The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (14 page)

The answer lies in the life of Billy Graham, and now in that of his son Franklin. Both men have
made religious liberty one of the most pressing human rights issues in U.S. foreign policy. With his 1950s cold war crusades, Billy Graham sought to mobilize the enormous potential of American Christians to oppose what he saw as the evils of communism—principally its denial of God’s existence and the horrific treatment that Christians received inside the Soviet Union. Graham’s struggle helped marshal
American resistance to the Soviet Union’s propaganda efforts in the developing world. It also helped heal a rift that had been tearing the evangelical community apart.

In the early twentieth century, the scientific method and the theory of evolution challenged evangelical beliefs about the nature of creation (that God had made the world in six days, for example). Some evangelicals responded by
turning inward, especially in the American South, and rejecting modernity altogether. Beginning in the 1920s, these self-proclaimed “fundamentalists” retreated from the secular world and split off from the broader evangelical movement. In the 1950s, young Billy Graham challenged them in their isolation, while affirming basic evangelical tenets: that believers must choose to give their lives to Jesus
Christ, and that scripture was infallible. Yet he also refocused American evangelicals’
energy outward, by turning their attention to the mandate of the Great Commission: to spread the Gospel to the entire world. Under his leadership, the popular evangelical advance of the late nineteenth century began to repeat itself. Once again, the movement flourished in opposition to a common enemy (that
time, Islam; this time, atheistic communism). Using the American Jewish lobby’s efforts on behalf of Soviet Jews as their model, Graham and his followers ceaselessly lobbied Congress on behalf of Soviet Christians—both evangelical and Orthodox—who were being persecuted in the USSR.
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Franklin Graham took up his father’s charge on such proxy battlefields as Angola and Nicaragua, where, in 1986,
he trained 250 Contra rebels to be chaplains.

Franklin Graham relishes the most adventurous—and dangerous—edge of evangelism and relief work. A self-styled evangelical gunslinger, he occasionally wears a .38-caliber pistol strapped to his ankle. Physically, Franklin shares his father’s avian attributes: the crown of stiff hair, the aquiline nose, and the startling blue eyes. Yet the younger Graham
is much less of a political dove than his father. Billy Graham was a vocal supporter of civil rights and advocated strongly for nuclear nonproliferation; he called himself “God’s ambassador,” a big-tent term that emphasized his appeal among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike. Franklin Graham, lining up alongside the emerging powers of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, called himself the ambassador
to Jesus Christ, which emphasized the exclusionary nature of his faith.

Growing up Graham wasn’t easy, Franklin says. Until he was twenty-two, he slouched in his father’s shadow. He smoked, drank, dropped out of Stony Brook, a Christian boarding school on Long Island, and got kicked out of a technical college in Texas for keeping a girl out past curfew. None of this pleased Billy. During a walk
on a North Carolina beach one day, he told Franklin, “You’ve got to accept Jesus Christ or reject him.”
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Salvation, for Billy Graham, was a black-and-white issue. Franklin, like everyone else, had to choose his soul’s future. Not long after, in 1974, in a Jerusalem hotel room, Franklin threw out his cigarettes and offered himself to the Lord.

He focused on the most hot-button issues—where the
American military, foreign policy, and his evangelical aims overlapped. After the first Gulf War, he sent thousands of Arabic Bibles and Christian tracts to Saudi Arabia as part of what he called Operation Desert Save. The influx of
Bibles enraged General Norman Schwarzkopf, who feared the Bibles would confirm their Saudi hosts’ suspicions that the U.S. military was on a secret mission to evangelize.
The general had an aide call Graham, who recounts the following phone conversation. The aide—an anonymous colonel—told Graham to stop sending Bibles. Then the colonel confessed that he, too, was an evangelical Christian, but he was “under orders.” “So am I, sir,” Graham responded, “orders from the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”
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The Bibles were taken away. Graham, however, was undeterred: in
no time at all, he would help lead a new revival.

