Transcript

Welcome to CR amplified, the Cairo Review’s Podcast, where we talk to experts and policy makers about relevant issues on the world stage. I’m Jacob Blau. 

Today, we are going to be talking about the history of Christian missionaries in Iran during the Pahlavi dynasty. In 1872, the first American stepped foot in Tehran. He was a Presbyterian evangelical named Reverend James Bassett, who was ordered to carry out his mission under the leadership of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, also known as the PCUSA. From the late 19th century all the way up to July 1980, Presbyterian missions exerted their power on Iranian culture, education, healthcare and politics. The nature of this relationship between Iranians and Christian missionaries provides us with an example of American imperialism. Christian missionaries in Iran coincided with 20th century U.S. foreign policy, specifically during the Cold War, and how it was used as a means of controlling state building and governments in other countries, so that the U.S. could curb the influence of their enemies. However, the relationship between the members of the Christian mission and Iranians in Tehran was both material and spiritual, and while American Presbyterians often played the role of colonizer, they also built meaningful relationships and friendships with Iranians through various roles, such as doctor, teacher, and social worker to talk about this relationship today, I’m speaking with Dr Matthew K. Shannon about his recently published book, Mission Manifest: American Evangelicals in Iran in the 20th century. He is currently an associate professor of history at Emory and Henry University and an expert on the history of U.S.-Iranian relations. Dr Shannon will be joining the Department of History at the American University of Cairo as a full time faculty member in the fall of 2025. I just wanted to thank you so much for coming today, Professor, and thank you for being here.

Matthew K. Shannon: Thank you so much for the invitation and for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Jacob Blau: Thank you so much. So I just wanted to ask, more generally, what got you into this research about Iranian US relations and, more specifically, the influence American Christian missions had in the Middle East? 

MKS: It’s a great question. So I was in college, an undergraduate in the early 21st century, and there was a lot of discourse in the United States about U.S.-Middle East relations in terms of “Axis of Evil” and  “The Clash of Civilizations”, and all of the other tropes and misperceptions that Americans had about the Middle East. They were prevalent. So I began to do research in graduate school and I was very interested in questioning those claims that were so prominent in American popular culture, in the media and the government in the early 21st century. For instance, were US-Iran relations really dominated by a clash of civilizations? And what I found in my research was that no, the relationship between the United States and Iran, that particular bilateral relationship was prior to the 1979 revolution, very much defined by a series of contested dialogs. In my first book, I write about Iranian students who studied in the United States prior to 1979 and I very much see this book we’re talking about today, Mission Manifest as the other side of the coin, as opposed to Iranian students in the United States, this book, Mission Manifest is about Americans in Iran, especially American evangelicals or missionaries. So we can look at the ways in which individual Americans and Iranians are political and cultural brokers within the context of a much more complicated bilateral relationship.  You’ll see this point coming up in a lot of my work, whether it’s my first book, Losing Hearts and Minds, or in an edited book titled American-Iranian Dialogs, you’ll see this question being addressed, engaged with, explained, and answered in different ways.

So with regard to what the Mission Manifest Book is about, American missionaries had a long presence in Iran, and there’s a lot of scholarship—on American missionaries in the Middle East and Iran in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I don’t really go back and rehash that history systematically. But what I was interested in was this mid 20th century moment, what I call the “American moment”, borrowing from some other scholars like Richard W. Cottam and others. With this concept [I examine if] older forms of religious and cultural influence that took the form of the Presbyterian Mission (these are missionaries that are part of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America) get replaced or superseded by newer forms of influence, the U.S. military or intelligence community, or the broader national security apparatus, or in that moment of supreme American influence in Iran (the 1940s to the 1960s is roughly the period that the book covers) was there a convergence of the kind of Messianic certainties of Presbyterian evangelicalism with the material power of the U.S. state? So what the book looks at are the different ways in which the mission of American evangelicals and other Americans without ideals become manifest with the support of their Iranian partners in Tehran in particular, between the 1940s and 1960s. I could talk more about periodization, but maybe we leave that for another point.

JB: Thank you so much. You talked a lot in your book about these Christian home bases in the U.S. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the degree of control that groups like the PCUSA, and other Presbyterian home based entities, so to speak, had over Christians in Iran. And moreover, how did this play into the imperialistic nature of the structure of the evangelical mission in Iran? 

