Evangelical Fear of One-World Rule Still Echoes Today

Another Evangelical Anxiety

My recent post here was about white American evangelical anxieties of the 1950s through at least the 1970s. My thesis is that these anxieties of the past entered into white American evangelical DNA and are still there even if not as clearly recognized or expressed as such.

Another white American evangelical anxiety that I clearly remember was fear of “one world government.” This was supported by the United Nations and the incipient European Union as well as the “communist international”—the communist (Soviet and Chinese) dream of a worldwide communist utopia.

There was talk, even as far back as the 1950s, of an all-Europe economy including money. An evangelical author and speaker named Willard Cantelon wrote and spoke about “The Day the Dollar Died.” The fear was that America and the dollar would be swallowed up in this growing one-world government and economy, even if it wasn’t communist. We were very opposed to any hint of a one-world government, even if only a dream.

Why? I return to my earlier thesis that the basic, underlying anxiety was persecution. Any government that our American government became part of would persecute Christians. Not necessarily those “nominal Christians” of the “mainline Protestant churches,” but evangelical Christians, us.

We were warned repeatedly that the United Nations and the European Economic Union (then just a dream) would grow and swallow up America. We were passionately opposed to the UN and any future European union. We often heard stories about evangelical Christians being persecuted in Europe. These stories still go around in some evangelical circles—about Scandinavian countries, for example, jailing evangelicals for opposing gay marriage.

An anecdote: In 1970 or 1971 (I don’t remember which year) I attended the Pentecostal World Fellowship convention in Dallas. Thousands of Pentecostals came from numerous countries. One delegate was pastor of the only Pentecostal church in Moscow (Russia). He had two men always beside him. The rumor was they were KGB agent. Some even speculated that HE was a KGB agent! He was slated to speak to the convention. While he spoke, with English translation, a well-known anti-communist “missionary” and three companions unfurled a banner above and behind him. It said “Russian Jails Are Full of Christians.” They shouted him down. Eventually some security people “escorted” the demonstrators from the gallery above the podium. While they were doing that, many of the delegates, probably the majority, stood and yelled to leave them alone. It was clear where the majority’s sympathies lay—with the anti-communist demonstrators and not with the Russian Pentecostal pastor. I felt very sorry for him. He never finished his speech.

My point is that these evangelical anxieties created among evangelicals, especially white American evangelicals, a very strong “us versus them” mentality that persists. “They” are foreigners who might change American culture (“more of them, less of us”) for the worse and Americans who embrace internationalism, multiculturalism, and who lean into anything that threatens evangelicalism’s perceived status as America’s baseline religion. (What Randall Balmer has called “America’s folk religion.”)

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