In August 1953, the United States and Great Britain overthrew the government of Mohammed Mosaddeq with assistance from Iranian elements and the shah. The coup was motivated by American concerns that an Iranian “collapse” was imminent, one that would pave the way for a takeover by Iranian communists and threaten Western control of Middle Eastern oil reserves. Mosaddeq’s attempts to construct an “oil-less” economy, with some assistance from American developmentalists working in the Point Four program, may have succeeded in disentangling Iran from dependence on oil revenues. The coup squashed this experiment, and in 1954 the United States engineered a new oil agreement between the shah’s government and a consortium of oil companies, reintegrating Iranian oil into the global market and tying Iran’s economic future to the production of petroleum.

Beginning in the immediate post-WWII moment and carrying on to the present, international law’s Human Rights and Development missions mirror the US Evangelical ethos that emerged and gained traction at a similar pace. Making no causal claims, this Chapter focuses less on the UDHR’s expressions of monotheistic beliefs and more on the actors and ethos that informed those expressions. Specifically, it explores how legal communicative strategies and ideas used by human rights and development champions parallel those deployed at the same time by dominant US Evangelical leaders. The communicative strategies, inter alia, recall the desperate straits of the ‘unsaved’ other, present information as good news (gospel) and as truth, appeal to Messianic notions of history, and offer salvationist promises to transform afflicted lives. And the parallels form some of the many rationalizing forces that can be viewed as an expression of quasi-religious faith in American approaches to social and economic governance, and a call for those approaches to be internationalized. Like the Kingdom of God, this faith must be true for everyone to be true for anyone, and truth knows no borders. In other words, it is international law as evangelism.