“Introduction” in “Mission Manifest”
Introduction
The first Americans in Tehran—the capital of Iran—were Presbyterian evangelicals. In 1872, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), with its Board of Foreign Missions (BFM) in New York City, instructed Reverend James Bassett “to occupy Tehran.” American Christians of various denominations had, for four decades, been living and working in the imperial borderlands of northwest Iran. But Bassett, who served in the Union Army during the US Civil War and pastored Presbyterian churches in the United States before becoming a missionary in the Middle East, was the first to open a mission in Tehran. His partner, Abigail, was reportedly “the first American lady to enter the capital of Persia.” When the couple paused to “look upon this city now spread out before them,” they did so with great interest, “not only because of its relation to themselves as their prospective home … but also because of its relation to the future of mission-work in Persia.”1 The Bassetts settled in Tehran a decade before the first diplomat arrived on behalf of the US State Department, and decades before the arrival of other American civilians and soldiers. They were, for better or for worse, on the front lines of American evangelicalism’s encounter with Iran.
The Bassett mission marked the beginning of the Presbyterian century in Iran. Most histories of “Protestant diplomacy” focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when Americans represented a quarter of all Protestant missionaries around the world and when, in Iran, there were more proselytizers from the United States than from all other countries combined.2 American evangelicals competed for influence with each other and with European Christians, and to achieve denominational deconfliction in Iran, the PCUSA and London’s Church Mission Society (CMS) divided the country at the thirty-fourth parallel. The 1895 mission treaty allotted the south to the British and allowed the Americans to establish a chain of stations from Tabriz in the northwest to Mashhad in the northeast. The denominational partition was like the Anglo-Russian Convention that, in 1907, divided Iran into geopolitical spheres of influence. While Britain and Russia dominated Iranian political and economic affairs during the “Great Game,” the PCUSA’s religious domain reached its largest geographic expanse during the years between Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 and the founding of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1925–26. In 1930, as the Pahlavi government centralized national authority and the global Protestant empire contracted, Tehran became the administrative hub of the PCUSA’s “Iran Mission.”3
This Presbyterian Mission, which in its literal and figurative forms existed in Tehran from 1872 to 1965, is the subject of this book. In a literal sense, the Presbyterian Mission was a physical place in downtown Tehran, the equivalent of an embassy that reported back to the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions in New York City instead of to the State Department in Washington, DC. It was also an administrative entity that ran institutions, managed finances, employed individuals, and handled business like any other nongovernmental organization. In a figurative sense, Presbyterian evangelicals were in Iran because they were on a mission. In English, the word “mission” has multiple definitions. The first is “an important assignment carried out for political, religious, or commercial purposes, typically involving travel.” The second is “the vocation or calling of a religious organization, especially a Christian one, to go out into the world and spread its faith.” A third speaks to “a strongly felt aim, ambition, or calling” more broadly conceived.4 These forms of mission were, in historical context, similar to Islamic dawa, Iranian national mission, and American “Manifest Destiny.”5 In its literal and figurative forms, the Presbyterian Mission, which was distinct from yet related to the American and Iranian missions, reached its height of international influence between the 1940s and 1960s.6 That is why this book focuses on the period between the Second World War and the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran in 1965. In contrast to other periods of history—either prior to the Second World War or after the Iranian Revolution of 1979—the Presbyterian Mission operated under the umbrella of US global power and with the support of the Iranian government during the mid-twentieth century.
