Putting an American God into Public Schools around the World

In the 1990s, a coalition of U.S. evangelical organizations launched a campaign to save souls in the former Soviet Union by proselytizing in public schools. This project, called the CoMission, retrofitted foreign public institutions for American evangelism and expanded U.S. evangelicals’ fight for prayer in schools into a global crusade. In only seven years, the campaign raised 70 million dollars, trained 42,000 public school teachers in 150 cities across 10 countries, and distributed 10 million pieces of evangelistic literature and films to over seven million schoolchildren in Russia and Eastern Europe. By internationalizing an American culture war, the campaign imposed abroad the framing that U.S. evangelicals were using at home while also reinforcing the idea that the U.S. culture war over schools was not complex, but simple – there were those who wanted God in schools, and there were those who opposed God. Inspiring widespread support and fierce opposition, the CoMission flattened multifaceted dynamics in the United States and the former USSR in the 1990s into a dualistic battle of good versus evil that combined the discourses of the Cold War with those of the U.S. culture wars. Assessing the methods and messages of the CoMission reveals how transnational religious activism linked American international influence and U.S. domestic activism in the late twentieth century.