Congressman Frank Wolf is the author of Prisoner of Conscience: One Man’s Crusade for Global Human and Religious Rights, written with Anne Morse. It is a chronicle of some of the human-rights journeys the northern Virginia congressman has been on and battles he’s fought with colleagues around the world. Representative Wolf talks to National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about his travels and his stutter.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Why would you go to all of these far-off dangerous places — Sudan, war-torn Afghanistan not long after September 11 — often against the wishes of the State Department?

REP. FRANK WOLF: I think if you vote to send young men and women to war, as I had done with Afghanistan and Iraq, you have an obligation to see how things are going. As far as the other trips are concerned, there are times when, if you hear something bad is happening, you have to go. I went on my trips to Romania and to the prison camps of the former Soviet Union because I felt there was a need to go. Same thing with my trips to Sudan and Chechnya.

Even when the State Department gives you an okay to go somewhere, you can’t get a real feel for what’s going on by just flying in for several hours. To learn what’s really going on, you need to get out and spend time with the people of Sudan or Ethiopia or Romania for a few days. On one of my trips to Iraq, I went in connected to a nongovernmental organization and not as a U.S. congressman. We were in a huge traffic jam one day, without any security, and it was a pretty scary situation.

When I wanted to go to Tibet, since the Chinese government didn’t like me, they refused to give me a visa. So I got a new passport identifying myself as a tourist instead of a diplomat, and applied for a visa through the Chinese consulate in Chicago, describing myself as a lawyer, which is perfectly true, and traveled to Tibet as part of a trekking group. The International Campaign for Tibet set me up with someone who spoke fluent Tibetan, but because he was a Westerner, and Caucasian, the Chinese government didn’t pay any attention to him; they had no idea he spoke Tibetan. So we were able to wander around Tibet for several days, without Chinese minders, talking to ordinary people, who were eager to talk to us and tell us how bad things were under Chinese rule — about relatives being tortured in prison because they’d been caught with a picture of the Dalai Lama, for instance.

LOPEZ: You praise Ronald Reagan for his relations with Congress. Is that a rare thing, in your experience?

REP. WOLF: Yes, it is, although Pres. George H. W. Bush also had a good relationship with Congress. He was really close to a lot of members since he had served in the House. And at times Clinton and Newt Gingrich worked closely together. But Reagan had a special gift for working with people. He worked closely with Tip O’Neill. We don’t see that kind of thing much today.

LOPEZ: You ask and answer a question about Ethiopia: “Will there ever be an end to the suffering of Ethiopians? Not unless something is done to develop long-term strategies to tackle the root causes of the food shortages — such as improving irrigation, drilling wells, developing drought-resistant crops, and teaching Ethiopian farmers about sustainable agricultural practices.” You add, citing the author of the recent book Dead Aid: “The best long-term solution, for Ethiopia and the rest of the developing world . . . is economic development, not aid.” So how do we do that?

REP. WOLF: The No. 1 problem there is they need land reform. We give aid to the Ethiopian government, but if people aren’t allowed to own their own land, they’re not going to invest in things like irrigation projects. That’s why our approach to foreign aid hasn’t worked. So we need to tie any aid we give to major land reform.

LOPEZ: What a privilege it must be to know the stories of people like Fr. Gheorghe Calciu of Romania. Did you feel an obligation to make sure people remember him, his courage, and his faithfulness?

REP. WOLF: Yes, he was a special person. You feel an obligation to raise their cases, as long as it doesn’t endanger them. There have been a lot of Father Calcius. Once we get involved with people like this, we never cut them off. We stay with them. I’m still meeting with Romanians I met on my trip in the Eighties. And just recently I met with the Iraqi Christians, who have been so terribly persecuted in recent years. Once we adopt an issue, we don’t put it down. We stay with it.

LOPEZ: Who are among the bravest you’ve met in your travels? I do keep thinking about what might have happened to your cab driver in Tibet.

REP. WOLF: Yes, he was a pretty brave guy. He knew the Chinese could throw him in prison for driving us around Lhasa, showing us where all the prisons were, letting us take pictures, and telling us about all the monks and nuns who had been dragged off to prison and tortured with electric cattle prods. We were worried about the police catching on to what he was doing, but he said what we were doing was too important to worry about his own safety.

I’ve met a lot of brave people. Those believers in Romania who came up to speak to us in front of the Securitate — they were extremely brave. The refuseniks I met with in the Soviet Union in the Eighties, prisoners who spoke out when I visited Perm 35, right in front of the KGB, knowing they were going to pay a price after I’d gone home. I think of the brave Chinese pastors and human-rights lawyers who tried to have dinner with me in Beijing, and were arrested. I recently met a guy whose father is director of security for Samaritan’s Purse, he’s living in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan where the Sudanese government is bombing every day.

