Cold War Flashpoint? Hungarian Christians and the Evanston Assembly of 1954

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Several Protestant churches in Hungary were members of the World Council of Churches (WCC) since its creation at the Amsterdam Assembly in 1948. By the time the WCC’s second assembly convened in Evanston, Illinois six years later, the Cold War was in full bloom. Despite international tension, a handful of churchmen from behind the Iron Curtain joined the thousands of attendees at this heavily reported two-week meeting on the campus of Northwestern University with its associated events in Chicago and the surrounding region. The delegation from Hungary was the largest of any from the Soviet bloc: the Hungarian government made use of this forum to break out of its political and ideological isolation and make propaganda for the purported religious freedom in the country. What was the contribution of Hungarian attendees to the meeting and its aftermath? How was this contribution perceived in the US and in Hungary? Finally, how can we understand this contribution in the context of the history of the WCC? My investigation of these questions will draw upon evidence from the archival record and contemporary press coverage. As in the present day, there was a complex relationship between faith, organized religion, political ideologies, and international relations.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
James P. (Jim) Niessen earned his Ph.D at Indiana University with a dissertation on religion and politics in nineteenth century Transylvania. He has published several studies on the Romanian and Hungarian national movements. Since 2001 he is World History Librarian at Rutgers University, and he supervised the digitization at Rutgers of papers related to the Hungarian refugees at Camp Kilmer. His recent research has focused on Hungarians in the Cold War and collections for the study of Hungarian Americans. In 2023 he published a review in Hungarian Cultural Studies and gave a paper at ASEEES on Hungarian American research collections.