western campus is an appropriate setting for such a program.”¹²²

There were other civil rights seminars on Ohio campuses during the 1950s and 1960s, but the one at Western in 1964 was most significant.¹²³ It took place in late June, and, as a scholar at the college explained, “The Oxford training was the one moment when all of the activists were in one place.” That included college students with a conscience; people of the cloth who believed in racial justice; African American civil rights organizers; and men and women of different ages, races, and religions. The activists who descended on Oxford from different parts of the country participated in seminars, sang hymns, and shared other common experiences. Tragically, they confronted their mortality after learning about the murder in Mississippi of Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. The murders emboldened the activists, as seen in the work of the Friends of the Mississippi Summer Project. This Oxford-based group supported the Mississippi-bound youths, and it was among the most effective “Freedom Centers” in the United States. As a result, the training seminar at Western was “a critical threshold” in the Civil Rights Movement. It was the launching point for Freedom Summer, and it graduated “a new cadre of activists who would go on to contribute to social change movements over the next decade.”¹²⁴

Herrick Young, along with Walter Groves and Ralph Cooper Hutchison, fused the Presbyterian and American missions, and their experiences at Alborz College informed their college presidencies in the United States. In interwar Tehran, as missionaries at Alborz College, they offered an educational program that claimed to transform individuals and graduate students who would, in turn, transform Iranian society.¹²⁵ In the postwar United States, all college presidents outlined their understanding of the Christian liberal arts, and they attempted to address social problems such as racism in institutionally specific contexts. The Persian boomerang meant that the Alborz College mission informed conversations about religion and race in American higher education decades after it closed in Tehran.

Old Mission, Neo-Evangelicals

William Miller and John Elder had second careers as evangelicals in the United States after retiring from the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran. Miller retired in 1962 to the Mount Airy neighborhood of northwest Philadelphia, and in 1964 Elder settled on a farm in southcentral Ohio. The two men, whose missionary tours began after the Great War, lived into the early 1980s and early 1990s, respectively.¹²⁶ During their long careers, which coincided with an era of rapid globalization, they learned that “it is no longer necessary to cross the ocean in order to be able to tell the Good News of Christ.”¹²⁷ Wherever the audience, the old mission of Christian outreach to Islam, which had expired in postcolonial Iran and on America’s Protestant mainline, was born again in the United States within the neo-evangelical culture of the 1960s and 1970s.¹²⁸

The Presbyterian Mission in Tehran produced few “fundamentalists,” but there were major differences between the old and new missions in Iran.¹²⁹ Despite the conservative aspects of their worldviews, Miller and Elder were careerists for four decades with the mainline PCUSA. Later in life, Miller reminded an interviewer at Wheaton College that, during the interwar years, the creation of conservative and independent mission boards “did not seem to affect us in Iran,” where “we were loyal to our board and to our leaders.” Miller considered the PCUSA’s mainline lay administrator, Robert Speer, one of “God’s Mighty Men.” The PCUSA and the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran were home to proponents of mission, both old and new, and Miller appreciated that “in the Presbyterian Church there are people who love Christ but [t]hey have different understandings of what their Christian duty is.”¹³⁰ However, in Miller’s own faith, “the Bible is believed, it is true, it is God’s word.” Reflecting on his time in Iran, Miller recalled in another interview that “the members, almost without exception, of the Presbyterian mission … are Bible believing people.” Miller told this interviewer, with the Presbyterian Historical Society, that he was “glad that the Iranian Church was not plagued with a lot of heretical ideas or too liberal ideas,” as he believed was the case in places such as China.¹³¹ In 1979, during the Iranian Revolution, Miller did not go to the US government or academic conferences to discuss the situation; he appeared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club.”¹³²

