Sex Trafficking, US Evangelicals, and the Promise Of

Captivated: Sex Trafficking, U.S. Evangelicals, and the Promise of Rescue

by Kimberly Pendleton Schisler

B.A in Women’s Studies, May 2009, Georgetown University M.A. in Religious Studies, May 2011, Yale Divinity School

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 19, 2018

Dissertation directed by

Melani McAlister Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs

The Columbian College of the Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University

certifies that Kimberly Pendleton Schisler has passed the Final Examination for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of November 29, 2017. This is the final and approved

form of the dissertation.

Captivated: Sex Trafficking, U.S. Evangelicals, and the Promise of Rescue

Kimberly Pendleton Schisler

Dissertation Research Committee

Melani McAlister, Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs, Dissertation Director

Jennifer C. Nash, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies, Northwestern University, Committee Member

Joseph Kip Kosek, Associate Professor of American Studies, Committee Member

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Dedication

For my parents, and for their parents.

Acknowledgements

This dissertation is the product of tremendous support from family, faculty, and friends. It is with tremendous gratitude and humility that I wish to acknowledge those without whom this project simply would not have happened. I would like to thank my committee and my outside readers for contributing their invaluable feedback and time to this project. This project is indebted to the institutions that made this work possible, first and foremost the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. I also thank the Lake Institute for Faith and Giving at IUPUI, for furthering the work of philanthropy, giving, and religion through their support of early scholars. Sharing my work as a doctoral dissertation fellow with the board of directors and students at the institute was a joy, and their feedback shaped my project. I am also thankful for the support of the Columbia College of Arts and Sciences doctoral dissertation fellowship, as well as the Jeffrey C. Kasch grant that made my research possible.

When I began my graduate work, I found mentors in Kathryn Lofton, Melani

McAlister and Jennifer Nash. Anything good in these pages is an attempt to follow in their footsteps with verve and precision. All mistakes are entirely my own. Without

Jennifer Nash’s feedback, questions, and in-laws in Kolkata, this would be an entirely different project. Melani McAlister’s example as a professor, and as a mentor has shaped me indelibly, reminding me of what kind of work I want to do, in academia and in the world. Her patience, support, and advice guided every good turn this project took, and I am so grateful. Kathryn Lofton’s thoughtful, committed investment in me led me down this path, offering me the much-needed encouragement as I considered applying for PhD

programs, “You can have this life, if you want it.” I would not be here without these women, and I hope to someday inspire and empower students with a shimmer of that same invitation.

I am grateful for my wonderful colleagues and friends in the American Studies department at George Washington University, who fostered an environment of support, curiosity, and happy hours. I owe the greatest thanks to Shannon Davies Mancus,

Kathryn Kein, Julie Chamberlain, Rahima Schwenkbeck, and Michael Horka, who read drafts, took me to dinner, and let me talk about sex trafficking for much longer than anyone should ever have to. Thank you, too, to Mona Azadi, whose willingness to get coffee with me and help me out of my near-constant bureaucratic trouble were equally critical. Mari Andrew and Linnea Farnsworth championed not only this project but me, withstanding the best and worst of the last seven years, and never leaving my side. I am also eternally grateful for the support of my oldest friends throughout this process. Thank you to Hillary Caudle, Tegra Swogger, Katie Dally, Kat Adams, Jackson Emmer, and

Sam Marks, whose kindness, words of encouragement, and distractions have kept me going in the most difficult points. Also, to the “group,” Erika Satterwhite, Jackie Black,

Caroline Scott, Hilary Miners, Naomi Jacobs, Lyda Ghanbari, Leigh McCurdy, Tara

Gelb, and Anna Lippe, who have made these last two years a pleasure. Finally, without

Chris Maier, Pam Carmesine, Dylan Gilbert, Cat Breen, and Lucian Mattison, I would never have realized that my skills as a feminist scholar translated so well to the field of reality television. I accept this rose. Thank you to Naseem and Ameer Ahmad, for generously hosting me in India, and to Janell Anema, whose inspiration and openness

made my research possible. Kathleen Pointer, you are my soul sister and proofreader, and without you this dissertation would simply not exist.

Throughout this journey, like all of my journeys, my family has given me the encouragement and confidence to believe that not only could I do this, but that my contribution to the world mattered. Without my parents, Yvonne Pendleton and George

Schisler, Laurie Shelton and Dale Cruikshank, and my siblings, none of this would have been possible. Thank you for making me laugh when I came home, and for letting me avoid answering the question of when I would be done. My grandparents, uncles and aunts, and cousins, supported this project from afar. And thank you to Dizzy and Mila, my cat gurus who taught me about the value of taking a break and napping when needed.

Finally, to Nick, thank you. You arrived just in time and ensured that I finished this project with promises of rescue of your own: of travel, of adventure, of takeout. There is no way for me to thank you enough for the generosity, creativity, and love that you have poured out in the moments I needed it most, so I will simply offer this invitation: “stay as long as you want.”

Throughout the course of this program, I have experienced more loss than I ever could have imagined. In particular, I will always remember this season of my life as being marked by losing my brother, Paul Cruikshank. In moments when it did not seem possible to continue on, my support system held me together and held this project, too.

For that, I am so humbled, and so grateful. Every moment of dark humor that propelled me through the hardest moments of this work was dedicated to, and inspired by, Paul.

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Abstract of Dissertation

Captivated: Sex Trafficking, U.S. Evangelicals, and the Promise of Rescue

This dissertation tracks the rise of sex trafficking as an issue of investment for

U.S. evangelical concern, mission work, and financial donation in the after the Cold War.

I argue that it is the unique political, cultural, and religious climate of U.S. evangelicalism in the 1990s and early 2000s that rendered sex trafficking a legible cause for missionary interest, empathetic compassion, and monetary investment to evangelicals in the United States. I trace the narratives of imagined captivity abroad and longings of rescue as they circulate within cultural products for evangelical audiences designed to raise awareness, galvanize action, or solicit donation. I argue that participation in the fight against sex trafficking guarantees its own kind of rescue for evangelical participants. Whether as a mechanism by which their own faith can be revived, a warning that their sexuality is being scrutinized, or an initiation to join in an adventure abroad, the narratives of sex trafficking with which this project is concerned position evangelicals as the target of transformation. It is to them that rescue is truly promised.

Narratives of rescue and redemption within the canon of evangelical storytelling about sex trafficking promise a revival of restless faith, a restoration of broken sexuality, and a remodeling of stale lives devoid of adventure and beauty. By tracing stories of captivity, rescue, and redemption in the evangelical fight against sex trafficking—where both trafficking victims and those who donate to their cause are freed—this project establishes the crucial role that narrative plays in the relationship between religious belief

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and humanitarian intervention abroad. Racialized bodies operate within evangelical narratives of sex trafficking as the very terrain of transformation. An historical understanding of Asian women's condition is erased through their aestheticization, while an historical understanding of slavery is erased through its de-racialization. Additionally, there is an evacuation of the history of slavery in the universalized language of harm that conjoins trafficking, modern-day slavery, and abolition. Race operates within these narratives to signify innocence or brutality, indicate foreign space as one of danger, and sometimes promising an enticing engagement with fantasies of the exotic, sensual, and authentic that are imagined to exist uniquely abroad.

How does the concept of the global sex industry, and of sex trafficking, come to be useful for evangelical transformation in this particular historical moment, after the

Cold War, in the United States? Along similar lines, why is the body of the transnational trafficking victim the terrain upon which such a transformation is imagined to be available and possible? In what follows, I examine the role that racialized figures and spaces of abjection abroad play in evangelical imaginings, unthreading the various ways that images, stories, and imaginings of foreign space, and foreign bodies, work within sex trafficking narratives for evangelical audiences. The central argument of this project is that as viewers, readers, donors, or missionaries, evangelicals understand the issue of human trafficking to be transformative, both for victims abroad and for themselves, moved to learn more, give financially, travel abroad, or change their behavior. By examining what has captivated evangelical audiences about sex trafficking, as a real issue but, more crucially for these chapters, as a site of imagined harm, I argue that we learn

something valuable about what draws audiences to an issue in which they can imagine themselves to play a central part. Along the way, the role of the State and of intervention are negotiated in specific ways, as humanitarian norms shift toward private responsibility for charity rather than state responsibility for large-scale intervention. I argue that the affective component of this intervention is a pleasure in benevolence that echoes other humanitarian efforts, but for evangelicals has an added religious component in that they experience rescue, redemption, and renewal of their spirituality.

Table of Contents

Dedication iv

Acknowledgements v

Abstract of Dissertation viii

List of Figures xii

Chapter 1: Promising Rescue: Consuming Freedom 1

Chapter 2: Innocence Abroad: Humanitarian Adventure and the Restless Christian 49

Chapter 3: Hearts of Men: Masculinity, Sex Work, and Crisis 98

Chapter 4: The Other Sex Industry: Freedom Businesses, Souvenirs, and Spiritual Renewal 144

Conclusion 192

Bibliography 200

List of Figures

Figure 1, In-n-Out “Slave 2 Nothing” website 1

Figure 2, In-n-Out Ad 1 3

Figure 3, In-n-Out Ad 2, 3 4

Figure 5, In-n-Out Menu 5

Figure 6, In-n-Out Cup 6

Figure 7, Lilya4Ever 45

Figure 6, Terrify No More 51

Figure 4, Salvation Army 79

Figure 5, Did Jesus Die for Your Porn Addiction? 115

Figure 6, Mars Hill, Peasant Princess 120

Figure 7, Mars Hill, Text questions 122

Figure 6, Mars Hill, Whac A Fox 123

Figure 8, Porn again Christian 127

Figure 9, Unearthed Adam and Eve 134

Figure 10, Unearthed, Eve 134

Figure 11, Unearthed B-Roll: Dance club 135

Figure 12, About Sari Bari 139

Figure 13, Sari Bari Cover Photo 1 155

Figure 14, Sari Bari Cover Photos 2, 3 158

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Chapter 1: Introduction Promising Rescue: Consuming Freedom

In a January 2016 campaign to raise funds, awareness, and advocacy around the issue of human trafficking, the California fastfood chain In-n-Out Burger created a foundation called “Slave 2 Nothing.” Placemats lined food trays with images of young women who signified trafficking victims, accompanied by textual information about how patrons could join in the fight against trafficking. Slave 2 Nothing was created with the premise “to help those throughout our country who are enslaved by any person or substance, by empowering them to live free!”1

In-n-Out, a fast food chain that was founded by evangelicals, and its focus with the Slave 2 Nothing campaign aligned with broader evangelical interest in sex

1 “About Us” Slave 2 Nothing, 2016. https://www.slave2nothing.org/about Accessed 15 October 2017.

trafficking.2 The Slave 2 Nothing campaign goes beyond a simple mechanism by which fast food diners can engage in a global issue of women’s human rights by learning more about the foreign women and girls looking longingly up from trays, however. Instead, it fits into a paradigm through which addiction, slavery, captivity, race, and sexuality are bound together in the evangelical imagination of the global. By linking drug addiction, signified as a domestic issue, with human trafficking, with exotic models coded as foreign to U.S. patrons, the Slave 2 Nothing campaign deftly performs the unifying logic with which this dissertation is concerned: by linking the “slavery” of trafficking with an idea of other types of slavery, such as addiction, this campaign invites consumers to imagine that they, too, are captives in need of a kind of rescue. In what follows, I argue that this slippage is made possible through particular conceptions of racialized foreign bodies, conflations of ideas of captivity and slavery, and the transformational promise of rescue that invites audiences to imagine their own rescue as bound up with the rescue of imagined victims abroad.

The In-n-Out campaign highlights both human trafficking and drug addiction, but it was imagery of trafficking that the fast food’s storefronts utilized in marketing. “Let’s

End Human Trafficking Where We Live.” Guests were invited to donate at the register, presumably after simply being moved by the images of the campaign—young women staring up from the paper liners of trays and the lit menu signs. “Help Us Set Them Free,” the campaign invited, offering 3-to-1 matching for donations made in the month of

2 As I will go into in more detail further below, In-n-Out Burger was founded by an evangelical Christian, Rich Snyder, and prints Bible verses on the paper goods that they utilize.

January. Soft watercolors in pink and blue surround the longing faces of the women meant to stand in for trafficking victims, subtitled with the caption, “Across all 50 states, victims of human trafficking silently cry for help.” In this dissertation, I argue that the subtext of evangelical investment in human trafficking follows similar arcs but argues the opposite: rather than being a domestic issue or silent crying, evangelicals consider trafficking to be a global issue with a thundering voice, capable of shaping evangelical habits of cultural production and personal consumption.

These three images, which were designed for the campaign, all evoke race at a distance.

The victims that symbolize “human trafficking” are beautiful, ethnic, but with heightened contrast, thus still read as whitewashed. The accompanying text reads, “In-n-Out Burger created the Slave 2 Nothing Campaign to open paths to freedom for those who are

enslaved to any person or any substance.” They are also headlined with the phrase,

“Awareness. Rescue. Support.” The faces of the victims are clearly meant to be the ones in need of rescue.

These three images lined In-n-Out trays under burgers, but were also featured online and on the menus overhead the physical spaces of the storefronts. Juxtaposed with the orders available, the image of the trafficking victim is even more stark. She is meant to be consumed. An idea of her freedom is but one option to order.

In-n-Out Burger was founded by an evangelical Christian, Rich Snyder, and has long been famous for printing Bible verses on the paper goods that they utilize for cups, and wrappers. The phrase “John 3:16” is printed on the underside of their soda cups, as seen below, in reference to the Bible verse, “For God so loved the world that he gave his

one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

This verse, considered to typify evangelical belief, is a missionary element of In-n-Out’s marketing. As I will demonstrate below, in their own way, the trafficking ads are as well, signaling to customers that In-n-Out, and evangelicalism, both stand for freedom.

Freedom that you can support through what you consume, literally and figuratively.

The central argument of this project is that as viewers, readers, donors, or missionaries, evangelicals understand the issue of human trafficking to be transformative, both for victims abroad and for themselves, moved to learn more, give financially, travel abroad, or change their behavior. As the patrons of In-n-Out consume, so too are they consuming a set of images and ideas about trafficking that promise a life of freedom.

That freedom is not just in an imagined foreign space, but in the domestic space of their own internal world, as the campaign links addiction to trafficking, signaling that there are forms of slavery all around us.

In what follows, this dissertation traces this positioning within other evangelical engagements with sex trafficking, where an audience’s own experiences with addiction, sex, or boredom, are all communicated through the language of captivity, phrased in opposition to a promise of rescue. Like the In-n-Out ads, this placement is done through the imagery and narratives of an idea of trafficking that focuses on women and girls in crisis abroad. As such, the Slave-2-Nothing campaign is a representative example of contemporary engagement with the issue of human trafficking, and sex trafficking in particular, visually implied by the sexual nature of the Slave-2-Nothing images of captive women. At the same time, it is a campaign with missionary undertones, one designed to invite eaters into the evangelical world of captivity and rescue, one freedom at a time.

Throughout this dissertation, I use the term “sex trafficking” to denote the specific attention to the kinds of sexual harm which evangelicals are specifically invested in fighting. A range of sex work practices, on a spectrum of coercion, often get collapsed within evangelical discourse. Many evangelicals in the following chapters echo secular human rights language, and have indeed moved away from the term “sex trafficking” in favor of language that is more precise, like “human trafficking,” “forced prostitution,” or

“coercion into the sex industry.”3 However, as the ad campaign comment above

3 I will say more about UN language and protocol in subsequent sections, but the current UN definition of trafficking can be found in Article 3, paragraph (a) of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking “Trafficking in Persons” as: “The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced

demonstrates, narrating “human trafficking” and even “slavery” includes the implication of sex trafficking through the illustrations of the young women and the wording of “set her free.” The sexual component of trafficking is often the true subject of evangelical trafficking narratives, or is the core harm around which other harms revolve. This is not to say that evangelicals are not interested in other kinds of trafficking issues, but to examine the specific kind of work that narrating sex trafficking does for evangelical communities in the U.S.4 To use scholar Yvonne Zimmerman’s language, I am interested in how the framework of “trafficking as sold sex” came to stand in for all forms of trafficking for evangelicals.5 Sex trafficking is both a literal human rights issue—though a minor component of trafficking globally—and, more importantly, a symbolic and meaningful narrative strategy with particular affective pull for evangelicals.6

labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”

4 Indeed, IJM, one of the subjects of this dissertation, is works on a number of other justice issues in addition to sex trafficking. However, the majority of their donors, and thus much of their marketing materials, focus on sex trafficking. In fact, it was with the casework issue of sex trafficking that IJM’s work began. This is why I argue that though the overall interest can be more expansive, it makes sense to explore the particular logic of sex trafficking.

5 L. M. Campbell & Yvonne Zimmerman, “Christian Ethics and Human Trafficking Activism: Progressive Christianity and Social Critique,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 34 no. 1, (2014).

6 Reliable data and statistics on trafficking is nearly impossible to collect, considering the underground nature of illegal smuggling, labor violations, and crime. The UN currently offers this statement on the scope of trafficking in persons: “The question of the magnitude of the trafficking problem—that is, how many victims there are—is hotly debated as there is no methodologically sound available estimate.” (https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human- trafficking/faqs.html#How_widespread_is_human_trafficking) However, common un-

The central questions that frame this project are: First, how does the concept of the global sex industry, and sex trafficking in particular, come to be useful for evangelical transformation in this particular historical moment, after the Cold War, in the United

States? Second, why is the body of the transnational trafficking victim the terrain upon which such a transformation is imagined to be available and possible? In other words, what role do the racialized figures and spaces of abjection abroad play in evangelical imaginings? Each of the following chapters responds to these questions in a related but distinct way, illustrated by a particular set of narratives within evangelical cultural production focused on sex trafficking, the sex industry, and the sex worker rescue industry.

Racialized bodies operate within evangelical narratives of sex trafficking as the very terrain of transformation. Across the spectrum of evangelical cultural products about sex trafficking, this terrain is imagined and understood in distinct ways, which are examined separately within each chapter. In each chapter, I argue that dynamics of race function slightly differently, though in related ways, sometimes signifying innocence or brutality, sometimes indicating a foreign space of danger, and sometimes promising an enticing engagement with fantasies of the exotic, sensual, and authentic that are imagined to exist uniquely abroad. The racial dynamics of a U.S.-based evangelical audience cited statistics among awareness-raising groups use numbers like this, from Texas Representative Will Hurd’s website, stating that “21 to 30 million people are currently victims of human trafficking in our world. Half of the 800,000 people trafficked every year across international borders are believed to be children. At least 80 percent are female.” With no source, it is unclear where these statistics come from. (https://hurd.house.gov/media-center/editorials/modern-day-slavery-america_)

whose object is abroad, and for whom a history and legacy of abolition and slavery is important if contested, are complex. This expansive audience includes people of color who identify as evangelicals as participants on mission trips to red light districts, as well as depictions of brown bodies, anonymous and sexualized, in brothel footage B-roll designed to raise awareness about sex trafficking. Race, within this project, is not simply a matter of white evangelicals and non-white sex workers, even in cases in which this is the most common demographic constitution, but rather, race operates within this set of narratives as a productive force, separating spaces into domestic and foreign, safe and dangerous, boring and exotic.

As I will demonstrate below, the mechanisms by which evangelical ideas of race and sex trafficking come together to play this role in shaping, upholding, and ultimately disciplining a vision of “home” and a threat of “abroad” were the product of the unique historical moment of the post-Cold War period. This idea of threat is rooted in a framing of violence that specifically creates the idea of a non-western woman in crisis. As Minoo

Moallem writes,

The representation of women has been central in this framing of violence and protection. As stated by Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, the civilizing mission of modern European imperialism has relied on women’s lives and such practices as suttee, seclusion, foot binding, veiling, arranged marriages, and female circumcision to symbolize the ‘barbarism’ of non-Western cultures….Such framing has been essential in the production and reproduction of both Eurocentrism and masculinist citizenship in the context of colonial modernity and postcolonial nationalisms.7

7 Minoo Moallem, “The Texualization of Violence in a Global World: Gendered Citizenship and Discourses of Protection,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 11, no. 12 (1999):10.

The third world woman in danger, in other words, is a familiar and crucial concept within mobilizing narratives, even for non-evangelicals. Due to globalization’s effect on local and national economies, as well as on immigration policies of countries around the world, women’s travel on cross-border circuits as a means of searching for jobs and livelihood is ever increasing in the contemporary moment. These circuits are strengthened by the global (neoliberal) economic system. In Saskia Sassen’s terms, these “counter- geographies of globalization” overlap with the major dynamics that compose globalization: the global market formation, transnational travel, and increasing ease of communication across borders that go unregulated.8 In Hyun Sook Kim, Jyoti Puri, and

H. J. Kim-Puri’s 2005 study, “Conceptualizing Gender-Sexuality-State-Nation,” they offer the following framework, “Thus, globalization is often understood as the inevitable outcome of Euro-American hegemony, and research on Third World women is evaluated within that framework. The analysis of globalization and gender remains embedded in the vantage point of the West.”9 Thus, even when addressing representations of sex trafficking—as I do here—these representations are inextricably read through the positioning of the western audiences (like the In-n-Out customers) who are consuming them.

Methodologically, within this dissertation I perform close readings of narratives of sex trafficking within U.S. evangelical cultural products in the contemporary period,

8 Saskia Sassen, “Women's Burden: Counter-geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival,” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 2 (2000): 503.

9 Hyun Sook Kim, Jyoti Puri, and H. J. Kim-Puri. “Conceptualizing Gender-Sexuality- State-Nation: An Introduction,” Gender and Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 141.

using an analytic of captivity and rescue to understand why and how the figure of the foreign sex worker offers transformative promise to U.S. audiences — U.S. evangelicals in particular. This analytic, by which I mean the framing paradigm through which I analyze these narratives, offers insight into evangelical definitions, of captivity and rescue as terms and states of being, but also of concepts of transformation and freedom.

Transformation is understood to be a kind of physical, spiritual, or internal change, and hinges upon a layered definition of freedom, which is not only the physical rescue for victims held captive abroad, but also as the spiritual, internal rescue offered to evangelicals themselves, as they engage with narratives of sex trafficking. Ranging from books and media products to instructional spiritual guides (or devotional products) and even transnational travel itself, the cultural products in this study are all designed to invite evangelicals into a broader understanding of sex trafficking. To persuade evangelical audiences (readers and viewers) to support the work of fighting sex trafficking, whether financially, spiritually, or with physical travel, the narratives woven through these cultural products deploy a paradigm of captivity and rescue that presents a division between good and bad, freedom and unfreedom. Evangelical audiences are promised freedom and transformation within this division between captivity and rescue, both for captive victims who might be rescued by their support and for themselves, captive in their own lives to dullness and distraction. “Freedom” and “rescue” within these narratives offers insight into what promises hold sway for contemporary evangelical audiences in the U.S., as well as broader audiences drawn to humanitarian

investment abroad more generally. Promises of reviving stifled spirituality, restoring sexual order, and refashioning life to be more beautiful.

To be sure, violations of international labor law, including abuse, coercion, and violence within the sex industry, are real, and have grave consequences for a hyper- exploitable global underclass of workers who have almost no recourse. Insofar as clients of NGOs and ministries testify their experiences of exploitation, harm, and rescue, including at promotional events for the groups I study here, they should be wholly supported and believed. However, these are not the central concerns of this dissertation.

Instead, what I am curious about has more to do with the utility of those stories—why they compel action, and how they came to be legible in contemporary U.S. culture, particularly for religious audiences who would typically shy away from feminist concerns of international women’s human rights. Because this curiosity is located in the religious attention to the harmed female body abroad, transnational scholarship on religion, feminism, and global crisis all inform my analysis. Indeed, it is impossible to make sense of this topic without the overlap of all three bodies of knowledge, and my project demonstrates the productivity of putting them deeply in conversation, where religious actors are transnational and sexual subjects, and the transnational space is one of testing both sexual and religious boundaries.

Ultimately, I argue here that imagining the space of the foreign sex industry as one of danger, in which innocent victims are held captive and require rescue from outside forces in order to be restored to a state of safety and freedom (as opposed to bondage) serves to soothe U.S. audiences. Narratives of rescue beckon to the reader, promising

them the real transformation. In chapter one, this appears in the form of a transformational faith encounter that engaging with issues of injustice like sex trafficking will engender, an antidote to the struggling Christian who is bored and stifled at home in the safety of the United States. Chapter two takes the promise of transformation inward and online, utilizing engagement with the harms of the sex industry including sex trafficking and pornography to discipline Christian men’s sexual behavior. In the third chapter, engaging with sex trafficking and other issues of global harm becomes an adventure in traveling abroad, promising a transformation in the form of how you see the world and in terms of what is brought back home — stories, photos, souvenirs, and spiritual awakening. Each promise deploys a related but distinct logic of what the true horror and harm of sexual captivity is, and how an awareness of it ought to frame evangelical conceptions of what its opposite, sexual freedom, entails.

Sexual freedom, then, is the shadow figure within these narratives of captivity and bondage. Rescue is not a goal in and of itself, but the path through which captives— whether sex workers within a brothel or evangelical readers and viewers in the United

States—will leave a life of captivity and enter into a life of increased freedom. What this means for each group invested in the work of rescue varies, but an idea of evangelical sexual freedom emerges through a close reading of the language of sex trafficking narratives. Captivity in these narratives references a spectrum of evangelical un-freedom: including literal conditions of force in sexual labor, spiritual conditions of sin, or metaphorical conditions of addiction to sexual behavior considered to be damaging or dangerous, such as looking at pornography or purchasing sex. Conflation between these

three categories is deliberate in the narratives I examine—indeed, much of this language argues for a unique evangelical pull to the work of rescuing captives because they themselves have experienced (a kind of) captivity and rescue of their own, through their religious beliefs. If captivity is a category of physical, spiritual, and metaphorical bondage within these narratives, freedom has a number of meanings as well.

As the antithesis to sexual captivity, and the ultimate realization of the goal of rescue, sexual freedom, within narratives of sex trafficking, is sexual expression that conforms with an unfolding spiritual understanding of monogamous, heterosexual, married, faithful union between two Christians. Within this definition, coercion plays an important analytical role in parsing the difference between sexual captivity and sexual freedom. The throughline of these evangelical narratives is this: coercion that tricks, traps, or compels victims to engage in sex work with the threat or reality of economic or physical violence is captivity. These are the situations that impel evangelicals to learn, act, donate, travel, or otherwise respond in support of rescue. Coercion, conversely, that instructs and guides believers toward a sexual relationship that aligns with what the subjects would consider to be correct, Christian, safe (and saved) behavior, is freedom. In other words, sexual captivity is restrictive and can be violent, but its opposite is not freedom from restriction. Instead, for the evangelicals in this study, sexual freedom is its own form of restriction, calling to mind Foucault’s theory about discipline—this is a freedom that requires fairly strict adherence to a certain set of rules. (No pornography, no purchased sex, no non-heterosexual, non-monogamous, or un-married sex. Beyond that, different subjects within the following chapters have distinct, additional rules. For

example, Mark Driscoll, a pastor who is one of the subjects of Chapter Two, was criticized for promoting a standard that married couples also have sex every day, a recommendation that was considered to be harmful in part because it was directed as a rule that wives within his church ought to follow.) Whether because these rules prohibit certain kinds of expressions of sex—any LGBTQ relationships, any unmarried or non- monogamous relationships—or because they insist upon such strict and patriarchal values within heterosexual sex, the rules of sexual freedom themselves can be understood to contain a degree of violence, albeit mostly different from the physical violence of labor and bodily abuse.

Sexual freedom and sexual captivity are also ideas that hinge upon the very racialized and historically produced logics that weave throughout the three chapters, marking the safe space of sexual freedom as domestic or home-based, spiritual, structured, and light versus the dangerous space of sexual captivity as dark and foreign, evil, and a case of “modern-day slavery.” This language pervades evangelical engagement with trafficking of every kind, but particularly animates discussions of sex trafficking, where often “human trafficking,” “slavery,” and “sex trafficking” conflate and collide to reference the same kind of harm: the harm, violence, and injustice of sexual captivity. For a minority of evangelicals, any sex work at all, even if consented to, is still activity that falls under the rubric of slavery. This is not the normative position, however, and the majority of evangelicals engaged with sex trafficking shy away from labeling consenting adults in the sex trade “victims” in need of rescue, even when they personally believe that everyone would benefit from leaving the paid sex sector.

However, the language of “modern-day slavery” to describe these contemporary abuses, and the reciprocal labeling of “modern-day abolitionists” to describe the work of narrating, and responding to sex trafficking, is consistent throughout. Investment in the idea of continuing a legacy begun by abolitionists at the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave

Trade animates the discourses of evangelical narratives of sex trafficking. Though similar to the analytic work that the concept of captivity does, evangelical sex trafficking narratives deploy the concept of “slavery” somewhat differently. Where captivity gestures broadly to all the kinds of unfreedom referenced above, directed mainly toward the conditions of the captive, “modern-day slavery” as a term does a different kind of work, one that is oriented toward the rescuer, as an abolitionist. Slavery, in other words, is a categorizing of the evangelicals themselves—as it names the crisis, it confirms the respondents. References to Sojourner Truth and William Wilberforce within evangelical cultural production about sex trafficking positions the fight against sex trafficking as a seamlessly continuation of the work of fighting the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Understanding an engagement with sex trafficking to be part of a legacy of

Christian justice work also makes sense of references to Mother Teresa, Martin Luther

King Jr., and of course, Jesus, within narratives designed to encourage evangelical readers to act. These figures and this history also operate with a post-racial, post- historical logic, drawing unbroken lines across race, position, privilege, and time. In this way, however well-intentioned and encouraging, evangelical audiences are invited to understand themselves to be fighting alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth, and Mother Teresa even as they may, in reality, be focused on praying that they can

overcome an addiction to pornography. This is not intended to be flip or dismissive, but rather to deeply unpack the racial, historical, sexual, and spiritual layers contained within the logic of this discourse. What this dissertation seeks to prove is not that these responses to sex trafficking are illogical or random; rather, the narratives that I discuss here demonstrate that this work operates with a coherent, internal alignment toward a goal of rescue—just not for the people one might expect.

Chapters

Each chapter of this dissertation examines the narrative utility of ideas of captivity and rescue in motivating international, domestic and individual participation in the fight against sex trafficking.