During the Second World War and Cold War, the Presbyterian Mission was amplified by other Americans, in and out of government. The Allied occupation of Iran during the Second World War involved thirty thousand US soldiers and transformed what had been, in Tehran, a Presbyterian colony with a few Americans, into an American colony with a few Presbyterians. Neither the Presbyterian Mission nor US-Iran relations was the same after “the arrival of the Yankee Brigade” during the war.7 After the war, the United States allied with Iran to contain the Soviet Union. That meant staging coups, providing military and economic aid, and waging the Cold War in a manner that was unrivaled in other noncombat theaters of what was then called the Third World. It also meant that US diplomats, soldiers, aid officials, and cultural workers, along with various nonstate actors and nongovernmental organizations, operated inside Iran.8 Historians of postwar US-Iran relations have typically portrayed missionaries either as relics from a bygone age or ghosts that faded into historical obscurity.9 That is an “epochal fallacy.”10 The communion of American evangelicalism and US national power, which impacted US foreign relations with countries around the world and became manifest in Iran during the Second World War and Cold War, had no precedent in the history of the binational relationship.11
The Presbyterian Mission was also amplified by Iranians. At the top was Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79), the second of two Pahlavi kings and the last Shah of Iran, who was allied to the United States and looked to Americans to support his own national mission. In his memoir, Mission for My Country [Mamuriyat bara-ye vatanam], the shah explained his vision of a socioeconomically developed, globally connected, authoritarian nation-state. The shah’s memoir was published just prior to the start of his reform program, known as the White Revolution, in 1963.12 To accomplish his authoritarian and developmentalist aims, Mohammad Reza Shah was more welcoming of foreign missionaries than his father before him and the Islamic Republic after 1979. Despite their influence in Pahlavi Iran, American Presbyterians did not enjoy friendly relations with the majority of Iran’s Shia Muslim population, let alone the clerical leadership, known as the ulama. But the Presbyterian Mission’s circle of Iranian friends went beyond Pahlavi royals to include some Muslims along with Christians, doctors, social workers, literacy advocates, teachers, professionals, and internationalists of various stripes during the mid-twentieth century.
Long after James Bassett’s generation faded from the scene, Iran’s capital city was the base from which American evangelicals attempted, as the Presbyterian Mission’s cable address read, to “Inculcate Tehran.”13 With American and Iranian support, Presbyterian evangelicals advanced a mission in Tehran based on their subjective ideals about religion, nationhood, and world order. This book explores the impact, along with the meaning and feeling, of their endeavor in mid-twentieth-century Tehran. In that time and place, the Presbyterian Mission that Bassett opened was an epicenter of US-Iran relations. At the moment of US global hegemony, the spiritual authority of “the church” converged with the material power of “the state” to transform the Presbyterian Mission into an American one and infuse US foreign relations with the messianic ideals of Christian evangelicalism.
Manifestations of Mission
This book contains thematically oriented chapters, each of which spans the period between the 1940s and the 1960s: the “American moment” in Iran.14 Many chapters examine the deeper history, so well explored by other historians.15 But the point remains that the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran, which James Bassett established in the late nineteenth century, reached the peak of its power during the mid-twentieth century. Because of the patron-client relationship between the United States and Pahlavi Iran, various evangelical projects, which the Presbyterians understood as manifestations of the “old” mission for “Christ” and the “new” mission for “culture,” were integral components of US-Iran relations.16 The American moment began with the US occupation of Iran during the Second World War, which came at a time of transformation for the Presbyterian Mission and on the heels of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s ascension to power, and continued through the early Cold War. The start of the shah’s White Revolution in 1963 and the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran in 1965 were watershed events that, along with a series of seminal episodes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, marked the end of the American moment in Iran.
The humanity of this moment can be understood through the history of the Del Be Del, or heart-to-heart, network.17 As the Presbyterian Mission’s human face, it was a multigenerational, transnational network of evangelicals, along with their Iranian friends and nonmissionary Americans, bonded by personal and professional ties and with deep cultural and emotional connections to Iran. Fortunately, members of the Del Be Del network left a vast evidentiary record of their lives. The following chapters are immersed in these English-language archival sources that, after careful reading and contextualization, provide multiple vantage points on US foreign relations and religious history, and open a side door into the main foyer of Iranian history. The most important archive is the Presbyterian Historical Society. Located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it houses the administrative records of the Presbyterian Mission in Iran and its parent organizations in the United States.18 It also has biographical files, with professional records and dear-friend letters, of missionaries that the PCUSA and its successor church sent to Iran.19 The Presbyterian Historical Society also preserves personal papers, family collections, films, photographs, and interviews, and it maintains a digital archive.20 These sources are critically weighed alongside other primary sources, including but not limited to documents from the US National Archives and Records Administration, to give each chapter a distinct archival flavor. These evidentiary trails follow individual American and Iranian lives through the mid-twentieth century and unearth multiple manifestations of mission.