John Elder was a “church-planter” and, with Miller, the leading light of the old-school evangelists in Iran.¹³³ Elder’s theology stressed the supremacy of scripture and its value to religious questions rather than ethical-historical inquiry. He decried the “general disbelief in the Bible” that prevailed among “most educated people,” who “considered the Bible a collection of myths and fables” or even “a primitive superstition.” It was not just intellectuals, agnostics, and atheists who held that view, but also many American Protestants during the mid-twentieth century. Elder rejected that view. At the same time, he did not agree with those who “insisted that the Bible must be true because it was the word of God.” In addition to other problems, this was “no answer to give the sceptics.” Elder argued that everything from Christian literature to “biblical archaeology” could reinforce Christian witness and keep evangelicalism rooted in the missions spelled out in the Old and New Testaments.¹³⁴ Yet, Elder espoused a broader missiology than Miller. For example, Elder was for many years on the Fulbright commission board in Iran, and he and his wife, Ruth, were proponents of the social gospel. Elder wrote books and essays in English and Persian on many subjects, including the relationship between Christianity and the “Path of Social Reform.”¹³⁵ Elder understood the social dimensions of religion. But he and Miller differentiated their old mission from its newer offspring, and this was highlighted in correspondences with and about their colleagues who broke ranks from the Presbyterian Mission to work for the US government.

The politically undesirable dimensions of the American global mission became apparent in Iran during the Second World War. It was then that “American soldiers came in,” Miller remembered years later, “and people were horrified.” The Presbyterians benefited from the umbrella of US global power. But Miller thought it was important to disassociate the church from US military, diplomatic, and commercial interests, “lest outsiders should think that this Persian Church was a kind of agent of Western Christianity,” which could result in American missionaries and Iranian Christians being “accused of being spies, government agents.”¹³⁶ With the thirty thousand American troops were a few former missionaries, such as Edwin Wright and Cuyler Young, both of whom left the Presbyterian Mission for the US government. In 1945, Elder and Miller agreed on this point: “We too are rather dismayed at the stream of former missionaries coming out here in political capacities.” In response, the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran “took the rather unusual action of decreeing that Cuyler [Young] should not stay for more than one night at the Mission when he comes.”¹³⁷

While the old and new missions were quite different, evangelicalism was inextricably intertwined with the projection of American power into Iran, and this was something that members of the Del Be Del network discussed with each other. In correspondence with Ralph Cooper Hutchison, William Miller wrote that, while the Second World War presented extenuating circumstances, he did “not want again to use the influence of the American government.” Hutchison responded: “Bill, you are using the influence of the American government every time you go on an evangelistic tour.” This was American privilege in an age of US hegemony. “Though you did not want it, you have had it and have used it,” Hutchison continued. “Through all the years you have unavoidably and properly used your American government and your citizenship to take you where you could not have gone otherwise.”¹³⁸ The correspondence with Hutchison and about Cuyler Young indicate that Elder and Miller were conscious that Christ and Caesar were different masters.

As much as US-Iran relations and Christian conceptions of mission evolved during the twentieth century, Miller’s worldview remained remarkably consistent. In retirement, from the comfort of his Philadelphia home, Miller found that “my Corona Portable, which went to Iran with me in 1919, still works hard and [is] efficiently typing letters, and producing Christian materials in English to be translated into the languages of the Muslims.”¹³⁹ He was among the first generations of Americans that trained for evangelical work with Muslims in the Middle East, instead of with local Christians, such as the Assyrians and Armenians of Iran. In the 1910s, Miller was inspired by the American missionary Samuel Zwemer, the “apostle to Islam,” whose “consuming passion” was “to make Christ known to Muslims.” According to Miller, “The fire in Dr. Zwemer’s soul kindled a blaze in other hearts,” including his own, back in the 1910s, to preach about Jesus to Muslims in the Middle East. “Now in 1975,” Miller wrote, “I can still say that my heart’s desire is that Muslims may be saved and may know the love of Christ.”¹⁴⁰