MKS: It’s a really good question and so let’s just talk about that religious piece for a second. When I talk about “mission” in this book, you know, I’m talking about it in literal and figurative terms. The figurative form would be what do we mean by mission? What do these evangelicals understand their mission to be? This ties into questions about “American providentialism” and “manifest destiny” and stuff like that. But, your question about, kind of these material networks, forms of influence, and control is super interesting. The Presbyterian Mission was also an entity, a physical entity that existed in downtown Tehran. In the book you’ll see maps [of the Presbyterian Mission’s layout]. So there was a central compound located on a street called Qavam al-Saltaneh, in the Cold War it was called Stalin Avenue, and it had a different name after 1979. That’s where the main Presbyterian evangelical chapel was located, and where some of the business of the mission would take place. There are other compounds and sites throughout the city, but this is “central”, as the missionaries called it. But, that wasn’t kind of the place where all of the decisions were necessarily made. We have to think of the global missionary network as a parallel network to the U.S. State Department. Whereas the U.S. State Department manages a network of embassies, consulates, and other diplomatic institutions all around the world, and they report back to Washington, the Presbyterian Mission reports back to the United States, but not to the State Department. They report back to the Board of Foreign Missions in New York City where the policy makers—the church men—of the Presbyterian evangelical network are, and where decisions are often made. So that board of foreign missions, it takes a different name after 1958 but still located in New York City, runs a network of mission enterprises. So you’ll see, even in the book, different maps about how various American denominations essentially carved up the Middle East. I mean, the Presbyterians are in Iran, but the Methodists really aren’t prior to the 60s and 70s, because it was considered to be, in the American context, a Presbyterian field, So there’s the home base, as you called it, a New York City Board of Foreign Missions and there [was] be field station missions all around the world. 

My book is about the Iran mission, the Presbyterian Mission in Iran. They would communicate to the folks at Central Compound in downtown Tehran with a cable address that was inculcate Tehran, which gives you some ideas to what the broader goals of the mission were; and then from that Central Compound there would be various mission institutions and other kind of projects, some ad-hoc and some permanent, that would be run by by the missionaries in Iran, So I won’t go into all the details of what types of institutions were there quite yet, because we’re talking about this religious piece. 

It’s an interesting question. How do we understand the Board of Foreign Missions and the Presbyterian Mission in Iran and its church within the context of colonial arc? The churches—these are evangelical churches that the Americans are establishing, for instance in the late 19th century and last two thirds of the 19th century as when some of this is really beginning, and the Americans are working with Christians in Iran. So, Assyrian Christians and Armenian Christians are big groups, but they’re pulling Assyrians and Armenians away from their home churches to join this new evangelical community. This is of course a problem for many Assyrian and especially Armenian Church leaders. They see this as a schismatic enterprise where American Presbyterians are going to carve up their already small and sometimes fledgling communities in the ways that we see churches divided up in the US; there’s no single Presbyterian Church in the U.S. even today  So this is a problem, and there is a lot of resistance prior to the interwar years. Prior to the 1920s and 1930s any church, any Evangelical Church that exists in Iran, is going to be totally controlled by Americans. They’re going to have partners, and they’re going to be working in local languages, but they don’t have independence. They are under the synod of New York, [where] American church governance structures are imposed upon these new congregations in Iran. There’s like a shift from a looser form of Congregationalist organizing to a much more hierarchical and rigid form of Presbyterian organizing when we get into the interwar years, and they’re consolidating their different religious institutions into one body.

In the interwar years, eventually that Evangelical Church of Iran, gained its independence from the American church governance structure. But, what I argue in the book is that period from the interwar years until the 1960s marks this commonwealth stage. You’ll see this term in the one chapter, within the context of church mission relations—this idea that the church is independent, technically, but there’s this mission too. So there’s a foreign mission and a local church and really the Foreign Mission controls the resources, often personnel, finances, reporting back to the Board of Foreign Missions, and getting the resources you need to engage in these enterprises. So in chapter two, I look at this commonwealth stage in church-mission relations, which is this liminal space between the full blown colonial church period, and the post 1965 period. After 1965, the American Presbyterian Mission dissolved itself, and the Iranian evangelical church is freer to, at least prior to the revolution of 1979, set its own course. You’ll see in that chapter on religion, there’s another section called “Out of the Commonwealth Stage”. So I’m very much interested in trying to think in a nuanced and critical way about how to map the existence of this church’s large arc of colonial commonwealth, and maybe whatever comes after that, these various stages. Now there’s an argument to be made that the whole enterprise, no matter what the stage is, is colonial in various ways; and American evangelicals are working in Iran, during the mid 20th century, under the protective umbrella of U.S. national power.

 [However,] I’m not at all downplaying the broader structural factors here, but in this particular world of intra-Christian relations in Tehran, we can see this kind of evolution that I’ve just described. 

