Saving Former Soviets: US Missionary Work in the Post-Cold War Era

In the late twentieth century, American evangelicals were the majority of the world’s missionaries, their mission organizations were the world’s largest NGOs, and over one million Americans were traveling abroad for mission trips each year. Many US evangelicals hoped to harness this global manpower and institutional power for the ambitious goal of converting the whole world by the year 2000.

What evangelicals saw as a divinely-given opportunity opened in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. In response, eighty mission organizations banded together and, with the assistance of former Soviet officials, launched a program to save the former Soviet Union through its schoolchildren. Posing as education experts, waves of US volunteers spent one-year terms hosting conferences for public school teachers in the Commonwealth of Independent States. At these conferences, US evangelicals invited teachers to convert to evangelical Protestantism, and gave the teachers Bible-based curriculum and instructions on how to use the curriculum to teach classroom lessons about “Christian ethics and morality.” In five years, the campaigns hosted 42,000 teachers from 2500 schools in ten different CIS countries.

Along with those numerical successes came opposition – from local populations and Orthodox churches in these countries, from Protestant church leaders throughout the Global South, and even from within some of the US mission organizations involved. These criticisms re-energized resistance to US evangelicals’ unreflective activism and cultural chauvinism around the world.

This paper traces the effort to save as many former Soviets as possible, and the global conflicts that ensued as a result. Drawing on never-before-seen sources, the paper argues that this mission project fueled US evangelicals’ apocalyptic ambitions to complete the conversion of the world, inspired conservative evangelicals who wanted Bible-based curriculum in US public schools, and ignited global opposition to evangelicals’ international dominance.