While the Presbyterian Mission was part of US-Iran relations, Elder and Miller understood their work in terms of Christian-Muslim relations. When stationed in Tehran, they were vexed by “a vigorous Islamic drive,” and Elder watched nervously in the postwar years as “clubs for the defense and propagation of Islam [were] founded everywhere.”¹⁴¹ Iran was, during the early Cold War, still years removed from Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary vision of an Islamic state, but Grand Ayatollah Boroujerdi presided over a “religious subculture” whose goal was the “politicization of Islam.”¹⁴² Elder squinted in 1948 when, “After many years of partial eclipse the Shiah sun is today shining forth in much of its former glory.”¹⁴³ As the US government gambled on “the perils and promise of political Islam,” the missionaries saw only peril.¹⁴⁴ “In condemning thus the mulla[h] class as a whole we do not condemn every individual,” Miller wrote, as he knew “enlightened men” among the ulama.¹⁴⁵ In fact, Miller had learned Persian from a mullah. Yet, outside of individual relationships, theological disputes between totalizing religions with different societal visions made interfaith dialogue difficult.¹⁴⁶ In the late 1940s, Miller lamented that, “The priests, who lost all their power during the reign of Reza Shah, are now permitted to stir up the people.”¹⁴⁷ The “revival of Islam” accelerated in the 1950s as the US and Iranian governments attempted to manipulate “religious fanaticism” as “a bulwark against the invasion of ideas from the North,” meaning communism from the Soviet Union. This Islamic revival, along with the popularity of leftist and nationalist ideologies, created a situation in which “the foes of America” could “annoy and threaten, in the name of religion, the American Christian missionaries.”¹⁴⁸

In response to Islamic organizing, evangelicals such as Elder and Miller engaged in and authored apologetics, a style of defending the Christian faith in relation to a critique of Islam that has existed for centuries.¹⁴⁹ The scholar Abbas Amanat found that, in modern Iranian history, this style of Christian-Muslim debate began in the early nineteenth century. In 1811–12, Henry Martyn, a British missionary linguist with the East India Company, arrived in Shiraz to translate the New Testament into Persian. Generations of missiologists considered the so-called Martyn Bible the most important consequence of this episode. However, Amanat shifted the focus of this encounter to the impact of Christian apologetics on Shia Muslims in Iran. Martyn debated Shia scholars, which compelled one of Shiraz’s most learned clerics to respond with a form of Islamic reasoning known as “refuting the padre.”¹⁵⁰ Christian missionaries were the so-called padres, and whether in nineteenth-century Iran or the twentieth-century United States, evangelicals developed a culture of apologetics as an arm of the old mission designed to engage advocates of Islamic mission, or dawa.¹⁵¹

The PCUSA sponsored evangelism among Muslims and was part of American apologetic culture between the 1870s and 1950s, but the post-1958 UPCUSA eschewed such activity in its decolonized formulation of fraternal Christian outreach. While an outlier in postcolonial Iran and in mainline Protestant churches, the idea of converting Muslims to Christianity—and defending one’s faith against other religions—was popular among neo-evangelicals in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Because Elder and Miller were Christian apologists to Islam, they found partners in the neo-evangelical network. That network emerged amid the collapse of mainline mission boards in the United States, and as a challenge to the dominant international Christian bodies of the era.

In the United States, the era of mainline-dominated, denominationally organized foreign missions was succeeded by a new wave of American evangelicalism. In 1953, mainline American Protestant churches had 9,844 missionaries working around the world; in 1985 that number was halved to 4,349. During the same period, the number of neo-evangelical missionaries working with unaffiliated churches or independent organizations skyrocketed from 9,296 to 35,386. These numbers reflected the “crisis” that many evangelicals experienced when the mainline churches decolonized their foreign missions.¹⁵² The tipping point came in the 1950s and 1960s, as the work of American neo-evangelical churches and organizations “grew rapidly and greatly outstripped those from the mainline Protestant denominational agencies, thus ensuring a conservative evangelical preponderance in overseas missions.” Like Elder and Miller, their mission was driven by “traditional evangelical piety.”¹⁵³

A comparable trend played out internationally. For two decades after it was chartered in 1948, the World Council of Churches was the most important international Christian organization.¹⁵⁴ However, neo-evangelicals disagreed with the World Council of Churches on many issues, including its renunciation of the old mission. By the 1960s, its international meetings became divisive affairs. After the twentieth-anniversary meeting in 1968, the neo-evangelicals went their own way. The American Billy Graham and his supporters organized the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974 to unify neo-evangelicals under the banner of a revived mission. The historian Lauren Turek explained how this conference spawned the “Lausanne Movement” and laid the foundation for “a global ‘evangelical superstructure’ to fulfill the Great Commission.”¹⁵⁵