Chapter one, “Innocence Abroad: Humanitarian Adventure and the Restless

Christian,” introduces the a concept of missionary humanitarianism, work that combines spiritual motivations present in mission work with the practical goals of offering humanitarian and human rights assistance. This chapter addresses International Justice

Mission, an evangelical NGO that both works on cases of sex trafficking (as well as other justice issues) abroad and communicates about that work in prolific publications and media products for U.S. evangelical audiences. Through close readings of IJM texts, this chapter clarifies the role that narratives of sex trafficking play as a mechanism for reanimating lapsed or bored faith for U.S. evangelicals. In this chapter, an IJM slogan,

“the rescued becomes the rescuer,” offers a critical, if unintended, insight into this promise. Meant to convey that “rescued” Christians, saved by their belief in Jesus, can now rescue victims in need abroad, the phrase is also an astute observation that these

victims themselves offer a form of rescue to the restless readers of IJM texts. No longer captive by their own lives of “mediocre niceness,” which I address further in the chapter,

IJM’s evangelical audiences are rescued themselves as they join in the fight against sex trafficking as supporters, readers, and prayer partners with IJM’s work. Such engagement is transformative. Racial imagery in this chapter facilitates such a transformation, establishing the heroes, villains, and vulnerable victims as characters in the foreign backdrop, the space in which the fight against injustice happens. Both innocence and brutality are translated to evangelical readers in racial terms, whether through imagery of foreign women and children in need in South and Southeast Asia, or in depictions of brothel owners and madams, foreign, violent, and brutal.10

In chapter two, this transformation extends beyond the spiritual lives of supporters and moves the subject inward, transforming their sexual behavior. “Hearts of Men:

10 It is important to note two crucial caveats here about my argument about race within IJM storytelling. First, I am not arguing that all the “good guys” are white, while all the “bad guys” are brown, within these texts. Far from it—often the patrons or customers of the brothels are described as U.S. citizens or western, white men from Australia, New Zealand or the U.K., who travel to foreign countries to pay for sex with minors because it is harder to do so easily in their home countries. Second, IJM is one of the evangelical organizations addressing sex trafficking that focuses exclusively on working with local law enforcement to conduct raids or rescue operations. This means that the figures breaking down doors, removing children, arresting perpetrators, and even pressing charges are often foreign nationals. However these facts, while important, do not change the uses of the racial imaginary in establishing foreign space as one of uniquely vulnerable victims and uniquely brutal villains—and this understanding is made possible through imagery, descriptions, and storytelling that highlights the foreign-ness of these cases and crimes. This will be discussed in further detail in chapter one, but it is also an important contrast to popular movies in the U.S. that focus on trafficking, where the central victim is often white. Instead, IJM establishes an innocence of victims through their very foreignness, in which the fact that the victim is a young child in Cambodia, for example, makes her more vulnerable, both because her race codes her as a global victim to Western audiences and because she is not protected by her government the way readers assume (and hope) Western children are protected by Western governments.

Masculinity, Sex Work, and Crisis” examines evangelical narratives that link consumption of pornography with sex trafficking globally. This chapter performs close readings of the cultural products rooted in this link from the former evangelical megachurch Mars Hill, and satellite products that augment it, including the church’s sex trafficking ministry REST and the video production company that produced sex trafficking informational videos featuring the church’s pastors, Unearthed. These texts, or cultural products, include videos, books, and an e-book titled, “Porn Again Christian” that establishes a spiritual link between pornography use, a global economy of sold sex, and crumbling marriages in the U.S. The consistent argument within the logics of these texts is that personal behavior, even in terms of what happens at home, has global impact, and conversely, global threat can motivate changes in domestic, and individual behavior.

Linking pornography use, conceived by the subjects of this chapter as its own kind of captivity through addiction, to the economy of sex trafficking, establishes both the idea of the victim abroad and the idea of the men in the audience at home as captives in need of rescue. In this chapter, racial images establish the danger of both types of captivity, where the sex industry itself is painted as a space of foreign temptation, even when accessed at home from a computer. Sex workers in these texts are exotic, exploited brown bodies, whose victimization in turns victimizes the sanctity of the domestic, safe bodies of married evangelicals.11

11 As with IJM, I am not interested here in arguing that a majority of evangelical marriages considered to be under threat from pornography addiction are “white,” but I am arguing that a threat from the foreign and exotic sex industry is imagined in contrast to an idea of safe, domestic, sanctioned sexuality that is itself painted in racial language. Marriage does not go hand in hand with light skin or the construction of American

In chapter three, foreign space and foreign bodies do not code danger in the same way, as the danger itself is what provides the energizing possibility for transformation in the form of adventure and short term mission trips. In “Freedom Businesses, Souvenirs, and Spiritual Renewal,” the adventure of rescue joins an economic circuit of rehabilitation, transformation, and aesthetic enhancement. Beauty is, I argue, an unspoken promise within this work. Participation in the work of fighting sex trafficking, whether by going on a mission trip or an adventure oneself or by supporting the cause as a donor or shopper at home, is a process that puts evangelicals in contact with a kind of beauty that underwrites the “ugliness” of captivity and harm narratives. This includes the natural beauty of foreign countries, the physical beauty of the (predominantly) women in red light districts, and the created beauty of promotional products that have their own missionary tone, blankets created by former sex workers, for example, or journals made of saris whose sales donate to anti-trafficking organizations. The promotional material for one organization invites travelers to, “See firsthand how serious of an issue sex trafficking has become in our world today.” This continues: “We encourage you to absorb all you can from the beautiful scenery and unique Asian culture, explore the different sensations of Cambodia and Thailand through new flavors, fragrances and

whiteness, obviously, but within this conception of good and bad sexuality — sexual captivity versus sexual freedom — racial images serve to distinguish between the two by way of establishing foreign, sexual, tempting, and dangerous space as one in the same. In other words, these distinctions operate with a racial logic, even for an evangelical reader in the U.S. who is not perceived to be “white,” just as they operate with the same logic of equating sexual freedom with heterosexual marriage, even if an evangelical reader in the U.S. is unmarried or LGBTQ.

sounds.”12 The trips deliberately place evangelicals from U.S. churches into spaces that they would not normally visit—spaces imagined to be marked by abjection, captivity, and sin—but they are also meant to offer a window an antidote to that darkness in the form of the literal beauty of the exotic. Imagery and depictions of racialized figures, even when still conveying harm and danger, offer the promise of beauty.

Whether through a spiritual revival, a sexual renunciation, or an experience of beauty, evangelicals themselves are promised transformation through their investment in a fight against sex trafficking, as donors, supporters, and travelers. Together, all three chapters reiterate the central argument of this dissertation: that the image of the captive within evangelical narratives of sex trafficking motivates, disciplines, and inspires believers to participate in the work of rescue, both as missionaries and as those in need of rescue themselves. In other words, the missionary is the mission field.

Border Crossing & Broader Conversations

How did the sex trafficking narrative come to have this transformative role within the evangelical global imaginary? These narratives draw upon global, spiritual, gendered, and even feminist discourses, to lead the charge in framing sex trafficking as a global issue. Janie Chuang writes, “control over the meaning of trafficking has been perhaps the greatest of the neo-abolitionist’ gains because it has significantly influenced how anti- trafficking interventions are constructed and implemented on the ground.”13 These

12 “Overseas Team Trips” Destiny Rescue. http://www.destinyrescue.org/us/get- involved/teams/short-term-trips/ Accessed 15 October 2017. 13 Janie A. Chuang, “Rescuing Trafficking from Ideological Capture: Prostitution Reform and Anti-trafficking Law and Policy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 158, No. 6 (May 2010): 1659.

meanings, constructed in disparate but ultimately cohesive parts of U.S. evangelicalism, all animated by an interest in sexual captivity. This interest has occasionally perplexed journalists, including Ruth Graham, who noted in Slate,

Human trafficking—and sex trafficking in particular—has become something of a Christian cause célèbre. There are prayer weekends, movies, magazine covers, Sunday school curricula, and countless church-based ministries. More unusual efforts include lipstick sold to help “kiss slavery goodbye” and tattoo alteration services for victims who say they have been “branded” by their captors. An extraordinarily complex global issue has somehow become one of the most energetic Christian missions of the 21st century.

It is this “somehow” I am interested in here. The energetic mission of Christian interest in general, and evangelical interest in particular, is the product of religious, domestic and international discursive formations that worked together a decade earlier to make sex trafficking a perfect crisis.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, evangelicals were positioned politically and affectively as prime participants in a fight against sex trafficking, as real investors and as imagined allies. Below, and within each chapter, I explore these discursive formations in detail. Feminist debates about pornography in the 70s and 80s, international concern for post-socialism and the crumbling Soviet Union, and the history of U.S. evangelical organizing for religious freedom are the three central discourses of harm that combined to create the environment in which sex trafficking could act as a unifying cause for evangelicals and feminists in the early 1990s. Backlit by the shifting global landscape of

Christianity itself, in which increased believers were located in the Global South, and the rising attention to multiculturalism and diversity domestically, these discourses operated

in tandem to transform sex trafficking itself into the cause célèbre that Graham examined.

This has not escaped the attention of scholars.

Transnational, sexualized figures within the narrative imagination of religious audiences in the U.S. are subjects that inherently span a multiplicity of borders. From the state borders crossed by missionaries to imagined spaces traveled by readers, evangelical audiences themselves are in transnational motion within this project. Drawing upon scholarship in the fields of religion, feminist studies, and work on transnational humanitarianism and human rights in the global south, analyzing evangelical narratives of sex trafficking contributes to each of these fields primarily through emerging in the overlap between them. Partly, this simply furthers scholarly conversations that have already explored the transnational, the sexual, and the spiritual in conjunction with one another. Work on religion in the United States is inherently work about sexuality, just as work on sexuality globally is already work about race. Likewise, transnational scholarship has astutely established the inextricable link between the domestic and the international. Yet, the specific case of narratives of sex trafficking, as mobilized by evangelical actors in the United States, acts as a microcosm drawing these three modes of academic thought together—indeed, all three are necessary to render it legible.

Scholars of the sex industry who have addressed interest in sex trafficking through transnational feminist research have primarily understood evangelical actors through a paradigm of harm. Thought to be intrigued by narratives of sex-saturated violence, evangelical actors in this line of thinking engage with the sex industry as voyeurs, as visiting spectators, with goals of judgment, conversion, and objectification.

The pre-eminent scholar of this evangelical interest in sex trafficking, Elizabeth

Bernstein, summarizes such a position as a chance to “engage directly in a sex-saturated culture without becoming ‘contaminated’ by it.”14 This reading draws from ethnographic research with sex workers themselves, for whom invasive rescue operations, when unwanted, can be disruptive at best, and result in criminalization or police abuse at worst.15 Even in less extreme examples, scholars like Elena Shih have documented policies in which the “conditions” of “rescue,” for victims, require that they attend church, or even convert to Christianity.16

This body of work makes the important contribution that narratives of sex trafficking that appear to be hyperfocused on assisting imagined victims of exploitation are often detrimental, even harmful, to real sex workers. My work builds upon this crucial observation but departs from it in important ways, shifting focus to the underlying purpose and utility of these narratives in the first place. Rather than viewing the exchange between sex workers and evangelicals as a dynamic categorized by harm—whether intentional or not—my work offers a new way of reading this important and complex

14 Elizabeth Bernstein., “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns,” Signs 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2010): 63.

15 For more on the negative impact that religiously motivated intervention can have on sex workers, see work by Jo Doezema, Ronald Weitzer, Julia O’Connell Davidson, Wendy Chapkis, Gretchen Soderlund, Emma Grant, Vanessa E. Munro, Annette Lansink, Molly Dragiewicz, Janie A. Chuang, Edith Kinney, Rutvica Andrijasevic, Yvonne Zimmerman, Alicia Peters, Elizabeth Bernstein, Wendy Hesford, Elena Shih, Denise Brennan, Laura Agustín, among others.

16 Elena Shih, “The Anti-Trafficking Rehabilitation Complex,” Contexts 13, no. 1 (2014): 21–22.

interaction: as a series of promises geared more toward the needs of evangelical audiences than focused on aid for sex workers, captive or not. To be sure, this is not to sidestep or downplay the realities of harm that this feminist scholarship documents.

Instead, my work offers the underpinning narrative logic to evangelical engagement with the issue of sex trafficking, addressing components of personal longing and theological need that are often overlooked.

As these longings and needs are directed toward the eroticized body of the foreign sex worker in a situation of harm, or crisis, they map onto the erotics of spectacle with which scholars of humanitarianism and human rights are concerned. Wendy Hesford’s work on representations of harm, including sex trafficking, addresses framing sex work as a human rights violation, writing,

To the extent that these campaigns uncritically turn to women’s narratives of victimization in making the invisible visible, they ignore the complications of transnational movements and privilege certain rights over others. The right to be protected from violence and exploitation (admittedly a crucial right) is privileged over the right not to live in poverty and the right to control one’s sexuality, for instance.17

In fact, rhetorically positioning sex trafficking to be a matter of humanitarian crisis

(rather than one of violations of fundamental human rights) allows for the kind of obfuscation that Hesford describes to go unchallenged. Hesford describes “sympathetic

17 Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 126.

visibility for women and girls coerced into the sex trade” as a matter of isolating “women and children as objects to be seen and then rescued.”18

When it comes to scholarship on Christianity, the sex industry in any form is not generally present. However, two types of scholarship within religious history pave the way for understanding the sex industry as a crucial site of missionary engagement for contemporary evangelicals. The first is scholarship within religious history in the U.S. focused on gender and sexuality, particularly addressing complex negotiations of power and performance within conservative Protestant traditions in terms of marriage, sexual expression, and femininity or masculinity. Work like R. Marie Griffith’s study of women’s submission (and subversion) within a Pentecostal tradition with strict gender roles, and Clifford Putney’s research on the logic and history of “Muscular Christianity,” establish important parameters of behavior within evangelicalism that performs femininity or masculinity in certain ways.19 Rather than see the gendered expressions within this dissertation in a vacuum, I submit them as engagements with power that are historically and socially produced.

Scholarship on mission work is the second central body of research within religion that this project draws and expands upon. Through the actual acts of departing from a space of familiarity and engaging with the foreign, whether across town or across a national border, the physicality and praxis of evangelical belief emerge as central

18 Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 130.

19 For more on this scholarship, see work by Amy DeRogatis, Sara Moslener, Tanya Erzen, Kristen Luker, Christine Gardener, and others.

components of salvation’s embodied effects. Religion scholar Kenneth Scott Latourette describes the Christian missionary enterprise as “a continuing and little appreciated factor in the shaping of the American mind,” in his aptly titled monograph, Missions and the

American Mind.20 The majority of academic work addressing mission work focuses on the golden age of missions, the turn of the twentieth century, and the eras that directly precede and follow. Less prevalent is research that attends to mission in the later 20th century or explores U.S.- sponsored mission work in contemporary Christianity. Despite declining denominational figures for long-term foreign missionaries, “mission” and the forces it encompasses — missionaries, mission work, missiology —has actually flourished in the contemporary period. It has, however, assumed new attributes, appearing predominantly in language of international issues and short-term mission trips abroad. Though these short-term trips generally aim for different global results than their long-term predecessors, the justifications for international engagement are strikingly similar. Some of these trips are specifically designed to remove participants from their culture and expose them to something more “authentic.” These trips and the transformation they promise are an element of what scholar Melani McAlister has termed, “enchanted internationalism.” McAlister writes, “Young people in particular go on the trips with the idea that they can and should change, that the experience will involve emotional intensities and spiritual development.”21 The trips are meant to inform

20 Kenneth Scott Latourette, Missions and the American Mind, (Washington, DC: National Foundation Press, 1949).

21 Melani McAlister, “What is Your Heart For? Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere,” American Literary History 20, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 877.

home congregations while transforming participants. The productivity is rarely measured in terms of impact abroad; rather, missions most clearly shape the religious worlds of

U.S. Christians.

Missionary scholarship is also a site with which scholars have addressed the increased mobility of women in traditions that might not otherwise permit them such expansive reach as spiritual leaders, and transnational single travelers. In Patricia Hill’s analysis of female missionaries in the Victorian era, she argues that women in the mission field did not compromise contemporary gender norms as they ventured out of the domestic sphere, but instead, by imagining female missionary work as a kind of international mothering to women and children in need, were simply able to expand the idea of the private sphere until it was large enough to include the entire world.22 Work on later periods, like Susan Thorne’s “Missionary-Imperial Feminism,” describes the western privilege that enabled U.S. upper class women to financially support international mission work, even while acknowledging that their interest in transnational space was part of a project of exercising social freedom of their own.23 This analysis echoes the “consumer’s imperium” that scholar Kristin Hoganson describes, wherein

22 Patricia Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870 – 1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985) 160.

23 Susan Thorne, “Missionary Imperial Feminism” in Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) 252.

travel-focused book clubs and cosmopolitan displays invited women to imagine foreign space as one they might consume.24

These central tensions can be usefully read alongside the evangelical women for whom sex trafficking narratives combine exotic space with transnational mobility. My research is indebted to these analyses, even as it probes more deeply into contemporary missionary motivation. Rather than understanding engagement with sex trafficking as an expansion of sanctioned feminine activity like mothering, or even as a chance to shore up social and cultural capital with global interests and goods, wherein mission work is a strategy through which women increase their freedom, I argue that narratives of sex trafficking perform specific and unique freedom-work inherently. An expansion of feminine care and global souvenirs are an element of this, but the promise of rescue and the peril of captivity offer, I argue, a unique invitation to evangelical readers to feel transformed, free, and rescued themselves as they read, watch, or see. The “reflex story” is what mission work scholars Daniel Bays and Grant Wacker term the impact of foreign missions on domestic politics, social life, and church dynamics, in some of the earliest scholarship to seek direct connections across transnational lines for these religious actors.

My work extends the idea of the “reflex story” by asking not just how international engagement shapes the domestic space of the nation, but also how international engagement shapes the other domestic space, at home. This internal reflex story is what animates evangelical engagement with sex trafficking narratives, and its power as a tool to shape domestic behavior is drawn from its transnational subject matter.

24 Kristin Hoganson, Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

The appeal of figures (like the sex trafficking victim) in texts with transnational circulation is the subject of its own crucial body of scholarship. Work on the idea of the nation—itself a mix of fantasy and physicality—lays the foundation for my research.

Like the work of globe-trotting missionaries, attention to the nation and to citizenship inevitably pushes beyond the borders of the state. The turn toward the transnational in recent scholarship builds on the productive and painful ways that western feminism has engaged subjectivity beyond the boundaries of the nation as well as responds to recent incarnations of neoliberal expanse. Gayatri Spivak’s foundational critique, “Can the

Subaltern Speak?” and Chandra Mohanty’s incisive response to western feminist overreach, “Under Western Eyes” negotiate the space between the West and the Global

South.25 In what would become a rallying cry and apologetic reiteration for years to come, Spivak pointedly describes the work on women’s welfare around the world as the project of white women saving brown women from brown men.26

The transnational figure of the sex trafficking victim occupies this space of foreign imaginings and indigenous silences. Writing with particular familiarity in the colonial context in India, Spivak examines the issue of sati, or a widow’s self-immolation on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Between the western feminist outcry and the patriarchal Indian defense (“she wanted to die”), Spivak argues that the actual voice of

25 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12, no. 13 “On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism,” (Spring - Autumn, 1984).

26 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 271-313.

the widow is obscured. Likewise, Mohanty accuses western feminist scholarship of collapsing entire histories, geographies and desires into the fantasy of the secluded, veiled

“brown” woman. Indeed, the image of the harem, decorated with hidden beauty and hypersexualized-yet-repressed bodies, that underpins the gender politics of British colonial rule in India is remapped through feminist engagement with “the other,” upon whom Mohanty argues western feminists project desires of rescue always backlit with voyeurism and exoticism.

Border-spanning investments of evangelicals, both in practice and in fantasy, shore up the existing relations of power and hierarchies even as they attempt to transcend the nation. This question places evangelical narratives in conversation with post-colonial feminist critiques of romanticizing, exoticizing, and ultimately using the figure of the subaltern woman for their own ends. Rather than halt attention to the global, increasingly important as an analytic category as neoliberalism structured the 1990s and early 2000s,

Mohanty calls for more specific scholarship. (“Women of Africa” is fine, Mohanty argues, if we are talking about all women on the continent, but if it is a stand-in for the abject and the culturally backward, “we say too much and too little at the same time.”)27

Such scholarship is especially useful when it engages or emerges from non-western women themselves. Indeed, Mohanty’s pioneer anthology with Gloria Anzaldua, This

Bridge Called My Back and Anzaldua’s own work on mestiza consciousness and

Borderlands: La Frontiera specifically cite the space of citizenship and the borders of the

27 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 25.

nation as generative and tumultuous for feminist identity.28 Anzaldua offers that Between the citizen and the immigrant, between Spanish colonization and indigenous ancestry, between the United States and Mexico, between masculine and feminine, between white and brown—is the alterity of the mestiza, the interstitial, the bordered.29 Transnational feminist scholarship has continued the labor of analyzing this alterity, in work that frames the lure of narratives of sex trafficking for the subjects of this dissertation, even when not addressing sex work or evangelicals directly.

Transnational feminist work on representations of South Asian women highlight mobility, consumption and fantasies of intimacy. Inderpal Grewal discusses the circuits of fantasy that are in many ways the legacy of the Hoganson’s imperium in her text

28 Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press: 1983). Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012).

29 This non-nation space is where Anzaldua argues the most clear and creative vision of feminism emerges, illuminating the privileges of institutional inclusion that simple citizenship obscures. Likewise, Donna Haraway offers the image of the cyborg as the hybrid akin to la mestiza in her 1988 piece, The Cyborg Manifesto. A continuation of and challenge to essentialism and emphasis on the natural in work like Adrienne Rich’s and Audre Lorde’s, Haraway charges, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” Like Anzaldua, Haraway sees mixing and hybridity as a challenge to the social order and a window into new possibilities for feminist subject formation. The cyborg also joins technology and the body, relating the experience of embodiment to the biopolitical regulation of the state. Thus, the borders are not simply the productive space surrounding the national but the spaces of internal rivenness in which the nation and the citizen are regulated and maintained. The power of the figure of the cyborg — or that of the monster, or the mestiza — is that it is uncontainable and unable to neatly uphold the pillars of national consciousness or coherence from which it emerges.

Transnational America.30 For example, Grewal highlights the emergence of India Barbie, still blonde and blue-eyed, but clad in a colorful sari with a red bindi on her forehead.

Barbie, Grewal notes, is marketed as “right at home” on her travels to India. Rather than devolving easily into assessments merely of economic imperialism or sartorial appropriation, Grewal points out that this is an assemblage of fantasies and desires about purchasing flexible citizenship and moving easily between consumer bases, both for

Barbie and her customers. It is only through attention to the transnational that Grewal’s assessment of the role of citizenship in forming subject position both within the United

States (a diasporic citizenship that can purchase its sense of being “at home” abroad, just like Barbie) and in India (a cosmopolitan consumption that forms a market for American doll tourism). The borders of the nation are dismantled and reconstructed through the transnational exchange of bodies, products, and ideological commitments. Likewise, in

Impossible Desires, Gayatri Gopinath argues that the feminine figure in the global south undoes Western logic, as neoliberal regulation and the myths of aid or charity collide.31

Gopinath uses the queer subaltern subject to argue that transnational attention is laced with fantasies and assumptions of sexuality. Placing the evangelical consumption of narratives of sex trafficking within the conversation between these texts offers a space where both the pleasure of consuming the exotic and the blindness to the harm of that consumption coexist. Though not particularly interested in U.S. subjects, evangelical or

30 Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Johanneshov: MTM Press, 2014).

31 Gayatri, Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007).

otherwise, these feminist texts offer insight into the work that the transnational figure, particularly female, particularly in distress, do within narratives of sex trafficking, both in terms of embodying harm and in acting as a terrain of transformational.

In Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred, M. Jacqui Alexander offers another meaning for crossing, one with particular relevance for narratives of sex trafficking. Alexander utilizes “crossing” as a metaphor that references the literal crossings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, establishing an “archive of empire’s twenty-first-century counterpart, of oppositions to it, of the knowledges and ideology it summons, and of the ghosts that haunt it.”32 For

Alexander, the possibilities for desire are structured by the realities of the state, and in the

U.S. these are imprinted with the legacies of violence that mark its boundaries and its history. This stands in productive tension with the ways that evangelical narratives of sex trafficking reference and cite the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, seamlessly joining as new abolitionists. Within this newness, the haunt of history and the structuring violence of ideas like “desire” that appear neutral but, as Alexander argues, are laced with power, disappear. For Alexander, concepts of the sacred and of spirituality offer anti-colonial possibility for figures Spivak would call the “subaltern.” I argue for their importance in understanding figures with more power as well, where a mirrored combination of spirituality, sexuality, and state-structured power motivate U.S. evangelical crossings here.

History: A Dream of the Nineties

32 Jacqui M. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 2.

Overlapping discourses in the late 1990s coalesced together to make the issue of sex trafficking the perfect crisis for evangelicals in the U.S. Tracing a timeline from the end of the Cold War through to short term mission trips in the 2000s, the chapters that follow expand upon this historical positioning, but a brief overview will offer guidance here. I argue that the 1990s was a generative and unique moment in which the idea of sex trafficking was able to take root in the evangelical imagination as a humanitarian crisis in need of a missionary response. Domestic discourses of multiculturalism amidst fears about crime and the Soviet bloc, re-animated evangelical political organizing around religious freedom, and the legacy of feminist alliances with conservative Christianity in obscenity and pornography debates all contributed to the environment in which sex trafficking could become the perfect crisis. Meanwhile, the narrated rescue of vulnerable sex trafficking victims mirrors Biblical stories of wayward, redeemed prostitutes.

Together, these factors produced the energetic mission of the evangelical movement against sex trafficking, imbuing it with the moral import that helped to make spiritual sense of the humanitarian drama of globalization, communist transition, and domestic politics.

Debates about pornography shaped feminist orientations toward prostitution and trafficking, joining them together under the rubric of sex trafficking made possible through the logic of female sexual slavery. The legacy of working with conservative

Christian groups on the common ground of viewing the sex industry as a manufacturer of women’s sexual harm also shaped the anti-sex trafficking coalition. For example, in discussing George W. Bush’s attention to sex trafficking, abolitionist feminists Phylis

Chesler and Donna Hughes write, “Feminists should stop demonizing the conservative and faith-based groups that could be better allies on some issues than the liberal left has been.”33 Likewise, in the next decade, evangelical Christians seeking to control and undermine the pervasiveness of pornography turned toward feminist logic of harm and oppression as they increasingly utilized the issue of sex trafficking to illustrate the link between consuming porn, enslaving women, and participating in a global economy of violence.

The Barnard College Scholar and Feminist conference of 1982, themed ‘pleasure and danger,’ is the point at which feminist scholars view an origin of the debates about pornography and feminism that have come to be known as the ‘sex wars’ in the late

1970s and early 1980s. Antipornography feminists protested outside, claiming that they had not been allowed to fully participate in the conference. Wearing shirts that read, “For

Feminist Sexuality, Against S/M,” the protesters drew enough negative publicity to the conference that Barnard delayed publishing its proceedings, eventually printing it without the school’s name.34 The antipornography feminist camp would come to be represented by the legal and activist work of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who became famous nationwide when Linda Lovelace joined them to advocate against pornography by speaking of her experience in the porn film, Deepthroat. As Jennifer

Nash writes, “For antipornography feminists, pornography is not simply an explicit

33 Phylis Chesler and Donna Hughes, “Feminism in the 21st Century,” Washington Post, February 22, 2004

34 For more, see Duggar and Hunter, Sex Wars; MacKinnon, Only Words; Leidholdt, “When Women Defend Pornography”

depiction of women’s subjugation; it constitutes violence and disguises it as mere representation.”35 Protecting pornography as free speech, in this reading, is merely a legal mechanism by which patriarchy asserts and sexualizes the domination of gender hierarchy, oppressing women by spectacularization their suffering. As Dworkin famously wrote in her text, Intercourse, “Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.”36

The feminist crusade against pornography, and “abolitionist” feminists, who argued for the elimination of sex work in the name of protecting women, found key political and strategic allies among conservative Christians. Conversations about obscenity increasingly drew attention from Christian voices in the same time period, including criticism from Moral Majority that led to the 1983 Hustler parody of Jerry

Falwell (Sr.) that would culminate in the court case of Hustler v. Falwell.37 In fact, recent controversy around evangelical support for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign inspired Michael Farris, the former executive director of Falwell’s Moral Majority to claim the battle against pornography as a central component of Falwell’s legacy. (One that his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., was disregarding by supporting Trump.) Farris wrote,

“Trump made history by opening the first strip club in a casino in New Jersey. Jerry Sr. made history by inspiring millions of Christians to engage in civic life — including

35 Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015): 9.

36 Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987).

37 Susan Dudley Gold, Parody of Public Figures: Hustler Magazine Inc. V. Falwell (Cavendish Square Publishing, 2014).

battling porn, not putting on pornographic stage shows.”38 Though Falwell was never in alignment with second wave feminism, his views on pornography did match with antipornography feminists like MacKinnon, or feminist scholar Kathleen Barry, who was the first prominent voice to link the harms of pornography to an idea of modern sex trafficking.

As scholar Robert Weitzer points out, Barry’s text from 1979, Female Sexual

Slavery, “advocates a view of sex quite similar to that of the religious right.”39 Barry, who founded the Coalition Against the Trafficking of Women, wrote, “We are really going back to the values women have always attached to sexuality, values that have been robbed from us, distorted and destroyed as we have been colonized through both sexual violence and so-called sexual liberation.” She goes on to argue that, “Sexual intimacy precludes the proposition that sex is the right of anyone and asserts instead that it must be earned through trust and sharing. It follows then that sex cannot be purchased, legally acquired, or seized by force.”40 This view contains many layers, one of which precludes the possibility that women could consent to be in an economic relationship to sex, whether in pornography or prostitution. It also argues for the collapsing of all experience into the one, essentializing the ideas of women and sexuality. In Elizabeth Spelman’s

38Facebook: Michael Farris, January 18, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/michael.farris.374/posts/917207375043622. Accessed 15 October 2017.

39 Ronald Weitzer, “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade” Politics & Society 35, no. 3 (August 2016): 470.

40 Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1979): 227, 230.

terms, “For essentialism invites me to take what I understand to be true of me "as a woman" for some golden nugget of womanness all women have as women; and it makes the participation of other women inessential to the production of the story. How lovely: the many turn out to be one, and the one that they are is me.”41 These discursive strands build upon one another to create the anti-trafficking position in contemporary narratives of sex trafficking.

