Shortly after pastor Brunson’s release in 2018, Turkish authorities began deporting or effectively banning foreigners connected to the Protestant church.
When they arrested Andrew Brunson and his wife, Norine, in 2016, Turkish officials had an order to deport the American pastor, who ran a small Protestant church in the coastal city of Izmir.
Deportations of foreign workers happened occasionally, and the process for Americans, he figured, would be relatively straightforward. Maybe it would take a day.
“But with us,” Brunson told The Epoch Times, “somebody higher up decided to hold onto us to see what would happen.”
What happened was more than the Brunsons had bargained for. Officials released Norine Brunson after two weeks but charged Andrew Brunson with military espionage and terrorism, which resulted in his imprisonment and ignited a diplomatic crisis with the United States.
Pressure from the first Trump administration led to Brunson’s release in 2018—but not before U.S. sanctions and tariffs helped tank the Turkish economy.
Brunson had been in Turkey for 25 years, part of a wave of missionaries that helped nurture a fledgling Protestant community in the country, where Christians make up less than 1 percent of the population, according to the U.S. Department of State.
As of 2022, most of Turkey’s 83 million people are Sunni Muslim, and while the republic is nominally secular, religious minorities have long faced societal and state discrimination. Compared to Orthodox and Catholics, Protestants, who number around 10,000, are a relatively new presence—and are not legally recognized.
Shortly after Brunson’s release in 2018, authorities began deporting or effectively banning foreigners connected to the church with immigration codes that labeled them a “national security threat.”
“I was the first one, and I think that it brought enough negative attention and consequences that they decided it would be easier to just ban people,” said Brunson, who now lives in the United States.
Since then, hundreds of Protestants have been expelled, according to Alliance Defending Freedom International, a U.S.-based legal nonprofit that advocates on behalf of Christians worldwide. Many spent decades in the country and raised families there. Some were missionaries or church leaders, others simply had spouses active in the church.
While Turkish officials accused Brunson of ties to the Gülenists, the Islamic political movement it blames for a bloody failed coup in 2016, and ultimately convicted him of supporting Kurdish separatists, the indictment used against him at trial accused him of “Christianization,” according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
“All of the evidence they used was actually our ministry. And underlying it was the accusation of trying to divide Turkey, politically, through Christianization,” he said.