Miller and Elder were, in the 1960s and 1970s, at once mainline Presbyterians and neo-evangelicals. On the Lausanne Movement, Miller praised anyone who “supported the wonderful ministry of Billy Graham.”¹⁵⁶ On the World Council of Churches, because of its position on mission and its allegedly leftward political tilt, Elder determined that the “time has come for the grass root members of the Christian churches to rise up and protest.”¹⁵⁷ Beyond supporting Billy Graham and not the World Council of Churches, Elder and Miller found new international sponsors off the American mainline. For example, Miller published articles in the magazine of the neo-evangelical organization World Vision International.¹⁵⁸ He also attended conventions of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship to perpetuate the old mission among young Americans, and he spoke to various other evangelical “Internationals” about how “the unchanging duty of the Church Universal is the evangelization of the world in every generation.”¹⁵⁹ Miller respected these Christian groups, especially those that sent workers to Iran after the Presbyterian withdrawal in 1965. For example, he thought that International Missions (Christar) was “doing valuable evangelistic work” in Iran and around the world. He knew that, “They are conservative in faith … and feel some of the Presbyterian workers are very liberal.” Notwithstanding those views, Miller’s opinion was that “we should cooperate with them as much as we can.”¹⁶⁰ Denominationalism remained important, but organizations such as World Vision International, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and International Missions (Christar), to name a few, were the driving forces of the neo-evangelical movement of the late twentieth century.

Amid this burst of neo-evangelical activity, Miller, Elder, and others in the Del Be Del network thought it was important to show the upstarts that old hands had skin in the game. In 1968, a former missionary to Iran observed in the Del Be Del newsletter that “several of us who were writing and editing material for the Persian literature program many years ago are now producing books in English.” He described the wave of publications by retired missionaries as “an upsurge of the 70 and 80 year olds.” Moreover, “There is a great need for that now since the idea is abroad that Christianity is getting ‘involved’ for the first time.”¹⁶¹ While the context for the comment was the rise of the neo-evangelical movement, the reference was to the published apologetics of former missionaries to Iran. While Elder’s most enduring post-Iran publication shed light on the neo-evangelical organizations that supported this work, Miller’s style of Christian apologetics revealed the genre’s view of and approach to Islam.

John Elder’s book, A Biblical Approach to the Muslim, blurred the boundaries between mainline Presbyterianism and neo-evangelicalism. It was originally published in 1974 by the Houston-based Leadership Instruction and Training International. The book, subtitled “Apologetics,” was an instructional tool for evangelists-in-training, complete with an Orientalist rendering of Islam and practice quizzes at the end of each chapter. Elder characteristically devoted a few pages to the social gospel and the various other “channels for evangelism,” but the bulk of the book spoke to religious issues. This book was popular among American Christians, and Worldwide Evangelization Crusade (WEC) reprinted Elder’s book in 1978.¹⁶² WEC was originally a British organization that opened posts around the world, including a US branch in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, in greater Philadelphia. The organization’s mission was the same as Elder’s and Miller’s, namely the evangelization of the world.¹⁶³ While WEC reprinted Elder’s book, Miller helped turn out the believers for the organization’s annual “day of prayer,” which, during the 1960s and 1970s, was held in Fort Washington for evangelicals to collectively pray for Muslims around the world.¹⁶⁴ Apologetics and group prayers were hallmarks of the old mission, and Elder and Miller cooperated with Christians who were unaligned with mainline churches and interested in the so-called Muslim world.

Miller’s apologetic, A Christian’s Response to Islam, which a Presbyterian press published in 1975, was the clearest manifestation of the genre in print. The intended audience was conservative Presbyterians, neo-evangelicals, and Christians interested in Islam. To the reader, Miller explained that the business of apologetics was only for true believers. “If a Christian has any doubts regarding the authenticity and authority of the Bible, he would do well to resolve these doubts before talking with a Muslim about his faith,” Miller wrote. “If he does not trust the truth of the Bible, he will have no ground to stand on.” Miller knew that “Islam is a highly developed religion,” with its own corps of apologists versed in the Quran and other sources of Islamic practice and law. It was precisely because Islam “contains much that is true and good” and enjoys “a long and in some respects a brilliant history” that it was said to be “Christianity’s greatest challenge.” To engage with a Muslim, let alone an Islamic scholar, a Christian apologist had to “become acquainted with Muslims and with Islam” and, eventually, come to “love the people of Islam.”¹⁶⁵ This was a version of heart Christianity, and apologists understood their work in reference to the Epistle to the Ephesians as “speaking the truth in love.”¹⁶⁶

