Mission Manifest: American Evangelicals and Iran in the Twentieth Century

By Matthew K. Shannon

In Mission Manifest, Matthew Shannon argues that American evangelicals were central to American-Iranian relations during the decades leading up to the 1979 revolution. These Presbyterian missionaries and other Americans with ideals worked with US government officials, nongovernmental organizations, and their Iranian counterparts as cultural and political brokers—the living sinews of a binational relationship during the Second World War and early Cold War.

As US global hegemony peaked between the 1940s and the 1960s, the religious authority of the Presbyterian Mission merged with the material power of the American state to infuse US foreign relations with the messianic ideals of Christian evangelicalism. In Tehran, the missions of American evangelicals became manifest in the realms of religion, development programs, international education, and cultural associations. Americans who lived in Iran also returned to the United States to inform the growth of the national security state, higher education, and evangelical culture. The literal and figurative missions of American evangelicals in late Pahlavi Iran had consequences for the binational relationship, the global evangelical movement, and individual Americans and Iranians.

Mission Manifest offers a history of living, breathing people who shared personal, professional, and political aims in Iran at the height of American global power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501775963

Book preview

Cover: Mission Manifest, American Evangelicals and Iran in the Twentieth Century by Matthew K. Shannon

Mission Manifest

American Evangelicals and Iran in the Twentieth Century

Matthew K. Shannon

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For Hazel

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

1. The Errand to Iran

2. Into the Commonwealth Stage

3. Spiritual Lend Lease

4. Something Other Than Ordinary Education

Map and photo gallery

5. These Young Persian Friends of Mine

6. The Persian Boomerang

7. Build It for the Eye of God

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I am lucky to have received much support to research, write, and publish this book. I am especially thankful to Cornell University Press. Michael McGandy encouraged me in the early stages, and Sarah Grossman has been an excellent editor and a good shepherd of the manuscript. Emily Conroy-Krutz and the editors of the United States in the World series offered guidance and feedback throughout the process. They placed the manuscript with peer reviewers whose reports were smart, professional, timely, and helpful. I appreciate all of them for the support.

I am grateful to my home institution, Emory and Henry College. In 2016–17, conversations with colleagues pushed me to think about the second book. Colleagues also nominated me for a faculty fellowship from the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, which meant I could begin archival research in 2017. I also received research grants from Emory and Henry to do sustained research during the two years prior to the start of the COVID pandemic. In 2020–21, I did most of the writing during a sabbatical. I was able to finish drafting the manuscript in 2021 because of a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Emory and Henry continued its generous support during the last two years of writing and editing.

There was also a lively intellectual milieu beyond southwest Virginia. Thanks to my fellow panelists at meetings of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2020 and 2023 and the Association for Iranian Studies in 2018 and 2020, among other conferences. I appreciate the invitations in 2019 to deliver lectures on pieces of this book, first as part of the Sherman Emerging Scholar Lecture Series at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and then at the biennial conference of the Peace Corps Iran Association. I enjoyed moderating the Baskerville Institute’s webinar series in 2021–22 and am thankful to the speakers who shared their research in that forum. A special thanks to Christine Westberg, David Woodward, Michael Zirinsky, and the other former Community School students who shared their memories with me. I learned a lot while editing American-Iranian Dialogues: From Constitution to White Revolution, c. 1890s-1960s, which Bloomsbury published with its New Approaches to International History series. Thanks to Thomas Zeiler for the invitation to be part of the series, and to all of the book’s contributors: John Ghazvinian, Kelly Shannon, Kyle Olson, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Gregory Brew, Richard Garlitz, Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, Ida Yalzadeh, Camron Amin, and Cyrus Schayegh. Sections of my chapter from that edited volume, Alborz, Bethel, and Community: Missionary Institutions in Postwar Tehran, appear in a modified form in chapters 4 and 5 of this book. I owe many debts of gratitude to staff and archivists at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, especially Natalie Shilstut and Kristen Gaydos, and to Susannah Burger for helping me in the archives in 2021. Thanks to Sim Smiley for scanning images from the National Archives and Records Administration, and to Bill Nelson for the excellent maps. I am eternally grateful for having mentors who remain active in my professional development. To Richard Immerman, Petra Goedde, and Jim Goode—Thanks!