The genealogy of sex trafficking within feminist discourse has roots both in

Barry’s arguments about female sexual slavery and Gayle Rubin’s 1975 essay, “The

Traffic in Women: Notes on the political Economy of Sex.” Rubin’s Marxist analysis of the social oppression of women is both related to, and distinct from, the life that the idea of “traffic in women” would take on in the following decades.42 Moving into the 1990s and early 2000s, discourses of sex trafficking in policy and feminist writing turned on the idea of understanding sex trafficking as a type of sexual violence, rather than necessarily an issue of organized crime, economic inequality, or even labor/migration. This shift, as

Jennifer Suchland points out in her work on the politics of the anti-trafficking movement, was not predetermined, but rather was the product of deliberate feminist discourses. By the 1995 UN Commission on the Status of Women in Beijing, the “Violence Against

Women” declaration included the strategic objective, “Eliminate trafficking in women

41 Spelman, Elizabeth “Woman: The One and the Many” in Philosophy of Woman: An Anthology of Classic to Current Concepts, ed. by Mary Briody Mahowald. (Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1978): 396.

42 Rubin has noted that she occasionally gets requests from those interested in her work on “trafficking,” but heruse of the term “traffic” had nothing to do with sex work.

and assist victims of violence due to prostitution and trafficking.”43 Understanding prostitution, trafficking, and violence against women as one issue is not an aberration, but rather flowed from the language and political clout of the anti-porn feminist activism.

The turn toward an idea of sex trafficking, however, was specifically produced in this moment. Suchland writes, “The term ‘sex trafficking’ was not widely used in the 1970s or 1980s, but feminists raised concerns about prostitution, forced prostitution, sexual violence, and sex tourism.”44 However, these issues came together, and coalesced in the discourses of “female sexual slavery” that had animated the porn debates, leading to a language of “sex trafficking” that incorporated concerns of consent, freedom, and women’s participation in the sex industry.

The figure of the racialized sex trafficking victim was already present in these discourses, haunting the articulations of harm mobilized by antiporn feminists. In

Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, MacKinnon describes the dominant framing of integrating race as a spectacularized dimension of the harm of pornography, writing, “Porn sexualizes women’s inequality…Black women play plantation, struggling against their bonds, Jewish women orgasm in reenactments of Auschwitz.”45 Thus, race is an element

43 “The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women” Beijing, China - September 1995 Action for Equality, Development and Peace. http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/violence.htm Accessed 15 October 2017.

44 Jennifer Suchland, Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015): 30.

45 Catherine MacKinnon, Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005): 301.

of the violence, even one to which anti-porn rhetoric deliberately attends, but it is still under the rubric of a harm that befalls women as women. Indeed, critical race scholars and pro-sex feminist scholars critique this view of harm as essentializing both race and gender, collapsing both into the spectacle of the harmed body of color. In so doing, turning toward the violence against women of color within the sex industry reveals harm that befalls all women, essentially using the brutality of racism to shore up the distorted values that Barry defended as underpinning sexuality for women. In the words of Angela

Harris in the Stanford Law Review, “black women are white women, only more so.”46 In viewing the black female body as a site of harm and violence, the logic of antiporn feminist arguments illustrated harm for women as a whole. This pattern would continue into narrations of sex trafficking, assuming the mantle of global violence as the harmed body of the victim abroad signaled a similar, racialized violence.

An alliance between views of conservative Christians and anti-porn feminists turned, then, on an idea of harm at the root of sex work. When Edwin Meese led the team that produced the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, in 1986, under

Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the findings of pornography’s harm for women utilized language that mirrored MacKinnon’s, Dworkin’s, and Barry’s, arguing for a “causal relationship” between pornography and acts of sexual violence. The commission included

Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson. Interestingly, Christian publishing houses debated about whether or not to carry published copies of the report when it was

46 Angela P. Harris, “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory” Stanford Law Review (42, 1990): 592.

converted into a manuscript, because its extensive quotations from erotic literature and pornographic films deemed it offensive in itself. The manager of NY-based Christian

Publications commented, “I agree with the commission’s findings, but there are many things objectionable in the book.” When it was eventually published, by Routledge Hill, it was printed with a wrapped cover warning of explicit content, that would “be offensive to most individuals.”47 This paradox, that the findings condemning obscenity were in themselves too obscene for the audience with which they agreed, would evolve over the next decades into an industry of Christian cultural production about the sex industry that did not shy away from graphic content, particularly when narrating sex trafficking.

A shift in political discourse about trafficking, from a product of state failure and organized crime toward a unique harm against women, offered evangelicals a cohesive map of crisis for pre-existing concerns about sexuality, such as sexual purity and sin. This was uniquely possible in the aftermath of the Cold War, when trafficking transitioned within feminist political discourse as well, away from an example of state failure and toward a rubric of sexual violence. Jennifer Suchland, a scholar of trafficking and post-

Socialism, argues, “When sex trafficking became an example of violence against women, it lost political connection to antiracist, anticolonial, and critical development perspectives that saw historical racial formations and neo-imperialism as key to understanding exploitation and violence.”48

47 Edwin McDowell, “Some Say Meese Report Rates an X” New York Times (October 21, 1986).

48 Suchland, Economies of Violence, 9.

The figure of the racialized sex trafficking victim changed in the 1990s. A central image that had come to stand in for the abjection of soviet state failure was the figure of the Natasha—the trafficked woman forced into prostitution—trapped by precarious markets in the boundaries between the free enterprise of democracy and economies of repression. The Natasha was, in a sense, the ideal victim of communism in the American imagination, a fallen figure commodified on the black markets between the first and second worlds. Importantly, she is first a figure that conveys a kind of whiteness, though still foreign, as the Natasha represented Eastern abjection. As I show below, once this narrative of sex trafficking brushed up against evangelical interest in the global south, the paradigmatic victim of sex trafficking changes from a European to an Asian, a change that coincides with increased evangelical attention to the issue.

In a 1991 LA Times article, journalist Denise Hamilton writes, “KIEV, Soviet

Union — Larissa sits alone at the bar of the Intourist Hotel. She is 20, with long chestnut hair and the face of a Ukrainian Madonna. She is also a hard-currency prostitute who sells her body to strangers for valuta — dollars, deutschmarks, lira and yen. Lighting up her first cigarette of the evening, Larissa smiles sweetly and explains why she dons her leopard-print mini-dress and black boots several nights a week and makes her way to this chilly hotel lounge to dangle her long legs over a bar stool. ‘For us, life has become very difficult,’ Larissa says. ‘I have a little daughter to raise, and I work in (a) children's

hospital but the pay is only 200 rubles a month ($6.50 at the tourist exchange rate). It is not enough to live.’”49

In this moment, the image of the trafficking victim, and the social breakdown that she symbolized, was a post-Soviet (and white) image. The 2002 Swedish-Danish drama,

Lilya4Ever, trades upon this fantasy of the white, European trafficking victim. Lilya4ever is a story of the downward spiral of Lilja, played by Oksana Akinshina, a girl in the former Soviet Union whose mother abandons her to move to the United States. The story is loosely based on the true case of Danguolė Rasalaitė, a Lithuanian girl sold into the sex trade in Sweden in 1999. In Moldova, the International Organization for Migration received the distribution rights and organized screenings attended by 60,000 people, mostly young females but also members of the government.

49 Denise I. Hamilton, “Changing Lifestyles : Prostitution Rising as Tough Times Wear on Soviet People” LA Times (Nov. 12, 1991).

Lilya is abandoned by her family, discarded, and vulnerable to the sex industry with no support from the state. In the following years, films about trafficking—whether popular dramas like Taken or independent awareness-raising films like Holly, a fictional account of an American trying to rescue a Cambodian child from the sex industry— would rely on sexual content to hold an audience’s attention. In what Laura Mulvey terms, “the male gaze,” trafficking victims are occasionally then presented primarily as objects of desire, even when their abjection is the thrust of the plot. By contrast, the primary abjection in Lilya4ever is the state, and Lilya’s innocence is a casualty of soviet lawlessness and then collapse. Though not an American film, it provides a narrative link between the LA Times article and the later trafficking films, in which the transnational is offered as a space of danger. It also marks a prior moment, racially, when trafficking, even sex trafficking, was a humanitarian crisis of whiteness. Not only is Lilya white, but her situation is set within Europe, her abusers are white, and her captivity is marked as the failure of an economic system, rather than racial difference. She is still foreign to U.S. audiences, but that foreignness is not coded in the racial terms upon which images of sex trafficking just a few years later would trade, to which the In-n-Out ads attest.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union made migration, smuggling, and trafficking a more immanent, border-spanning threat, with the destitute and desperate abroad on both the sympathetic (like Lilya) and criminal side of that global danger. The end of the Cold

War ushered in the success of a liberal feminist approach to women’s rights that mirrored the advancement of neoliberal doctrine globally. Suchland notes, “This is reflected in the fact that sex trafficking came to be categorized in UN Women’s rights documents in

terms of sexual violence, a violation largely neutralized in terms of macroeconomics and its connection to racialized imperial projects.”50

This time period also marked a transition in the political activity of American evangelicals. From the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. evangelicals re-animated their relief efforts and a missionary view that was increasingly humanitarian, in which organizations like

World Vision (and child sponsorship programs) thrived.51 In domestic politics, their organizing focused on central issues, rallying around conservative candidates, etc. The

Moral Majority is founded in 1979, Christian Coalition in 1989. In the 1990s, these two come together, and evangelicals became prominent interlocutors in foreign policy legislation and humanitarian/human rights outreach. Scholars have noted that this also corresponds to an increased reliance on the private sector across the board for health, education, and other services that might have otherwise been provided by the state.

“Faith-based initiatives,” filled the gaps, both domestically and abroad.

The rhetoric of humanitarian crisis within mission work framed the Cold War and its aftermath as a critical opportunity to rescue vulnerable figures abroad, particularly women in the sex trade. As political and ideological fears over communism were translated as a matter of human rights abuse and humanitarian crisis, narratives of need abroad became legible among evangelical Christian communities in the U.S. as important sites of financial and compassionate investment. Along the way, these narratives laced

50 Suchland, Economies of Violence, 50.

51 Melani McAlister, “The Persecuted Body: Evangelicalism, Islam, and the Politics of Fear” in Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective, ed. Michael Laffan and Max Weiss, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

foreign harm together with its domestic counterparts, where need and rescue of evangelical communities themselves were included. Thus, the “Slave 2 Nothing” campaign legibly links sex trafficking with addiction, marking both a conditions of unfreedom. Public ads in the space of the restaurants themselves were photos of women, and indicators of trafficking, but the rhetoric of “slavery” mapped on the idea of slavery in its abstract form. In what follows, I trace a similar arc, where imagery and narratives of harmed women abroad—sexualized and sometimes sanitized, as in the In-n-Out ads, but also depicted in gruesome violence—come to signify the relationship between harm and safety, foreign and familiar, captive and free, all in both literal terms and in figurative terms. As evangelical audiences in myriad forms, as consumers at In-n-Out, as readers of

IJM texts, as viewers of Mars Hill online sermon series, as travelers on short-term mission trips, engage with these tales of captivity, they stand captivated, but, as I argue below, they are also encouraged to understand themselves to be captives as well.

Ch. 2 Innocence Abroad: Humanitarian Adventure and the Restless Christian

The history of evangelical NGO International Justice Mission’s sex trafficking casework includes a moment called “Operation Teddy Bear.” Part of a mission in Svay

Pak, Cambodia, that was going to result in the removal of over forty minors from two brothels, the teddy bears were planned as gifts for the children. Thus, the need for teddy bears would also indicate that the raid had been successful, and that the children were safe. “I want to be in a position where we have to buy teddy bears,” an IJM operative remembers saying, which would signal the successful extraction of over three dozen minors from Cambodian brothels. “If you could just call me up and say, ‘start making that teddy bear run,’ I’ll be ecstatic.”52

The mission that Operation Teddy Bear was poised to follow was IJM’s 2003 rescue in Svay Pak, Cambodia, a small fishing village that had developed an international reputation for a sex economy that permitted access to minors. In what was considered an open secret, “very young girls” were available in Svay Pak brothels, and drew business from both local Khmer men and visiting foreigners. The mission was also filmed by

Dateline NBC, in an effort to both rescue and raise awareness about minors in the sex trade.

The Svay Pak mission and Operation Teddy Bear were a success for IJM—nearly forty girls under the age of 18 were removed from two brothels in Svay Pak—and its results were far-reaching. The televised operation featured footage of people raiding the

52 Gary Haugen. Terrify No More: Young Girls Held Captive and the Daring Undercover Operation to Win Their Freedom, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005): 156.

brothels, arresting the brothel-owners and johns, and carrying Cambodian children out.

IJM supporters, as well as new viewers, got an insider look at the drama and the dangerous logistics of the fight against sex trafficking. Dateline’s edited segment on the raid also offered the public a set of visuals to accompany IJM’s work of rescue, including images of crying children and frightened brothel owners attempting to flee. These characters helped to create the narrative of sex trafficking for IJM’s audience. Depictions of racialized foreigners established innocence and guilt, marking the foreign space as one where non-white subjects needed to be marked either as in need of rescue or in need of discipline. At once the images of the raid engaged in a powerful lexicon of harm; cunning villains, innocent victims, and the figure of the intervening hero all emerged out of the chaos of the raid. Though the literal rescuers in the footage were IJM employees

(evangelical lawyers and undercover agents) the invitation was to understand that supporting IJM’s work would mean that audiences could also be a version of that hero.

The image of one child in particular, Lanah, a five year old, was captured in undercover footage that IJM collected in preparation for the Svay Pak raid and she became the galvanizing face of the crisis. Haugen describes the footage in one of IJM’s books, Terrify No More, writing, “I had never seen girls so young, eleven, ten, maybe eight. And then as the footage rolled forward I saw a tiny girl—no more than five years old—held on the hip of another girl and pushed forward for sale.”53 This was Lanah, who was six years old by the time IJM and Dateline NBC captured her rescue on camera. The striking image of a white IJM investigator carrying her out of the brothel would become

53 Haugen, Terrify No More, 57.

the cover of the book and the feature photo in the Dateline story.

Lanah had stood out within the undercover footage that IJM captured in preparation for the raid. Her obvious status as a child helped to turn the undercover footage of Svay Pak into a political catalyst. Haugen describes the moment in the footage when Lanah appears, carried on the hip of another child, writing: “It was a horrible moment, captured in clear black and white and repeated in slo-mo. In fact, in the months to follow, it was a taped moment [we] would play over and over again for anyone who was willing to watch the reality of modern sex slavery. It was always the point in my presentation when men would finally turn away in revulsion and women would quietly gasp and involuntarily lift a hand to cover their mouths.”54 Once church leaders, politicians, potential partners, and Cambodian officials had seen this footage, there was no turning back — Lanah’s obvious innocence and terrifying circumstances required rescue.

54 Haugen, Terrify No More, 57.

After the girls had been given their teddy bears at the safe house, Haugen recounts the exhaustion and anxiety that he felt, worried about the next steps and worried about the children they had not found. “You recognize that one, Gary?” A colleague asks, after the raid in Svay Pak is complete. “That’s the girl from the video. The one you’ve been showing everyone for the past year.” Lanah had been one of the thirty seven rescued from

Svay Pak, a year after the undercover footage had been shot. Haugen reflects,

This little Lanah was the one whose suffering had mobilized so much global power, and now here she was safe and free before my eyes. But that had been more than a year ago, and what were the odds of finding her again and rescuing her now as one of the thirty-seven? I couldn’t believe it. It just seemed too good to be true. But then sometimes it turns out that the very best things are indeed true. I compared pictures and, for sure, there she was. Oh what I prize, I thought. Oh what a kind gift from our heavenly father that he should provide such encouragement.

Lanah was rescued. As her image circulated on the cover of Terrify No More, she became the illustration for the “young girls held captive” of the text’s subtitle. The text itself is one of IJM’s earliest books, and it focuses on sex trafficking casework through an in-depth narrative of the Svay Pak rescue. Through the frame of this predatory space in a

Cambodian fishing village, and the most vulnerable of victims, Terrify No More depicts a foreign space that is truly terrifying. It is also necessarily punctuated with innocence, like

Lanah’s, and brutality, like the fleeing brothel keeper’s. Foreign space, where something like what happened to Lanah was possible, was a space that required intervention and rescue. Reading the book makes that foreign space is accessible to the reader, inviting them to imagine joining it and being transformed. One transformation that IJM offers is an invitation to let that foreign space jolt readers out of the dullness of regular life.

Haugen describes “powerful but largely unspoken sense of disappointment in the way

their Christian life is turning out.”55 Christians go about their daily lives, attending church and trying to be good, all the while feeling like something is missing, “leaders look up and find themselves somehow stuck in the same routine of mediocre niceness that never seems to get near the radical drama, adventure, desperate passion and glorious power depicted in the Scriptures.”56 These key terms — drama, adventure, passion, power — are part of the promise that awaits the donors and readers who join IJM’s fight against injustice. I argue that this pleasure is its own kind of rescue.

In this chapter, I read the archive of IJM’s cultural production to make the argument that two spaces of intervention exist in narratives of sex trafficking: the foreign space where sex trafficking is possible, and the reader’s space, where narratives of sex trafficking offer an invitation to join in the work of rescue. Joining requires transformation of some kind, even if it is merely the transformation into someone who now knows about the issue of sex trafficking, and from there can pray, donate, or join in some way. As I will demonstrate, however, there is more promised to readers than that.

Joining in IJM’s work is presented as an invitation to join in the adventure of rescue, as well. The logic of the promise includes a shift in focus, toward the issues that matter most for people of faith, according to IJM texts.

While most supporters won’t be the ones rescuing Lanah by literally carrying her out of the brothel, their support enables her rescue, and by directing their focus and heart toward such a worthy cause, they will be rescued, too. Haugen writes of “the moment in

55 Gary Haugen, Just Courage: God's Great Expedition for the Restless Christian (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2008): 25. 56 Haugen, Just Courage, 27.

which we can see that all the work that God has been doing in our lives and in the lives of the church is not an end in itself,” rather, “the rescued enter into their divine destiny as rescuers.”57 And as they do so, they are rescued again. Continuing, Haugen writes,

“Certainly the work of justice brings marvelous rescue and joy to the victims of injustice, but God wants his people to know that the work of justice benefits the people who do it as well. It is a means of rescue not only for the powerless but also for the powerful who otherwise waste away in a world of triviality and fear.”58 The world of triviality and fear is the life that restless readers are invited to leave behind as they read and imagine narratives of sex trafficking. Scenarios like Lanah’s reveal the urgency of readers’ actions in a divine drama between good and evil.

Racial imagery in this chapter upholds this dynamic, establishing the foreign space in which the fight against injustice happens as one of heroes, villains, and vulnerable victims. Both innocence and brutality are translated to evangelical readers in racial terms, whether through imagery of foreign women and children in need in South and Southeast Asia, or in depictions of violent brothel owners. Participation, through IJM texts, in the work of rescue, is a way to translate that foreign space into legible categories, and then to cast oneself on the side of the innocent, the young, and the rescued.

In what follows, I examine the work that narratives of sex trafficking do within

IJM’s cultural texts, media and books written specifically to engage evangelical audiences and explain their work within a spiritual framework as part of the Christian

57 Haugen, Just Courage, 28.

58 Haugen, Just Courage, 4.

path. In particular, I am interested in the ways that these texts understand the figure of the transnational victim of sex trafficking in relation to their own transformation into the kind of Christian who cares about sex trafficking. Specifically, I discuss the argument that the texts make collectively about the productive role that ideas of sex trafficking play in animating, reviving, and shaping the imaginative worlds of U.S. evangelicals.59 I argue that this message of dual rescue was rendered legible by the particular historical context in which IJM emerged, in a period of what I call “missionary humanitarianism” for evangelicals in the United States.

Missionary humanitarianism is work that combines the spiritual motivations present in mission work with the practical goals of offering humanitarian and human rights assistance. IJM’s work, and its translation to evangelical readers, was the product of a cultural tide within evangelicalism in the U.S. in which global humanitarian efforts made spiritual sense, including those with a sexual element that might not have otherwise been included in the parameters of Christian care. I argue that this connection is explicitly clear within the evangelical turn, in this period, toward HIV/AIDS as an issue of missionary concern abroad, a turn away from the domestic response of U.S. evangelicals

(and other Christians) that had seen the epidemic in terms of sexual sin and evil. By looking at the transformation of evangelical attitudes that marked this transition, I argue that it becomes clear how an issue of sexual harm abroad, like sex trafficking, could fit logically within evangelical missionary humanitarian impulses. The international element

59 IJM is non-denominational, and interest/support for their work is cross-denominational, but their texts specifically target evangelical readers, addressing them directly and referring to shifts necessary within the evangelical church.

of this shift is paramount — issues can be sympathetic abroad even if they are sinful domestically. Missionary humanitarianism repositions the sinful to the space of the foreign, deftly marking it as racialized in its foreignness. The promise of transformation for IJM readers turns on this foreignness.

Evangelical narratives of sex trafficking are the product of colliding discursive formations in the early 90s that coalesced around a personal and spiritual understanding of post-Cold War global crisis. A shift in political discourse about trafficking, from a product of state failure and organized crime toward a unique harm against women, offered evangelicals a cohesive map of crisis for pre-existing concerns about sexuality and purity. Sex trafficking is legislated under the rubric of the Violence Against Women

Act, a political shift reflective of evangelical labor. Understanding sex trafficking as an issue of international crime of violence against women, and further, one with which religious believers ought to be involved, is the product of a unique and overlapping set of discursive formations that ushered in the transition from the 80s to the 90s. As scholar

Jennifer Suchland argues, “When sex trafficking became an example of violence against women, it lost political connection to antiracist, anticolonial, and critical development perspectives that saw historical racial formations and neo-imperialism as key to understanding exploitation and violence.”60 Rather than an opportunity to analyze disintegrating economies as byproducts of globalization’s unfolding, or as an example of western exploitation of porous borders, trafficking became first and foremost, violence against women. This shift enabled the alliance between feminist work and evangelical

60 Suchland, Economies of Violence, 9.

action, however it limited the scope of attention to harm, and in turn, refashioned sex workers in the Global South merely as harmed women.

In another IJM text, Just Courage: God’s Great Expedition for the Restless

Christian, Haugen offers readers a clear moment that does this work of conveying the urgency to sex trafficking that necessitates the readers’ intervention. Haugen writes,

“Almost every night, somewhere in the world, IJM undercover investigators are infiltrating the dark, violent underworld of sex trafficking to find the women and girls who have disappeared into the blackness. These women and girls suffer alone, out of sight and out of mind—so someone has to go find them.”61 Going to find the disappeared and suffering is work that the readers can also do, by proxy, as they engage with IJM’s work. Such an engagement is, in fact, the great expedition toward which the subtitle of

Just Courage gestures, meant to invite the restless Christian into a world in which their faith, their donations, and their prayers, truly matter. The women and girls who are out of sign in the dark underworld of sex trafficking, like Lanah, need to be sought out, work that IJM investigators perform, and that inspired readers make possible with their contributions to the mission.

In what follows, I offer a close reading of the discourses of captivity, crisis and rescue that circulate within narratives of sex trafficking using IJM cultural products and the historical context in which they were imaginable to evangelical readers in the United

States in the post-Cold War period. To do this, I look at the six monographs that IJM has produced since its founding in 1994, four of which were written by Haugen and two of

61 Haugen, Just Courage, 51.

which were written by IJM Church Mobilization staff, in addition to a range of other IJM cultural texts, from smaller scale prayer partner email updates to edited media projects about their work. Though IJM partners with secular organizations, both at home and abroad, and works with the U.S. government to draft and lobby for legislation, the texts I examine are designed specifically to appeal to evangelicals in the United States, often addressing them directly, as in the following passage. Haugen writes, “The last people who should get caught off guard by injustice in the world should be Bible-believing

Christians,” Haugen writes in IJM’s first book, Good News About Injustice.62 Here,

“Bible-believing Christians” signals evangelical religious commitment, alongside Haugen articulates IJM’s double mission to both fight the injustice in the world and to encourage

U.S. Evangelicals to join it. The missionary humanitarian narrative is what beckons readers to imagine the horror and to assume the position of responder, even if only through donations and prayer. Within such narrative construction are unique and powerful images, able to stir the drama of suffering into the theological and practical realities of the world.

One broader application of the arguments of this chapter is that by addressing the specific logics and fantasies of evangelical texts about sex trafficking one can draw larger, and more nuanced, conclusions about the ways that U.S. readers and donors are moved by narratives of crisis abroad.63 In certain ways, the evangelicals who comprise

62 Gary Haugen, Good News About Injustice: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 1999): 49.

63 The IJM slogan “the rescued becomes the rescuer” is meant to signal that saved Christians, rescued through their belief in Christ, turn into rescuers themselves when they

the subject of this chapter map onto the sensationalist patterns that scholars have noted characterize work fighting sex trafficking—the elements of violence and horror, even a pleasure of being horrified, mark some of the graphic detail and attendant warnings within IJM texts. Yet, both in terms of the readers and in terms of IJM texts themselves, I propose a departure from the looking-as-voyeurism model, and offer instead the complex call and response of texts that have a dual mission field. First, the texts describe IJM casework happening abroad, but their parallel mission field is domestic, in the nation and in the homes of their readers. This is the invitation to terrify no more, to join the great expedition, and to leave behind a life of Christian restlessness. This is related but distinct from claims other scholars have made that the power of the idea of sex trafficking abroad in the minds of western audiences is simply voyeurism, imagining scandal and sex in place of nuanced evaluations of imperial histories or economic realities. 64 Instead, I argue that that reading captures only one element of the lure of sex trafficking narratives, missing swaths of the need and longing for transformation that we see in the evangelical restlessness to which IJM speaks directly.

Such longings are predicated on a racialized fantasy of foreign abjection, even when narratives do not explicitly engage with the race of victims, perpetrators, or rescuers. Support for IJM and other anti-trafficking organizations, both those that focus

assist IJM in freeing captives abroad. However, I argue that this slogan actually depicts a revealing slippage, that it is the freed captives in IJM narratives who are meant to rescue the readers, from their disappointing Christian lives of mediocre niceness.

64 For more on evangelical interest as voyeurism, see Elizabeth Bernstein: “The Sexual Politics of the New Abolitionism” as well as scholars Jo Doezema, Gretchen Soderland, Alicia Peters, and Janie A. Chuang.

on forced sex and those that attend to broader labor concerns, frequently deploy the language of “modern day slavery” and “abolition.” This operates with a racial logic, even when ignoring or absorbing the history of the transatlantic slave trade by framing the fight against trafficking as a post-race concern. In this logic, sex trafficking impacts victims because they are poor, or because their rule of law is weak, not because they are brown or black. Yet, as I demonstrate further in the chapter, rhetorical engagement with the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is a move that makes race present and absent at once. This is predominantly done through imagery—of black hands, or of brown children—and slogans comparing numbers of slaves today to historical numbers of slaves in the U.S., or drawing inspiration from key abolitionist figures such as,

William Wilberforce, Harriet Tubman, or Abraham Lincoln.

This chapter explores the work that these promises of rescue do together. The harm that IJM narrates through stories of injustice around the globe are linked to the harm of listless, triviality at home, beckoning evangelicals to re-imagine their faith as one that trades on the terms of captivity, innocence and crisis, and in which they are part of the divine drama of rescue. To examine the work that the figure of the forgotten victim and the dark underworld do within evangelical narratives of sex trafficking, I utilize historiographic work on humanitarianism and transnational feminist theory to think through why the body of the foreign victim in particular is thought to be accessible to

Western readers, donors, and believers. I also draw upon scholarship on Christian missions, as this is a distinct formation but an old pattern, in the history of Christian attention to various kind of fallen women or prostitutes.

The observation that the humanitarian narrative itself has a disciplinary function augments the conversation in scholarship about the global government of threat and care.65 Describing humanitarian crisis requires articulation of a legible victim and a comprehensible story of disaster. As such, the parameters for ethical engagement are shaped by narrative long before the donor gets an urgent update or an informational pamphlet. If the humanitarian imperative keeps bodies alive, the humanitarian narrative ensures that some are also photographed.

To include evangelicals with serious attention in such a conversation is to offer the intervention that this narrative not only shapes the victims but shapes the responders.

Because the transformation promised to evangelicals is explicit, the transformation promised in parallel secular examples is more clear. Narratives of crisis and care do not simply mark the boundaries of those in need, they shape and discipline the responders.

Here the religious underpinnings of missionary humanitarianism are particular useful as they illustrate a dynamic of humanitarian narration more broadly; the fate of the responder is bound to the fate of the imperiled, the response to crisis establishes what it means to be good, what it means to be saved. IJM cultural texts demonstrate that the promise of missionary humanitarianism is rescue for the victims of violence abroad as well as revival for the faithful at home. Though in its literal iteration for evangelicals— the rescued and the rescuers—this mirrors the transaction of the humanitarian narrative.

To engage, by donation or even merely by knowing, is also to be promised change for the better, abroad and within.

65 See the work of Craig Calhoun, Fiona Terry, Michael Barnett, Ilana Feldman, Didier Fassin and others.

Missionary humanitarianism directs evangelical attention outward toward a foreign idea of captivity within sex trafficking abroad and then back again toward rescue at home. This mix of literal, figurative, and spiritual understandings of captivity make a kind of imagined solidarity possible. Victims—women and children abroad—are captive, their captivity is captivating, and audiences of U.S. evangelicals, can uniquely connect to the need for rescue and freedom, as they are and were captives themselves. Such an identification with captivity—which I explore further in the chapter and in the rest of the dissertation—makes for the legibility of IJM’s unique appeal to evangelicals. This identification also offers a kind of pleasure to the reader, the donor, the believer. Not simply a pleasure of cruel, distant compassion, but rather, one that imagines identification and even solidarity, shot through with power.

What captivates evangelicals in the United States as they read IJM texts narrating the harm of sex trafficking is not simply horror, but is additionally the beckoning pleasure of imagining themselves to be part of the story. Indeed, perhaps every part of the story, both an element of the agent of rescue, and, as I argue below, as the victim, held captive abroad. Because the imagined body of the foreign victim is vacated, the reader is invited to take her and transform themselves through their identification with and through her. Her foreignness makes this possible in a way that only racialized, imperial longings can articulate. Western fantasies of the foreign, long imagined as a space for trial and adventure, are saturated with the erotic, the lush beckoning of departure joining the imperial legacy of conquest. Alongside such a storyline is the fantastic burden of rescue, both for the downtrodden foreigner and the Western traveler in need of rehabilitation.