In 1991, when the cold war ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the evangelical lobby’s interest in U.S. foreign policy did not. In the power vacuum left behind, Franklin Graham stood at the vanguard of a new movement, one that would once again pit evangelical Christians against the emerging power of militant Islam. Nowhere was this
cast in sharper relief than along the tenth parallel in Sudan, where news of the Islamic regime’s persecution of Christians in the 1990s supported this view. American evangelicals—including Franklin Graham—were watching firsthand. Evangelical Christianity had deep roots in southern Sudan, dating back to the missionaries who had preached there during British rule. Although Christians made up only
a minority of the population, they formed a strong presence on the ground in churches, hospitals, refugee camps. This gave American evangelicals back home unparalleled access and information about the war. In response, Bashir targeted their outposts. On March 2, 2000, his regime bombed Graham’s hospital in Lui—the largest in southern Sudan—for the first of two times.

Beyond Sudan, other Muslim
countries were hardening their stance against the West, and against Christianity. For decades, Muslim countries had been growing alarmed by the West’s economic and political dominance. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), drafted in the wake of the Holocaust by a committee including Eleanor Roosevelt and the French Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, had appeared to many Muslims
as a secret tool for backdoor evangelization, and so an affront to their faith. In 1990, representatives of forty-five Muslim countries signed the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. The concept of
universal rights—the precursor to human rights—the Cairo signatories argued, was encoded with a Judeo-Christian value system, beginning with the emphasis on the individual over the community,
as well as questions about personal freedoms and rights. In response, Muslim countries rallied to protect their societies from the incursion of such values. Ostensibly, to defend their faith and culture, they provided a code for ethical human behavior governed exclusively by Islamic law—not nations or individuals. Criminal law, women’s rights, and labor law—all were to be determined exclusively
according to Islamic law.
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Since there is no single way to interpret Islamic law, this leaves the countries that signed the Cairo Declaration open to interpreting Sharia as they see fit.

For many evangelicals, the Cairo Declaration was a shot across the bow—largely ignored by the secular press but followed intently by those concerned with the state of Christianity in the world at large. In 1995,
Michael Horowitz, a Jewish activist and a neoconservative who had served as general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget under the Reagan administration, published a now famous opinion piece in
The Wall Street Journal
with the headline “New Intolerance Between Crescent and Cross.”
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Evangelicals, he wrote, were the victims of a rising tide of Islamic persecution. To him, this development
was the beginning of a new holocaust, and evangelicals were the “Jews of the 21st century.”

The evangelical lobby, with its cold war experience and Washington contacts, turned its attention to protecting Christians in frontline states against Islamic persecution. In 1998, the lobby had its first real sweeping political success when Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA),
which sought to protect an individual’s right to choose and freely practice his religion around the world, as guaranteed by Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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The bill passed unanimously in both the House of Representatives and the Senate at a time when Congress was deeply divided over the impeachment of President Clinton. Its sweeping success would make religion a leading
aspect of human rights in the twenty-first century. Religious freedom defied the traditional lines between liberals and conservatives and gathered support across the political spectrum: the bill had the backing of such unlikely political bedfellows as former Republican senator John Ashcroft, a conservative evangelical who focused on stopping the persecution of Christians; and then senator Joseph
R. Biden, Jr., a Roman Catholic who lauded religious freedom as an aspect of U.S. foreign policy. Other powerful political
champions included Senators Joseph Lieberman, Nancy Pelosi, Frank Wolf, and Sam Brownback, to name a few. Evangelicals also found unusual partners in a new, broad-based coalition of allies all equally appalled by the war in Sudan, including the Congressional Black Caucus and
the broader human rights lobby. IRFA would be the first of many such joint campaigns.
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An Office of International Religious Freedom opened at the State Department with its own ambassador-at-large, an independent budget, and a mandate to monitor freedom of religion abroad. A new age of Christian activism, which included Jews, Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Iranian Baha’is among its ranks, had
begun.