Finally, I thank my parents, Kevin and Cindy, and my wife, Samantha, who provided all forms of support, including in the archives. In 2020, I was blessed by the birth of my daughter, Hazel, and it is her to whom this book is dedicated.

Note on Transliteration

This book’s transliteration system is based on the style guide of the journal Iranian Studies, which recommends a modified version of the transliteration system used in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. In this book, however, there is no use of the macron, or the ayn and hamza. Proper nouns, such as the names of Iranian cities and people used regularly in English-language sources, appear in their most commonly used forms, as opposed to a transliterated rendering. The aim was for internal consistency within the volume.

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.

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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.

Chapter 1

The Errand to Iran

Mission and Place in Transnational History

Mission was the driver of the American errand to Iran. This is a new argument about US-Iran relations that has deep roots in US history. Historians have highlighted the connections between Protestant providentialism, American exceptionalism, and convictions about the United States as a redeemer nation.¹ As Anders Stephanson described it, Manifest Destiny defied the separation of church and state, involved Americans of different faiths and belief systems, and transcended the continent to travel across oceans. The American global mission was, to missionaries and statesmen, universal and exceptional, and it was based on the assumption that the United States had a providentially assigned role … to lead the world to new and better things through what Stephanson called regenerative intervention.² If the framework of promised land, crusader state carries more explanatory weight than the standard international relations categories, then the question for historians is, to borrow from Andrew Preston, "not of whether religion influenced US foreign relations, but how."³

This book argues that the answer to that question hinges on the historical conditions, contingencies, and contexts of place. Place is a social process involving the natural, built, and human environments and defined by deep conflicts of persons, institutions, and processes, both local and global.⁴ A conception of place that is local and transnational, and attuned to culture and power, the sacred and secular, and the subjective and interpersonal, offers a unique vantage point on US-Iran relations. It reveals that missionary ideals, and the related concepts of exceptionalism, providentialism, and redemption, were not merely theoretical. Christian evangelicals, along with champions of the American global mission, considered it a duty to actualize their ideas through an errand to the world.⁵ In other words, an evangelical impulse compelled Presbyterians and other Americans to leave the United States and take their missions global. Through the evangelical errand, ideologies of mission, which were embedded in imperial networks and transnational processes, became manifest in places such as Tehran.

The natural environment, or setting of this history, was Tehran. Then as now, the city sits on a high plateau, between the Great Salt Desert and the Zagros Mountains, on the southern banks of the Alborz Mountains. One missionary described the city as being beautifully situated on the northern edge of a great plain with a noble mountain range rising like a wall behind it. Travelers regularly comment on the Alborz Mountains and Mount Damavand, the highest point in the Middle East. If Damavand’s snowcapped volcanic peak seems to climb to the heavens, the city in its shadow historically served as a conduit between East and West. As an analyst wrote of Tehran’s longue durée, Its crossroad location explains why this area has been inhabited for more than six millennia. This was true for the ancient city of Ray and, beginning in 1785, the national capital of Iran.⁶ In 1907, one year after Iranians opened their parliament, or Majles, the country’s first class of elected officials made Tehran the constitutionally mandated capital of the country.⁷ During the twentieth century, Iranian nation-building and globalization transformed Tehran and elevated its international profile. The mid-twentieth century, in particular, coincided with and was propelled by the rapid scientific and technological advances of the age of speed.⁸ Travel time between the United States and Iran shrank from one year in the 1830s to six weeks in the 1920s to thirty hours in the 1950s, if one flew a jet into Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. During the early Cold War, Americans realized that New York is far closer to Teheran today than it was to Boston when the Republic was founded.⁹ This is why Tehran was, since the 1930s, the administrative and institutional hub of the Presbyterian Mission, and why, after the Second World War, the city was the site of the US colony. Tehran, more than any other place in Iran, hosted the American errand.