The first chapter, “ ‘The Errand’ to Iran,” introduces the book’s conceptual framework about “mission” and “place” in transnational history. While John Winthrop and the early Puritans prioritized religion in colonial New England, they proclaimed it less significant to build a “city upon a hill” than “to excite and stir us all up to attend and prosecute our Errand into the Wilderness.”21 This outward-looking, change-oriented errand carried into the twentieth century and around the world. In Iran, it fused Presbyterian “ardor and order” with American “visions of national greatness.” In other words, mission involved “ardor for things of the spirit” and “order for the things of society.”22 In international affairs, “place matters,” and it was in Tehran, specifically, where Americans with ideals mingled with Iranians to form a socio-affective community that ascribed meaning and feeling to their shared endeavors.23 Especially important were the Presbyterian and American institutions in Tehran, which became pipelines of people-to-people exchanges that shaped the contours of intra-Christian, Christian-Muslim, and US-Iran relations. The Del Be Del network’s mission became manifest, as the following chapters demonstrate, in the spheres of religion, development, education, and associationalism.
The second chapter, “Into the Commonwealth Stage,”24 reveals that, during the American moment, the Presbyterians sustained an “old mission” that was motivated by the New Testament’s “great commission” and manifest in the Evangelical Church [Kelisa-ye Enjili] of Iran.25 The fledgling church, which never had more than a few thousand congregants, consisted of born-again Assyrian and Armenian Christians, Iranian converts from other religions, and American Presbyterians.26 Iranian Protestantism, a creation of foreign missionaries, was conditioned by historical forces emanating as much from the United States as Iran. During the Second World War, the church aided the US occupation of Iran. During the Cold War, it was part of the pivot in US foreign relations from the Western Hemisphere to the Middle East.27 These missionaries were, in contrast to their millennialist predecessors and their neo-evangelical successors, part of the American “mainline,” which began to turn inward and away from overseas mission work during the mid-twentieth century. In 1958, formerly estranged branches of American Presbyterianism, including the PCUSA, merged into the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA). The new church, which existed until the next ecumenical merger in 1983, was the product of a relatively postcolonial religious landscape among mainline Protestants in the United States.28 In Iran, those changes became manifest in 1965 with the closure of the Presbyterian Mission and the “indigenization” of the Evangelical Church.29 These events in church-mission relations were part of US-Iran relations during the American moment.
The third chapter, “Spiritual Lend Lease,”30 draws on Presbyterian files and the records of the US government’s Agency for International Development to demonstrate how American evangelicals and aid workers partnered with Pahlavi reformers on a “new mission,” or a “mission for development.”31 While previous generations of evangelicals were motivated by the social gospel and progressive reform, postwar Presbyterians embraced the ethos of developmentalism. This chapter provides two case studies that localize the history of Cold War development in Iran.32 The first case study is of literacy work. In Cold War Iran, the Presbyterian Mission and the US government were active promoters of literacy, and in 1963 the shah established the Literacy Corps as part of his White Revolution.33 The second case study is of clinic-based social work. With the Presbyterian Mission Hospital in Tehran shuttered as of 1942, the Clinic of Hope continued to offer medical and social services to women, children, and the underserved of the city. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iranians incorporated social work into their emergent welfare state.34 This chapter’s integrated examination of different archival sets reveals how different groups of Americans cooperated with each other and with Iranian reformers to harness their missions, either indirectly or directly, to the White Revolution.
The fourth chapter, “Something Other Than Ordinary Education,”35 finds that, despite the closure of an older generation of Presbyterian Mission schools in 1940, American evangelicals remained embedded in Tehran’s educational landscape through the late Pahlavi period.36 Community School originally served the children of missionaries, but it became the preeminent preuniversity school for English-speaking students in Tehran, including elite Iranians, because of its global liberal arts curriculum, college preparatory program, and diverse and coeducational student body.37 Iran Bethel was another prominent Presbyterian institution of the late Pahlavi period. It was a “finishing school” for young Iranian women that was synonymous with its principal, Jane Doolittle, who dedicated six decades of her life to Iran.38 The school’s alumnae were organized, active in Tehran’s professions and the postwar women’s movement, lobbied for the right to vote in 1963, and thereafter entered Iran’s political arena.39 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, these two American schools became Iranian schools.40 Through schools, and also associations, Americans and their Iranian partners created spaces for socialization and the habituation of citizenship practices that were, as in earlier eras, applicable to Iran, the United States, and the world.41
The fifth chapter, “These Young Persian Friends of Mine,”42 explores the intersection of the Presbyterian, American, and Iranian associationalist traditions.43 Youth clubs and cultural centers were not new to the twentieth century. What was new was the extent to which they linked distant countries in a particular “worldmaking” moment.44 Between the world wars, Americans and Iranians ran religious and binational associations in Tehran. The Second World War and Cold War politicized but did not interrupt these efforts, and in the 1940s the Presbyterians opened the Alborz Foundation. It offered English-language classes and academic services to Iranians, many of whom were preparing to study in the United States. For its part, the US government opened the Iran-America Society, which in the 1950s and 1960s was a meeting place for the jet-set elite in Tehran.45 There was no central clearing house for American cultural programming in Iran, but the documents of the US Information Agency indicate that parochial and public institutions ran parallel yet complementary programs. Despite the emphasis on friendship-building, the Alborz Foundation and Iran-America Society were signposts at the intersection of the cultural Cold War and “America’s Great Game.”46 After five chapters on Tehran, the final two chapters explore the metamorphosis of mission across space and time.