JB: So you’re talking both about the religious relationship between these Presbyterian home bases and the evangelical churches in Iran but, then also at the same time, you’re talking about this foreign policy aspect that was sort of a U.S. colonial enterprise and I want to talk a little bit more about that. So, from my understanding, and this is something that you spoke about in the book, for example, the Eisenhower Doctrine  was a foreign policy method from President Dwight Eisenhower to administer military and foreign aid to Middle Eastern countries to exert influence and to curb Russian influence during the Cold War. In fact, many presidents during this Cold War period sought to exert influence through foreign policy, economic aid, cultural influence, and what have you. Scholars refer to this phenomenon, oftentimes as the Arab Cold War. So, [in talking about] the manifestation of the Cold War in the Middle East, how did the Christian mission in Iran coincide with this and with imperialistic attempts to exert foreign influence?

MKS: It’s a great question. I mean the question of the Eisenhower doctrine and the Arab Cold War—these are perennial questions that scholars like us will be thinking about. So, how [does] this more granular history relate to some of these bigger questions? I’ll give a few examples:

If we’re thinking about when this “American moment” began, there’s a series of events: 39’,40’, and 41’ set in motion [during] this period that I examined. The nationalization of some mission schools toward the end of the Reza Shah period  really resets the Presbyterian Mission in Iran; of course, the Anglo-Soviet invasion during the Second World War and the installation of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi on the throne is another major moment of change, and the arrival of the 30,000 U.S. troops with the Persian Gulf Service Command is another seminal moment in this early bookend period.  I would go back even farther than the Cold War and the Eisenhower period to think about the Second World War, which transform[ed] US foreign policy and virtually every part of the world.

JB: Those troops arrived, 30,000 troops arrived in 1941 correct?

MKS: So the Soviets and the Russians come in and 41’, but the big American contingent is in 42’ and 43’. Again, this is the context of wartime Tehran. You know, we think about the Tehran summit in late 1943 where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill will meet. There’s a reason that they meet in Tehran; it’s [because it’s] where all of the allies are. So this is a foundational moment—I argue that this moment, the occupation of the Second World War, transforms what had been a Presbyterian colony with a few Americans into an American colony with a few Presbyterians.

In the book, I trace the relationship between this particular American GI, GI Jimmie who encounters the Iran mission when he comes over with the U.S. military. I look at that particular kind of episode, or a series of encounters as a way to understand the fusion of the cultural know-how—the “we understand Tehran maybe a little bit better than the military mentality of the missionaries with just the brute force and sheer number of 30,000 troops”. I mean, we won’t have 30,000 Americans in Iran again until the mid-1970s [so this time period of the late 1930s and early 1940s] is a major moment of transformation. 

So the missionaries lease out some of their compounds to the US military. I mean, there’s all kinds of different forms of cooperation between the missionaries and the soldiers in wartime Tehran. That’s one place where it’s not like missionaries are making [or] determining the policy of the military, but there is a convergence of interests on the ground between the sacred and secular American missions, and we see it happen there during the Second World War. 

Another example,  just kind of sticking on the Second World War piece for another moment, is there are former missionaries who, let’s say, in the late 1930s, retire from missionary service, and then they do [end up] working for the government. In chapter six I believe I look at the careers of Cuyler Young and Edwin Wright, who were missionaries in Iran in the inter-war years. [But], during the Second World War they’re doing [The Office of Strategic Services] OSS, and other forms of intelligence and national security work, which is a common story [that] we see in a lot of other national case studies [where] other scholars have written about this in the context of American orientalism.  

I’ll give one other example, because, again, you ask a really rich question, and there are many different ways that we could think about it, but the status of American missionaries in Iran [is] always kind of unclear. The Shah could just nationalize properties or issue a decree to close down enterprises, and we see what this looks like during the Islamic Revolution. So there’s always a degree of uncertainty that is there in Iran among the missionaries, but this is something you’ll see in other mission fields, meaning places like China or Cuba or other places where revolutions happen, things get shut down and change. But after the 1953 coup, on August 19, 1953 there’s an Anglo American coup in Iran that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian Prime Minister, about two years after that,  [signs a treaty] in 1955 [and] it’s not necessarily too much different than types of treaties we see between the U.S. and other countries, but they call it a Treaty of Amity Economic Relations and Consular Rights. So, we’re not quite yet to the Status of Forces Agreement of the mid-1960s that’s a real flash point in the Khomeini movement. But, this is the treaty, (Treaty of Amity Economic Relations and Consular Rights) again, coming on the heels of the coup, where essentially the two governments are clarifying the rights of each other citizens in the other country. So the missionaries see this treaty as authorizing them to do their work,  eliminating, at least to their mind, some of the uncertainties that existed in other periods, like various types of travel permits and things that were required before are no longer needed after this friendship treaty is signed. So the way that one missionary reports it to their friends is they say [that] “this treaty established for the first time a legal basis for missionary activities in Iran” [and] this is significant. Also, this treaty frees Iranians in the U.S. to do some things that would have been maybe more difficult to do before. So, it’s also important for understanding the kind of the freedoms that Iranian students had in the U.S. in the 60s and 70s, and some of the cultural foundations and initiatives that the Pahlavi government were able to launch as well during that period. But, this is a treaty that isn’t going to be signed likely outside of the context of that post coup moment.

