Conclusion
The Del Be Del network’s mission became manifest in a particular place—Tehran—because of the interdependent relationship between American evangelicals, US global power, and Pahlavi nation-building. To understand that interdependence, the reference to musical “counterpoint” is instructive, as it refers to “the relationship between and movement of two or more voices” that contribute to the same composition but retain their respective rhythms and sounds.1 The three parties in this history had distinct voices but shared the same aim: the ideological and material transformation of Iran. It was because of US global power and Pahlavi nation-building that the Del Be Del network’s mission became manifest in churches, development programs, schools, associations, and other areas of national and international life during the twentieth century.
American Presbyterians and Pahlavi Iran
Why were Presbyterians the most important American evangelicals in Pahlavi Iran? Part of the answer relates to timing. Most of the Pahlavi period coincided with the era of “mainline” Protestant hegemony in the history of the American missionary movement. The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) and, after 1958, the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA), was the quintessential mainline institution. It administered the Presbyterian Mission in Iran, which closed in 1965 but had representatives in the country until 1980. Prior to the Iranian Revolution, the authoritarian Pahlavi mamuriyat meshed with the “ardor and order” mentality of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran.2
The era of mainline hegemony in the history of the American missionary movement was sandwiched between two other evangelical waves. Prior to the 1870s, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was the most important US-based evangelical organization. The fracturing of its ecumenical coalition in the United States, and the emergence of denominational organizations such as the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions, had ramifications around the world. In Iran, the PCUSA took over preexisting American missions and established new posts in Tehran and other cities beginning in the 1870s. A century later, as mainline churches lost parishioners stateside and missions overseas, a new generation of evangelicals went abroad. This wave trended toward conservative churches such as the Pentecostal Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptist Convention, along with nondenominational mission societies like International Missions (Christar).3 Despite their similarities, there were theological, socioeconomic, and political differences between the three waves of the American missionary movement.
These three evangelical waves roughly coincided with three different Iranian regimes. During the first wave, the ABCFM was hosted by the Qajar Dynasty. The Qajar monarchs did not implement a development program that required large-scale international assistance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under Qajar rule, Iran was in the British and Russian spheres of influence, which meant that Americans did not enjoy the same protections and privileges as they would during the Pahlavi period. The ABCFM mission in Iran passed to the PCUSA decades before the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11, and a half-century before the Pahlavis seized power from the Qajars in the 1920s.4 The third evangelical wave, which transformed Latin America and Africa in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, was less consequential in the Middle East and Iran.5 The fall of the Pahlavis, fallout from the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and decades of hostility between the “great Satan” and “mad mullahs” made cultural ties difficult to sustain.6 More to the point, the American Protestant missionary has, since the revolution of 1979, been a persona non grata in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The situation was different when the second wave of the American missionary movement overlapped with the reign of the Pahlavis. The Presbyterians were preponderant in Iran between the 1870s and 1960s because, in the context of American evangelicalism, Iran was the PCUSA’s mission field. Other mainline denominations worked in other mission fields.7 Also, the PCUSA and London’s Church Mission Society divided Iran into two different Protestant realms, with the Presbyterians in the north and Anglicans in the south.8 When the Pahlavis came to power in the 1920s, with the aim of modernizing Iran along European and American lines, the Presbyterian Mission was known in Tehran for graduating first-class nation-builders from its schools. Just as the first Pahlavi shah pulled graduates of Alborz College into his government, the second Pahlavi shah understood Presbyterian Mission institutions as models for his own vision of modernity.9 Consequently, the evangelical enterprise during the Pahlavi period was, when contrasted with the preceding and succeeding eras, qualitatively more meaningful.
Presbyterian institutionalism was invaluable to the authoritarian Pahlavis. Some missionaries argued against institutions because they required sizable financial investments and detracted from the work of the church.10 Still, the Presbyterians were institutionalists, and the Presbyterian Mission’s most direct impact came at its brick-and-mortar properties in downtown Tehran. After Alborz College was nationalized in 1940 and the Presbyterian Mission Hospital in Tehran closed in 1942, the most important institutions were the Evangelical Church, Clinic of Hope, Community School, Iran Bethel, and Alborz Foundation. In the short term, the Presbyterian Mission’s association with the Pahlavis meant that Americans could church-plant, run medical and educational institutions, and enjoy a relatively free hand as evangelicals in a Muslim-majority country. In the long term, the missionaries and their Iranian partners were severely tarnished by their ties with the dictatorial Pahlavi regime. The scholar Philip Hopkins was correct in writing that, “although American missionaries did many fine things for the Iranian people, their connection with the Pahlavi Government was not one of them.”11
The Presbyterian Mission was, in the revolutionary context of late Pahlavi Iran, politically conservative. The relational patterns that the historian Michael Zirinsky identified in Presbyterian thinking toward the first Pahlavi shah continued through the second shah’s reign.12 Presbyterian evangelicals enjoyed life in the American colony, beginning with the US occupation of Iran during the Second World War. They also benefited from being American at the height of the US-Iran alliance during the Cold War. That was a reason why, in the 1950s, next to no Presbyterian missionaries in Iran supported Mohammad Mosaddeq’s nationalist vision for his country. It was only later that some Americans came to see the wartime occupation and 1953 coup as problematic milestones in the US-Iran relationship. Anticolonial nationalism and Islamic revival were two forces that troubled American evangelicals and Iranian monarchists alike. In the end, the Del Be Del network was hitched to an authoritarian political system and was on the losing side of a revolution in 1979.