The sixth chapter, “The Persian ‘Boomerang,’ ” borrows from the scholar David Hollinger’s “Protestant Boomerang” to highlight the metropolitan impacts of overseas ventures.47 Put another way, the Presbyterian Mission—old and new—became manifest in the United States. These Persian boomerangs swung into the US government, American higher education, and neo-evangelical culture. During the Second World War, some missionary veterans moved “their service from Christ to Caesar.”48 They included Edwin Wright and Cuyler Young, both of whom joined the US intelligence community. After the war, Wright helped construct the national security state in Washington, and Young took a faculty position at Princeton University.49 Meanwhile, three former Alborz College faculty members—Walter Groves, Ralph Cooper Hutchison, and Herrick Young—transferred their educational missions from Iran into the offices of the American college presidency.50 In contrast to these two biographical case studies, John Elder and William McElwee Miller transferred the old mission from Iran into the neo-evangelical culture of the United States in the late twentieth century.51 Taken together, the twin forces of knowledge-power and transnational circularity played a paradoxical role, both in US-Iran relations and Christian-Muslim relations, by aiding hegemonic thinking in the United States about the place of Protestantism and Americanism in the world. While this chapter explores the movement of mission across space, the next chapter turns to the question of change over time.
The seventh and final chapter, “Build It for the Eye of God,”52 follows the afterlives of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran, which formally closed in 1965 but remained informally open until 1979–80. The institutions of the Presbyterian Mission—the Evangelical Church, Clinic of Hope, Community School, Iran Bethel, and Alborz Foundation—all remained in operation through the 1970s, often with different names and under Iranian and international stewardship. However, after 1965, the local adaptation of these foreign institutions was accompanied by the dramatic expansion of the American colony in Iran and its capital. In 1948, at the dawn of the Cold War, there were reportedly two hundred Americans in Tehran. In the early 1960s, there were about five thousand Americans in the country, most of whom were cloistered in the capital.53 In the 1970s, businesspeople and military advisers eclipsed missionaries, educationalists, aid workers, and diplomats as the most visible Americans on the streets of Iranian cities. When William Sullivan, the last US ambassador to Iran, arrived in 1977, there were nearly forty thousand Americans in the country, more than during the Second World War.54 This colony, which continued to grow until the fall of 1978, disintegrated during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers deemed American evangelicals, the United States, and the Pahlavis enemies of dawa, or Islamic mission.55 The last American Presbyterians departed Iran in July 1980.
This book reconstructs and deconstructs these manifestations of mission. The Presbyterian Mission, in its literal and figurative forms, became manifest in Tehran because of the relationship between Christian evangelicalism, US global hegemony, and Pahlavi power during the mid-twentieth century. Presbyterian evangelicals worked in Tehran, through churches, as part of development programs, in schools, at cultural centers, and across time and space, to advance their “old” and “new” missions. Working in concert with other Americans and Iranians, the history of the Presbyterian Mission intersected with the processes of US foreign relations and Iranian nation-building. The following chapters excavate the human dimension of that history, unpack the meaning of mission, and grapple with the feeling of an encounter that was as intimate as it was abstract, as local as it was global. From the 1940s to the 1960s, at the height of the US-Iran alliance, Americans and Iranians lived and worked together as part of a transnational social milieu that guided an ideological and material intervention that transformed Iran, the United States, and themselves. This book tells their story.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.