The IRFA has little legal force abroad. Its real value is to function as a restraint on the U.S. government, making sure that the current administration honors religious freedom (or at least pays it lip service) in diplomacy. It requires that the United States evaluate countries on the basis of religious freedom, compile an annual report, and take action against the worst offenders, ideally
in the form of sanctions.
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Although the IRFA has been widely praised at home, where religious freedom is an easy issue to rally around, it prompted concern in some Muslim countries, which fear that Christians are attempting clandestine evangelization through American foreign policy. In 2001, when three members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (another office spawned by
the IRFA) visited Cairo to prepare a report on Egypt’s treatment of its minority Christian population, the Copts, the Egyptians stonewalled them.
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Only a very small handful of officials would even meet with them. As a representative of the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut (which has the Coptic Church in Egypt as a member) put it plainly, American evangelical engagement in politics evokes
“memories of the Crusades” and is viewed as “a new invasion of American foreign policy and some evangelical groups who want to convert Muslims.”
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Many African Christians and the Americans watching close at hand were coming to believe they were on the front line of a new global conflict, and their counterparts in Washington thought likewise. Once again, to them, Africa served as the knife-edge
of global evangelization and the front line for a defense of the Christian faith. A century earlier, the technological advances of the industrial revolution had allowed many evangelical missionaries to spread their message all over the world. Now computers,
spreadsheets, and statistical modeling programs allowed them to identify the last “unreached” people, analyze them against the broader population,
predict changes in population and culture over time, and devise a high-tech strategy for evangelization. Once again, the push for the Gospel and the drive for human development went hand in hand.

In 1990, the Brazilian evangelist Luis Bush—a former business analyst at Arthur Andersen in Chicago—devised a map showing the locations of the people whom he called “the neediest people on earth.” By
this he meant both those who had never heard of Christianity (“the spiritually poorest of the poor”) and those struggling to survive (“the financially poorest of the poor”). Using United Nations statistics on population, poverty, and religious affiliation, he employed a cutting-edge geographic information system (GIS) computer program at the San Jose office of a secular company called Strategic Mapping
Inc. to create “the 10/40 Window,” which served to illustrate an evangelical strategy for proselytizing to the entire world.

The 10/40 Window is a twenty-seven-thousand-square-mile red rectangle whose southern edge is the tenth parallel (running through Sudan, Nigeria, and the Philippines), and whose northern edge is the fortieth, (passing through Portugal, Afghanistan, and North Korea.) The
Window (also known as the “the Window of Opportunity” and “the Resistant Belt”) is home to 2.7 billion people, almost half the world’s population: 900 million Muslims, 400 million Buddhists, and 600 million Hindus. Eight out of ten of those people live on less than $500 a year. Most important to the proselytizers, only 3 out of 100 are born-again Christians.
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The red rectangle, the catchy name,
the round numbers—the 10/40 Window was a brilliant visual strategy. It was also statistically accurate. By joining spiritual need to material need, and representing the two together in the graphics of a secular newsmagazine or foundation report, it captured the new evangelical approach in a stroke. Luis Bush told me that when he saw the map come up on the computer screen in the San Jose office,
he collapsed facedown on the floor and thanked God for its clarity. Not long afterward, he presented the 10/40 Window at a Billy Graham Conference in the Philippines—a majority Christian country divided along the tenth parallel between a Catholic north and mostly Muslim south. Along it, some Christian observers feared a “domino effect.” “If the line falls to Islamic domination through civil war
or constitutional coup,” wrote Elizabeth Kendal, an evangelical reporter and blogger, “it will destabilize
all of West Africa along that ethnic religious fault line that runs from the Sierra Leone/Liberia border in West Africa, east through Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, southern Chad, central Sudan, to Asmara, Eritrea on the Red Sea.”
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