“To Make the World Safe for Christianity”: The United States, Rhodesia, and the Global Protestant Far Right, 1965–80

This paper traces the emergence, evolution, and decline of the Rhodesian-American religious lobby, a transnational network of churches, magazines, lobbying groups, and other non-state actors that operated during the Rhodesian Bush War from 1965 to 1980. Voicing its concerns in religious, racial, and anticommunist terms, the lobby recruited US combatants into the Rhodesian Security Forces and mobilized US evangelicals to press political leaders to recognize Rhodesian sovereignty. By threading together the post-Vietnam mercenary diaspora with waning pro-segregation activist networks and the emerging Christian Right in the United States, the lobby significantly shaped US-Rhodesia relations and global far-right politics in the late Cold War. This paper additionally contextualizes this Rhodesian-American religious lobby within a broader global Protestant far right with roots in the 1960s that drew self-professed ‘fundamentalist’ militants across the United States, Northern Ireland, and southern Africa into a loose communion that endured into the late twentieth century and beyond.