The US invasion began in the middle of March 2003, and by “early April representatives of the International Bible Society were already in Iraq watching the bombs fall and distributing tracts and videos,” FitzGerald writes. With God on Their Side: Evangelicals in America According to the leader of a missionary organization, conservative Christians “had prayed for years that Iraq would somehow be open to the gospel.” RELATED: Faith & Reason In The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, journalist Frances FitzGerald notes that evangelical Christians had created a comprehensive plan to convert Muslims in the years before the 9/11 attacks, focusing on the nations “between the 10 th and 40 th parallels north of the equator in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, where much of the world’s Muslim population lived.” The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, had a particularly strong interest in Iraq. Perhaps you thought the war was about oil. Bush’s war in Iraq was the campaign by evangelical Christians to spread the gospel in the aftermath of the invasion. One of the under-reported and largely forgotten stories of George W.

This post originally appeared at In These Times. (Photo by Robert Wallis/Corbis via Getty Images) Parishioners at Sunday services at the Bethel Assembly of God church in Lake Worth, Florida.

The Evangelicals by Frances FitzGerald