JB: And the thing is, this coup is a seminal moment in in Iranian history, and it was so interesting to me to read about what the perspectives were of these Christian missionaries, and what the perspectives were in terms of how they viewed Mosaddegh and how they how they viewed his Iranian nationalism, and it didn’t really seem like they were very fond of Mosaddegh at all; and moreover, they had to sort of contend with this idea of Iranian nationalism that was starting to become pervasive amongst Christians in Iran.

MKS: When we think about the “Del Be Bel” which is what I call the group, I didn’t come up with the term, [whose] name of a newsletter that the missionaries and their American and Iranian friends had for decades. But when we think about this “Del Be Bel” network and what the circle of friendship looked like, it is a pretty narrow circle. There are some real key players, important people, in the history of modern Iran that are part of this network, Sattareh Farmanfarmaian and others like that. There are royal blessings given, so there are friends in high places, but that vertical influence wasn’t matched by horizontal reach. So there are blind spots, big blind spots, that not just the evangelical community has, but the broader American community in Iran and I would argue, the United States in the Cold War has these blind spots. So, in some ways, the missionaries are reflective of some of these broader trends despite their intimate knowledge of the country [and] they actually came away, some of them, with the same conclusions, which is a difficult thing to think about and unpack; but  you’re absolutely correct. 

So, during the Mosaddegh period, at least the missionaries that I was studying, the folks in Tehran, they were not fans of Iranian nationalism as understood through Mohammed Mosaddegh in the National Front, [and] they understood it as something that was problematic and maybe could jeopardize the future of their work. Now, there are some ironies there because many of the people who would be considered Iranian nationalists have ties to the mission network and  could be graduates of the old Alborz College. But as you note, Iranian nationalism actually permeate[d] into the church. By the 50s and 60s, there [were] Iranian evangelicals who [threw] their lot in with the Presbyterians, who are beginning to say, “boy, maybe you move those institutions away from our church—you’re giving us a foreign stigma; or, maybe you should give us financial and institutional autonomy in a way that would be meaningful in a nationalist context”. So, you’ll see both how the phenomenon of Iranian nationalism influences intra-Christian relations, and then the broader picture outside of the Christian Network—what do these missionaries think of Mosaddegh? So, you see the evidence that I present in the book, there’s kind of a sigh of relief among the leadership of the Presbyterian Mission when that coup happens which is an unfortunate thing to find in the archives, but nonetheless, it’s there. I would also point out too, and this is something I talk about in much more detail at the end of the book, but another blind spot is Islam. So this idea that there, as I argue, was an overlap between understandings of this mission on the Presbyterian and American side, and understanding of mission in the context of Pahlavi development—this idea of mamuriyat (the persian word for mission), national mission, [and the] mission for development. There’s like a convergence of interests, but we don’t see that convergence of interests with the Mossadegh moment, and we certainly don’t see that convergence of interests between [the] American mission and Islamic Dawa. This idea that the revolution happens and it takes the form that it does, and there was such a popular groundswell of opposition to the American presence in Iran, is something that you see some career missionaries and old Iran hands struggling to understand toward the very end of the Pahlavi period. So I would argue that it’s not just animosity toward or misunderstanding of Mosaddegh, but also the Khomeini piece as well. 

JB: That concludes episode one of this two part series on the history of U.S. Christian missionaries in Iran during the Pahlavi dynasty. Next episode, Professor Shannon and I will be continuing this discussion by focusing on the relationship between us missionaries and Iranian evangelicals, and how it represented an idea of cultural imperialism. We will be examining development programs in Tehran examples of cultural integration or the lack thereof, on behalf of Christian missionaries and the ways in which the US Christian mission changed in the moments leading up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I want to thank Zeina Hafez for producing this podcast, along with Abigail Flynn and the American University in Cairo’s Journalism and Mass Communication Department for helping throughout this process. And of course, I want to thank Dr. Matthew K. Shannon for taking the time to speak with me. Tune in next time on CR amplified. I’m Jacob Blau.