Missionary Humanitarianism

Sex trafficking took on a unifying role in the 1990s, folding evangelicals into the political work of global action focused on women’s human rights. To do this, evangelicals understood the issue through a framework of missionary humanitarianism, building upon the history of evangelical organizing around religious freedom, and humanitarian care regarding HIV/AIDS. In Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely

Alliance for Global Human Rights, Allen Hertzke described anti-trafficking work as “the most significant human rights movement of our time.”66 This is primarily a result of

Hertzke’s assessment that no other issue unites such a disparate coalition of actors, particularly across religious lines. NBC Dateline’s coverage of Svay Pak includes this quote from Colin Powell, affirming, “How can we turn away? If we want to have friends in the world, if we want to have better relations with the countries of the world, we have to help them with this kind of problem.”67 This kind of problem, sex trafficking, was not only a chance to alter foreign impressions, however, but took on the catalytic role of including evangelicals into the foreign policy fold domestically.

The missionary humanitarian narrative presents a spiritual and physical call to action to a crisis, translated explicitly through the vulnerability of victims. Anthropologist

Ilana Feldman studies the rhetorical focus of this vulnerability in relation to Gaza, observing the impact of using language to describe Palestinians as harmed victims rather

66 Hertzke, Freeing God’s Children, 6.

67 “Children for Sale: Dateline goes undercover with a human rights group to expose sex trafficking in Cambodia” Dateline NBC (9 January 2005).

than freedom fighters in campaigns to raise awareness, sympathy, and donations.

Feldman writes, “By reducing people to their victim status—in part by requiring them to appear as exemplary victims and not political actors in order to receive recognition of their suffering, and in part as a byproduct of exigencies of aid delivery, restrict their capacity to act in other ways.” Once the issue is one of humanitarian crisis (instead of

Israeli occupation) Palestinians are victims, rather than political organizers or fighting for freedom.68 Palestinians cannot be both deserving crisis survivors and politically disenfranchised by occupation. Compassion for victims, in Feldman’s terms, is “reserved for those who only suffer but do not act.”69 This compassion precludes obligation, reserving as “humanitarian” only that which extends beyond the boundaries of duty.

Missionary humanitarianism extends this either/or paradigm, wherein victims must signify vulnerability, rather than political agency. This is why Lanah was the perfect catalyst, and why “operation teddy bear” resonated with IJM readers. By contrast, work to organize sex workers as a collective in South East Asia or fight deregulating economic policies, is not a part of IJM’s narrative of rescue. Readers can hook onto the vulnerability of Lanah, in need of a teddy bear, because it reassures them of her innocence and can then establish the parameters of her need.

Though missionary humanitarianism is explicitly directed at the spiritual side of a call to care, it makes use of the tropes of humanitarianism more broadly. What does narrating humanitarian need require? Fiona Terry writes, “In contrast to business, where

68 Ilana Feldman, “Gaza’s Humanitarianism Problem” Journal of Palestine Studies 28, No. 3 (Spring 2009): 25.

69 Feldman, “Gaza,” 31.

it is the satisfaction of the client that ensures financial viability, in humanitarian action it is the satisfaction of the donor.”70 Victims, as opposed to political agents or radicals, deserve aid and assistance in the minds of donors, and so humanitarian narratives construct victims of disaster and crisis rather than politically disenfranchised or exploited actors. Such an analysis also maps usefully on to representations of need within missionary humanitarianism, particularly in representations of children in the sex trade, who can be understood as impossible subjects, as their childhood innocence confronts their participation in the commercial sex trade. As Miriam Ticktin asks in her work on the “gendered human” within humanitarianism, “What happens when we declare women who experience sexual violence as both exceptional and representative of the humanity produced and protected by humanitarianism?”71 The idea of the sex trafficking victim comes to include all women in the Global South, to transmute race, even to racialize and victimize whiteness while trading in a lexicon of purity and globalism that is inherently racialized, always imbued with a racial logic.

Telling the story of their need for intervention echoes the de-politicization of the refugees Feldman describes in her work on Palestine, wherein a narrative of crisis renders subjects as victims rather than oppressed and political actors. Rather, race is deployed as a cosmopolitan fantasy. IJM readers can imagine Lanah’s rescue, from home, as they read—coming away with a sense that they understand the good and bad within

70 Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002): 229.

71 Miriam Ticktin, “The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism: Medicalising and Politicising Sexual Violence” Gender & History 23, no.2 (August 2011): 251.

Cambodia. Race is part of the swirl of authenticity, where Lanah’s very foreignness establishes her as the perfect victim. As Adam Lively writes about blackness signifying truth-telling and authenticity, significations of race offer for the disenchanted, but captivated, evangelical a chance to engage with something unique in its true-ness abroad.72

Scholars have connected the panic surrounding sex trafficking to the discourses of

“white slavery” at the turn of the century, the content of which focused on corrupted femininity, violated youth and shattered innocence.73 Narratives of women and girls lured to urban areas and then held in captivity as sexual slaves abounded, eventually leading to the passage of the 1910 Mann Act, which probated transporting women “for immoral purposes.”74 Historians have determined that such a phenomenon was largely a fiction, useful for expressing anxieties about modernization, urban density and women’s increasing sexual mobility. Indeed, as historian David Langum has shown in Crossing the

Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act, the law was largely utilized as a tool for prosecuting miscegenation.75 That a sex panic utilizing the vocabulary of “slavery” developed at the intersections of anxieties about movement, race and modernity is unsurprising considering its echoes in contemporary abolitionist rhetoric. Here, too,

72 Adam Lively, Masks: Blackness, Race, and the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

73 In particular, see the work of Julia O’ Connell Davidson, Jo Doezema, and Elizabeth Bernstein.

74 Mann Act, ch. 395, 36 stat. 825. 75 David Langum, Crossing the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

practicalities of fears regarding female violation draw upon and serve to concretize racial categories in which violence and innocence are laden with social meaning. Missionary humanitarianism translates the same kind of moral panic into Christian responses to the realities of global harm, which has roots in earlier responses to HIV/AIDS.

President George W. Bush’s expanded upon the charitable choice initiative established during the Clinton administration, not only allowing faith-based organizations to receive federal funding, but positioned anti-trafficking work as a component of fighting HIV/AIDS around the globe. At the forefront of heart-speak and establishing the parameters of missionary humanitarianism is the evolving evangelical narration of

HIV/AIDS. In a 2005 interview with Christianity Today, Kay Warren explains that after reading an article about children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, “My heart came out on the other side in more pieces than I could gather back up in my arms.”76 In an introduction to her ministry for orphans, she continues, “No one expects the church will care about a sexually transmitted disease! The church has notoriously failed to talk about sex, let alone a sexually transmitted disease.”77 With this brief introduction, Kay Warren presents one of the simplest explanations for the HIV/AIDS ministry at Saddleback, the California megachurch Saddleback pastored by her husband, Rick Warren. “Choose Compassion” is the first step that Saddleback recommends for congregants who wish to get involved in

76 Timothy K. Morgan, “Purpose-Driven in Rwanda,” Christianity Today (September 23, 2005)

77 “Why the Church Must Care” HIV/AIDS initiative, Saddleback church.

the global fight against HIV/AIDS. 78 Warren has now been invited to partner with the

Rwandan government to make it a “purpose-driven country,” helping to establish an

HIV/AIDS outreach program that is rooted in evangelical theology but has a social focus on disseminating treatment, establishing homes for orphans and expanding access to preventive care. Matters of the heart, like choosing compassion, also enable a kind of adventurous self congratulation—no one expects the church to talk about a sexually transmitted disease, they certainly don’t expect the church to develop a long-term partnership with a small African nation ravaged by colonial legacy and genocide.

Evangelical political commitments were once easily relegated to the domestic realm with issues focused on abortion and gay marriage. Indeed, powerful evangelical leaders like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell narrated the emergence of the evangelical right on the political stage as an irresistible pull to rescue the unborn after Roe v. Wade

78 Saddleback Church is an evangelical Christian megachurch located in Lake Forest, California, situated in southern Orange County, affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. The church was founded in 1980 by pastor Rick Warren. Weekly church attendance averages over 20,000 people, currently making it the seventh-largest church in the United States (this ranking includes multi-site churches). Warren rocketed to evangelical fame with the best-selling devotional, The Purpose-Driven Life, which sold over 30,000 copies since its 2002 release. from the Saddleback site: “The HIV&AIDS Initiative of Saddleback Church inspires and equips churches in Rwanda and around the world to care for those infected and affected by HIV & AIDS through the C.H.U.R.C.H. Model: C – Care for and Support the Sick H – Handle HIV Testing and Counseling U – Unleash a Volunteer Labor Force R – Remove the Stigma C – Champion Healthy Behavior H – Help with HIV Medications At home or on a PEACE trip, you can use your unique skills to make a difference in the fight against this global pandemic. You don't need to be an expert or a medical profession to have an impact – we'll teach you everything you need to know!”

legalized abortion. But alongside such rhetoric was always a smaller divergent voice that included 1970s and 1980s social causes—war, poverty, famine—as among the issues that ought to worry a “pro-life” agenda. Figures like Ron Sider and publications like

Sojourners and Christianity Today laced theological commitments to the Bible and to a

Christ-centered salvation with a logic of tending to the poor and of utilizing political and social means to encourage elements of God’s Kingdom to break through in the mess of global inequality.

By the mid 1990s, when IJM is founded, “pro-life” commitments can logically take evangelicals on crusades against global humanitarian crises, including a reframing of dangerous sexual spaces on the global map, where thinking about sex trafficking and

HIV/AIDS enters the discourse in a more fervent way. The history of socially conscious evangelicals that David Swartz describes in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an

Age of Conservatism is essentially incorporated into the larger evangelical agenda by the end of the century, folded into global imaginings through the familiar avenue of mission work.79 This is the cultural logic in which Warren, who had originally become famous in evangelical circles with the publication of his best-seller, A Purpose-Driven Life, comes to establish an outreach program for AIDS orphans in Rwanda through a Southern

California conservative, evangelical megachurch. (One IJM text even encourages boycotting Shell oil as a result of human rights concerns.)80

79 David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

80 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 170.

The borders of evangelical care expand here in more ways than one, allowing IJM to present humanitarian concerns as logical extensions of the evangelical missionary call.

IJM’s emergence is a paradigmatic example of such a shift in evangelical discourse, produced by and always producing a stream of missions-oriented language that infuses

Christian call (to “choose compassion,” for example, or to “seek justice”) with humanitarian concern (for those with HIV/AIDS, for those trapped in the sex industry).

Though Warren has faced criticism for public opposition to gay marriage, particularly when he was selected as the religious leader to offer the invocation at President Obama’s first inauguration. Warren’s anti-LGBTQ politics are seldom the focus of his political action, however, and are rarely linked to the ardent messaging about fighting HIV/AIDS that he and Kay both espouse at and through their church. Rather, the Warrens and the community of evangelicals they lead at Saddleback, claim to “have a heart for AIDs orphans,” for Africa, and for Rwanda, in particular, this concern about HIV/AIDS is not framed as a project of sexual regulation.

Just twenty years prior, however, the political faces of U.S. evangelical politics had quite a different take on God’s relationship to HIV/AIDS. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority was, in some ways, similar to Rick Warren in terms of his ability to participate in U.S. politics from the standpoint of an evangelical minister. As the first

AIDS patients began to surface on the radar of the U.S. media in the late 70s and early

80s, Christians across denominations joined the general public in fearful distancing. Yet, evangelicals had a distinct theological explanation for both the virus and for their condemnation of victims. Falwell infamously proclaimed that “AIDS is not just God’s

punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punishment for the Society that tolerates homosexuals.” Fellow evangelical Patrick Buchanan put it this way, “The poor homosexuals – they have declared war upon Nature, and now Nature is exacting an awful retribution.” HIV/AIDS was a logical effect of gay promiscuity at best, a Biblical-scale plague in punishment at worst. Activist group ACT UP responded to the tide of anti-gay religious fervor with the famous “STOP THE CHURCH” action at St. Patrick’s

Cathedral in New York City – a die in, where members littered the cathedral floors with their bodies and with tombstones, protesting the Pope’s refusal to condone condom use but also the general atmosphere of silence and presumptions of sin that the politics of religious leaders like Falwell promoted.

How, then, does the logic of such a movement evolve so quickly to the border- spanning commitments of the Warrens’ focus on HIV/AIDS as a matter not of American apostasy but of global crisis? Such a shift is a reflection of evangelical re-imaginings of missions, an orientation toward the foreign that explores the pleasures and possibilities of globalization alongside more traditional theological commitments to convert non- believers. The space in evangelical discourse between AIDS patients in the United States and orphans with HIV in Rwanda is not simply a matter of twenty years of research or geographic distance, but speaks to a crucial shift in the ways that the religious right in the

United States refashioned itself as a player on the global stage, primarily through the concept of missionary humanitarianism.

Religious Organizing

This time period also marked a transition in the political activity of American evangelicals. From the 1970s and 1980s evangelicals in the U.S. had been active in world relief efforts and an expanded sense of global mission that was increasingly humanitarian, in which organizations like World Vision (and child sponsorship programs) thrived. In domestic politics, their organizing focused on central issues, rallying around conservative candidates. The Moral Majority is founded in 1979,

Christian Coalition in 1989. In the 1990s, these two come together, and evangelicals became prominent interlocutors in foreign policy legislation and humanitarian/human rights outreach.81

Evangelical advocacy on foreign policy in the 1990s emerged against this backdrop of expanding global engagement, building upon the geopolitical work that earlier generations had done under the rubric of global missions.82 This evangelical attention to HIV/AIDS orphans, famine victims, child soldiers, and religious freedom eventually lead to the global focus within ‘compassionate conservatism’ and George

Bush’s establishment of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community

Initiatives (OFBCI) which is now the White House Office of Faith-Based and

Neighborhood Partnerships.

81 This also corresponds to an increased reliance on the private sector across the board for health, education, and other services that might have otherwise been provided by the state. “Faith-based initiatives,” filled the gaps, both domestically and abroad.

82 These missionary investments also had political, sometimes radical, impact. See Melani McAlister’s The Kingdom of God has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Evangelical advocacy on foreign policy issues emerged against this backdrop of expanding global engagement, eventually leading to the global focus within

‘compassionate conservatism’ and George Bush’s establishment of the White House

Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) which is now the White

House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Concern for the

“persecuted church” abroad, particularly in the Soviet Union, was the first central issue to evangelical foreign policy. In 1998, Congress passed the International Religious Freedom

Act at the behest of evangelical lobbying (and a coalition of others) and created an office in the State Department to address religious freedom, fundamentally concerned with three countries (Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and China) — but, as McAlister writes, “American

Christians were also called to a attend to a different kind of persecution – the quotidian dramas of the ‘suffering church’ under communism.”83 After 1989, scholars record evangelicals pouring into the Eastern bloc to evangelize newly freed Europeans.

At the same time, in the Global South evangelical churches & conversions grew.

At the 1989 second international conference on world evangelization in Manila,

Argentine evangelist Luis Bush called upon evangelical missionaries to focus their attention on the 10/40 window—the area between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north of the equator that includes the Middle East and much of Asia—in which Islam, Buddhism and

Hinduism, Bush said, “enslaved billions.” Language of persecution, human rights abuse, and freedom/enslavement dominated the following years’ discursive evangelical formations of the globe. By Christianity Today’s 1992 special issue on The Persecuted

83 McAlister, “The Politics of Persecution.”

Church, stories from the former Soviet Union joined those from China and the Middle

East in depictions of global need, beckoning Western readers to respond, whether by giving, or by going. By 1996, a movement was underway, with the first International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church and what McAlister refers to as the emerging movement’s activist manifesto, In the Lion’s Den: Persecuted Christians and what the

Western Church Can Do About It 84 – which calls upon Christians to tend two zones of global concern: Islamic countries, and the communist world.

This provided the discursive scaffolding upon which anti-trafficking networking would emerge. The legislation initially proposed (in 1997) in the Freedom from Religious

Persecution Act (H.R. 1685) and the legislation first written to address trafficking in 1999

(The Freedom from Sexual Trafficking Act – H.R. 1356) were both drafted by Joseph

Rees, a top congressional aide for Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ), and the trafficking legislation was deliberately designed to build upon the “scaffolding and relationships forged in the religious freedom effort.”85

This provided the discursive scaffolding upon which anti-trafficking networking would emerge. The legislation initially proposed (in 1997) in the Freedom from Religious

Persecution Act (H.R. 1685) and the legislation first written to address trafficking in 1999

(The Freedom from Sexual Trafficking Act – H.R. 1356) were both drafted by the same person, Joseph Rees, a top congressional aide for Rep. Christopher Smith (R – NJ), and

84 By Nina Sheah, director of the Puebla Program at Freedom House

85 Alan Hertzke, Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004).

the trafficking legislation was deliberately designed to build upon the scaffolding and relationships forged in the religious freedom effort.86

This scaffolding enabled the logic of missionary humanitarianism, which integrated global concern into the personal faith of evangelicals. Within IJM texts, this meant utilizing the idea of the foreign sex trafficking victim, and drawing upon a framework of slavery. Drawing together evangelical articulations of slavery, storytelling and visions of freedom is the framing of the (transnational and spiritual) process of rescue as a politics of abolition. Haugen writes,

The word slavery is so powerful that, to me, there is something obscene and sensationalizing to lightly suggest that such a grotesque atrocity is taking place on any meaningful scale today. But the shocking truth is this: There are more slaves today… than were extracted from Africa during 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade.87

This gesture toward histories of abolition is consistent in IJM texts, and it offers a specific window into the work of narrating captivity and slavery in ways that both open up and foreclose questions of race. Positioning oneself as an abolitionist also allows for the obfuscation of race as the harm of slavery writ large emerges as the central moral struggle and one that impacts people because they are poor, rather than with a specifically racial lens.88 However, explanations for fighting injustice that reference Martin Luther

86 Ibid. 87 Gary Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 18.

88 Julia O’Connell-Davidson writes, “Child prostitution seemingly collapses conceptual matrixes that in liberal thought are quite distinct. It turns ‘the child’ into ‘a prostitute’ (a sexual and market actor), so potentially disrupting both a model of children as innocent, asexual, passive, dependent, unable to contract, the opposite of adults, and a model of the

King Jr. or William Wilberforce, frequently deployed by IJM, seem to consciously draw upon histories of abolition, at least on the surface. In one example, Haugen asks readers to evaluate their lives by asking himself,

Would I have been a supporter and confidante of William Wilberforce and his Clapham sect in fighting the British slave trade, or would I have been part of the detached and oblivious middle-class masses who said and did nothing? Would I have stood shoulder to shoulder with Harriet Tubman in secreting slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, or would I have been left flat-footed with apathy, moral neutrality, or fear?89

The participation of white actors in the assistance of securing freedom for bonded, black slaves is directly referenced here, presumably with the assumption that in retrospect it is clear which side of the abolition struggle was correct. However, the image of Harriet

Tubman is followed by another theoretical question, this one about the Holocaust. Would the reader, Haugen wonders, have challenged Nazi policy alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Christian who was executed for plotting to assassinate Hitler? “The great struggles of good and evil, right and wrong, seem to be of a bygone era,” Haugen concludes, of which the trans-Atlantic slave trade was one.90 In so doing, IJM texts turn the reader toward abolition without an analysis of white supremacy, likening it instead to broad struggles against evil, wrong, and injustice, in general. In so doing, IJM offers a way for evangelicals to imagine themselves as engaged with the global struggles of market as a benign site in which sovereign subjects and civil equals meet to engage in voluntary, mutual, contractual exchanges. The metaphor of slavery offers a means by which to make the otherwise incompatible categories of ‘child’ and ‘prostitute’ congruent.” Children in the Global Sex Trade, 33. 89 Haugen, Terrify No More, 28.

90 Haugen, The Locust Effect, 28.

slavery, both today and in the past, in a way that can avoid thinking about the racial politics of U.S. life or transnational engagement. By reducing the struggle for abolition to the brave actions of Harriet Tubman and William Wilberforce — indeed, boiling them down to ‘the one’—blackness becomes a background character in a story about moral struggle and courageous action.

Representations of sex trafficking trade on cues about race as innocence or brutality, taking viewers and producers to the boundaries between humanitarian representation, the pornographic and the abject.91 Indeed, the space where these three overlap is the point of contact with the viewer’s empathy, and perhaps action. A compelling story of victimhood depends upon the narrative elements of imagery and a sense of urgent, unusual crisis. Craig Calhoun describes compelling humanitarian narrative as, “the focus on immediate response suggested by the emergency imaginary, with its emphasis on apparently sudden, unpredictable, and short-term explosions of suffering.”92 To be meaningful for evangelical audiences, who must be swayed as donors and believers, missionary humanitarian narratives must convey the disruptive crisis necessary to warrant abnormal attention and emergency support. The crisis must be shocking itself, as should the images that portray it. Or, in Fiona Terry’s words, “Both aid organizations and journalists benefit from presenting images that shock Western

91 Julie Kristeva, “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

92 Craig Calhoun, “The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis)Order,” Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (New York: Zone Books: 2010): 54.

audiences, often giving rein to what has been described as ‘disaster pornography’” in which graphic pictures do the work of storytelling itself.93 Terry and Calhoun both note that the pictures are “real,” of course, but they also carefully curated, “selected from among tens of thousands available to newspaper and magazine editors and the marketers who prepare fundraising appeals for humanitarian organizations.”94 Within this process of selection the ideal victim, gendered and racialized, emerges amidst specific backdrops: children captured, women tricked, all of whom are held against their will in the dark spaces of the foreign sex industry, awaiting rescue from someone willing to go and find them.

Scholars of humanitarianism have noted that to truly fit the mold of ideal victim this narrative requires an ideal crisis: seemingly sudden and extraordinarily harmful, and for evangelicals, it is even more complicated. For humanitarians of all stripes, the disempowering dangers of a narrative of crisis and incapacity can be read as an issue of

“dirty hands,” or the negative but necessary consequences of the mandate to keep as many bodies alive as possible. In missionary humanitarianism, these molds of victimhood and crisis abroad are incorporated into religious narratives of salvation and suffering.

When it comes to depicting sex trafficking for evangelical audiences, the hands of narrative representation may be even dirtier. The role of sexuality and fallen femininity within the narrative of sex trafficking serves as an always-objectified instructional tool, whether in Biblical stories or contemporary sermons about the dangers of sexual sin.

93 Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002): 230-231.

94 Calhoun “Emergency,” 33.

In another IJM text, designed specifically for churches, the author writes, “I remember vividly the moment when I was first confronted by the reality of slavery in our present world,” reflecting on a Salvation Army poster at Princeton Theological Seminary.

“On this poster was an image of a girl with a tear rolling down her cheek. The poster said two things: Slavery is alive. Rape for profit must be stopped.”95

In the top left hand image, in which the handcuffed hands of a young girl read

“Help Me,” one sees only arms and legs, her face and body buried in darkness. Likewise, the young girl whose mouth is covered by a black, masculine hand (and upon whom a second black hand presses down in the bottom corner) speaks to a threat of racial familiarity—the black brute—endangering the world’s children. Her innocence is established in relation to the threat, the dark hands that signify men of color. The rest of the faces in the grid, surrounded by the words, “Protect, Help, Freedom, Safety and Life,”

95 Hoang, Bethany. “Deepening the Soul for Justice” (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2012): 21.

grab the viewer with piercing eyes, designed to present a spectrum of ethnicities but a commonality of youth, vulnerability and innocence.

The erotics of humanitarian spectacle present a visual and ethical conundrum for evangelicals, for whom the gaze is laden with missionary import. Hesford addresses representations of sex work when framed as human rights violation, writing,

In fact, rhetorically positioning sex trafficking to be a matter of humanitarian crisis

(rather than one of human rights) allows for the kind of obfuscation that Hesford describes to go unchallenged. Hesford describes “sympathetic visibility for women and girls coerced into the sex trade” as a matter of isolating “women and children as objects to be seen and then rescued.”97 This approach assumes that the ends of rescue justify the means of objectification, and takes on the murky ethics of images that are also sexualized. This has not escaped scholarly attention, leading Julia O'Connell Davidson to observe, in her work on children in the sex trade, that, “Some of the materials that NGOs have produced would (and probably do) make a welcome contribution to any pedophile’s collection of child pornography.”98 And yet, the power of the spectacle to communicate urgency, as it did for author of the IJM text above, who would translate that first contact

96 Hesford, Spectacular, 126. 97 Hesford, Spectacular, 130.

98 O’Connell Davidson, Children, 144.

with the Salvation Army into her work with IJM, is what moves IJM supporters to act, financially, spiritually and politically. Racial violence and images of sexual predation are not incidental to the power of the narrative, rather they are constitutive elements of its persuasive and transformative function, moving supporters to behave and believe differently. Images of sex trafficking as a crisis augment IJM’s textual narration by this collision of fantasy, fear and racialized spectacle.

The IJM Archive

After opening its doors in 1994, Good News About Injustice, IJM’s first monograph, was published in 1999. In it, Haugen offers evangelical readers a theological and practical injunction to engage in global humanitarian crises, complete with scriptural references to protecting and defending the poor. This is work for lawyers like Haugen, the book is clear, but it is also the work of every evangelical believer. Good News About

Injustice positions IJM on the global stage, intervening abroad in sex trafficking cases, but it focuses even more clearly on positioning the work they do within an evangelical religious framework. Even the title speaks to this, with “Good News” being a reference to the meaning of the word Gospel. Haugen writes, “The great miracle and mystery of God is that he calls me and you to be part of what he is doing in history.”99 The good news about injustice, then, is that believers have a responsibility to fight it. This responsibility is a thrill, and offers the pleasure of an important, exciting, adventure. (The promise that accepting this responsibility will bring a dead or bored faith back to life gets more clear within each monograph, Terrify No More—featuring the Svay Pak Raid—comes directly

99 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 34.

after Haugen, Good News About Injustice, and Just Courage: God’s Great Expedition for the Restless Christian, is third.)

Good News About Injustice invites readers in explicitly with the casework of sex trafficking. Haugen writes, “In 1996 the IJM asked nearly seventy evangelical ministries serving globally in missions and relief and development to be the church’s eyes and ears in the world.”100 In particular, Haugen writes, local missionaries across the globe noticed that young girls from their communities were “disappearing.” It was this discovery that led IJM to the issue of forced prostitution. In this origin story, IJM establishes both the crisis of sex trafficking and a link to missionary work, where eyes on the ground narrated a kind of local harm that necessitated outside intervention.

Prior to founding International Justice Mission, director Gary Haugen worked for the U.S. Department of Justice where he had participated in the UN Special Envoy for the

Investigation of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. The impact of this assignment permeates nearly every explanation Haugen gives of his own evolving awareness of violence as a humanitarian crisis. “What was so clear to me was the way these very impoverished Rwandans, at their point of most desperate need,” Haugen writes, “did not need someone to bring them a sermon, or food, or a doctor, or a teacher, or a micro-loan.

They needed someone to restrain the hand with the machete—and nothing else would do.”101 Violence would disrupt all other missionary and development efforts. This became the central mission of IJM—to protect the poor from violence in situations where

100 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 41. 101 Haugen, The Locust Effect, x.

local law enforcement did not.

Narratives of sex trafficking, particularly the struggle between freedom and captivity, articulate a component of missionary humanitarianism with unique pull for

U.S. evangelicals, one that includes but is also larger than simply voyeurism. Instead, I argue here that the pull toward Lanah, the power of sex trafficking for evangelicalism, requires attention to both a narrative history and a disciplinary function—the stories told and the rules generated—in the making of the foreign fantasy. The fantasy offers not only an opportunity to commune with and consume the exotic, but requires a vulnerable victim, coded through both gender and race. Central tensions of narration present both in the specific example of sex trafficking as well as the larger genre of describing need abroad, combining a history of orientalist interest in the dysfunction of foreign gender relations with western ideas of international aid.

But, as McAlister notes, these evangelical global visions harbor longings of solidarity, animating the fantasies and fears of global engagement with a sense of the sublime and the possibilities of being swept away by the exotic and authentic. Enchanted internationalism, McAlister describes, harbors such evangelical global longings, in which

“to have a heart for” sex trafficking suggests “an unplanned moment of contact with an issue, that leads the believer to an understanding of the particular walk God has in mind for her.”102 And, as Hoang noted above, the heart of God. This language conveys not just a deep concern for the foreign, then, or even as a newly-outward orientation for a group of religious actors better known for inward focus (missionary efforts to conversion,

102 McAlister, “Heart,” 870.

others to ‘believe with their hearts and profess with their lips.’) It is also the language of testimony and personal narration. As Gregg Hunter, Haugen’s co-author to Terrify No

More, writes in the book’s preface, “You’ve opened my eyes to God’s heart for the oppressed in ways I never would have imagined.”103 The altered imagination is necessary to come closer to the heart of God.

Haugen argues, “The call to remember the oppressed is couched in the logic of love.”104 The book of Isaiah, Haugen notes, details “the plunder from the poor” in the houses of the elders and princes (Isaiah 3:14) and in the book of Joel, “They cast lots for my people and traded boys for prostitutes; they sold girls for wine that they might drink.”

(Joel 3:3) These are passages, Haugen notes, that may never make it “on our calendar of daily inspiration,” but the Bible is clear that this is a world of evil and of suffering.105

Continuing on, Haugen writes, “We need not feel overwhelmed or out of place in such a dark world of injustice. This is precisely the world into which Jesus intended his followers to go.”106 Haugen views the move toward awareness of injustice and responsive action to be simultaneously essential in the evangelical journey—“Bible- believing Christians”—and radical in light of the world that most evangelicals inhabit in their daily life in the United States.

This is both the theological imperative and the adventure of missionary

103 Haugen, Terrify No More, xx.

104 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 39.

105 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 48.

106 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 50.

humanitarianism, the responsibility to reach the hungry, the sick and the oppressed is

God’s, but it also rescues believers who are struggling through a season of faith that is uninspired, even bored. “Jesus wants us to know that through us lives can be changed.