Always, in the trouble spots in the world, there is some brave soul who rises up. Every time I go on a trip to a dangerous place, I pray for protection, and that no one connected with the trip will be harmed or killed. I pray this prayer a couple times every day, and that only good will come out of the trip.

LOPEZ: Was Mike Pacepa’s defection an important moment?

REP. WOLF: I believe it was, because Mike was one of the highest-ranking defectors ever to leave the former Soviet empire. He knew all of Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu’s secrets. He was very valuable to our government. He’s still living in hiding, because he’s still concerned that there are people out there who want to harm him.

LOPEZ: What can we do about China’s one-child policy? What do you want to see us do to confront China on this and Tibet and so much else?

REP. WOLF: Speak out, write your congressman and senators, write to the president, work with groups like China Aid and Open Doors and Voice of the Martyrs and Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, which lobbies on behalf of Chinese women forced to undergo abortions. Write to the prisoner of conscience behind bars; prison authorities don’t know why he’s suddenly getting all this mail, but they treat him better when he’s got the attention of the outside world. Churches should be advocating for these prisoners, many of whom are Christians. Every American church should have a Religious Persecution Sunday. What else? Write to the American ambassador in China, and ask him to speak out. Many business people go to China. They should ask to meet with a dissident and his family. They should make a point of visiting a house church, something this and previous administrations have not done. We can write letters of encouragement to the families of Chinese pastors who were thrown in jail for daring to hold religious services in underground house churches. There are so many things a person can do to make a difference.

LOPEZ: Why are you optimistic about China, ultimately?

REP. WOLF: Because the Chinese people want freedom. We now have the technology, through the Internet and Facebook and Twitter, to bypass repressive governments trying to stifle dissent. Frankly, I think we’re going to have regime change. The Chinese government is going to collapse, we’re seeing uprisings in rural areas and in cities alike. The Falun Gong scares the living daylights out of the Chinese government.

Europe’s going through a recession, which means China isn’t going to be able to sell as many of its products abroad. If it seems unlikely that China’s Communist government will collapse under all these pressures, remember how unlikely it seemed in 1986 that the Berlin Wall would come down in just three years, and that the entire Soviet empire would collapse. At yet, it happened.

LOPEZ: Waodani? Weren’t there millions of people on your priority list to visit before this tribal group in Ecuador?

REP. WOLF: Well, as it happened, a Waodani tribesman came by my office with Steve Saint, the son of slain missionary Nate Saint. It’s not a matter of having a priority list. They asked me to help, I was able to help, and I did. Visiting this remote tribe in the Amazon jungle was a memorable trip.

There are a lot of places I went that we didn’t cover in the book simply because of space limitations. I went to East Timor during the crackdown by the Indonesian military and to Chechnya when they were fighting the Russians. In the former Yugoslavia, Chris Smith and I drove through a cornfield to the town of Vukovar, where many people we met were later slaughtered. I went to the Congo and Rwanda, where thousands were killed. I’ve been to the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone with Tony Hall, to deal with blood-diamond issues. I wish we had had room to cover all these other trips in the book, but we were limited to 75,000 words.

LOPEZ: “If we really want to help the people of South Sudan, we ought to provide them with what they say they desperately need: an air defense system, such as mobile, truck-mounted missiles, technical support, and other assistance. President Bush reportedly approved this in 2008, but Obama has never followed through.” Is this realistic, getting it into the right hands? Do you have any hope?

REP. WOLF: I think it’s very realistic — just not with the current administration. One, President Bush promised this, and two, these are defensive weapons; they would be used only to shoot down airplanes bombing civilians. Bush left office before it was done, and to date it has not been done.

LOPEZ: You recall a U.S. officer in Iraq telling you: “We must win the war so we don’t fight the next war in America.” Does that take on new concern with President Obama’s pullout?

REP. WOLF: I hope not.

LOPEZ: You talk about the importance of “reconciliation” in Congress. And why, too, did you apologize to Ted Kennedy for nothing you did wrong? How do you do that without compromising principles?

