100 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Starting with the 1871 arrival of Reverend James Bassett in Tehran and ending with the 1965 closing of the Presbyterian Mission in Iran and subsequent winding down of American evangelical activity, this book chronicles the “Presbyterian Century” in Tehran, when more than three generations of U.S. missionaries worked with their Iranian colleagues to spread their faith while doing good works. The initial wave of missionary work in the late 19th century was among Iran’s existing Christians, mostly Assyrians in northwest Iran and Armenians in Tehran, later expanding to Iran’s Muslim population. In addition to this “church planting,” we see how these missionaries grew their activities to include running medical clinics and international schools, in addition to starting a variety of Iranian American associations. Following the flow of these Presbyterian evangelical activities in the country over time reveals and highlights the broad forces that have acted within and on Iran throughout. At the start, the dysfunction of the Qajar dynasty allowed the Presbyterians de facto autonomy, which lessened under the centralized nationalism of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. U.S. evangelical fortunes rebounded in 1941 when the Allies banished him and installed his young son. Shannon particularly excels in detailing the strong ties between Iranian elites and U.S. Presbyterian institutions during this time, from 1940 to 1960, the apogee of Presbyterian activity and influence in Iran. Starting in the 1960s, U.S. missionaries became less prevalent and less relevant. There was an increase in U.S. aid after the 1953 coup, along with a concomitant boom in the number of Americans in Tehran. With the Status of Forces Agreement and the shah’s 1963 White Revolution came increased anti-U.S. and antimissionary sentiment among Iranian laypeople and Shia clergy. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. missionary population in Iran was dwarfed by military advisers, defense contractors, businesspeople, and their dependents; and by the mid- to late 1970s, there were fewer than 200 missionaries total and more than 40,000 U.S. military and businesspeople in Iran. Although the Presbyterians were largely unsuccessful in proselytizing—conversion of Iranian Muslims to Christianity was rare—Shannon shows how they left their mark in countless other ways, including treating the poor, teaching literacy, educating young Iranians, and forming associations where people from different cultures met and learned from one another. Indeed, this book is at its most evocative when we read of “Persophiles” like Dr. Samuel Jordan, head of the American College of Tehran (aka Alborz College) from 1899 to 1940, and missionary Jane Doolittle, who came to Iran in 1921, became the principal of the historic “Iran Bethel” school for girls, and stayed until 1979. Unlike the waves of Americans who came to Tehran in the 1960s and 1970s and isolated themselves in affluent, “Westoxified” (Westernized) northern Tehran, U.S. missionaries lived and worked alongside Iranian colleagues in the poorest parts of the city. Shannon’s work does a valuable service for those in the foreign policy community by showing us, almost contrapuntal to the more well-known aspects of the bilateral relationship, the “retail” century-long evangelical effort that was “the product of two visions that were separate but singular: the Presbyterian and American global mission.” Although by and large they failed in their mission to spread their faith, these evangelicals were a significant influence on Iran’s development at an important time in its history. Alan Eyre is a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer, who spent most of his federal career on Iranian issues, including as the State Department’s only Persian language spokesperson and as a member of the U.S. interagency team negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran. Chancellor Under Fire Freedom: Memoirs, 1954-2021 Angela Merkel, with Beate Baumann, St. Martin’s Press, 2024, $40.00/hardcover, e-book available, 720 pages. Reviewed by John Starrels Hailed as one of her country’s most consequential figures upon her resignation in 2021, Angela Merkel, Germany’s eighth chancellor, has over the past year or so suffered the fate of many popular political leaders once their record has drawn detailed scrutiny: She has become the object of scorn and searing criticism at the hands of both the domestic and international media and the intellectual elite. Her “sins” were allegedly failing to effectively “read” Vladimir Putin, hastily and wrong-headedly shuttering Germany’s nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and, of course, the massive political fallout in response to her decision allowing hundreds of thousands of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees into Germany in spring-summer 2015. For the first several years after leaving office, Merkel elected to stay on the politi-
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