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| 161 Conclusion 1975 By 1975, much of America had grown tired of foreign policy debates, a reality borne out in portions of the Christian community yet with significant exceptions . Many entities lost interest in global issues, as revealed in the fact that Christian sources that had previously contained numerous and lengthy articulations of foreign affairs viewpoints housed much less such discussion by 1975. Yet other Christians remained aware of both the Cold and Vietnam wars in their print media, assemblies, and churchwide discussions. From March 1975 to early July 1975, Christian America’s reaction to events in Southeast Asia summarized where the 1960s and 1970s had taken their religious convictions about foreign policy, thus also summarizing their contribution to the culture war about foreign policy that had gone on for over a decade. For Americans refusing to put their heads in the sand, the events in Vietnam that year demanded that they continue to monitor what was happening in Southeast Asia. After the United States agreed to a peace settlement with North Vietnam in January 1973, it removed its ground forces but never stopped providing economic and military aid to Nguyen Van Thieu’s regime in South Vietnam. The Cold War mentality of resisting Communist expansion had not disappeared with the failure of U.S. actions during the Vietnam War. Neither had the oppression faced by the South Vietnamese from this dictatorial government, leading to a continued civil war between South Vietnam, the insurgent guerilla movements there, and infiltrations from the north. But the American public, led by Congress, had had enough; when President Ford requested renewed and increased funding to defend allies in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, Congress refused. Without U.S. military fighting and with the withdrawal of funding for that region, the civil war came to a head in April 1975 when Communist forces and their allies spread throughout South Vietnam and ultimately took Saigon, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City and reuniting Vietnam as a Communist nation.1 162 | Conclusion Poignant coverage of what happened during the Communist advance throughout Southeast Asia made its way to the United States. Thousands of South Vietnamese citizens who had supported the Thieu regime and allied with the United States fled for their lives. As the Communists advanced and took over, they assassinated political and military enemies and placed neutral people in reeducation camps where they tortured them into supporting the Communist government. This included attacks against many in South Vietnam with whom the North had allied throughout the war. Those who made it out of Vietnam had risked their lives on makeshift boats, luckily boarded an airlift, or smuggled themselves in other ways. Dramatic footage of American helicopters landing at the U.S. embassy just before Saigon collapsed into chaos showed Vietnamese people climbing fences and fighting one another in a desperate effort to get out. The United States also publicized the airlift of hundreds of children from an orphanage who otherwise faced a bleak future; this accompanied pleas to adopt the children, many of whom were of mixed race because of relationships between Vietnamese women and American soldiers. Here the U.S. churches had a particularly important role to play in spring 1975; while the government did many things to assist these impoverished and now despondent people, churches also moved into action around the world and within the United States to provide food, shelter, clothing, and other assistance , including sponsoring the Vietnamese families who immigrated to the United States and orchestrating efforts to adopt orphaned children.2 The collapse of South Vietnam spurred Christianity Today to appeal for assistance for the refugees who swarmed out of that country. The influx of refugees united Christians of all stripes in a humanitarian outpouring of goodwill for these exiled people. Editor Edward Plowman explained that many missionaries who had fled for their lives from Vietnam turned their attention to resettling those in need, and at first providing basic necessities such as food and shelter in places such as Taiwan. He wrote that “hundreds of thousands of persons poured into coastal areas” and found scarce food and astronomical prices for life’s staples. A July editorial concurred that all Christians should turn their attention toward this crisis by assisting those resettling in the United States: “These people are God’s creation as much as native North Americans are, and He will do the rewarding. The Samaritan spirit calls for making room not only in our homes but in our hearts. Whatever one...

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