And in the process God offers to change us, to grant us courage and to drive out the gathering darkness of small fears.”107 The change being offered is part and parcel with the larger evangelical theological paradigm, in which the terms slavery, bondage, and captivity signal both to the history of abolition and to the terms of salvation, where belief in Christ equals a life of freedom from the bondage of sin. Rescue and captivity hold theological meaning for IJM in addition to their literal role as elements of international crime.

The conscious connection is that evangelicals—the rescued—join in God’s work to rescue others, like Lanah in Svay Pak, or the orphans in Rwanda. Haugen elaborates in

Just Courage, “The world is a dark and hurting place, and the Creator of the Universe has one plan to bring light to it—and through Christ, we are that plan. Jesus is telling us that we have been rescued out of the darkness so that we can be the light of the world.”108 It goes beyond the realm of privilege, into duty, albeit a sacred one. As Haugen puts it in

Terrify No More, “In fact, in a world of so much acute suffering, hurt, and need, for what purpose have you and I been granted so much?”109 Participating in the work of justice not only draws one closer to the heart of God, a God of justice, but it can make western life

107 Haugen, Just Courage, 102.

108 Haugen, Just Courage, 30.

109 Haugen, Terrify No More, 31.

(and faith) more tolerable by infusing it with the urgency of crisis and the drama of response. Or, as Haugen cautions, “We catch glimpses of the passionate exhilaration and beauty of confronting evil and doing good, but we lose heart, fearing the work too divine for us or the risks too great.”110

In the preface to Good News About Injustice, John Stott writes, “What this book obliges us to do is ask ourselves some basic and uncomfortable questions that living in a comfortable culture may never have allowed us to ask before.”111 Indeed, the danger of staying in a culture too comfortable is that you might miss the action that God has in store for you, making you vulnerable to violence of a different kind. Or, as Haugen puts it, an equally devastating poverty, “In the affluent West it manifests itself as a spiritual barrenness that made non-Western Christians like Mother Theresa and Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn gasp and grieve. For these Eastern Christians, Western brokenness and deathlike alienation from the sacred evokes a guttural reaction not unlike that experienced by Americans and Europeans at the sight of starving children.”112 Christian bravery from outside of modern western culture offers, here, another type of hero narrative, encouraging U.S. evangelicals to cultivate a “just courage” that will help them escape the circuitous path of the cul-de-sac.

To overcome the fear that the work of justice is too divine, too good—indeed, too exciting—is to miss out global engagement that takes a stale U.S. Christianity closer to

110 Haugen, Terrify No More, 242. 111 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 10.

112 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 47.

heaven. “It is the route to rescue from the very specific perils of fear and pettiness that threatens this present generation,” Haugen notes in Just Courage, “and it is the path to life for hundreds of millions of people who are suffering in our world. It is God’s call to

‘Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.’ (Isaiah

1:17) This is our call to seize today.”113 A path to life not just for the suffering millions, in other words, but for restless evangelicals. Here the saved are included among the lost, endangered but invited to live a more exciting life by seeking justice. The missionaries become the mission field; global social action is translated into personal devotional action.

Evangelical theology is predicated on a commitment to each individual having a personal relationship with God. Though parents and churches can shepherd children toward salvation, each person must believe in their own heart, and ask to be saved, or

“born again.” In other words, evangelicals are rescued one by one. In the cultural texts that tell their stories of rescue, IJM has translated the practicalities and affective power of this sentiment into their operations, scaling large statistics and overwhelming accounts of harm down to one client, one story at a time. God calls us “one by one,” Haugen notes, but so too does cataclysmic crisis happen to individual people.114 “Just as with famine,”

Haugen writes, “despite appearances, people really do die one person at a time.”115 Cohn-

Wu demonstrates the political power of such a stance, as it held tremendous weight in the

113 Haugen, Just Courage, 45.

114 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 34.

115 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 30.

aftermath of the Svay Pak case. “‘While there are millions of girls and women victimized every day, our work will always be about the one. The one girl deceived. The one girl kidnapped. The one girl raped. The one girl infected with AIDS. The one girl needing a rescuer. To succumb to the enormity of the problem is to fail the one. And more is required of us.’”116 Like Lanah, whose image had stood apart in IJM’s undercover footage, “the one girl needing a rescuer” is the image required to give “the enormity of the problem” a face, and to beckon rescue.

The logic of missionary humanitarianism offers evangelicals a guidepost on the journey to the foreign, creating an archive of spectacle and a path toward devotion in which the believer is as much in need of rescue as the captive child or the fallen, foreign woman. The language of crisis and the media that conveys it ascribe attributes to donors, by way of flattery and inclusion. Craig Calhoun writes, “Emergencies are crises from the point of view of the cosmopolis. The attention of the ‘international community’ — the newspaper accounts, the TV news, the donors, and the agencies – is on the efforts of outsiders to help, to minister to strangers. Too often, the story seems to be: moral white people come from the rich world to care for those in backward, remote places.”117 In this logic of humanitarian intervention, donors must recognize a certain ability and impulse within themselves to match the request being asked of them, to attend to danger.

In Just Courage, Haugen recalls being told that it is a sin to bore children with

Christianity, which should excite and invite them. “But what about adults?” He asks. “Is

116 Haugen, Terrify No More, 19.

117 Calhoun, “Emergency,” 54.

it okay to bore grown ups with the Gospel?” With this question, Haugen invites readers into the logic of longing that encourages Christians in the United States to support IJM’s work abroad. Like the oppressive ‘mediocre niceness,’ or the feeling that something is missing from the Christian life, Haugen warns readers of the peril of the cul-de-sac in suburban neighborhood housing, drawing a parallel to the hidden dangers within evangelical Christianity in the United States.

Haugen explains that while cul-de-sacs were designed to insulate neighborhood and protect children from through traffic, the set up of multiple driveways facing one another was actually far more dangerous, as cars backing up proved to be more deadly than forward-moving traffic.118 “Likewise,” Haugen writes, “many Christians and churches in the West, seeking safety from a dangerous world, a threatening culture and personal weakness have turned inward to the prosperous cul-de-sac, only to find a spiritual atrophy, mediocrity and boredom that is lethal to the soul.”119 Before the

Christian crisis of midlife mediocrity sets in, or in response to it, IJM offers another option—it is to join in the work of rescuing captives abroad, including sex trafficking victims. In so doing, one is rescued themselves, from this spiritual atrophy and lethal cul- de-sac Christianity, presented as another kind of captivity.

Lanah’s power as the youngest object of IJM’s attention (and consequently, of numerous state and religious leaders to whom the footage was shown) is a significant marker within the narrative of rescue required for Svay Pak’s story to compel political

118 Haugen, Just Courage, 44.

119 Haugen, Just Courage, 44.

action and a Dateline special. Though her age makes her exceptional, it is an exception that usefully demonstrates the stakes of the storytelling and the power of the script of melodrama within narratives of crisis. “The Child, the Prostitute and the Slave are socially imagined as the objects, not the subjects or authors, of social exchange. As cultural figures, they symbolize and embody our fear of engulfment, infantilization, exclusion and dishonor.”120 The figure of Lanah, the child sex slave, brings these figures together, to the horror of readers who long to intervene.

Lanah’s rescue, as this chapter addresses, exemplifies not only the innocence of the indisputable victim, but the power—theologically and narratively—of addressing humanitarian crisis one child at a time. Constructions of innocence and foreignness are woven together, factoring prominently in the narrations of sex trafficking that call upon the logic of missionary humanitarianism, but disrupting the history in which the sex trafficking victim was once thought of as an Eastern European adult. The combination of missionary humanitarianism, shifts in the domestic and geopolitical discourses of trafficking, and evangelical orientations toward the foreign transformed the idea of the victim.

Haugen writes of “little girls in Cambodia who have been robbed of their childhood innocence,” who “suffer without the western world taking notice.”121 Rescue and compassion exist at safe remove from the debates surrounding agency and subjectivity because the victimhood of the girls in crisis are secured by their status as

120 O’Connell Davidson, Children, 24. 121 Haugen, Terrify No More, 30.

minors. In imagining and visualizing crisis, where the ambiguities of agency and objectification are immediately silenced by the image of a five year old girl in a

Cambodian brothel. While sex workers and activists may argue against a paradigm of slavery and rescue for prostitution in general, no one would argue that Lanah is exercising agency as a five year old in the Svay Pak sex industry. Indeed, in discussing the subjectivity of children in the global sex industry, or as Julia O’Connell Davidson notes, “to allow 5-year-olds the liberty to trade sex in exchange for trips to Disneyland if they chose to do so, for instance, would be neglectful rather than respectful of their autonomy.”122 But, their status as children serves a purpose within the narrative construction of foreign vulnerability and racial abjection.

Indeed, the villains in IJM’s narrative are not difficult to identify. Pedophiles, particularly Western men who viewed Cambodia as a place where children would be unprotected and accessible, and their foreign counterparts—the brothel owners themselves who make this all possible—exist in the stories as the embodiment of sin.

Sexual contact here, particularly when monetized, transgress the binary of child/adult for readers. Innocence is cherished while its defilement repulses it, each identify made possible through its negation of the other.123 Utilizing each to shore up the other, such categories also create the figure of the healthy adult, neither child nor pedophile, hands clean from any contribution to the cultural creations that sexualize childhood. The realities of commercial sexual exploitation, some scholars argue, do not intersect with a

122 O’Connell Davidson, Children, 30.

123 O’Connell Davidson, Children, 11.

meaningful distinction between children and adults. While the figure of Lanah can appear incontrovertibly clear, most cases of trafficking exist somewhere on a spectrum of coercion. The sex industry forces innocence and complicity to mingle, where definitional categories are at stake—in part this is the revulsion that draws the reader in. Haugen writes,

These young girls, who yearn like any other for goodness and kindness and love, are painted and dressed up like world-weary prostitutes. It’s actually nauseating to see what can be done with makeup and dress to make a childish fourteen-year-old tribal girl from the rural hill country look like a hardened, twenty-six year old sexual veteran. But let them scrub off the ugly lie and let them have their simple teenage outfits back, and you recognize the face of fresh curiosity, silliness, delight, love, and tenderness.124

Operating beneath the surface here is a re-working of the kind of innocence that Robin

Bernstein examines in the American imaginary, where blackness and innocence, or even childhood, are mutually exclusive categories.125 Markers that connect these “young girls” to their ethnicity, their tribal origins, draw them both further from the West and toward it, connecting them to the children Haugen’s readers would recognize from their own neighborhoods, while simultaneously establishing their increased risk of lost innocence as ethnic others.

Returning to Operation Teddy Bear, Haugen goes on to describe the girls, after the ugly lie has been scrubbed off, writing, “they looked a lot more like my nine-year-old

124 Haugen, Terrify No More, 47.

125 Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. (New York: NYU Press, 2011).

twin daughters than anything else.”126 Innocence is both natural and manufactured.

Simultaneously, they represent the foreignness of the other, a space where foreign NGOs can participate in the public justice system only because it is so dysfunctional. In some ways, all of Cambodia is an innocent child, requiring paternal assistance. At the same time, Cambodia is the space where innocence is under siege, where the assumptions of innocence that attend white children in the West are buried.

After the rescue and the run for teddy bears, Haugen returns to the markers of innocence and childhood that will render these girls legible to his evangelical readership.

Once the interpreter had convinced the girls that the teddy bears and goodies were really for them, a marvelous pandemonium of little girl laughter filled the courtyard. The softest sunlight of the day cast a sublime glow over these girls as they forgot themselves for a moment and shared the unfettered glee of soft and pretty things that someone had prepared just for them.127

The marvelous pandemonium of little girl laughter is a far cry from the hardness of world-weary prostitutes, yet Haugen notes that the children are capable of creating both images. At the core of the transformation from one to the other is the figure of the villain, in which the role of arrests and prosecution move the story along. “The bottom line,” Haugen writes in Terrify No More, is that “we want the perpetrators to be as afraid as the children are.”128 The project of making the perpetrators as afraid as the children are is primarily a matter of incarceration. Cambodia’s Minister for Women's Affairs, Mu Soc

126 Haugen, Terrify No More, 47.

127 Haugen, Terrify No More, 200.

128 Haugen, Terrify No More, 235.

Hua, commented on the Dateline coverage of the Svay Pak raid, “Prosecution is the key word, the message has to be very strong.”129 The role of prosecution, and the attendant judicial systems it requires, is the focus of IJM’s newest text.

The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence, published with Oxford University Press (rather than the smaller, Christian publishing houses that previous books had been under,) offers readers the theory behind IJM’s focus on public justice systems as not only a missing piece in contemporary international development and humanitarian discourses, but the central mechanism by which the poor can be protected. “In the lives of the poor,” Haugen writes, “violence has the power to destroy everything and is unstopped by our other responses to poverty.”130 Aid and education help, the book argues, the poor are outside of the shelter of the law in communities where the wealthy can simply purchase private systems of protection and jurisprudence. To end poverty, as the subtitle argues, the aid community must address violence against the poor, which means arresting and prosecuting perpetrators. Haugen explains the fractures of the current system in terms of imperial aftermath, writing,

“When the colonial powers left the developing world a half a century ago, many of the laws changed but the law enforcement systems did not—systems that were never designed to protect the common people from violence but to protect the regime from the common people.”131 Elites, for whom the broken system already works, prevent the

129 “Children,” Dateline NBC.

130 Haugen, The Locust Effect, xi.

131 Haugen, The Locust Effect, XIV.

“pipeline of justice” from getting fixed.

Ultimately, then, the literal component to IJM’s resolve to “seek justice” involves securing convictions for perpetrators. Haugen writes, “That’s the kind of urgency attached to this whole issue of sex trafficking. As we wait day after day, more and more girls are being exploited. It isn’t just those girls who are being exploited now. If someone can go after the brothel keepers and traffickers and shut them down, then all the other

Dacies and the Danjas who haven’t yet been exploited can be prevented from being exploited just by someone doing the work, and soon.”132 Dacie and Danja, two IJM clients who Haugen introduces readers to in The Locust Effect, won’t have suffered in vain if the work to stop the trafficking operation succeeds, which in practical terms means more criminals behind bars. Criminalization, here, is a mechanism by which insurmountable abuse is rendered legible as the actions of individual actors; it is a way to return focus to “the one.”

Though the descriptions within IJM’s narrations do not dwell on the subject of a client’s race, their category as a racialized figure is central to their ability to offer a construction of innocence and a compulsion toward rescue. In other words, their race is the vehicle through which the reader’s change is made possible, even if only briefly described. It is because the Svay Pak girls are Cambodian that they offer the readers and viewers the opportunity to experience an exotic empathy. In so doing, not only do the narratives of sex trafficking circle around an absented racial importance, they also offer

132 Haugen, Terrify No More, 48.

U.S. evangelicals a format in which to engage an idea of racial reconciliation outside of the history of race within U.S. Christianity, or even within U.S. borders. Drawing upon— and redacting—a broad Christian history of abolition, this contemporary abolitionist movement is untethered from strict historical proceedings or the mess of evangelical support for slavery in the United States.

In Spectacular Rhetorics, Hesford encourages readers to “call into question the normative frameworks that govern subject formation and the scenes of suffering, as well as the recognition scenes in human rights discourse.”133 So too must the normative framings of difference and distance be scrutinized in the narrations of sex work, redemption, and the suffering other. Hesford argues that consuming the spectacle of human rights failure can enlist the viewer, however well-intentioned, in disciplinary technologies that uphold racial, economic, and social hierarchies. Likewise, in the compassionate gaze, shored up with power, evangelical attention to the sex industry maintains the distance of such a hierarchy.

Western fantasies of the foreign, long imagined as a space for trial and adventure, are saturated with the erotic, the lush beckoning of departure joining the imperial legacy of conquest. Alongside such a storyline is the fantastic burden of rescue, both for the downtrodden foreigner and the Western traveler in need of rehabilitation. Nowhere are these twin fantasies more present than in evangelical discourses of sex trafficking. The central argument of this chapter is that the logic of missionary humanitarianism (of which interest in sex trafficking is a meaningful example) offers evangelicals a guidepost on the

133 Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 46.

journey to the foreign, creating an archive of spectacle and a path toward devotion in which the believer is as much in need of rescue as the captive child or the foreign woman.

Rather than understanding narratives of abjection to be simply a tool for recruiting the most sympathy from the most donors, as scholars of humanitarian crisis has described, sex trafficking narratives promise audiences their own rescue.

Chapter 3 Hearts of Men: Masculinity, Sex Work, and Crisis

In a 2014 interview with Religion News, evangelical author John Eldredge reflected on the continued popularity of his 2001 text, Wild at Heart: Discovering the

Secret of A Man’s Soul. Wild at Heart is a meditation on masculinity and manhood within evangelicalism. It calls readers to embrace the “wild” within the heart of every man, portraying a core of Christian manhood that combines pop culture references like the films Gladiator and Braveheart with theological explanations about Adam and Eve.

Eldredge distills Wild at Heart with the claim that every man deeply longs for three things: a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. Embracing these longings will ensure that churches nurture men and that men can live out their true, divinely-ordained nature. This message resonated with evangelical readers, and the book remains a best-seller in religious texts, maintaining its spot as the number one religious book for men available on Amazon.134

In discussing Wild at Heart’s continued popularity, Eldredge linked his core beliefs about masculinity to sex trafficking, articulating a link between male behavior and the broader sex industry that animates one element of evangelical engagement with sex trafficking. For Eldredge, and other evangelicals who focus their fight against sex trafficking on changing male attitudes and behaviors, the core problem that sex trafficking presents is masculinity gone awry. In Eldredge’s words, “Human trafficking

134 Jonathan Merritt, “The book that revolutionized ‘Christian manhood’: 15 Years after ‘Wild at Heart’” Religion News (April 22, 2014).

and particularly the sex trade are fueled largely by men with evil intent; men with deeply distorted sexuality. If you can heal a man’s soul, he doesn’t support that industry. That is our only hope for lasting justice.”135 Eldredge locates “human trafficking and the sex trade,” other ways of signaling an idea of sex trafficking — forced participation in the sex industry — in the evil intent and distorted sexuality of men. Thus, the crisis in manhood his book first sought to address is still a threat, but rather than leading simply to dissatisfied men and unhappy marriages, that crisis now has a global harming effect.

These two symptoms of masculinity in crisis, domestic dissatisfaction and global harm, are actually linked, and it is that link which I explore in this chapter. “The thousands of letters we receive every year,” Eldredge continues, “are stories of men who have become good dads, loving husbands; stories of men getting free from addiction and living a life of genuine integrity.”136 Becoming loving, and good men, and living with integrity, is articulated as getting “free” from addiction — in particular, Eldredge is referencing addiction to pornography.

Pornography is the link between masculinity in crisis, domestic dissatisfaction and the global harm of the sex industry. Eldredge, and the subjects of this chapter who draw upon his foundational logic to create their own products for evangelical men, argues that men who are not fulfilling their masculinity purchase pornography, and as such fuel the sex industry, while shirking their responsibilities to be good husbands and fathers at home. Eldredge writes, “Most men want the maiden without any sort of cost to

135 Ibid.

136 Ibid.

themselves. They want all the joys of the beauty without any of the woes of battle. This is the sinister nature of pornography—enjoying the woman at her expense.” He continues,

“What makes pornography so addictive is that more than anything else in a lost man’s life, it makes him feel like a man without ever requiring a thing of him. The less a guy feels like a real man in the presence of a real woman, the more vulnerable he is to porn.”137 In what follows, I pull the threads of this logic apart in order to examine each side by side: the vulnerability that leads lost men to porn, the enjoyment of beauty at a woman’s expense, and an idea of addiction that is set up as captivity in opposition to an idea of battle, and of freedom.

When disentangled, it is more clear that a racial marking distinguishes the spaces of global harm and domestic dissatisfaction, and that pornography acts as a dangerous bridge between the two. Though Eldredge’s logic makes it sound as if the “real woman” and the woman at whose expense pornography is being made are the same, or at least that their difference may not matter; I argue that it is crucial. The “good dads” and “loving husbands” with lives of integrity in Eldredge’s thousands of letters create an opposition against the distorted sexuality and unhealed masculinity of lives that fuel the sex trade.

However, this opposition is not simply in the behavior of men, as Eldredge describes. It is also an opposition of various imaginings of women, victims, and children, characterized by racial understandings of the foreign and the domestic, at home and abroad.

It would seem that a theory of manhood predicated on rescuing trapped women would translate neatly onto the issue of sex trafficking, in which, for so many

137 John Eldredge, Wild At Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2001): 187.

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evangelicals, the figure of the trapped woman is quite central. Indeed, one does map onto the other. However, I argue here that rather than view the idea of the sex trafficking victim as the maiden to be rescued, she is more legible when understood as the tower itself — an obstacle to be overcome. In the transition from unhealed masculinity to lives of integrity, the foreign sex worker, even when imagined as a victim of sex trafficking, is an element of the distorted sexuality that Eldredge — and the other subjects of this chapter — are warning men against. Predominantly, this happens through the rhetorical linking between pornography, the sex industry, trafficking, and men’s behavior at home.

Within this circuit, race distinguishes women from whom men must be saved (foreign and exotic women encountered in pornography) from women men are saving themselves for (domestic wives at home).

The focus on men and manhood is not simply a byproduct of evangelical narratives of sex trafficking, but constitutes the central target, particularly in conversations that link male behavior, sex trafficking, and pornography. In this chapter, I address evangelical masculinity through Eldredge’s successors, Mark Driscoll, a pastor who took up Eldredge’s charge to make space for masculine wildness with evangelicalism, and Unearthed, an evangelical production company that creates content focused on sex trafficking that features Driscoll, and quotes Eldredge. In “The Porn

Path,” a 2011 sermon at his former megachurch, Mars Hill, Driscoll preached, “There’s no such thing as free porn.” He continued, “Some of you will say, ‘Well, I don’t contribute any money to it,’ But you do, because the advertisers are the ones who pay a fee, and every time you click, you are legitimizing their existence, and you’re

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participating in a culture of slavery and abuse.”138 This culture of slavery and abuse is the one generated by the sex industry, and with clicks, Driscoll notes, evangelicals are already involved in it, as customers. The anti-sex trafficking ministry begun at Mars Hill under Driscoll’s leadership, REST, or Real Escape from the Sex Trade, has continued on even after the church disbanded, as I discuss below. For both Eldredge and Driscoll, the circuit of harm within pornography results in women being harmed by its production and men being harmed by its consumption. In what follows, I examine the role of masculinity in crisis that animates the rhetoric of both.

This chapter makes three central claims. Primarily, I argue that masculinity itself is imagined to be the central victim within the evangelical fight against sex trafficking.

Secondarily, I argue that the language of this fight, particularly its emphasis on the ways that men harm women, is embedded with feminist rhetoric and logic, even when utilizing them to anti-feminist ends. Finally, I argue that the parameters, both of the evangelical interest in the sex industry in general and the focus on masculinity in crisis in particular, are imbued with racial imagery that creates a dichotomy between the foreign, dangerous, and dark space, where men are tempted, and a safe, white domesticity to which properly restored patriarchy promises to return them. Race, in this chapter, signifies exotic danger laced with sexual appeal that proves nearly impossible for evangelical men to resist; pornography is the battle they must fight. Thus, women in the sex industry, whether in

138 This is still available on a new website, though the Mars Hill site on which it was originally posted is no longer active. http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/the-porn-path/

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pornography or imagined as sex trafficking victims, are not actually the beauties to rescue, but constitute part of the battlefield, and the addiction that men must overcome.

This chapter utilizes what I call an archive of crisis masculinity, analyzing evangelical texts designed to address manhood, masculinity, and sexual behavior through language of crisis and narratives of sex trafficking. While other scholars have written about masculinity and evangelicalism, characterizing the performative nature of muscular

Christianity, for example, or the complexities of power negotiation within denominations with strict gender roles, my work departs from these conversations by analyzing domestic masculinity as it is articulated specifically in relation to an imagined globally vulnerable and harmed womanhood. 139 In fact, domestic masculinity within evangelicalism is illegible apart from the transnational fantasies that characterize the narratives of sex trafficking that I analyze here.

139 See: Hall, Donald, ed. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age; Higgs, Robert. God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America; Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History; Ladd, Tony, and James Mathisen. Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport; Macleod, David I. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920; Mjagkij, Nina, and Margaret Spratt, eds. Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City; Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920; Vance, Norman. The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought. See also: the rich history of scholarship on chastity, virginity, and modesty, with work like Amy DeRogatis’s Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism, Sara Moslener’s Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, Tanya Erzen’s Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement, Kristen Luker’s When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex—and Sex Education—Since the Sixties, and Christine Gardener’s Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns, among others.

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This chapter offers close readings of two video sermon series that Mark Driscoll preached about sex while at Mars Hill, both of which garnered notoriety and criticism, as well as some praise, from both religious and secular audiences. The first, “The Peasant

Princess,” was a 2008 sermon series Driscoll did as a study of the Biblical book, the

Song of Solomon, and the second, “Real Marriage,” was a 2013 sermon series that corresponded with the release of his book of the same title. In both, pornography is an important topic, one that Driscoll considers to be symptomatic of the most toxic traps into which his congregation could fall. Alongside these sermon series, I read two accompanying texts written by Driscoll. The first, Porn Again Christian, is a fifty-page e- book that Driscoll published serially online throughout the 2008 run of “The Peasant

Princess” sermon series. The other, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and

Life Together, the book that he and his wife, Grace, wrote together (and upon which the sermon series was based.) Read together, these texts demonstrate the speech, sexual ethics, and personality qualities so hyperfocused on performing the confrontational and aggressive masculinity that would eventually lead to Driscoll’s downfall.140 They also articulate the link between pornography, captivity, and harm. I read these sermon series alongside the video products about sex trafficking and male desire that Unearthed produces, including those that feature Driscoll.141 To raise money for their feature film,

140 Driscoll was put on leave at Mars Hill when allegations were filed against him for bullying and intimidating staff, particularly other men on the preaching or pastoral staff at the church. 141 Unearthed has been working since 2010 on a film called The Hearts of Men, which explicitly focuses on the link between pornography, sex trafficking, and sexual sin. Unearthed features a list of partner organizations with whom it works on their cover page, including International Justice Mission (featured in chapter one).

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Unearthed has produced a series of trailers and awareness-raising videos for evangelical audiences, designed to move viewers to invest in the fight against sex trafficking, to commit to fighting their own battle against pornography, and to donate to Unearthed.

Both Unearthed films and Driscoll sermons quote Eldredge, and Wild at Heart laid the foundation for this focus on evangelical manhood in new media decades later.

Both sets of evangelical texts engage with an idea of the “global” that never addresses race, and solely feature the authoritative voices of white, American men.

Imagery of sex trafficking victims depicts non-white bodies, often in footage of bars or brothels, or imagined as biblical characters, like Eve, but the subject of the story seems to always be a white, male body located in the United States, whose subjectivity is predicated on a kind of imagined whiteness. Even, or perhaps especially, when race is not deliberately named, I argue that this archive of crisis masculinity generates a dichotomy between an imagined whiteness of good sexuality, upheld by proper manhood, located at home, and bad sexuality, racially coded, rooted in men’s evil intent and distorted sexual drives, that evokes foreign space.

The premise of Wild at Heart proposes that men long to rescue a maiden in distress to fulfill their adventurous need for battle. “Once upon a time (as the story goes) there was a beautiful maiden, an absolute enchantress. She might be the daughter of a king or a common servant girl, but we know she is a princess at heart.” Eldridge continues, “But this lovely maiden is unattainable, the prisoner of an evil power who holds her captive in a dark tower. Only a champion may win her; only the most valiant,

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daring, and brave warrior has a chance of setting her free.”142 This passage echoes and confirms the core tenets of the Eldredge’s vision for both masculinity and femininity. He is a daring warrior and she is a beautiful prisoner. Yet, it is also clear in this passage that the promise of rescue is not just that the captive princess will be freed, but that the hero himself will come to the valiant conclusion of his own battle-strewn journey. Eldredge’s comments linking unhealed and distorted masculinity to the sex trade revolve around the idea of multiple maidens in distress, across the world. Indeed, this entire project examines what is essentially a global translation of Eldredge’s fairytale drama: that trapped women await a rescuing hero around the world, and that through their battle, both the hero and the maiden are free to live their true nature, one wild, one rescued. For evangelicals who adhere to conservative gender roles, this setup is unsurprising. However, I propose a counter-reading to the fairytale casting, in which the figure in need of rescue transcends a simply a story of harmed victims in need of rescue and brave heroes who would help them. Within these narratives that connect sex trafficking to pornography, and blame both on men’s dissatisfaction and lack of discipline, masculinity is the true damsel in distress.

Mars Hill

The emphasis on sex for which Driscoll became well known was interwoven at

Mars Hill with Driscoll’s attention to sex trafficking. Driscoll writes both that “Christian men are enslaved to pornographic lust and live in silent shame,” and that “pornography is made, in part, because of sex trafficking; some of the women who are even in the industry in the US are often held against their will, threatened, beaten, traumatized,

142 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 180.

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because it’s always about the money.”143 The vulnerability of those Driscoll sees as victims of sex trafficking, coerced into the sex industry, via pornography, is linked rhetorically to those who consume pornography and are, in Driscoll’s view, enslaved by it. Driscoll summarized the evangelical argument that men who were using pornography were causing harm in two ways, first, they were ruining their marriages at home, and second, they were contributing to an industry that abused women. Both the women on- screen and the women in the other room were victims, in Driscoll’s positioning, of male behavior. Thus, the specter of sex trafficking, linked to pornography, became a tool through which evangelical masculinity at Mars Hill could be disciplined and shaped.

Thus, discourses of harmed women and girls in need of protection and rescue were truly a format through which masculinity in crisis could be anxiously addressed at the church.

This use of feminist rhetoric to discipline masculinity was the product of a particular historical moment.

Mars Hill was located in Seattle, Washington. Driscoll founded the church in

1996 and was the head pastor until its dissolution in 2015. Driscoll was the central personality associated with the church, and both became well-known for championing a brand of hip, evangelical masculinity that combined an orthodox Calvinist conservatism with an urban hipster aesthetic. Driscoll promoted a brand of masculine Christianity that maintained male “headship” over women, but was also tough on men, instructing men to live up to their patriarchal duties by getting married, buying houses, and staying

143 Mark Driscoll, The Porn Path: A Frank Discussion on Pornography & Masturbation for God's Men, 2011, 75. pdf available: http://theresurgencereport.com/resurgence/files/2011/03/02/relit_ebook_pac.pdf

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employed. Masculinity was one of Mars Hill’s central subjects. Just as Eldredge drew from Braveheart and Gladiator to form his vision of evangelical manhood within Wild

At Heart, Driscoll promoted “Ultimate Fighting” as a sport that “lets guys be guys,” and declared that Jesus was no “limp-wristed hippie.”144 Scholars have addressed Driscoll’s sexual politics, but have not yet integrated his focus on the sex industry with evangelical global activity, as missionaries, visitors, voyeurs, or donors.145 While he was head pastor at Mars Hill, Driscoll was extremely focused on regulating the sexual practices of his congregants, preaching on marriage and sex frequently. However, these topics were backlit by the connection to the sex industry that Driscoll made, through pornography.

