Here's a real case of "salt and light": a largely positive story in The New Yorker about evangelical Christian lawyer Gary Haugen and his organization International Justice Mission.Haugen, who was educated at Harvard and at the University of Chicago Law School, is a forty-five-year-old evangelical Christian who believes that Christians have generally ignored the Biblical injunction to “seek justice, protect the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” In 1997, he created the International Justice Mission to offer legal services to the poor in developing countries. Haugen believes that the biggest problem on earth is not too little democracy, or too much poverty, or too few anti-retroviral AIDS medicines, but, rather, an absence of proper law enforcement.
Three hundred Christian lawyers, criminal investigators, social workers, and advocates at Haugen’s mission now work with local law-enforcement officials in twelve countries on behalf of individuals in need: bonded laborers, children who have
been sold into prostitution, widows who have had their land seized, poor people who, like Mutungi, languish in jail for crimes they did not commit. Though Haugen recognizes the inequities of the United States’ justice system, he decided that he could achieve more by working abroad. According to a report released in June by the United Nations Development Programme, four billion people live in places with dysfunctional justice systems—abusive police, entrenched bribery, mismanaged courts. “These people don’t get a sleepy lawyer or a crummy lawyer—they get nada,” Haugen said, after finding a seat in the courtroom. “The colonial powers who built justice systems in the Third World never intended to serve these people. Colonial justice was designed to control these people. Then, in the nineteen-sixties, the colonial powers left, and the justice systems stayed. Nobody, when we started international development, said, ‘Let’s revamp the public justice system. Let’s go into these places, where you either have colonial or pre-modern systems of justice, and bring to bear what we’ve learned about due process.’ No, that part was skipped.”
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After law school, he joined the Department of Justice, as a trial attorney in the civil-rights division. He married Jan Larsen, a staff assistant at a law firm. (They now have four children.) In 1994, Haugen took a short leave to direct the United Nations’ investigation of genocide in Rwanda, gathering the preliminary evidence needed in order to set up a war-crimes tribunal. In Rwanda, a predominantly Catholic country, the first visits he made were to pastors and missionary doctors, as he felt that he could quickly establish trust with them. He believed that the Christian network was an untapped resource in the human-rights world, even as he saw how badly some Rwandan clergy had failed their people. He was sickened to come across charred piles of bodies in a church where Tutsi had expected to find sanctuary. He took down the testimony of a father who saw his three small children hacked to death with machetes. At one massacre site, Haugen rolled back the decaying body of a woman and found the corpse of her child beneath her.
Six weeks later, after returning home, Haugen felt disoriented. In church, his mind drifted into calculations of how long it would take a machete-wielding gang to wipe out the congregation. Although the Salvation Army, World Vision, and other Christian organizations fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless, no Christian organization that he knew of had heeded the Bible’s appeals for justice (“Break the arm of the wicked and evil man; call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out”). He resolved that Christians serving God had to do more than pray for the victims of cruelty; they had to use the law to help rescue them. “This is not a God who offers sympathy, best wishes,” he later wrote. “This is a God who wants evildoers brought to account and vulnerable people protected—here and now!”
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