REP. WOLF: I didn’t compromise principles. I had major policy differences with Senator Kennedy. In the situation I described, I think the spirit just kind of moved us. We had heard Kennedy had been having a tough time in his personal life, and he’d been hurt by some of the attacks on him by Republicans. When my friend Joe Pitts and I went to see him about a piece of legislation, we took a moment to apologize to Kennedy for some of the nastier personal attacks on him, even though we hadn’t engaged in these attacks ourselves. And as I note in the book, Kennedy was very moved by our words. Just because you don’t agree on the issues, or belong to the same party, doesn’t mean you can’t make an effort to be civil to one another, and offer kindness to someone who is hurting. A lack of civility is driving a lot of the problems in Congress today.

LOPEZ: How was your stutter a “gift from God”?

REP. WOLF: It was a gift because I was laughed at so much as a child. It toughened me up and gave me a drive and a determination I would not otherwise have had. This determination led directly to my winning my congressional seat. I had run in ’76 and in ’78, and lost both times. I decided to give it another try in 1980, and when I was out campaigning, people would say, “Are you running again?” Because very few people run a third time after losing twice. If you’ve ever watched the film The King’s Speech, you’ll understand how it was with me. You can’t express yourself. You can’t say what you want to say.

The Bible tells us to thank God in all things, not just in good things. I thank God for my stutter because I see how He was able to use it for my good and for His purposes.

LOPEZ: Why is William Wilberforce so important?

REP. WOLF: Because he was a man of faith who brought his religious beliefs into the political realm, where they were badly needed, and where they are needed today, as well. When Wilberforce underwent his conversion to Christianity, he was a member of Parliament, and briefly considered becoming a minister. But his great friend John Newton, the former slave trader, warned him against doing this. He told Wilberforce that God had raised him up both for the good of His church and for the good of his nation. In other words, he would serve God more fruitfully in the political realm than in the religious one. Politics was where his gifts lay.

The Bible-study group I joined when I first became a member was modeled after Wilberforce’s group, called the Clapham Sect, after the London neighborhood in which Wilberforce and others who fought the slave trade lived. Like Wilberforce and his friends, we are all people of faith who happen to be members of different political parties. The Clapham Sect fought things like slavery and child labor and prostitution. We work on things like hunger and fighting the sale of blood diamonds and international trafficking of humans. We also pray for one another and for one another’s families. It’s a wonderful fellowship. When you have prayed for and with another member, and he’s praying for you, it develops a special relationship even though you may have differences on political issues.

LOPEZ: What can be done about the fact that “Westerners have a short attention span” when it comes to human rights abroad?

REP. WOLF: Elect a new president who speaks out the way Ronald Reagan did, and both Republicans and Democrats who are willing to make human rights a priority.

LOPEZ: Some of these so-called human-rights organizations, while involved in some worthwhile fights, are a mess when it comes to a full understanding of the human person, including who is one (I have Amnesty International in mind, for one). What can be done about that?

REP. WOLF: When we agree on an issue, we can work together, as there are some issues of common ground. When we don’t agree on an issue, we make clear our differences and part ways.

LOPEZ: Is there something to be said for long terms in Congress? As you know, the Tea Party, among other groups, is no fan of Washington. Period.

REP. WOLF: The late Henry Hyde, a Republican, and Tom Lantos, a Democrat, were both long-term members of Congress — and you won’t find greater advocates for human rights than these two. And I think their seniority was very helpful in their efforts to promote human rights.

LOPEZ: You write a lot about how churches need to do more: for the people of Tibet, China, Sudan . . . For someone reading this right now inclined to answer that call, what are a few concrete things they can get in motion today that would actually have an impact?

REP. WOLF: I’ve mentioned some already. We have a model in the 1980s for what we should be doing today. Under Reagan, our embassies in repressive countries were islands of freedom. Priests, ministers, rabbis, and dissidents were invited to meet with our State Department people and congressional delegations. You don’t see that today. Today, it’s all about trade and business, business and trade.

As for the Obama administration — I don’t think anything expresses its attitude toward human rights better than the fact that the Nobel Prize committee awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human-rights activist, and President Obama — who was awarded the Peace Prize in 2009 — responded by holding a state dinner for Hu Jintao, the guy who cracked down on dissidents in China and in Tibet. You’d think Obama would have some sympathy with his fellow Peace Prize winner — it’s a pretty select group. Instead, he wins in 2009, and the next year he’s throwing a state dinner for the guy who prevented the 2010 winner from leaving China to accept the award, and who to this day is keeping him in prison and his wife under house arrest. It’s just unbelievable.

LOPEZ: Does your title subtly suggest we should all be prisoners of conscience?

REP. WOLF: I just hope that Americans who live in freedom will be encouraged to focus on these things.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor-at-large of National Review Online.