Van der Bijl’s memoir, “ God’s Smuggler,” became a bestseller when it was published in 1967. Do not let the guards see these things you do not want them to see.” When you were on earth, you made blind eyes see. “Lord, in my luggage I have forbidden Scriptures that I want to take to your children across the border. According to one ad that ran in Christian magazines, he said: As he headed toward the border in a specially outfitted vehicle with a hidden compartment that might hold as many as 3,000 Bibles, he prayed. It was founded by “ Brother Andrew” Van der Bijl, a Dutch pastor who smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.īrother Andrew and other evangelicals argued that what Christians in communist countries really needed were Bibles – reflecting how important personal Bible reading is in evangelical faith.īrother Andrew turned the smuggling into anti-communist political theater. One evangelical group that emerged at this time was “ Open Doors,” whose main aim was to work for “persecuted Christians” around the world.
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and European evangelicals presented themselves as intimately linked to the Christians who were suffering at the hands of communist governments. Starting in the 1950s, but intensifying in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. And yet, today, Russia, still a country with low church attendance and little government tolerance for Protestant evangelism, has become a symbol of the conservative values that some American evangelicals proclaim. They carried out dramatic and illegal activities, smuggling Bibles and other Christian literature across borders. Once upon a time, American evangelicals saw the Soviet Union and other communist countries as the world’s greatest threat to their faith. Graham in turn praised Putin for his support of Orthodox Christianity, contrasting Russia’s “positive changes” with the rise of “atheistic secularism” in the U.S.īut it was not always so.
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On that trip, Putin reportedly explained that his mother had kept her Christian faith even under Communist rule. The enthusiasm for Russia is embodied by Graham, who in 2015 famously visited Moscow, where he had a warm meeting with Putin. Nonetheless, a small group of the most conservative American evangelicals cannot quite break up with their long-term ally. Most oppose Russia’s actions, especially because there is a strong evangelical church in Ukraine that is receiving attention and prayers from a range of evangelical leaders. Now, with Russia bombing churches and destroying cities in Ukraine, the most Protestant of the former Soviet Republics, American evangelical communities are divided. At the center is Russia’s spate of anti-LGBTQ laws, which have become a model for some anti-trans and anti-gay legislation in the U.S. Those American believers, including prominent figures such as Graham and Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice see Russia, Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church as protectors of the faith, standing against attacks on “ traditional” and “family” values. evangelical community, particularly white conservatives, has been developing a political and emotional alliance with Russia for almost 20 years.
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President Joe Biden.Ī significant subset of the U.S. And he had rarely called on believers to pray for U.S. Graham had not solicited prayers for Ukraine, some observers commented. But Graham asked that believers “pray that God would work in his heart so that war could be avoided at all cost.” His tweet acknowledged that it might seem a “strange request” given that Russia was clearly about to invade Ukraine. In February 2022, evangelical leader Franklin Graham called on his followers to pray for Vladimir Putin.