Though Mars Hill disbanded not long after Driscoll resigned from the pulpit amidst a publicity crisis, REST, survived. REST, begun by church members in 2012, eventually became a 501 ( c ) 3 non-profit and continues to operate independently in Seattle. It now claims no affiliation with the church or with Driscoll. It is no coincidence that the pastor known for preaching about porn invested in the evangelical fight against sex trafficking, nor is it a surprise that it was that fight that survived while the rest of his church crumbled.

Concern for the masculinity within Christianity was central to Driscoll from Mars

Hill’s founding, and remained a core anxiety throughout the sermons and workshops

Mars Hill offered, many of which were focused on complementarian gender ideology, in

144 Brandon O Brien, “A Jesus for Real Men” Christianity Today (April 18, 2008).

145 For more on Mars Hill, see Jessica Johnson’s “The Citizen-Soldier: Masculinity, War, and Sacrifice at an Emerging Church in Seattle, Washington” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33, no. 2 (November 2010): 24.

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which men were meant to lead and make decisions and women were intended to submit to the authority of their husbands, fathers, and pastors. This meant both a toning down of women and a concurrent building up of masculinity. Often, encouragement toward men in the congregation to take on more of a leadership role went hand in hand with insults about the current status of masculinity in the church. “The problem with the church today,” Driscoll asserted in a 2006 interview, is “it’s just a bunch of nice, soft, tender, chickified church boys,” then noted with dismay that “sixty percent of Christians are chicks and the forty percent that are dudes are still chicks.”146 Concerned with the softness of Christian men, Driscoll offered a path to restored manhood that involved taking control, but remaining disciplined—particularly regarding sex. As he would explore in graphic detail, marital sex was permitted and encouraged, but masturbation and pornography were decidedly not. Narratives of sex trafficking, woven into Mars Hill materials about the harm of pornography, upheld this distinction through depictions of harmed, vulnerable, foreign sex workers. In this logic, wives were harmed most by a husband’s “enslavement” to pornography, but women abroad were harmed as well.

Race functions here to mark the difference between these categories of harmed women, positioning whiteness on the side of marriage, domesticity, and safety, while darkness—coded in the dark bodies shown in brothels, nightclubs, and bars—signifies sexual sin, foreignness, and danger. Meanwhile, discursively framing both labor within the sex industry and using pornography as “slavery” offers a sidestepping of the racial politics or history of slavery within the U.S. Thus, race is present and absent at once

146 O’ Brien “A Jesus for Real Men”

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within these narratives, marking difference but simultaneously occluded by inclusion. To weave these various strands together, Driscoll utilizes language of protecting, empowering, and rescuing women abroad, in order to reform and uphold the power of men at home. Though sex trafficking narratives tell a story of women in peril, it is actually masculinity, and white masculinity in particular, that needs to be rescued.

Driscoll’s concern that the “dudes” going to church were “still chicks,” did not emerge in a vacuum. Within evangelicalism, Driscoll’s predecessors were already concerned with the relationship between church-going and feminization. David Murrow’s

2011 Why Men Hate Going to Church included the chapters, “Check Your Testosterone at the Door” and “How Churches Feminize Over Time.” Murrow’s predecessor was Leon

Podle’s 1999 The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. Groups like the

Promise Keepers emerged in 1990 to address this same concern. What Makes a Man?, the first hardbound book written for the organization, was published in 1992. James Dobson had McCartney on Focus on the Family’s nationwide radio program that same year.

Outside of evangelical circles, a parallel conversation was happening. In 1987, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich published Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, arguing that men rejected the “breadwinner” role first, leading to women moving toward feminism and work outside the home to cope with the growing realities that they were on their own. Ehrenreich argues that Playboy, whose very premise signaled that men need not be husbands in order to be masculine, was a sign not of 60s sexual revolution but of 50s male revolt. Both feminism and antifeminism are a response to this shift, with the latter being, in Ehrenreich’s argument, the attempt to force men

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back into the role of breadwinner and head of household — thereby forcing them back into their responsibilities to women. Just a few years later, in 1990, poet Robert Bly applies Jungian philosophy and folklore to study the coming-of-age German story of Iron

John, in Iron John: A Book About Men. Bly argued that the essential nature of the text had lessons for the modern man about reviving ad reanimating masculinity. Discussion of the “loss of masculinity” in the larger culture, as well as in pseudo evangelical culture like PK, focused on the need to return to traditional roles, which are, for some like Bly, rooted in these primal urges and myths. Promise Keepers echoed the call of Mars Hill, without the porn/sex industry but definitely about male leadership and a sexually ordered life.

Meanwhile, feminist alliances with evangelicals were primed for a 90s resurgence. To place information from the introduction within the specific context of its parallel conversation within evangelicalism, I will return to this alliance briefly here. The feminist crusade against pornography, and “abolitionist feminists,” who argued for the elimination of sex work in the name of protecting women, found key political and strategic allies among conservative Christians. In 1979, Kathleen Barry’s Female Sexual

Slavery, includes the line, “We are really going back to the values women have always attached to sexuality, values that have been robbed from us, distorted and destroyed as we have been colonized through both sexual violence and so-called sexual liberation.”147

This view contains many layers, one of which precludes the possibility that women could consent to be in an economic relationship to sex, whether in pornography or prostitution.

147 Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, 227, 230.

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The alliance between views of conservative Christians and anti-porn feminists turned on the assumption of harm at the root of sex work. Moving into the 1990s and early 2000s, discourses of sex trafficking in policy and feminist writing turned on the idea of understanding sex trafficking as a type of sexual violence, rather than necessarily an issue of organized crime, economic inequality, or even labor/migration. This shift, as

Women” declaration included the strategic objective, “Eliminate trafficking in women and assist victims of violence due to prostitution and trafficking.”148 Understanding prostitution, trafficking, and violence against women as one issue is not an aberration, but rather flowed from the language and political clout of the anti-porn feminist activism.

The turn toward an idea of sex trafficking, however, was specifically produced in this moment. Suchland writes, “The term ‘sex trafficking’ was not widely used in the 1970s or 1980s, but feminists raised concerns about prostitution, forced prostitution, sexual violence, and sex tourism.”149 However, these issues came together, and coalesced in the discourses of “female sexual slavery” that had animated the porn debates, leading to a language of “sex trafficking” that incorporated concerns of consent, freedom, and women’s participation in the sex industry.

148 “The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women” Beijing, China - September 1995 http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/violence.htm

149 Suchland, Economies of Violence, 30.

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Christian groups on the common ground of viewing the sex industry as a manufacturer of women’s sexual harm would also shape the anti-sex trafficking coalition. Evangelical

Christians seeking to control and undermine the pervasiveness of pornography turned toward feminist logic of harm and oppression. Increasingly through the 90s and into the

2000s, the idea of sex trafficking was the key to illustrating the link between consuming porn, enslaving women, and participating in a global economy of violence. This is what

Driscoll articulated.

Performance

Driscoll’s performances of masculinity and strict gender policing revived a Billy

Sunday-style muscular Christianity for a crowd with more men and more young people— indeed more people in general—than most churches. At its heights, Mars Hill had an average weekly attendance of over 12,000 people dispersed across its 15 campuses, most of whom watched Driscoll’s sermons streaming on large television screens, and could text questions to Driscoll who would answer them in real time.150 This technologically-

150 In 2000, Mars Hill created an unmoderated message board where Mark Driscoll posted comments under the Braveheart pseudonym, William Wallace II. (Driscoll refers to this as his “angry young prophet” phase, “discovered” in 2014, amidst the scandals that caused his resignation.) In 2005, Driscoll started the website The Resurgence, an evangelical website that published on theology, church matters, missions, and “human trafficking.” In 2007, Driscoll gave a controversial sermon in Scotland titled, “Sex, a Study of the Good Bits from Song of Solomon” that would then grow into the 2008 series, “The Peasant Princess.” In 2014, Acts29 removed Mark Driscoll from all leadership positions. The same year, Driscoll went on “leave” from Mars Hill, and in

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driven engagement was especially crucial for sermons in which Driscoll addressed gender roles and sex practices, two subjects for which he came to be known, as congregants texted questions to Driscoll about what sexual positions were allowed between husband and wife, when masturbation was sinful, whether it was permissible to think of other people during sex with one’s spouse, and many others.

Driscoll’s rhetoric about the sex industry borrowed from feminist tropes, while depicting a world of stark contrasts. When Driscoll utilized feminist rhetoric in sermons, he was actually quite self aware. For example, when encouraging men to revel in their wives’ bodies, he writes, “Some of you at this point will say, I’ve been studying, took a few women’s studies classes in college, and it sounds like, ‘Pastor Mark, you’re encouraging women to be objectified.’ I’m not. I’m not. To objectify a woman is what pornography does, it turns women into parts and pieces, not image bearers of God.”151

Pornography, sex trafficking, and objectification are set up together as an alliance of harm, and it is up to the men Driscoll is addressing to steer away from this. Driscoll encourages men to make marriage is the ultimate strategy they deploy in their quest for corrected, redeemed masculinity. In fact, Driscoll’s strategy set him up as an expert on sex, all with the caveat that it was reserved for marriage only. Within that boundary, there were few parameters. This combination of freedom and discipline is crucial to parsing

Driscoll’s attention to sex.

2015, the church was formally disbanded. REST continues to operate in Seattle, its affiliation with Mars Hill and Driscoll scrubbed from its promotional content.

151 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 187.

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One of Driscoll’s sermon series,“Real Marriage,” began with the provocation,

““Did Jesus Die for Your Porn Addiction?” Real Marriage was offered at the church in the spring of 2012 just three years before the church disbanded.152 The image Mars Hill generated to accompany the series’ blogpost features a white bride, in a wedding dress holding a bridal bouquet, but in the place of flowers are rolled magazines, signifying pornography.

Holding the pornographic bouquet are white hands with a French manicure, the smut tied with a grosgrain brown ribbon, the head of “the bride” is missing. The image is overlaid with the title of the text, “Did Jesus Die for Your Porn Addiction?” and conveys both layers of the post’s messages: that pornography sullies one’s actual bride, future or present, but that it also is the dirty bouquet held by “the bride of Christ,” a term

Christians use to refer to the church itself. Indeed, this layering is a helpful lens through which to view the focus on purity, sex, and pornography that persisted throughout Mars

Hill’s eighteen year duration.

The racial codes embedded in the image—the purity and whiteness of the image—are a central, if unspoken, element of the evangelical discourses of

152 ‘Did Jesus Die for Your Porn Addiction?’ Mars Hill Blog (3/4/2012)

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pornography’s harm. The transnational victim, forced into the sex industry, is a part of the harm that contaminates the purity of marriage through her presence in pornography.

Though Mars Hill admonitions against consuming pornography attend to the harm that befalls those within the industry, as I demonstrate below, the larger harm is that done to the interior — the family, the domestic, the marriage, and ultimately, to men at church.

This harm is racially coded, even when attempting to deliberately conscript the audience into a compassionate stance for an idea of those “abroad” that need to be rescued. The bride at home, the marriage that must be saved, is still coded as white, and is being infiltrated by an idea of the global sex worker.

In a 2008 e-book, The Porn Path, Driscoll defines illicit material with the following:

The US Supreme Court can’t even define pornography. They’ve struggled with it for a long time. For purposes of our discussion, here’s what we mean. We mean movies that are explicit, photos that are explicit, websites that are explicit. In addition to the hardcore forms, we also are talking about the softcore forms, some of the men’s magazines that basically show as much as pornography did just a few generations ago. And the same is true for the women’s magazines…I would go so far as to include romance novels, which encourage women to have pornographic fantasies in their mind of someone other than their husband, and the same goes for men who are also into such fantasizing.153

153 Driscoll, Porn Path, 3.

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Fantasizing is one element of the danger, but it is far from the only one. In what follows, Driscoll links this fantasizing to physical harm, both for the consumers and producers of the explicit material.154

He goes on to articulate that what he wants for men is from the books of Proverbs, chapter 5. He reads, “A husband should be captivated by his wife” and explains, this is what he means, “He is captivated, he is captured.” For her to be “captivating” is to be free, for him to be “captured” is to be free. Driscoll exhorts, “Okay, here is a dangerous questions, guys, ask your wives, ‘What can I do to encourage your freedom? Don’t argue, receive it. Ladies, ask your husband, what are your favorite snapshots of me?’”155 The centrality of an analytic of freedom v. captivity makes sense of Driscoll’s graphic Bible study. Freedom can be encouraged, fought for, maintained with a steady diet of the correct kind of sex.

154 Scholarship on evangelicals in the United States treats them as if their sexual politics are insular and domestically-oriented. Conservative Christian organizing around domestic policies like abortion and gay marriage in the United States have made this interior reading legible. Otherwise, evangelical sexuality is addressed in scholarship that focuses on the internal workings of the church, where the dynamics of gender roles, or purity regulation, is applied within the body of believers, and upon their actual bodies. Work on purity has focused on abstinence pledges, gay conversion therapy, and evangelical sex manuals. Scholarship on evangelicalism and gender has attended to the politics of purity in terms of chastity, virginity, and modesty, with work like Amy DeRogatis’s Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism, Sara Moslener’s Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, Tanya Erzen’s Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement, Kristen Luker’s When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex—and Sex Education—Since the Sixties, and Christine Gardener’s Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns, among others.

155 “Dance of Mahanaim,” Mars Hill Sermon (9 November 2008).

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Devoted to complementarian gender roles in marriage. This is the controversial but not-uncommon position for conservative evangelicals that espouses male “headship” and female “submission,” Driscoll frequently preached about marriage in the form of both metaphor for understanding God and practical guide. Though these were frequently woven in to sermons and writings, the two series that typified Driscoll’s theology of marriage best were “The Peasant Princess,” in 2008, and “Real Marriage,” four years later.

The 2008 Mars Hill sermon series, The Peasant Princess, was an important turning point for Mars Hill. It secured their status as a church that focused on sex. “If you have your children in the service,” he begins in the third week of the series, “take them to the nursery immediately, otherwise they will know how they got here.”156 The tour through the Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, was designed to be a theological and practical guidebook to evangelical ethics of sex and marriage, and the church boasted that it saw its attendance increase dramatically over the course of the series, at one point welcoming 2,000 new visitors in one week.157 Driscoll had already made headlines in religious news outlets for his crass style and fiercely Calvinist doctrine, often criticized by both the left and the right within Protestant circles, but with The Peasant Princess he

156 “Dance of Mahanaim”

157 Driscoll: “Two weeks ago we had our biggest Sunday of growth ever. We grew by 2,000 in one week. Last week we grew by another 500, and this week I’m sure we’ll be down. All the guys living with their girlfriends and all the stay-at-home dads hit the eject button on Mars Hill after the recent Q&A, but we still love them and pray for them.” http://download.marshill.se/files/collection/documents/PDF/20081005_the-little- foxes_en_transcript.pdf Also: https://dangitbill.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/the-peasant-princess/

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made national headlines.158 The “cussing pastor,” as he had been referred to in a popular evangelical book, was dealing with sex explicitly, from the pulpit, and claiming each stance on pleasure and sin to be Biblical, authoritative, and evangelical.159 Through the

Peasant Princess series, Driscoll argued that the book of the Song of Songs is a story of two monogamous lovers, and is meant both as an allegory for the relationship between

God and the Church (as it has long been interpreted by theologians, Driscoll claimed) and as a literal guidebook for sex and pleasure within marriage.

Mars Hill deployed media as a missionary strategy, using technology and aesthetics to reach a young, hip, and questioning, Seattle audience. Each sermon series at

Mars Hill began with an introductory vignette. For congregants in the audience, the sermons played from the screens onstage, either with Driscoll alongside them, about to preach, or (for most) as a live-streamed transmission.. For The Peasant Princess series, the Mars Hill team created an animated character, a fuchsia-haired peasant-turned- princess, to represent the series. The introductory vignette for the series features the princess, first in a field, surrounded by woodland creatures and grass, and then watches her transform into a princess looking out from a tall castle tower, her once bare arms now clad in elbow length gloves and her fuchsia hair crowned with a tiara. The tone of the vignette is playful, bouncing fawns frolic and an anthropomorphic willow tree with stenciled muscles gyrates to the music as the princess is transformed. In “Making of the

158http://www.christiantoday.com/article/pastor.preaches.sex.that.is.free.from.sin/21889.h tm; http://bpnews.net/30700

159 Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Press, 2003): 134.

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Peasant Princess,” a three-part interview with the art and design team at the church, the writers note that they wanted to channel “Vegas 2050 meets Disney meets Mars Hill” to illustrate the sermons about sex.160 For each of the ten Sundays Driscoll preached through the Song of Songs, the video played before he began, closing with a still from the video designed to frame that week. Week one, “Let Him Kiss Me,” which focused on the first book of the Song of Songs, is featured below. Here you see the princess as a peasant, her animal friends, and even the sculpted tree behind her. In the next image, the princess’s transformation is complete.

Because the sermons were televised, with most Mars Hill members watching over screens, technology and art were central to the mission of the church. At the end of the sermons, Driscoll invited his wife Grace to join him onstage, and together they answered questions from the audience that had been sent in via text. This interactive component of the sermon series is a central part of what had been a major strategy for Mars Hill, whose target audience was young people, particularly those who may not have found “church”

160 “Making the Peasant Princess into a Mars Hill Sermon Series.” Web Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20101130232010/http://theresurgence.com/2008/12/14/maki ng-the-peasant-princess-insights-into-a-mars-hill-sermon-series-part-1

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to be relevant to their lives. This SMS component is one of the central reasons that the series became such a popular hit, according to the church, who went into detail about the software they use and how.161 This is media designed to connect the congregants to the pulpit, but it is also a technology of surveillance. Each text is sent as an email to the

161 “Making the Peasant Princess into a Mars Hill Sermon Series – part 2” Web Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20101130232010/http://theresurgence.com/2008/12/14/maki ng-the-peasant-princess-insights-into-a-mars-hill-sermon-series-part-2: “The way that we do Q&A at the services created a lot of media attention and email traffic from organizations asking about the technical details. The technical how-to is listed below, but the why is what attracts me as a pastor to the medium. This series, we have opened up the Q&A segments to each of the 7 campuses that are synced up at the 9am, 11:15am and 5pm services. Pastor Mark and his wife Grace are fielding the questions together. After deleting the “stump the Pastor” or hypothetical questions and the frequent off topic questions, we are left with very real, candid questions that an open microphone setup would discourage. There is a false anonymity that Text Message Q&A provides. I say “false” because each message includes the sender’s phone number (allowing pastoral follow-up via phone), yet the ability to send a question up to the pulpit without self- identifying encourages a brazenness that makes answering 160 character questions exciting and most helpful. To provide this service to the church we use a company called Mobile Marketing (www.mobivity.com). They charge us a minimal monthly fee, which includes 1000 incoming text messages and 1 "keyword". We can rent additional keywords for an extra monthly charge. Each keyword is customizable to allow for different responses for each keyword. When someone sends in a message, they get a custom response back thanking them for submitting their question and participating in the sermon. After the question is sent in, it can be forwarded to an email account or cell phone for review. We have it setup so that each question goes to my email box. I review the questions to present to Pastor Mark & Grace, and enter them in a spreadsheet located on our Character Generator, which is a Chyron Lex2. The software that the Chyron uses, called Lyric, is set up so that we recall a slide linked to a cell in the spreadsheet. When one of the slides is called up it pulls the question from the right cell in the spreadsheet, and that goes to the TV on stage with Pastor Mark. For more info on SMS Q&A check out this blog by Pastor Jamie Munson.” & here: https://web.archive.org/web/20081219033438/http://voxpopnetwork.com/vision/2008/05/ 06/live-texting-at-mhc

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pastor, and of course, the phone number each congregant texts from is recorded, for (as the church explains) following up afterward.162

Driscoll onstage, with his wife, Grace, reading texts from the audience.

Finally, a video game was created to accompany the series, called “Whac-a-fox,” a reference to one of the passages in the Song of Songs about foxes eating away at the fruits within a vineyard. The “foxes” are issues that eat away at a relationship, in

Driscoll’s reading, and he views his sermons as offering a practical as well as theological and ideological guide to addressing them. To create a bulwark against the foxes—to

“whac” them—Driscoll offers a reading of the Song of Songs that offers married couples tips for getting along and having a fulfilling, “free” sex life.

162 Ibid

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These technological frameworks are not incidental to Mars Hill’s mission, they were in fact a deliberate strategy, even when not all directed from Driscoll/church authority themselves.

This was not the first time Driscoll preached a sermon series through the Song of

Solomon, or the Song of Songs. In fact, in what became one of the most controversial chapters of his book, Real Marriage, he explains that his first run through was in the second year of the church, or 1997. “In the second year of the church we had a lot of single people getting married, so I decided to preach through the Song of Songs on the joys of marital intimacy and sex. The church grew quickly, lots of people got married, many women became pregnant, and my counseling load exploded,” Driscoll writes. “I started spending dozens of hours every week dealing with every kind of sexual issue imaginable,” he continues, “Although I loved our people and my wife, this only added to my bitterness. I had a church filled with young women who were asking how they could stop being sexually ravenous and wait for a Christian husband, then I’d go home to a wife whom I was not sexually enjoying.”163 This relationship to women, and to wives, as

163 Mark and Grace Driscoll, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2012): 15.

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either being enjoyable or not, was one of Driscoll’s eventual downfalls. Real Marriage is a text and sermon series that is in constant dialogue with the Peasant Princess series, borrowing much of the same language and technological set up.

In one sermon in particular, “Dance of Mahanaim,” the seventh sermon in the ten sermon series, Driscoll offers a reading of “the dance” depicted in the Song of Songs as a striptease performed by a wife for her husband. Driscoll offers an exegetical reading of lust and even a theological response to objectification. Driscoll asks, “Is it a sin for a man to notice a woman is beautiful? No…it’s a sin for him to lust after her.”164 For husbands and wives, Driscoll argues for what he calls “complete sexual freedom,” and both seriously and playfully encourages married women to perform strip teases at home as

“visually generous” gifts, though he jokes, “guys you can’t go home and grumble ‘it’s in the Bible, now’s a good time,’ no it’s descriptive, it’s an example of marital freedom.”

This is the goal, however, and it involves a specific mobilization of “freedom” as a concept, one bound to ideas of sex, policing, and beauty. Driscoll continues, “ladies, your body is a great gift, your husbands really want you to understand this.” The dance is both serious and silly – Driscoll tells a story of a wife who was inspired by this and, in an attempt to recreate the dance, accidentally broke their coffee table. “I know one woman, she read this, this was years ago, she went to dance for her husband, tripped, and busted

164 “Dance of Mahanaim”

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the coffee table…yeah, it’s funny, unless you’re her! Now, a smart husband says, ‘I’m sorry, I bought a cheap coffee table, my fault!’”165

He goes on to articulate that what he wants for men is from the books of Proverbs, chapter 5 . He reads, “A husband should be captivated by his wife” and explains, this is what he means, “He is captivated, he is captured.” For her to be “captivating” is to be free, for him to be “captured” is to be free. Driscoll exhorts, “Okay, here is a dangerous questions, guys, ask your wives, ‘What can I do to encourage your freedom?’ Don’t argue, receive it. Ladies, ask your husband, ‘What are your favorite snapshots of me?’”166

The centrality of an analytic of freedom v. captivity makes sense of both Driscoll’s graphic Bible study and his church’s commitment to the sex industry in various forms, even if the two seem somewhat at odds.

Freedom from captivity is the paradigm through which both pornography and sex work are framed. In the former, Driscoll discusses men in the grip of pornography variously as having an addiction, being enslaved, and the more straightforward, sinning.

For them, freedom means no longer looking at pornography. It’s simple, if difficult.

While preaching “The Peasant Princess” series, Driscoll published (first serially, online, then as a complete e-book) a monograph titled, Porn Again Christian: A Frank

Discussion on Pornography and Masturbation. In it, he reiterates his position from “The

Peasant Princess,” writing, “Christian men are enslaved to pornographic lust and live in

165 “Dance of Mahanaim”

166 Ibid.

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silent shame, which hinders their growth in Christ and service in ministry.167 However, he also links that captivity to the bondage he sees in the sex industry writ large, arguing that working in pornography also “enslaves” the sex workers who are in the porn itself, as well as contributes to the financial economy of prostitution, sex trafficking, and stripteases outside of married bedrooms. He writes,

Some of what’s made is because of sex trafficking; some of the women who are even in the industry in the US are often held against their will, threatened, beaten, traumatized, because it’s always about the money. And even if you’re not giving your credit card number, by clicking on the site, you are encouraging an advertiser to pay money, so that someone might be assaulted and abused, and you’re complicit in that.168

Complicity is layered on to the sense that they consumer of pornography is already giving in to the compulsion to look. “The issue is which woman’s unclothed body you are lusting after. If she is your bride, then you are simply making the Song of Songs sing again to God’s glory and your joy. If she is not your bride, then you are simply sinning.”169 Some interesting Q&A is included in Porn Again Christian, which Driscoll introduces as having come from his experience in “pastoral counseling,” but undoubtedly includes texts from The Peasant Princess, as some show up in the sermon series. The following three questions highlight two central themes in Driscoll’s answers to the “Are

167 Driscoll, Mark. Porn Again Christian: A Frank Discussion on Pornography and Masturbation, E-book, accessed here: http://www.covenanteyes.com/2008/11/12/porn-again-christian- new-free-e-book/, 27

168 Driscoll, “The Porn Path”

169 Driscoll, Porn Again Christian, 22.

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we allowed to____” form of sex questioning—which became a preaching genre of sorts for Driscoll and led to his sermon series and book “Real Marriage”—the first of which has to do with masculinity, and the second of which has to do with dangers of pornography.170

In the first question, Driscoll presents a man who he expects his audience to identify with. This is clarified by the second question, in which the asker is presumably a husband who is less interested in sex than his wife. Incessant mocking and blank stares are what he can expect if he tells his buddies. His masculinity is certainly in question, and

Driscoll’s response is a bit of a joke, “Thank God” for your wife and have sex with her

170 Ibid.

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more often. Years later, Driscoll’s confession that he had answered questions like this about female sexuality with pain and jealousy, as his own marriage struggled with periods of bad or non-existent sex, augmented these responses. For the first and third questioners, the issues of masculinity are taken more seriously, but are still under intense scrutiny. In both, the answer is no, pornography is not permitted, and in both, questions of manhood are at stake alongside questions of permission. Lusting after other women, the central act of consuming pornography for Driscoll, is adultery and never permitted.

However, for the first questioner, Driscoll adds, “Your wife’s lack of interest is likely indicative of your failings as her husband.” Likewise, to the third questioner, he closes with, “You should put down your dirty, defiling porn and pick up your Bible as the beginning point for your marital intimacy,” particularly fitting advice considering the sexual handbook that Driscoll considers the Song of Songs to be. In all three answers,

Driscoll demonstrates a fierce defense of a “Biblical” masculinity to which literally no human men can measure up – this is on purpose, as he considers the standard to be one of holiness and unreachable for anyone aside from Jesus. The crisis of masculinity then is not the imperfection of the body, lust and sin are to be expected, instead the crisis is that more men are not struggling against that sin.

For them, freedom means no longer looking at pornography. It’s simple, if difficult. In

Porn Again Christian, Driscoll reiterates his position from “The Peasant Princess,” that

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Christian men are enslaved to pornography.171 However, he also links that captivity to the bondage he sees in the sex industry writ large, arguing that working in pornography also

“enslaves” the sex workers who are in porn, as well as contributes to the financial economy of prostitution, sex trafficking, and stripteases outside of married bedrooms.

“You’re complicit in that,” he warns readers, as he links sex trafficking with pornography.172

Pornography is symptomatic of failed masculinity, but it is also dangerous for women. In the appendix to Porn Again Christian, Driscoll includes a note directly for servicemen overseas, titled, “A Final Word to Military Men and Other Men Who Like

Prostitutes.” Here, Driscoll makes explicit the link between masculinity in crisis→pornography→harmed women→sex trafficking. Driscoll writes, “Women do not sign up for sexual slavery. Most girls were recruited or coerced into prostitution. Others were “traditional wives” without job skills who escaped from or were abandoned by abusive fathers or husbands and went into prostitution to support themselves and their children.”173 The following passage opens the appendix, and I quote it here at length to demonstrate that Driscoll’s language is infused with a second-wave feminist rhetoric that scholars and critics often miss. He writes,

There is a wall of complacency, complicity, and corruption that has allowed this trade to explode recently. Sex trafficking runs by the laws of supply and demand. Demand is generated by thousands of

171 Driscoll, Porn Again Christian, 27.

172 Driscoll, “The Porn Path.”

173 Driscoll, Porn Again Christian, 46.

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men. Economic, social, cultural, and gender factors make women and girls vulnerable to being exploited as an endless supply.The international political economy of sex not only includes the supply side—the women of the third world, the poor states, or exotic Asian women—but it cannot maintain itself without the demand from the organizers of the trade—the men from industrialized and developing countries. The patriarchal world system hungers for and sustains the international subculture of docile women from underdeveloped countries. These women are forced or lured into the trade of providing international sexual services. Men accept this world order as well, regardless of their background. The world that is so satisfying to too many men is the same world that is utterly devastating to too many women and girls.

Of course, “patriarchy” is not generally a system with which Driscoll has a problem. He sees men as head of the household and church, and even writes in the introduction to

Porn Again Christian that it is not intended for women to read it. (In this warning he goes so far as to say that if women are interested in reading it, they should only do so if they are “a wife whose husband has read it first and he can discuss its contents with her in love.”174) Yet, Driscoll is able to articulate a kind of second wave feminist reading of global sexual politics and describes sex trafficking in ways that mirror Kathleen Barry’s

1984 text Female Sexual Slavery. This is also his only exploration of race, and even here it is incidental. His global list is meant more to demonstrate mastery than to interrogate post-colonial economies, though he is interested in the mix of “economic, social, cultural, and gender factors make women and girls vulnerable to being exploited as an endless supply.”