This chapter, as a foundation for the rest of the book, ascertains the centrality of mission and place in the history of US-Iran relations. It begins with a section that explains what Presbyterian evangelicals and other Americans meant when they spoke of mission, before turning to the socio-affective worlds and emotional neighborhoods of Tehran, where their mission became manifest.¹⁰ The second section profiles the human environment of place: the Del Be Del, or heart-to-heart, network. This transnational network included Presbyterian evangelicals, along with their American and Iranian friends, and they were the primary actors in this history. The third section excavates Tehran’s built environment through the deposition of the first Pahlavi shah in 1941, with a focus on the Presbyterian Mission’s institutions that physically hosted the American-Iranian encounter at the local level.¹¹ The chapter concludes with a section of commentary on the Iranian supporters of the Presbyterian Mission after 1941, primarily but not exclusively Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Throughout, the emphasis is on the meaning of mission, and the feeling of the American errand to Iran.

American Evangelicals

Ideology has historically mattered to US foreign relations. Whether the inspiration was the French Protestant John Calvin’s reformed theology, the American activist Jane Addams’s social outreach, or US President Woodrow Wilson’s use of national power, evangelically minded Americans considered their beliefs universal maxims that they could and should propagate on a global scale. Whatever their gospel, these Americans believed that right and truth were on their side. Some maxims sprang from the Bible. The word evangelical originates from the Greek word for gospel. As the historian Lauren Turek wrote, All evangelicals share a commitment to evangelize, or to spread the ‘good news’ throughout the world.¹² Good news came in other forms, including the gospel of Americanism, which was carried … to every corner of the globe.¹³ Matthew Mark Davis was among the first historians to identify the convergence of missionary and nonmissionary gospels in Iran. Because the ideology of mission was infused with notions of God and country, which were assumed to be both exceptional and universal, the Presbyterians were like other Americans who possessed an idealistic vision of how things ought to be in Iran and acted upon that vision.¹⁴ In Tehran, the evangelical errand was the product of two visions that were separate yet singular: the Presbyterian and American global missions.

The Presbyterian Mission grew out of the denomination’s family tree in the United States.¹⁵ The first American presbytery—the basis of the church’s governance structure—was established in Philadelphia in 1706, and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, or PCUSA, was founded in 1789, the year that the US Constitution went into effect. However, American Presbyterians have rarely been unified. Pro-slavery southerners split from their co-denominationalists in 1858. That same year, a faction of northerners met in Pittsburgh to establish the United Presbyterian Church of North America. In 1869, in the aftermath of the US Civil War, some other northern Presbyterians rehabilitated the PCUSA. In 1871, as denominational mission boards broke up the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the PCUSA acquired its mission fields in Iran. In 1872, James Bassett opened the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran. Despite their differences, the major branches of American Presbyterianism were, through the mid-twentieth century, evangelical. All sponsored foreign missions, with the two northern churches active in the Middle East. The Pittsburgh-based church managed a mission field that followed the Nile River from Cairo to Khartoum and Addis Ababa. From 156 Fifth Avenue in New York City, the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions administered a global organization that, in the Middle East, stretched from the beaches of Beirut to the mountains of Mashhad. In 1958, the two northern churches merged into the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA). The churches consolidated their mission fields under a new board called COEMAR: the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations. As the subsequent chapters demonstrate, the year 1958 was, for various reasons, a watershed moment for the evangelical errand to Iran and the Middle East.¹⁶

The Presbyterian Mission, like the institutional family tree, had many roots, branches, and leaves of all seasons that blew with the shifting winds of American Protestant culture.¹⁷ Presbyterianism is rooted in the French theologian John Calvin’s interpretation of the Protestant Reformation, with various branches adhering to the Westminster Standards, and all believing in God’s divine plan and the original sin of humanity.¹⁸ The Presbyterians in Iran, however, were products of the United States. While most nineteenth-century missionaries were animated by nothing but Christ and the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, those in the twentieth century modernized the formula to include Christ and Culture, with some taking after progressive-era reformers such as Jane Addams to preach the social gospel.¹⁹ Many scholars have contended that, in the Middle East, these modern missionaries abandoned the evangelism of their predecessors to focus on education and medicine and support local nationalisms.²⁰

