USA TODAY International Edition
Brunson: From US missionary to diplomatic flashpoint
WASHINGTON – Andrew Brunson arrived at a local Turkish police station nearly two years ago with his American passport in hand – hoping to renew his visa and continue the work he’d been doing for more than two decades as a Christian missionary in the city of Izmir on Turkey’s southwest coast.
Instead, the 50-year-old evangelical pastor was arrested, jailed and accused of plotting to overthrow the government of Turkey, where the population is overwhelmingly Muslim.
Now, Brunson is at the center of a geopolitical conflagration that has strained U.S.-Turkey relations, rattled economic markets and mobilized the U.S. evangelical community.
“His sole purpose for being in Turkey for the past 24 years was for one purpose only: to tell about Jesus Christ,” Brunson’s daughter, Jacqueline Brunson Furnari, told a packed audience last month at a July 24 State Department forum on human rights and religious freedom. She said her father “had suddenly been deemed a threat to (Turkey’s) national security” after leading a small Christian church in Ismir for more than two decades without incident.
There are a myriad of thorny diplomatic disagreements between the Trump administration and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from missile purchases to support for terrorist groups. But the standoff over Brunson has ratcheted tensions up to a crisis level, with Trump and Erdogan personally involved in a tit-for-tat escalation from which there is no clear exit ramp.
“The crisis we have right now is louder than it needed to be, and it was preventable on both sides,” said Howard Eissenstat, an associate professor of Middle East history at St. Lawrence University and a fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy.
Brunson is not, in fact, the only U.S. citizen detained in Turkey, but he has gained the most attention in part because of his ties to the American evangelical community and because his story fits into a broader narrative of Christians being persecuted abroad, Eissenstat said.
Working to free Brunson is the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative Christian organization. The group’s chief counsel, Jay Sekulow, is one of Trump’s attorneys in the Russia probe, giving him a direct line to raise Brunson’s detention with the commander in chief.
Eissenstat said Brunson’s case is well suited for Trump’s approach to foreign policy.
“He has prioritized the freedom of U.S. citizens as part of his diplomacy,” Eissenstat said. “And I think, in general, he likes to play the tough guy.”
While Trump and Erdogan lock horns on the international stage, Brunson remains under house arrest with his wife, Norine. He had been jailed for 20 months and is facing 35 years in prison if convicted.
“The charges against him are absolutely absurd and false,” Furnari said at the State Department forum.