Because we know that the entire text is designated for men, and that this appendix in particular is meant to reach men in the military, Driscoll’s assessment of the global

174 Driscoll, Porn Again Christian, 3.

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scope of sex trafficking is a mechanism for disciplining masculinity. Harmed femininity is a cornerstone of his argument, and it became a formal element of the Mars Hill mission in Seattle. Driscoll’s discourse draws from anti-porn feminism, while infusing it with racialized tropes, all in the service of reinforcing the kind of domestic Christian masculinity that is coded as pure, innocent, and ultimately, white. The following section illuminates this racial dimension in even starker contrast, as imagery of foreign bodies is set up in opposition to interview footage with authoritative white men, including Driscoll.

Unearthed and REST

“Men who are fueling the porn industry are victims, too. They’re slaves. They’re stuck.”175 This line, from Unearthed Productions’ short 2012 video “Groundswell,” became something of the battle cry for the organization. Unearthed is an evangelical media company led by Tony Anderson and Allen Warford. Founded in 2010, the organization claims to be interested in highlighting an aspect to the evangelical fight against what they call “sexual exploitation” by examining demand within the economy of the sex industry, or, “the hearts of men,” the title of their forthcoming film. Their biography reads, “Our heartbeat is to see the hearts of men changed - and we want that change to result in a systemic shift in the landscape of sexual exploitation. Join the groundswell of men committed to killing sexual exploitation at its root.”176 Unearthed has created fifteen short videos about the sex industry, sex trafficking, and sexual exploitation, over the past six years as it has tried to raise funds for “The Hearts of Men”

175 “Groundswell: Unearthing the Root of Sexual Exploitation” Unearthed (October 16, 2012) 176 “Our Story,” Unearthed, 2010.

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film, pushing the release date back numerous times. Their early videos, set in South

Africa and Cambodia. Driscoll is featured in the 2010 video, “South Africa’s Pandemic,” which addresses prostitution and abortion in rural South Africa. “You can rape her all day for four bucks,” Driscoll narrates, his voice incredulous, as B-roll of black bodies in a township, then a hospital plays.177

Driscoll is also in Unearthed’s short film, “Unearthing Sexual Exploitation,” produced in 2010. The film opens with Driscoll’s voice-over, reading, “The gals we see here in Seattle, most of them are 12, 13, 14 years of age. And most Americans think, so glad we’re on the backside of slavery, so glad that’s over. No, there are real, human, sex trafficking slaves, in every major city… and not just a few of them.” 178 These early films are designed to raise awareness about sex trafficking, recruit evangelicals in the fight against it, and establish the plan for rescue. Like the Mars Hill documentary, the films star white evangelicals, though these also feature South African and Cambodian survivors who are no longer in the sex industry. For the most part, bodies of color illustrate need and harm abroad in the background, while men within the church are in focus.

This focus on men grew as the years progress, and eventually became the self- conscious target for Unearthed. In 2011, Unearthed took their first step toward “The

Hearts of Men,” in creating the short film, “The Roots of Trafficking.” In the introduction to it, they write, “The global sex trade is fueled by a demand...and men are the ones perpetuating it. Over the last 2 years, our supporters have funded some of the best

177 “South Africa’s Pandemic,” Unearthed, 2010.

178 “Groundswell: Unearthing Sexual Exploitation” Unearthed, 2010.

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organizations in the world that rescue, restore and reintegrate victims of sexual exploitation...but we've realized that unless we go after the demand, we aren't just being unwise, we're being irresponsible.” By articulating Driscoll’s prayer, Unearthed echoes a trickle-down effect of reforming, first, the wayward habits and hearts of those who buy in. “Men, we're coming after you,” they continue, “In love. With the Gospel of Jesus

Christ. We need new hearts, new desires and new eyes for God's gift of sex. We're launching production for a full-length documentary called ‘The Hearts of Men.’ It'll be a raw, uncensored look at how men fuel the global sex trade with their sexual decisions, who's affected and how the Gospel changes all of it.”179 Eventually, this evolved to be,

“When the hearts of men change, everything changes.”180

The film itself mixes genres, combining narrative and animation about sin, Adam and Eve, and humanity’s relationship to God with interviews with experts on theology, psychology, and sex addiction. Like Mars Hill, Unearthed considers compelling media to be an act of service, and in appeal for donations Anderson clarifies, “we serve a creative

God, so we want to make this the best film it can possibly be.”181 Images from the 2015 trailer, below, show the beauty of the set, in Hawaii, and echo the Peasant Princess in depicting a lone, princess-type figure in long gown and with loose hair.182

179 “The Roots of Trafficking,” Unearthed, 2011.

180 Ibid.

181 “The Hearts of Men,” Unearthed, 2011.

182 “The Hearts of Men Featurette,” Unearthed, 2011.

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The man and woman seem to depict Adam and Eve; he leaves God to follow her to a stream and watches her undress—depicting sin in the garden of Eden—but when we see them again the couple is at a wedding feast, surrounded by others (including God.) This depicts, it would seem, the reconciliation that comes, in Evangelical soteriology, through belief in Jesus Christ, through accepting salvation.

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Eve is the only person of color in the film. Perhaps unsurprisingly, God is played by an older, white man reminiscent of Santa Claus, while Adam is first a young boy and then the bearded, blank-eyed, white adult pictured in the second frame above.

Earlier Unearthed films featured Asian women as well, panning across southeast

Asian sex workers as statistics on the global sex industry were read, or an interview was given. (Footage from the first films, in South Africa and Cambodia, frequently appears in later films.) Here, a still from “Groundswell” depicts a chaotic, flesh-filled night club.

Neither Eve undressing nor the b-roll footage of Asian dancers are intended to be read as pornographic, despite the sexual nature of the, albeit very different, images of undressing

Asian bodies. Instead, the Unearthed homepage, a description reads, “And what if, before we freed the captives on porn sets, street corners and in brothels, we need to admit the reality that WE are captives.”183 From “evangellyfish” to William Wallace disguises, the true target, even the true captives, are “the hearts of men.” In the words of John Eldredge,

“there is something wild in the heart of every man...”184

183 “The Roots of Trafficking,” Unearthed, 2011.

184 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 14.

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Haunted by Eve

In, Wild at Heart, Eldredge writes,

Why is pornography the most addictive thing in the universe for men? Certainly there’s the fact that a man is visually wired, that pictures and images arouse men much more than they do women.

But the deeper reason is because that seductive beauty reaches down inside and touches your desperate hunger for validation as a man you didn’t even know you had, touches it like nothing else most men have ever experienced. You must understand—this is deeper than legs and breasts and good sex. It is mythological… you see, every man remembers Eve. We are haunted by her.185

Though Eldridge, like Driscoll, is wary of feminists, and takes deliberate pains to clarify that his wife Stasi is not one (anymore!) he is concerned about the harm of objectification, or what enjoyment comes at the expense of women. However, Eldredge offers a vision of the masculine that, like Driscoll's or Adam in the Unearthed videos, is in desperate need of saving.

For Eldridge, this salvation comes through conscription in a battle to fight.

Though of course best known for turning the other cheek, Jesus serves as Eldridge’s example, who reminds readers of the vision of Jesus depicted in the book of Revelations, rather than the stories of the Gospels. Eldridge writes, “And when Christ returns, he is at the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood (Rev. 19). Now that sounds a lot more like William Wallace than it does Mother Teresa.”186 Like Driscoll, Eldridge finds comfort in William

185 Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 91.

186 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 29.

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Wallace’s unabashed masculinity, and the fantasy of embodying the dream of Braveheart is much less threatening than the fantasies of porn.

Thus, the answer is to fight. Eldridge writes, “The whole crisis in masculinity today has come because we no longer have a warrior culture, a place for men to learn to fight like men. We don’t need a meeting of Really Nice Guys; we need a gathering of

Really Dangerous Men.”187 A decade later, Driscoll would make headlines by agreeing with Eldridge, answering in an interview that “In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed.

That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”188 The fantasies at play, first of joining in an epic battle, then possibly of beating up Jesus, are the core solution to the crisis of masculinity that pornography proves and that the sex industry writ large houses. Eldridge longs for a return to bravery, writing,

That strength so essential to men is also what makes them heroes. If a neighborhood is safe, it’s because of the strength of men. Slavery was stopped by the strength of men, at a terrible price to them and their families. The Nazis were stopped by men. Apartheid wasn’t defeated by women. Who gave their seats up on the lifeboats leaving the Titanic, so that women and children would be saved? And have we forgotten—it was a Man who let himself be nailed to Calvary’s cross. This isn’t to say women can’t be heroic. I know many heroic women. It’s simply to remind us that

187 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 175.

188 “Where the Church is Going: A Interview with Seven Leaders” Relevant Magazine web archive. http://web.archive.org/web/20071013102203/http://relevantmagazine.com/god_article.ph p?id=7418

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God made men the way they are because we desperately need them to be the way they are. Yes, a man is a dangerous thing. So is a scalpel. It can wound or it can save your life. You don’t make it safe by making it dull; you put it in the hands of someone who knows what he’s doing.189

A scalpel is just what Unearthed intends to create with “The Hearts of Men,” as Anderson writes in a 2015 update, “This film cannot be an argument - it must be a scalpel.” 190 In fact, Anderson quotes Wild at Heart to open another of his updates to supporters of the film, writing, ‘The story of your life is a long and sustained assault on your heart by the enemy who knows who you could be and fears you. But it's also the story of the long and mysterious pursuit of your heart by God who knows you truly and loves you deeply.’

John Eldredge.”191 This is because, they continue,“Men's hearts are the battleground through which the Kingdom of God invades earth.”192

What is a man? Eldridge articulates the fundamental worry never said aloud by

Driscoll. “Even if he can’t quite put it into words, every man is haunted by the question,

‘Am I really a man? Have I got what it takes…when it counts?”193 At the core of this evangelical exuberance for masculine performance, and extreme fear of emasculation, is what Eldridge articulates as haunting. He writes,

189 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 83. 190 “Hearts of Men Progress Update 3,” Unearthed, 2011.

191 “Hearts of Men Progress Update 4” Unearthed, 2011.

192 Ibid

193 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 57.

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Despite my childhood dreams, I have never been a race car driver or a fighter pilot. I have no interest in televised sports, I don’t like cheap beer, and though I do drive an old jeep its tires are not ridiculously large. I say this because I anticipate that many readers—good men and women—will be tempted to dismiss this as some sort of macho-man pep rally. Not at all. I am simply searching, as many men (and hopeful women) are, for an authentic masculinity.194

This authentic masculinity is captive, like the maiden in the tower, enslaved by fantasy, desire, and lack.

After a prolonged Public Relations battle, Driscoll resigned on October 15, 2014, shortly thereafter, the remaining Mars Hill campuses were dissolved. The last sermon at

Mars Hill was preached by Rick Warren, pastor of California megachurch Saddleback.

Driscoll continued to preach as a guest pastor at various evangelical churches before founding a new church in Phoenix, Arizona, called Trinity Church.

However, REST continues to thrive in Seattle as a 501c3 non-profit organization divorced from its originating affiliation with Mars Hill. Here the power of donations becomes quite clear; Mars Hill dissolved as a result of its inability to sustain donations in the face of their crisis of leadership, while the sex trafficking ministry the church founded saw their donations double in the last fiscal year. Though Mars Hill was just one evangelical church that made sex trafficking a focus of missionary investment, REST is indicative of the kinds of evangelical organizations that have mobilized as part of the new abolitionist movement over the last twenty years. Joining REST are evangelical organizations like XXXChurch and Strip Church, which focus on outreach to sex workers in pornography and strip clubs. Both groups are ideally meant to be transformed through

194 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 13.

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the encounter. Like Driscoll, it is in fact, the “hearts of men” with which REST is concerned.

One REST blogpost reads, “Evil must hijack dignity and beauty in order to be successful. If this is true, the question becomes, will we have eyes to see not only women in prostitution, but also the buyers of sex as the faces of those who are trafficked through the economy of evil?195 Likewise, the REST post, “Men, We’re Calling You To

Something Radical,” reads, “We need you to be a different man – to hate both sexual slavery and the culture among men that ignores it, or even celebrates it. Refuse to participate in or abide with this culture in all aspects of your life.”196 The mission to retrain men, toward hating sexual slavery, is a familiar refrain, one that reflects REST’s

Mars Hill origins.

The call for eyes to see “not only women in prostitution, but also the buyers of sex” as those who are “trafficked through the economy of evil” is no linguistic slip.

Instead, it is an intentional inclusion of manhood, masculinity, and men themselves as the victims—perhaps even the true victims—of the sex industry. Encouraging men to denigrate the culture that permits sexual abuse and promotes sexual sin, and to doubt “the world that is so satisfying to too many men,” as “utterly devastating to too many women and girls” is seemingly in line with the feminist values that underpin the language of trafficking, patriarchy, and objectification that permeate these evangelical cultural texts.

Yet, Wild at Heart, like Driscoll and Unearthed, presumes a correct relationship between

195 Bridget Battistoni, “Sin is Trafficked Goodness” I Want Rest blog, (16 June 2014).

196 Brent Turner, “Men, We’re Calling You to Something Radical” Date Unknown.

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men and women, sex is reserved for married, straight couples, strength is deployed in masculinity, beauty reserved in femininity. The harms of pornography, homosexuality, even feminism, are the disruption of this neat system. As such, it becomes legible that issues articulated as violence against women, including exploitation in the sex industry as a prostitute or porn star, could be experienced narrated as equally a harmful for men.

Sex trafficking, and particularly the idea of sex trafficking victims, operates as the battle, the tower, or the journey within Wild at Heart — ultimately the testing ground upon which the hero (masculinity) can transform. Evangelical logic of intervening in the sex industry is held together with a paradox: utilizing feminist language to shore up patriarchy with a promise of rescue for all. Decrying sex work, conflating it with abuse, and longing to rescue women and girls imagined to be held in captivity abroad is translated through the feminist reading of power, the violence and harm is laid at the feet of the men who “support the industry.” Yet, this analysis of gender and power leads not to an evangelical commitment to dismantling patriarchy, rather quite the opposite. The problem is understood to be one of men not stewarding their power correctly. Rescuing men, then, turns out to be the central goal of such anti-trafficking ideology, despite its overt focus on women.

Sexual freedom operates as the shadow figure within these narratives of captivity and bondage. Rescue, rather than a goal in and of itself, clears the path through which captives—sex workers within a brothel but also the evangelical men with whom Eldredge and Driscoll are concerned—will leave a life of captivity and enter into a life of increased freedom. Thus, a core idea idea of evangelical sexual freedom emerges through a close

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reading of the language of sex trafficking narratives. Captivity in these narratives references a spectrum of evangelical un-freedom: including literal conditions of force in sexual labor, spiritual conditions of sin, or metaphorical conditions of addiction to sexual behavior considered to be damaging or dangerous, like looking at pornography or purchasing sex. Conflation between these three categories is deliberate in narratives at

Mars Hill—indeed, much of this language argues for a unique evangelical pull to the work of rescuing captives because they themselves have experienced (a kind of) captivity and rescue of their own, through their religious beliefs. If captivity is a category of physical, spiritual, and metaphorical bondage within these narratives, freedom has a number of meanings as well, and they revolve around a certain performance of masculinity.

The “wild” at the heart of every man, as these discourses about the sex industry demonstrate, is also the source of evangelical anxiety. Such anxieties are translated into concern for victims of pornography, sex trafficking, and sex work through racialized imagery, feminist tropes, and Christian exhortations. At their core, however, is a deep concern that the hearts of men are distorted, evil, and improperly stewarding the power of patriarchy. As such, it is men who emerge as the true objects of concern for these evangelicals, even as the true victims in need of rescue. By focusing on the “evil intent” of men, fueling the sex trade with a deeply distorted sexuality, evangelical narratives of sex trafficking transform concern for captive women into concern for captivated men.

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Chapter 4

The Other Sex Industry: Freedom Businesses, Souvenirs, and Spiritual Renewal

“Interested in making a difference overseas, but not quite sure if a long-term commitment is right for you? Then check out Short Term Mission Trips. They’re short, life changing and impactful.”197 Overseas Team Trips offer donors a chance to engage with the world beyond their church, through the Christian ministry, Destiny

Rescue:Ending Child Trafficking & Sexual Exploitation. As their description above invites, the trips are billed as are perfect for those who long to make a difference but are not interested in permanent relocation. “Come and experience these nations from a different perspective than the tourist brochures portray. Rather, encounter the people from the heart of our Heavenly Father. Look beyond the wastelands of brokenness and despair, and see heaven’s hope,” the trip description continues, “Each day is a new adventure into the uncharted…”198 This appeal to life-changing impact overseas is far from unusual for evangelical Christians in the west. Short term trips like the ones Destiny

Rescue offers reveal the adventurous component of contemporary evangelical narratives of sex trafficking, in which participation is possible as a missionary, a shopper, or a traveler. The domestic impulses of the previous two chapters link narratives of sex trafficking to life at home, reviving faith, structuring sexual behavior, and encouraging donations. However, these are all animated by a global vision that links narratives of sex trafficking to the world of everyday life. In what follows, this global vision is translated

197 “Overseas Team Trips” Destiny Rescue.

198 Ibid

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into literal circuits of border spanning investment, embodying the logic of enchanted internationalism, in Melani McAlister’s terms.199 Tracing multiple sites of evangelical global encounter, this chapter argues that evangelical narratives of sex trafficking contain an injunction to experience, exemplifying a shift in “missions” logic that weaves together the twin promises of heavenly encounter and uncharted adventure.

With the help of organizations like Destiny Rescue, the adventure of evangelical encounter lands missionaries across the globe, and occasionally at a brothel. Destiny

Rescue’s short-term mission trip description invites travelers to “see firsthand how serious of an issue sex trafficking has become in our world today, and personally see and experience the incredible work Destiny Rescue is doing to combat it.”200 Their ministry focuses on bringing evangelicals from the United States into spaces abroad where they will then engage with the issue of sex trafficking. Through short term mission trips, they encourage donors to join their work in the field, visiting one of the five countries in which they conduct rescue operations (India, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and the

Philippines.) The trips’ “tour objectives” end with the reassurance, “we also want you to have some fun and a little relaxation, too.” The trips deliberately place evangelicals from

U.S. churches into spaces that they would not normally visit — spaces imagined to be marked by abjection, captivity, and sin — but they are also meant to offer a window into a kind of beauty. The productive work of this tension is the central concern of this chapter.

199 McAlister, “Heart.”

200 “Overseas Team Trips” Destiny Rescue.

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“We encourage you to absorb all you can from the beautiful scenery and unique

Asian culture, explore the different sensations of Cambodia and Thailand through new flavors, fragrances and sounds,” the description continues, selling the elements of the trip that augment the serious side of engaging sex trafficking with adventure and appreciation. “Shop, laugh, and encounter the Lord in the beauty of His justice and mercy. And of course, don’t forget to capture loads of memorable moments for your photo albums back home.”201 This invitation makes beauty not an accidental byproduct of the engagement with an idea of abjection and captivity, but instead, its corroborating underside. In what follows, these twin forces work together to reveal the complexities of this kind of evangelical engagement with the sex industry, which can neither be breezily dismissed as gawking voyeurism nor simply celebrated as altruistic service.

The space of the foreign is imagined to be one of possibility, offering a deeper window into the fantasies that animate evangelical engagement with the sex industry.

When part of the circuit of travel, shopping, and transformative experiences abroad, evangelical narratives of sex trafficking utilize racial imagery to signal exotic authenticity and beauty. Racialized bodies operate within this fantasy as a constitutive element of the very terrain of transformation. Across the spectrum of evangelical cultural products about sex trafficking, this terrain is imagined and understood in distinct ways, here promising an enticing engagement with fantasies of the exotic, sensual, and authentic that are imagined to exist uniquely abroad. Race operates within this set of narratives as a

201 Ibid.

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productive force, separating spaces into domestic and foreign, safe and dangerous, boring and exotic.

I offer the terms of captivity and beauty here to capture two types of fantasy that mark the space of the foreign sex industry in evangelical narratives of sex trafficking.

Both present the foreign missions space as one of unique transformation for the participant, where “the wastelands of brokenness and despair” go hand-in-hand with invitations to “encounter the Lord.”202 One is not the byproduct of the other, but rather, they operate together to encourage participants to view wasteland abroad as a space where beauty may be encountered and transformation experienced. To find both, evangelicals are invited to join “the adventure into the uncharted.” This chapter addresses the unique role that transnational engagement with sex trafficking plays in the promise of adventure and the hope for encounter. I argue here that foreign space and foreign bodies do not code danger in the same way in these examples as in the previous chapter, as the danger itself is what provides the energizing possibility for transformation in the form of adventure and short term mission trips.

In what follows, the adventure of rescue joins an economic circuit of rehabilitation, transformation, and aesthetic enhancement. Beauty is, I argue, an unspoken promise within this work. Participation in the work of fighting sex trafficking, whether by going on a mission trip or an adventure oneself or by supporting the cause as a donor or shopper at home, is a process that puts evangelicals in contact with a kind of beauty that underwrites the “ugliness” of captivity and harm narratives. Through the

202 Ibid.

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correct consumption of narratives sex trafficking, accompanied by experiences and products, they can correct the harms of a global economy that has commodified sex workers themselves. In exchange, the promise of rescue in this chapter is that the life of an evangelical who engages in the fight against sex trafficking will transform, and will become more beautiful. This beauty includes the natural landscape of foreign countries, images of women in red light districts, and the created beauty of promotional products that have their own missionary tone: blankets created by former sex workers, for example, or journals made of saris whose sales donate to anti-trafficking organizations.

The trips deliberately place evangelicals from U.S. churches into spaces that they would not normally visit—spaces imagined to be marked by abjection, captivity, and sin—but they are also meant to offer a window an antidote to that darkness in the form of the literal beauty of the exotic. Imagery and depictions of racialized figures, even when still signaling harm and danger, offer the promise of beauty.

The central arguments of this chapter are about the logical work that short term missions that bring U.S. evangelicals into contact with the sex industry do. I argue that these trips offer evangelicals two related things: affective engagement with beauty, and the promise of contamination.203 Other scholars have argued that engagement with the issue of sex trafficking, particularly by traveling, is a way of engaging in poverty tourism,

203 Scholarship on the relationship between blackness, abjection, and border crossing is useful here. For more, see: Mumford, Kevin, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century; Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer;” Scott, Darieck, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

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of gawking at abjection and squalor. One reading of the unique power that sex trafficking holds as a marker of darkness abroad is that the underground world of prostitution, sex and black markets beckons the worldly side of stifled evangelicals. Elizabeth Bernstein, a sociologist whose ethnographic work with sex workers alerted her to the growing numbers of missionaries involved in the sex industry, describes such an interest in terms of voyeurism and slumming. Bernstein writes, “The embrace of the third-world trafficking victim as a modern cause offers these young evangelical women a means to engage directly in a sex-saturated culture without becoming ‘contaminated’ by it; it provides an opportunity to commune with third-world ‘bad girls’ while remaining first- world ‘good girls.’”204 Yet, this focus on voyeurism overlooks the dangers, and pleasures, of ‘contamination.’ For the subjects of this chapter, contamination is precisely the goal, and communion with “bad girls” that disrupts their lives as “first world good girls” is the promise itself. I argue for repositioning of the evangelical relationship to the foreign as one characterized by longing to be immersed and contaminated by the foreign (and even abject), as well as to consume it.

The second argument of this chapter is that the target of transformation in these mission trips is not necessarily located in the sex industry. Indeed, evangelical leaders of short term mission trips are candid that not much can be done to alter structural injustice or global inequality over the course of two, or even six, weeks. The hope is that the participants will be the ones transformed through an encounter with the sex industry.

Mission trips designed to put evangelicals in contact with the sex industry take western

204 Bernstein, “Militarized,” 63.

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Christians abroad to inspire and sustain action at home. While scholars of missions, and even of secular humanitarian work, sometimes point out the futility of short term charity work for generating sustainable change abroad, trips like Destiny Rescue’s are actually quite upfront that they are for the benefit of participants, whose lives will be changed, rather than those they will be visiting.205 In this sense, I argue that the missionary is the mission field.

Third, I argue here that evangelical interest in the sex industry offers an update to historiography not only on missions but on humanitarianism as well by explicitly addressing the function of imaginings of race and sex within narratives of need.

Scholarship on evangelical short term missions has addressed the contemporary phenomenon of these short term encounters abroad, both addressing their popularity, as

Robert J. Priest’s work has done, and analyzing the multivalent pleasures that attend to their narration, as Melani McAlister has addressed. This chapter builds upon this work by analyzing the racialized and gendered elements of this international enchantment when it is directed at the issue of sex trafficking.

These fit with the overall arguments of the project, which hinge upon the utility of sex trafficking narratives within the evangelical imagination. I argue that the figure of the foreign (redeemed and fallen) prostitute is the central productive image for evangelical transformation, offering a route through which the reader, visitor, or donor, imagines

205 This is not to say that this awareness absolves them of any responsibility here, but it is important to note that they aren’t being ‘fooled’ and operating with an assumption that systemic problems will be “fixed” with a short-term visit from them. Quite the opposite, these groups are hyper aware and somewhat self-deprecating about a lack of “impact” in measurable terms, but take heart in a larger impact that has to do with relationships between people and, of course, personal transformation.

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their own encounter and change. What makes this narrative of crisis possible and enables the reader to use it for their own transformation? I argue that it is the role of the racialized foreign body, and landscape, that operates as the terrain for this transformation, and the racial and gendered dimensions of this utility are not always theorized in literature on humanitarianism and missionary encounters. The conditions upon which a “moving,” or successful image of harm, or narrative of sex trafficking, depends upon the malleability of imagining the foreign body, even when race is not named.

Many of these movements are deeply committed to a kind of racial reconciliation that directly confronts histories of subjection, the violence of colonialism and the inequalities of race and class in the West, particularly in the U.S. At the same time, the mission field, and sex trafficking in particular, represent a darkness and abjection that is inherently racialized, itself a legacy of violence and oppression. Evangelical commitments to mission work with a humanitarian tone are reflective of broader ‘left of the right’ evangelical movements, or what David Swartz has termed the ‘moral minority.’206 The idea of the exotic is key in framing the foreign space as one in which missionary and humanitarian work can exist within the same trip, and race is central to that understanding of need even while not a neat black and white division. As Jennifer

Suchland points out, even simply the meaning of ‘global’ in the United States is

206 See: David Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (2014); David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, (2014); Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (2013); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2014); Kevin M. Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015) and Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015)

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embedded in a racialized understanding of difference.207 By viewing the abject as a space of testing and trial for evangelical belief, I argue that despite the racial diversity of the new missionary cadre and the deliberate awareness of difference and violence the logic of encounter includes, the element of the exotic (and the literally dark) figure heavily into evangelical fantasies of adventure abroad.

Finally, I argue that engagement in the fight against sex trafficking via short-term mission trips also offers evangelicals space to create and critique various iterations of the neoliberal market. In what I term ‘affective entrepreneurship,’ what is truly for sale has more to do with feelings generated and, particularly, the promises of correct consumption

(both of goods and people.) Sex trafficking, modern-day slavery in much of the literature, is narrated in ways that both celebrate and critique global capitalism. On the one hand, it is an indicator of the market gone wrong — not only are human beings for sale, but their very sexuality and purity is literally destroyed through their commodification — consumption is unwieldy as appetites are characterized by sin, excess, and slavery. On the other hand, solutions to the problem of sex trafficking have everything to do with correct consumption. Job training and integration into the legal market marks a level of success for rescued victims of sex trafficking, working at a network of ‘freedom businesses,’ evangelical companies that specifically hire former sex workers. On a literal level, dangerous and proper consumption and market participation illuminate the role that sex trafficking plays in evangelical conceptions of both the failings and liberatory

207 Jennifer Suchland, “Is Postsocialism Transnational?” Signs 36, no. 4, (Summer 2011): 839; Suchland also points out that just as the transnational operates as a racialized category within women’s studies (Suchland, 852)

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possibilities of neoliberalism. On another level, however, is the promise of cultural capital imbued not just by the correct consumption of liberator goods (for sale at the

Destiny Rescue shop, among other places) but of the trips themselves. And in both, what is truly for sale is a set of feelings, including those having to do with the market, a sense of self and even the disciplinary/regulatory rules for compassion.208 This work addresses the ways that such consumption takes on its own missionary tone, joining shoppers and donors to the labor of the adventure.

In what follows, I trace these claims through an economic circuit established through another kind of short-term mission trip with an emphasis on trafficking,

InterVarsity’s Global Urban Trek, one of their partners in the Kolkata red light district,

Sari Bari, and the stories and souvenirs that circulate between travelers, supporters, and shoppers. In this circuit, U.S. college students spend a summer in a “slum community,” one of the Trek tenets, and for students interested in sex trafficking, they spend their summer in Kolkata, India, surrounded by the poverty that made Mother Teresa’s work so famous. Sari Bari, however, deliberately cultivates beauty through its products and artful design, and Trek participants are invited into that. I am interested in the juxtaposition of these forces, as with the invitations from Destiny Rescue. The promise of beauty hinges on the space of the exotic, which is also, paradoxically, the site of uniquely abject harm.

Together, both form a missional engagement that critiques and continues colonial and capitalist legacies. Ultimately, participants long to join the space of the foreign yet return

208 This affective entrepreneurship is not the only market-based outcome of evangelical engagement with sex trafficking and its enchanted internationalist consumption—thesis an engagement that produces things, including ‘missional media’ — and participation requires an aesthetic and accessoried participation in a world global cultural capital.

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home with more to change about their own worlds, behaviors, and churches, than they did abroad. It is the promise of change and adventure for U.S. evangelicals themselves that is made to all who are willing to go, to watch or see, to donate or shop.

Sari Bari

The Global Urban Trek, a missions program started in 1999 by Scott Bessenecker, begins with the conviction that going abroad can alter the course of a student’s life.

Unlike a cultural exchange or a study abroad program, however, the Trek promises a chance to discern divine direction exclusively regarding one’s calling to serve the world’s poor. “It is here, in the encounter between students and the urban poor, where God will work at shaping your heart,” states the Trek reader, a packet of assigned articles for participants to read before they go.209 Short-term mission trips, especially ones that may evolve into long-term mission commitments, are encounters that promise to shape the heart.