But it was conditional love that had similarities and differences with the American global mission. Whether one was an advocate of religious or cultural conversion, Americans ranging from missionaries to modernization theorists considered Iranians the “other” and expected them to change.¹⁶⁷ For Miller, the goal was to convert Muslims to Christianity. The starting point was the ethnocentric assumption that Christians and Muslims, adherents to two of the three Abrahamic faiths, were necessarily different. He considered Christians to be among “the children of Isaac” and the “true children of Abraham,” Isaac’s father. Conversely, he considered Muslims to be among “the children of Ishmael,” Abraham’s other son, because they “have not yet put their trust in Christ for salvation.” Miller aimed to undo the Islamic expansion of the seventh century and unite the Abrahamic faiths under a Christian empire. For “their father Abraham awaiting in heaven,” this would be an “answer to his prayer.” However, very few Muslims in Iran and the Middle East actually converted to Christianity. Miller’s generation knew that “during the past century the expansion of the Christian movement has been greater than in any century since the first.” Yet, when compared to other parts of the world, in the Middle East there were “mountains to be moved.” However, unlike the US government, which moved mountains with armies and other coercive means, Miller stressed that religions “must be advanced not by the sword but by peaceful means, such as missionary effort.” Missionaries had different tools at their disposal than soldiers. Miller and his friends wielded “spiritual weapons,” but “we would never want to fight Islam with sword or bomb.”¹⁶⁸

During the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through their publications, the Persian boomerang brought Islam into neo-evangelical culture in the United States. William Miller and John Elder were combative toward Islam, and their views were different from and similar to other forms of American power and influence in the world. Through Miller and Elder, the Del Be Del network’s old mission gave neo-evangelical Christians an introduction to Islam, prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The three sets of contextual biographies in this chapter revealed the ideological complexity of the Del Be Del network and depicted “mission” removed from its Iranian environs. After serving in Iran, former missionaries informed various facets of American life: the US national security state, higher education, and neo-evangelical Christian culture.

On the spectrum of mission, Edwin Wright and Cuyler Young were on one pole, and John Elder and William Miller were on the other. Wright and Young embraced the tenets of American globalism and directly informed US foreign relations during the Second World War and early Cold War. As government workers and intelligence operatives, they were proponents of an interventionist policy in Iran and the Middle East. With the exception of the Second World War, when “GI Jimmie” met the Presbyterian Mission, Wright and Young were the most conspicuous examples of the Del Be Del network’s contribution to the American global mission.¹⁶⁹ In contrast, Elder and Miller were propagators of the Del Be Del network’s “old mission.” They attempted, with a mixed record, to draw a line in the evangelical landscape between church and state. While the former group understood mission in terms of international relations between the United States and Iran, the latter group interpreted mission as an interreligious exercise between Christians and Muslims.

Walter Groves, Ralph Cooper Hutchison, and Herrick Young attempted to split the difference and bring the “new mission” of Alborz College to America. Their vision of the Christian liberal arts was sandwiched between, what were at the time, more prominent educational models. There were large public research institutions, or the “multiversity.” The historian Ethan Schrum explained that this “instrumental university” tended “to marginalize some founding ideals of the American research university … not to mention even older ideals of liberal education.”¹⁷⁰ Presbyterian educators welcomed cooperation with government and industry, but not at the expense of those ideals.¹⁷¹ There were also conservative evangelical Christian colleges, which the Alborz men did not support. In the 1980s, Groves reiterated this point: “I thought there should be a place for a real Christian college in the best sense of the term. I wasn’t interested in a fundamentalist Christian college or anything of that nature or a Bible college. But I did believe that there was such a thing as a Christian liberal arts college.”¹⁷²

These three sets of contextual biographies demonstrated how the Persian boomerang became manifest in the United States. They also revealed the ideological tensions that permeated the Del Be Del network and, more broadly, US-Iran relations and Christian-Muslim relations during the twentieth century.