In Iran, there was no hard and fast division of the sacred and secular elements of the Presbyterian Mission. Like US power more broadly, evangelicalism melded seemingly contradictory impulses that reinforced each other, and that cut through generations rather than between them. During the interwar years, the Presbyterian Mission reflected the larger rifts within American Protestantism between modernists and fundamentalists that was seen in the interdenominational Laymen’s Inquiry of 1932. The report tilted toward the modernists in calling for Christianity’s active participation in an emerging world religion, a recommendation that dissenters considered the equivalent of renouncing missions.²¹ In New York, a mainline consensus emerged under Robert Speer’s leadership of the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions. However, the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran included social gospelers and those who spoke of a Christian Kingdom in Iran.²² There was a discernible shift toward evangelical secularism, or missionary modernity, but, as the religious studies scholar Adam Becker noted, intonations of secularization did not result in the desacralization of mission.²³ To use the lexicon of this book, the new mission of the Jane Addams archetype—which involved everything from social work to education and international organizing, had a Presbyterian connection, and touched the United States and the world—did not displace the old religious mission of the John Calvin archetype.²⁴

Because of the coexistence of the old and new missions, Presbyterian evangelicals linked individual salvation to social salvation and sustained a consistent missiology through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Early in the century, a PCUSA board member in New York stated that foreign missions … is not a side issue … it is the supreme duty of the Church. He believed that, despite their obvious differences in the United States, American Christians will be more and more agreed as to the imperative duty and inspiring privilege of preaching Jesus Christ to the whole world.²⁵ Later in the century, American Presbyterians made the metaphorical errand into the wilderness central to their understanding of the Cold War world. A 1958 document titled In Unity—For Mission celebrated the merger of northern Presbyterians, and it explained that the church’s mission is on the frontier.²⁶ The authors of that document, which was written two years before President John F. Kennedy introduced his new frontier, were mainline Presbyterian church leaders.²⁷ But they put forth a literal interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew’s great commission, in which Jesus instructed his followers to go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. Other evangelicals would have understood their missiological impulses in relation to one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, which read: an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!²⁸ The Presbyterian Mission in Iran, as the historian Heather Sharkey wrote about the American missionary community in Egypt, reflected the grassroots Presbyterian evangelical culture of its day.²⁹ They just happened to live and work in the Middle East.

The coexisting impulses of Presbyterian evangelicals in Iran were related to, yet distinct from, the American global mission. Scholars have made this point about other parts of the world. As examples, Darlene Rivas wrote about missionary capitalists and Emily Rosenberg about financial missionaries.³⁰ In addition to the scholarship on global capitalism is the corpus on development and modernization. Michael Latham established that modernization theory resonated with previous combinations of missionary vision and imperial control. Development workers, modernization theorists, and other emissaries of … ‘Americanism’ were, according to Nils Gilman, driven by proselytizing zeal and armed with sacramental science and technology to exorcise the secular demons of the postwar world. Such sentiments stretched beyond technical experts and aid workers, with the Peace Corps acting as a new lay missionary army, and the US military, particularly noncombat advisers and engineers, embracing the idea of nation-building.³¹ To borrow from the scholar Larry Grubbs, these were secular missionaries.³² These Americans had different aims in Iran than the Presbyterians, but both groups shared enthusiasm for affecting regenerative intervention in the religious, socioeconomic, and political affairs of a foreign land.³³ While the evangelical impulse has millennia of history, the projection of US power on a global scale is a more recent phenomenon.

The archetype of the American global mission was President Woodrow Wilson. He was deeply religious, yet, as a wartime president and international statesman, Wilson wielded the instruments of American power, including the military, to promote his vision of world order. His Southern Presbyterian covenant theology, which strove to extend God’s relationship with Abraham to the nations of the world, informed his foreign policy and the League of Nations covenant.³⁴ Wilson’s religious messianism was matched only by his conviction that the United States was the hope of the world.³⁵ He failed to realize that vision during his lifetime, but Wilsonianism survived as Americans who believed theirs to be an exceptional nation with universal appeal, divine destiny, and regenerative capabilities worked with international partners to keep the covenant alive.³⁶ The scholar John Fousek made a convincing case that, during the mid-twentieth century, Americans were certain they were chosen, not just to lead their constituents or congregants at home, but to lead the free world. US President Franklin Roosevelt urged every American during the Second World War to act as a trustee for all those who fell in the last war—a part of their mission unfilled. That mission was, according to Roosevelt, to resurrect Wilsonianism and build a world fellowship. In the Cold War, ideas about destinarianism, and the material ability to project various forms of national power, made the globe an American icon, which meant that "the entire world was