Church and State in US Foreign Relations
The Del Be Del network did not aim to influence US foreign policy, but the Presbyterian Mission was in the matrix of US foreign relations. Before the US government had security interests in the Middle East, American evangelicals were part of the scramble for souls in the region.13 They understood their activity within a transnational missiological history, rather than in relation to European and American soldiers, spies, and diplomats.14 Whatever their pretenses, the mid-twentieth century marked the first time in US history that church and state converged in Iran. The sacred and secular wings of the American global mission were, like the Presbyterian and Pahlavi projects, contrapuntal, or distinct yet reinforcing.
The religious and national creeds of the American colony in Tehran presupposed that Protestant evangelicalism and American modernity were remaking Iran. In Pahlavi Iran, the situation was similar to what the scholar Ussama Makdisi found about the rest of the Middle East. There, Americans “inherited and secularized this missionary story” of a US presence that they deemed “positive, anti-imperialist, and modern.” Whether through their legacies or in the flesh, “American missionaries … remained central in shaping how Americans viewed the Middle East as a place capable of being remade by American benevolence.”15 Indeed, midcentury American idealists understood mission in terms of exceptionalism, providentialism, and “Manifest Destiny,” and they believed that they could and should change people and places around the world. US global power involved various “missions” and varieties of evangelicalism, as outlined in chapter 1 through the archetypes of John Calvin, Jane Addams, and Woodrow Wilson.
Calvin was the archetype of the “old mission,” the subject of chapter 2. It involved the church-planting and religious proselytizing of the Presbyterian Mission’s preachers and evangelists. They believed in the historic grandeur of “eastern” churches but thought that Assyrian and Armenian Christians needed Protestant tutelage in the modern era.16 The mainline was sectarian in the United States, and, rather than strengthen faith communities in Iran, foreign missionaries split Iranians from their churches, temples, mosques, and communities.17 The Iranians that became evangelicals had American patrons, many of whom held to the inflexible tenets and problematic beliefs of the old mission. These intra-Christian tensions formed the crux of church-mission relations. “We are all familiar with … the post-World War II trend toward the integration of Church and Mission,” a missionary wrote in the late 1950s, and events in Iran were “out of step with the march of events elsewhere.”18 The Presbyterian Mission closed in 1965, but not before offending Iranian Christians and Islamist revolutionaries, with major consequences for American evangelicalism and US foreign relations.
Addams was the archetype of the “new mission,” whose myriad manifestations bore similarities to the US government’s foreign aid and cultural programs during the Cold War. As demonstrated in chapters 3, 4, and 5, the Presbyterian Mission launched literacy programs and ran clinics, schools, and associations in Tehran. Far more Iranians passed through the doors of these institutions than through those of the Evangelical Church. At the same time, the US Agency for International Development and the US Information Agency launched comparable initiatives. They were designed to promote Americanism rather than Christianity, and to reach Iranians on a larger scale than missionary organizations. Despite the introduction of US state power into Iran, nongovernmental organizations such as the Near East Foundation and the Presbyterian Mission remained active in the country. After the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in 1965, its former institutions survived under Iranian management and with new international backers. The Del Be Del network’s new mission kept the Presbyterians relevant to Iranian life through the mid-twentieth century and embedded evangelicals in the sinews of the US-Iran relationship.
Evangelicals historically informed US relations with the countries and capitals of the Middle East. This was true at the peak of the American missionary movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.19 It was also true during the Second World War and Cold War. The many manifestations of the Del Be Del network’s old and new missions in Tehran were evidence of that. Yet the stature of Wilsonianism, with its fusion of religious certainties and state power, increased throughout the century as US foreign relations became increasingly securitized and militaristic. During the Second World War, the Presbyterian Mission found friends among American soldiers in Iran, and former missionaries worked as diplomats and intelligence operatives into the early Cold War. Chapters 6 and 7, along with others, demonstrated that the Del Be Del network was part of this Wilsonian history, in both the United States and Iran. While Pahlavi Iran was a favorite of mainline evangelicals during the mid-twentieth century, Israel has since acquired most-favored-nation status among neo-evangelicals, especially the subset known as the “Religious Right.”20 The ebb and flow of missiology and geopolitics shaped the specificities of each historical moment, but American “covenant brothers” and sisters have historically been part of the matrix of US relations with the Middle East.21
This was especially true in Pahlavi Iran, where church and state converged to inform US foreign relations on multiple levels.22 The Del Be Del network’s old and new missions were forms of evangelical witness that shared a genealogy with the American global mission, understood through the John Calvin, Jane Addams, and Woodrow Wilson archetypes. Collectively, they informed the mentalité that, in Iran, drove the “great American mission.”23
Del Be Del Residuals
The Del Be Del community and discourse outlasted the American errand to Iran. Prior to 1979, Presbyterian evangelicals made “heart-to-heart” connections in Iran that were, through a newsletter titled Del Be Del, sustained across time and space. After 1979, the Del Be Del community existed outside of Iran, on the periphery of broader diasporic formations. To millions of Iranians who lost their country and, in some cases, their lives and livelihoods, the revolution was traumatic. Some of those Iranians were in the Del Be Del network. But its majority were Americans who forged emotional bonds with Iran during their time there with the Presbyterian Mission. The residuals of the Del Be Del experience lasted into the twenty-first century.
Different generations of the Del Be Del network experienced the Iranian Revolution of 1979 on different registers. For lifers such as Jane Doolittle, who lived in Iran from the 1920s to the 1970s, there was personal and professional loss, along with heartache for Iranian friends in dangerous situations.24 Among younger generations, there was an attempt to understand the revolution. Consider the case of Kenneth and Peggy Thomas, both of whom were part of the last cohort of Presbyterians to leave Iran in July 1980. Speaking that month, Kenneth Thomas and the other “ambassadors of reconciliation” said that, unlike the US diplomats being held hostage, the Presbyterians “had no personal difficulties” and experienced “nothing but gracious hospitality and friendship” in Iran. Peggy Thomas, the last director of Community School, understood their departure as “a very important factor in the revolution.” She knew that, “It was utterly essential that the number of foreigners in the capital city of Iran … be decreased in order for the Iranian people to feel that they had indeed control of their own destiny … without feeling manipulated by others.”25 Many Iranians, especially after 1965, resented the conspicuous invasiveness of the American colony, and the revolution downsized it in 1978–79 before terminating it in 1980.
In addition to seeing Iran’s revolution from the inside-out, the Del Be Del network looked to other global revolutions to understand their situation from the outside-in. Selma Seto, a colleague of the Thomases, knew that anticolonial revolutions resulted in the expulsion of missionaries from countries throughout the world: “You could just change some names and dates and places,” she said, and find “a very familiar sort of story.”26 It could have been China, where Mao Zedong’s Communists forced out missionary organizations after the revolution of 1949.27 It could have been Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s guerrillas showed American proselytizers the door after the revolution of 1959.28 Or it could have been Egypt and other parts of the Arab Middle East after the 1967 war with Israel.29 The list goes on, and Iran was, during its revolution, the most recent of the American mission fields and foreign colonies to be nationalized.
After the revolution, there were different streams in American political culture regarding US-Iran relations. Some Americans held anti-Iranian views tinged with national, religious, and racial prejudices.30 The governments of the United States and Iran pursued competing foreign policy objectives and developed rival national “myths” that helped make the countries “enemies” for decades.31 While many mainline evangelicals never accepted the Islamic Republic, some sought to understand it and unpack their relationship to Iran. Whatever the shortcomings of the Del Be Del community, particularly regarding monarchy and Islam, its members knew too many Iranians and owed too much to Iran to apply blanket judgments to the country and its people. This stream in post-1979 American political culture was informed by intimate on-the-ground experiences in Iran, and professions of “love” for Iranians based on discourses of the “heart.” If, at the most recent fin de siècle, the United States and Iran have a “love-hate relationship,” the Del Be Del network was part of the small circle of Americans that gave the first half of the phrase its meaning.32
The Del Be Del network’s striving to make “heart-to-heart” connections with Iran continued apace after 1979 and traversed generations. When a biographer took up the subject of Jane Doolittle in the 1980s, the answer to the book’s title—Is Love Lost?—was no, “love remembers.”33 Doolittle’s colleague, Richard Irvine, was even more emphatic about his persisting passion for “the ground of Iran.”34 A teacher who worked with Irvine at Community School wrote that the experience made “her heart thump,” and former students have conveyed a similar sentiment.35 The Del Be Del network’s last generation—the “mish kids” who enjoyed their schooldays in Pahlavi Iran—occupied a liminal space between epochs. Margaret Frame grew up in Iran and attended Community School in the 1950s, and she was the last editor of the Del Be Del newsletter in the 2010s.36 Whether the children of missionaries or Peace Corps volunteers, they were the last American generation with the experience of “living, loving Iran.”37 While the Presbyterian Mission aspired to “inculcate Tehran” with an evangelical message, Iran inculcated the missionaries’ lives, careers, and families.38 Many of the Americans who experienced the Iran of yesterday profess a heartfelt love for the country today.
The intensity of the American moment in Iran was not lost on any of its participants. While the meaning and feeling of that moment were different to the Presbyterian, American, and Iranian actors involved, the men and women of the Del Be Del network were on the front lines of an encounter between people of different faiths and nationalities. Their mission became manifest in the physical and emotional worlds of Tehran, the milieus of Christian and American internationalism, and multiple levels of US-Iran relations. The Presbyterian Mission left its mark in Iran, the United States, and places in between.