On the Trek, student assignments to read articles about or pray for victims of sex trafficking are connected to broader conversations about inequality and sin. Consider the following passage from the Trek reader, “God’s original design did not include a world where a few of earth’s residents live in luxury, struggling to decide how many cars they should own, while so many millions live in abject poverty, struggling to decide whether to sell their daughters into the sex industry in order for the rest of the family to survive.

209 “Incarnation” Trek Reader. (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2001).

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But just how exactly do we change the course of the speeding freight train of global urban poverty?”210 By joining them, to start.

Trek participants work at several internship sites throughout the city, ranging from Mother Teresa’s homes to secular nonprofits. For the students on the anti-sex trafficking track, their daily assignments are often with the evangelical NGO Sari Bari, a business that employs former sex trafficking victims. Started by missionaries from an evangelical organization called Word Made Flesh, Sari Bari is a paradigmatic example of a network of organizations in the city called ‘freedom businesses.’ Like the other freedom businesses, Sari Bari employs former sex workers, and considers itself a business-as-mission model of evangelical response to sex trafficking. Sari Bari employees consider the women they hire to be “self-rescued,”211 because for the most part they seek out Sari Bari, either through word of mouth or due to their location within one of Kolkata’s most prominent red light districts. Though careful to avoid an overtly

Christian presence within India, Sari Bari’s missionary founding and association with

Word Made Flesh, an incarnational ministry site Bessenecker highlights in The New

Friars, makes it a natural partner for students with the Global Urban Trek.

“Sari Bari” is a name with a layered meaning. The sari is the well-recognized wrapped cloth of traditional women’s dress in India. “Bari” is house, or home, in Bengali.

The labor of Sari Bari involves sewing old saris together in layers to create blankets,

210 Ibid. 211 Interview with Sari Bari director, 7/26/2015. In the Summer of 2015, I was able to spend three days interviewing Trek participants and Sari Bari employees. These interviews provided invaluable insight into how I interpreted Trek materials and the readings of missional materials within this chapter.

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bags, and small home items. For the most part, these are sold in the U.S., through Sari

Bari’s online store or at churches and ministry fundraisers. “Sari Bari is a safe place of employment where women who have been exploited in the sex trade or who are vulnerable to trafficking can experience a new life in the making,” the Sari Bari description (shown below) reads. “In India, a sari represents the essence of womanhood.

The word bari mean[s] ‘house or home’ in the Bengali language.”212 Together, the name invokes both the bright and cozy purchase of Sari Bari products and the more concrete promise of a home for the employees themselves. Both, I argue below, are for sale here, in what I refer to as ‘affective entrepreneurship.’ Sari Bari offers a safe place where the essence of Indian womanhood can be made safe and can also be sold.

When Trek students work with Sari Bari, they sort fabric scraps, attach tags to finished products and prepare saris for being cut and sewn into blankets. The students get to know

212 “About Us” Sari Bari Website.

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Sari Bari employees, but speak mostly to one another in English considering the challenge of learning Bengali in just a few summer weeks. The challenges of cross- cultural communication mean that the students can only get to know their mission field on a superficial level, but importantly, this is still a component of the Trek’s approach.

“Enter into the ministry of sitting around,” one former Trek student writes.213 Sitting with the women of Sari Bari, laughing when they make funny faces, fawning over their children when they bring them into work, or quietly assisting the menial tasks of their employment are all parts of the Trek. They are tasks, as the Trek itself and as short term mission trips more broadly, intended not to change or even really focus on the Sari Bari employees, but to give the students a chance to grow and change themselves.

Shopping for Sari Bari’s products is meant to offer a miniature version of this same experience. In this sense, the thrill and transformation of the short-term mission trip

(which in itself is not free, both the Destiny Rescue trip and the Trek cost roughly $3000) is for sale in a move of affective entrepreneurship. The labor of rescue is for sale, alongside a resolution of the fissures of neoliberalism and the guilt of individual participation within it.

Below are three banner images from the Sari Bari sight, each of which serves the affective purposes of this kind of entrepreneurship. For sale is a set of rules about beauty and the global, which is also always about race. I include all three of these images because it is a whole that I think they do their affective work on the shopper. “Stash your cash in style,” promises the first image, “and bring freedom at the same time.” Here,

213 Scott Bessenecker, The New Friars: The Emerging Movement Serving the World’s Poor (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2006): 90.

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accessorizing western consumption are familiar tokens of day-to-day life for an imagined evangelical shopper—a light skinned and manicured hand, a cup of coffee, cash. The promise of both style and freedom, for sale together through Sari Bari, reveals the promise of affective entrepreneurship. Not only can the business rescue the workers, shown anonymously here in the bottom corner (albeit introduced individually in another area of the website) but this kind of business also has the power to rescue the shopper. It is, in a sense, the newest form of evangelical church. Here “business-as-mission” also has a multivalent mission field, where the freedom for sale comes from the red light district in Kolkata in more ways than one.

In the second image, an Indian model’s smile and clothing are visible.

Interestingly, she is actually not wearing a sari here, but the salwar kameez. However, the signifiers of authenticity required to illustrate the text —“Laying a foundation for

Heroes” — remain intact through her dress nonetheless. The Indian woman could be an evangelical shopper in the West, as the disembodied hand in the first image conveys, or she could be an employee of Sari Bari whose smile represents surviving (and now thriving) within and despite the abjection of Sonagachi, the red light district in which Sari

Bari operates. She could also be the mediating presence between these two, a missionary employee of Sari Bari who facilitates the company’s work as a manager, social worker, or designer. The success of affective entrepreneurship requires all three, and the ambiguity of the image does the work of deliberately blurring the lines between business and mission that such a success implies.

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Finally, the third image returns shoppers directly to the West, in which “the art of the stitch” on a Kantha blanket promises to add a cosmopolitan beauty to the banal of everyday ritual, like stirring one’s coffee in the kitchen. Though the text here is less explicitly concerned with heroes and freedom, the image makes a promise perhaps more central to the Sari Bari promise. Engaging with this kind of mission literally makes one’s life more beautiful. All three images rotate above the text, “Made from the Indian sari, marked by a woman’s name.”

Sari Bari is one of Kolkata’s freedom businesses. Freeset and 8th Day Cafe are two other Kolkata businesses that employ former sex trafficking victims. Freeset, another manufacturing company states, “We make quality jute bags and organic cotton t-shirts, but our business is freedom!” The business of freedom is precisely the purpose of such engagement with sex trafficking. One question here is what the particular allure of sex trafficking offers for this kind of business missions model. Though certainly poverty

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alleviation efforts more generally are elements of various evangelical mission endeavors, the power and prevalence of items like those sold at Sari Bari sell an affect that goes beyond conscious consumerism.

This is for a number of reasons. First, trafficking itself presents a fissure in the market’s ability to protect us. Jennifer Suchland writes, in Economies of Violence, “The idea of trafficking as ‘modern-day slavery’ references an outrage of slavery in the past.

Yet imagining human trafficking as modern-day slavery actually furthers the idea that trafficking is an aberration, rather than symptomatic of political economy.”214

Exploitation is not a surprise side effect of neoliberalism, Suchland argues, but a built-in component of its global operation, particularly in light of a world economy in which money and labor are required to move freely but services and citizenship are restricted.

Additionally, the buying and selling of the female body is of particular importance for affective entrepreneurship, particularly when evangelicals are the missionaries behind the business. Female labor is a casualty of global capitalism, and sexual autonomy (not necessarily an intuitive rallying cause for conservative Christians) is threatened in what is also an affront to the family.

In this positioning, the true victim of crimes against women in the world of sex trafficking is the family. In work on representation of violence against women in the border city of Juarez, Sandra Soto recognizes a similar logic in language of protest and protection. (Where women’s safety is paramount because of its role in the family.) Soto writes, “The forces of transnational capitalism wreck havoc on the family by luring it to

214 Suchland, Economies, 6.

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the city (disrupting intergenerational harmony) and hiring its daughters (disrupting gendered divisions of labor).”215 Likewise, critiques of sex trafficking can focus on women’s mobility in ways that are still quite restrictuve. Sex trafficking can be understood here as another city-specific disruption where daughters are destroyed by the violence of capitalism. This invites evangelicals into a logic where the market is both filled with obvious sin and contains redemptive possibility. If the mothers and daughters of India’s families can be rescued and put to work in a safer environment, their sexual exploitation for profit can remain an aberration of the market rather than one of its guiding parameters.

Despite declining denominational figures for long-term foreign missionaries,

“mission” and the forces it encompasses – missionaries, mission work, missiology – has actually flourished in the contemporary period.216 It has, however, assumed new attributes, appearing predominantly in language of international issues and short-term mission trips abroad. Participants in most modern mission trips are evangelical teenagers, sent by their church. In response to his evangelical students’ unwavering interest in short- term missions, missions scholar Robert J. Priest began studying the short-term trips

215 Sandra K. Soto, “Seeing Through Photographs of Borderlands (Dis)Order” Latino Studies 5, no. 4 (2007): 429. 216 See David Hollinger’s Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, Princeton:: Princeton University Press, 2014, as well as Robert Priest and Joseph Paul Priest, “‘They see everything, and understand nothing’ Short-Term Mission and Service Learning” Missiology: An International Review (January 2008): 53-73; Priest et al, “Researching the Short-term Mission Movement,” Missiology: An International Review (October 2006); Melani McAlister’s “What is Your Heart For? Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere” Journal of American History 20: 4, (Winter 2008): 870-895; Timothy Yates’s Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press: 1996

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which offer, in Priest’s terms, a “liminal space where sacred goals are pursued, physical and spiritual tests are faced, normal structures are dissolved, communitas is experienced, and personal transformation occurs.”217 This transformation, in turn, is meant to “inspire new mission vision at home.”218 The suspension of American norms required for a liminal encounter on the mission field communicates an understanding of the international space as one of increased possibility, mystery and miracle.

In 1949, Kenneth Scott Latourette described the Christian missionary enterprise as a “little appreciated factor in the shaping of the American mind,” calling for increased attention to the border-spanning religious labor of missionaries.219 Nearly forty years later, William Hutchison resurrected Latourette’s call for scholarship on the connection between Christian missions and U.S. Culture when he referred to missionaries as the

‘shadow figures’ of U.S. Religious history.220 Missionaries’ well-intentioned imperialism made them challenging objects of study, Hutchison argued, as they were both too self- sacrificing to breezily condemn, yet undeniably complicit in colonial exploitation and thus also difficult to celebrate. “Too admirable to be treated as villains, yet too obtrusive

217 Robert Priest and Joseph Paul Priest, “‘They see everything, and understand nothing’ Short-Term Mission and Service Learning” Missiology: An International Review (January 2008): 54.

218 Priest et al, “Researching the Short-term Mission Movement,” Missiology: An International Review (October 2006): 433 – 34.

219 Latourette, Missions, 3.

220 Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar and Connie Shemo address this dimension of missions history in their 2009 volume, Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960.

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and self-righteous to be embraced as heroes,” the shadow figure of the missionary was cast within the longer shadow of western expansion.221 Yet, as explorers and narrators of the world beyond national borders, missionaries were also the “chief interpreters of foreign culture for the U.S. public” and deeply influenced Western perceptions of foreigners through their accounts of the mission field.222

This complicated mix of complicity and sacrifice continues to backlight missionary activity, even as it has changed shape for evangelicals in the contemporary period. Like the career missionaries of the 19th and early 20th century with which

Latuourette and Hutchison were concerned, the missionaries in this chapter translate the transnational for domestic audiences in the U.S. However, for evangelical short term missionaries the work of “interpreting foreign culture” and “shaping the American mind” is meant to also rewrite the testimony of the missionaries themselves and, as a result, church culture back home.

Contemporary, short-term missions work from U.S. evangelical congregations are both a continuation of that checkered, transnational history and a departure into new cultural territory that reveals the sexualized, aestheticized and power-laden fantasies of the late capitalist order. Missions historiography and transnational feminist and/or cultural analysis are not intuitive interlocutors, yet the realities of the short-term mission trip abroad, particularly when saturated with the promise of encountering (and reforming)

221 William Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 62.

222 Hutchison, Errand to the World, 1.

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the sex industry require the tools to intervene within both. Missional space in general is a site of production in which ethical engagement with globalization, gender norms, and

U.S. cultures of empire are formed. It is also an analytic of engagement with the transnational that allows U.S. evangelicals to experiment with gender, sexuality, adventure, and the exotic.

“Isn’t it time we admit to ourselves that mission trips are essentially for our benefit?” Lupton asks, one insider to another. “Would it not be more forthright to call our junkets ‘insight trips’ or ‘exchange programs’? Religious tourism would have much more integrity if we simply admitted that we’re off to explore God’s amazing work in the world.”223 The ‘enchanted internationalism’ of missionary allure is understandably dazzling and clearly intended mostly for the missionary themselves. Yet, as McAlister writes, “The longing for enchantment is a multivalent affect: it resists rationalism and claims a willingness to be delighted and swept away. But to be enchanted is also to risk being captivated and captured.”224 What else is swept up in this captivated, delighted longing? The feelings and affects of becoming not only the right kind of missionary, or even Christian, but of becoming the right kind of consumer.

This is animated by the unique role that the captive, fallen woman plays in

Christian theology. Viewing victims of sex trafficking as vehicles for personal transformation is woven into the very fabric of evangelical theology. In other words, it is

223 Robert Lupton, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help, And How to Reverse It (self-published, 2011): 69.

224 McAlister, “Heart,” 881

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not just that repressed evangelicals are drawn to the issue of sex trafficking so that they can finally say the words, “brothel” and “pimp” free from judgment. (Indeed, to applause.) It is specifically the role of the slave to sin, sexual sin, that feels more familiar than foreign in a theology that includes the whore of Babylon, Mary Magdalene and

Rahab, the prostitute who secured the fall of Jericho’s walls for the Israelite army.

Engaging with global issues like sex trafficking weaves the students themselves into the stories of rescue and rehabilitation that animate both the tales of missionary humanitarianism and evangelical theology more broadly. It is also rooted within a broader evangelical critique of inequality and capitalism that scholars outside of religious studies may not be attuned to—inheritors of the left of the right, or “the moral minority” who have moved into the neighborhood on purpose.225

Short-term mission trip participation echoes the missionary possibilities of ages, but a focus on sex trafficking offers a specific way to engage with capitalism and abjection. Consumption is a problem and an aberration but it also offers the solution.

Primarily, as the dominant activity of travel abroad on a short-term trip. Additionally, as a form of literal purchasing in service of the freedom of the market’s victims. To say that the Rahab’s Rope shop is a ministry site in the U.S. moves beyond simply designating a store in which evangelical items are for sale. It is to also nominate consumption as a possibility of evangelism and reform, in this case sharing the news of sex trafficking and rescue through sales of business-as-mission enterprises like Sari Bari. Another business- as-mission store offers the following promise, “Wear your “Rescue Her” bracelet,

225 See David Swartz’s work, as mentioned above.

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wristband, or shirt. Tell everyone that asks about it that you are helping fight human trafficking and they can help too!”226 Consumption—of travel or products—offers a sense of self, here, too.227

The space of the evangelical left includes both the focused critique of capitalism and its faithful resurrection through business-as-missions. The short-term mission trip provides the space, ideologically and literally, upon which that tension can be resolved.

Through the right kind of consumption, namely the consumption of cosmopolitan community and aesthetic re-investment in the future of rescue, the shopper and traveler are made the same promises. Indeed, they function in nearly the same way: as missionaries to the West, charged with converting believers back to the truth of the

Gospel and away from the American Dream, though it is a conversion they can still mostly purchase.

Descriptions of the popularity of travel clubs and the cocktail of reformed masculinity that required white decorum as well as virile, un-civilized strength characterize the gendered negotiations with empire at the turn of the nineteenth century that produced a conflicted white America of international consumers and national gatekeepers. Kristin L. Hoganson writes, in Consumer’s Imperium: The Global

Production of American Domesticity, “Indeed, the culture of travel was a component of imperial culture, for an important way that empire came home was in the touristic guise.

The culture of travel spun the economic, military, and political power of the United States

226 “Get Involved” Rescue Her.

227 Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital is useful to map on to affective entrepreneurship.

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and its European models as a matter of mobility and pleasure.”228 However, the clubs’ participants considered this international imaginative consumption to be educational, intentional study in service of the “uplift” of oppressed women around the world.229

This question of a subject’s self-perception is critical too for missionary activity, as the distance between exploitation and education is collapsed in the short-term mission trip.

Kaplan writes, “Domestic in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing, and the conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery.” This domesticity, Kaplan continues, “not only monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage but also regulates traces of the savage within itself.”230 Even the most interior of national spaces – the home, the gendered and sexualized self, childhood – is endangered by the looming threat of imbalance between civilization and savagery. This regulation is especially critical when taken alongside the examples of white, elite America’s enchantment with savagery. As Hoganson writes, they learned to consume the rest of the world, learning to regard others as service providers,

“if only by providing the service of spectacle.”231

How has the sex industry come to be a site of personal transformation for western evangelicals, both in fantasy and in physical contact? In part, it is through the adventure of global longing, to see and to buy, to consume and to join. In the evangelical space of

228 Hoganson, Imperium, 183.

229 Hoganson, Imperium, 189.

230 Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” Journal of American Literature 77, no. 3 (September 1998): 582.

231 Hoganson, Imperium, 199.

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business-as-missions, in particular, we see the collision of these longings into one—the corrected, occasionally shamed, but ultimately humble western believer willing to be changed by God on the terrain of the non-Western crisis (and specifically, on the body of the non-western woman.)

I argue that it has to do with the sexual politics of evangelical theology, where entrapment and contagion are both metaphors for sin, and in which freedom has a multitude of both personal and communal meanings. Not only is sex trafficking a “sexy topic,” as evangelicals will self-deprecatingly (and self aware-ly) demean, but it is a topic in which the tangle of free market ideology, sexual fantasy and a theology of captivity and rescue meet.

This chapter argues for the centrality of encounter—the actual collision of short- term missionaries and the world they are sent to experience and alter. It also nominates consumption as a space of encounter, if abbreviated. Affective entrepreneurship generates both a critique and a baptism of global capitalism. Purchasing the products that rescued sex trafficking victims (and Global Urban Trek participants) made at Sari Bari, or

Freeset, or through the shops at Destiny Rescue, Rescue Her or Rahab’s Rope, offers an encounter with sex trafficking as well as (and perhaps more importantly) an encounter with others within the church who do not yet know about the scriptural basis for missions or the violations of sex trafficking—they are the true mission field.

The Transnational Woman, the Paradigmatic Christian

In a chapter titled, “Fighting Persecution and Human Trafficking,” Michael

Horowitz reflects, “The explosive global spread of Christianity has made the

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paradigmatic Christian a poor and brown third-world female.”232 While it is true that the demographics of Christianity around the world confirm rising numbers in the Global

South, what is more significant here is the work that the idea of a “poor, brown” woman does in terms of setting the global stage in which trafficking is key. The poor, brown third world female is precisely the target of evangelical concern in mission trips that are geared toward bringing U.S. evangelicals into contact with sex trafficking. Though referring to feminist, rather than evangelical, attention, Chandra Mohanty’s critique of the monolithic

“third world woman” is useful here. She about “the production of the ‘Third World

Woman’ as a singular monolithic subject,” and offers a concept of colonization that is

“predominantly discursive, focusing on a certain mode of appropriation and codification of ‘scholarship’ and ‘knowledge’ about women in the third world.”233 The idea of the global, and the idea of need, are woven together in the image of the woman abroad whose rescue could be facilitated, at least in part, by travel like the Destiny Rescue or

InterVarsity trips.

This draws upon missionary and humanitarian legacies of desiring to help others abroad with a substantial distance of power, but it also layers upon that the longings and desires of a certain kind of encounter with both beauty and ugliness abroad. In Promises,

Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature, Adam Phillips asks what is being

232 Michael Horowitz, “Fighting Persecution and Human Trafficking” in Creating the Better Hour: Lessons from William Wilberforce. Ed. Stetson, Chuck. (Macon: Stroud and Hall Publishers, 2007): 263.

233 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Feminist Review, no. 30 (Autumn, 1988): 61-88.

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taken when we take care of another person? The whole notion of helping people, Phillips argues, is one of America’s favorite cover-stories for the moral complexity of exchange.234 In the exchange of bodies and commodities in the short term trips and souvenirs of this chapter, I argue that “what is taken” is what is taken away: products, photos, and promises of transformation that beautify life at home.

Narratives of sex trafficking, and their role in inspiring and shaping evangelical mission trips, offer guideposts for the navigation of such morally complex terrain.

Narrative devices of need and rescue offer a cover story of their own, while inviting evangelicals into the aesthetic enchantment and adventure of international care. Like most religious practices, it is a project of storytelling, one that relies on imagining the space of the ‘global’ as uniquely inviting and strangely dangerous simultaneously.

Indeed, this mix of longings is part of what marks and defines evangelicalism in the contemporary moment. As Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe note in A Short History of

Global

Evangelicalism, evangelical Christianity is neither a particular ethnicity nor ecclesiology, but is a historical convergence of convictions which serve to link personal and local experience with a global mission.235

The figure of the third world trafficking victim, poor and brown and female, as the paradigmatic Christian, and beckoning U.S. evangelicals abroad, combines the

234 Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: Basic Books, 2002): xi.

235 Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe, A Short History on Global Evangelism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 270.

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transnational logic of the exotic with the humanitarian imperative to rescue. As Leela

Fernandes argues, visions of the foreign woman as a victim abroad continues to preoccupy nationalist imaginations in the United States, for feminists (as Fernandes discusses) as well as for evangelicals.236 Often, they are spoken for. In evangelical narratives of sex trafficking where women are named and even given the microphone at times, speaking at IJM fundraisers or in interviews for Unearthed, they serve as a paradoxical subject and stage simultaneously. She invites the viewer to transform through her. “Subaltern speech is of necessity a postcolonial encounter,” as Cynthia Wood reminds us, and even when characterized as uniquely real, authentic and as an agent of change (indeed, one able to choose to convert and to choose to leave sex work) the power of the neocolonial encounter to shape the imaginations of both the missionary and “the colonized” goes largely unexamined by evangelicals.237 This critique of feminist discourse understandably remains concerned with secular rhetoric of rights and rescue.

Elora Chowdhury notes, “global feminism using a universal human rights paradigm constructs for itself the role of the heroic savior of women in non-western societies.”238

In other words, transnational attention of evangelical America is racialized, with the example of the sex industry being one of the most important. Purity and

236 Leela Fernandes, Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, Power (New York: NYU Press: 2013).

237 Cynthia Wood, “Authorizing Gender and Development: ‘Third World Women,’ Native Informants, and Speaking Nearby” Nepantla: Views from South 2, no. 3 (2001): 435. See also Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999)

238 Elora Chowdhury, “Locating Global Feminisms Elsewhere: Braiding US Women of Color and Transnational Feminisms” Cultural Dynamics 21, no. 1: 51.

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contamination dominate the involvement between sex workers and evangelicals, and even when not explicitly a matter of white missionaries and brown bodies in the mission field, the terms of the exotic/abject/captive are racially coded, and their rescue/saving has a whiteness to it that speaks to a specific religious perspective but also echoes larger patterns of humanitarian outreach and international ethics of need, harm, care. Even this engagement with race, fraught and sexualized, has an element of adventure for evangelicals from churches in the U.S. that are inherently embedded in a culture of white supremacy and the legacy of chattel slavery. In this way, engagement with the sex industry through a rubric of abolition and discourse of “modern day slavery” offers a fantasy of doing the work of racial reconciliation (or even historical examination of the transatlantic slave trade) without any messy engagements with histories of slavery in the

United States and Christianity, or engaging with modern racial politics, like the Black

Lives Matter campaign. Whereas those can seem overtly political, it can appear neutral to engage with the “new abolitionism” abroad.239

The work of the sex trafficking narrative turns on the malleability of the foreign body to operate however it is needed in evangelical discourse, signaling a range of transnational vulnerabilities from post-Soviet whiteness to Cambodian childhood, as chapter one explores. Even when not explicitly described through racial cues, the

239 That being said, apolitical is not necessarily the goal either. The “aura” of the political is welcome for most of these conversations: of engaging slavery, of intervention in real issues, with the complexity and potential push back they would get if they took their vision of rescue to Americans who are racialized and perhaps in need, but who would not tolerate being positioned as abject. So, in some cases, it isn’t exactly that evangelicals are shying away from the apolitical, but really from the controversial

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discourse of “modern day slavery” among western churches is a self-consciously referential term that includes race without naming it within the body of each sex trafficking victim and sex worker. This malleability is also what allows the figure of the foreign (redeemed and fallen) prostitute to resolve the tension posed between princess culture and purity culture within evangelicalism, she is a canvas upon which fantasies of the foreign and promises of rescue are projected. Scholars have written about evangelical attitudes toward both purity and virginity and toward princess culture and femininity within evangelicalism.240 Additionally, scholars have written about the transnational, paternalistic gaze toward sex workers.241 Taken together, it becomes clear that what might appear to be a fissure in logic is actually resolved by the issue of sex trafficking, through a view of the sex industry in which fallen women beckon for foreign rescue.242

Contemporary scholarship on the nation and on citizenship within feminist theory, then, draws upon this trajectory by examining the border crossing and biopolitical hybridity of globalized encounter. The added analytics of temporality and concern for neoliberal expansion incorporate new dimensions to this scholarship — notably, focusing

240 See work by Amy DeRogatis, Sara Moslener, Tanya Erzen, Kristen Luker, Christine Gardener, R. Marie Griffith

241 See work by Jo Doezema, Ronald Weitzer, Julia O’Connell Davidson, Wendy Chapkis, Gretchen Soderlund, Emma Grant, Vanessa E. Munro, Annette Lansink, Molly Dragiewicz, Janie A. Chuang, Edith Kinney, Rutvica Andrijasevic, Yvonne Zimmerman, Alicia Peters, Elizabeth Bernstein, Wendy Hesford, and others

242 It would appear that the central images of Christian womanhood, at least in the United States, are about princesses. God rescues, or a prince rescues, but it is a princess in a tower that sets the bar for feminine imagining. I argue, instead, that it is actually the image of the prostitute, redeemed and rescued, to which Christian notions of femininity are most deeply tied.

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on movement or mobility and kinship or intimacy — while maintaining Gloria

Anzaldua’s stance on the productivity of the margins and heeding Mohanty and Gayatri

Spivak’s warnings that projecting subjection onto the other is complicity in the colonial project that continue to unfold in uneven hiccups across the globe. For example, when

Grewal highlights the India-bound Barbie in her colorful sari and red bindi she notes the assemblage of fantasies and desires about transnational mobility of people and products represented in that plastic.

The borders of the nation are dismantled and reconstructed through the transnational exchange of bodies, products, and ideological commitments. Gayatri

Gopinath terms the third world woman as an impossible subject in Impossible Desires, work that is similarly situated in the intersection of gender, transnationalism and racial identity. Gopinath argues that the feminine in the global south poses a moment of undone logic, where the techniques of neoliberal regulation and the concerns of global capital confront the myths of western charity and globalization’s beneficence. These come together in Kolkata’s freedom businesses, where rescue is embroidered into the products for sale.

Ultimately, this is a set of promises that the narrative imaginings and pleasures of the evangelical fight against sex trafficking offers — that, at the end of the day, this fight is meant to rescue the audience, meant to make their lives more exciting, beautiful, meaningful, and adventurous, or even risky. By way of explanation to the question of whether or not freedom business employees are encouraged to convert to Christianity, one of the missionary staff responded, “Many convert on their own, just because being

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near the truth transforms them.”243 In truth, it is the western evangelical visitors who are longing to be transformed through proximity to something that seems more real abroad.

The Global

Rather than simply sending missionaries to evangelize non-believers, evangelicals increasingly include concern for global issues like HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, or poverty in their vision of mission work abroad. Such international attachment offers a collision of mission investment and humanitarian engagement, but it also promises the kind of life- changing adventure that inspires and transforms western evangelical faith. On the Trek,

McAlister’s concept of enchanted internationalism, which promises meaningful religious work laced with hopes for solidarity and the thrill of exploration, is both harnessed and tested.244

Bessenecker developed the idea for the Trek in 1999 while serving as director of

InterVarsity’s Short Term Mission Programs. InterVarsity, an American Christian

Fellowship and a member of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, already had a type of mission trip called Global Projects as well as Urbana, a missions conference. However, neither one had the longer term focus on urban poverty that

Bessenecker had in mind for the Trek.245 In his monograph The New Friars: The

Emerging Movement Serving the World’s Poor, Bessenecker writes, “I began to dream

243 Interview with Sari Bari director, 7/26/2015

244 McAlister 2008, 873

245 Urbana is one of the largest student missions conferences in the world and is held every three years, started in 1946.

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about what it might be like to set up experiences for students to live and learn in slum communities during their summer break.”246 During the first summer of Trek in 2001, they sent teams to Mexico City, Manila, Kolkata, Cairo, Nairobi, and Bangkok.247 From its inception, it was designed to offer students not simply a summer away but a glimpse into longer term service commitments. As Bessenecker explains in the Trek reader,

The Trek is essentially about opening up an opportunity for God to call some of us to go and spend our lives among the poor as his couriers of hope. This summer we may simply be able to offer a cup of cold water to those in need. We may also have the privilege of solidarity with the poor. But most importantly, we can lean into Christ as he speaks to us on how he wants us to spend the remainder of our lives. Each summer about 30-40% of the participants respond by pledging at least two years to serve the urban poor. Many will go on to spend their lives among them…pray for the mobilization of 1000 Mother Teresas. Perhaps you are one of them!248

Six weeks of the summer in a slum community offers evangelical college students a crash course in globalization. Everyday life involves living with a local family, when possible, and working with a local church or NGO. For the most part, students are not allowed to take photographs, go shopping, or call/write home. Instead, their lives are meant to echo the monastic call, at least on some level, and time is spent getting to know their new neighborhood, focusing on their personal relationship with their faith, or in time with their director and the rest of their team learning more about issues that plague the urban

246 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 78.

247 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 80.

248 Bessenecker, Trek Reader.

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poor. In Bangkok, Manila, Kolkata, and Phnom Penh, four past Trek locations, this includes engaging with the fight against sex trafficking.

Unlike the Destiny Rescue trips, which (however casually) acknowledged the

“beautiful scenery” and unique sensations of foreign “flavors, fragrances and sounds,”

Trek participants are placed in spaces of abjection, slums, on purpose. “Shop, laugh, and encounter the Lord in the beauty of His justice and mercy,” offered the Destiny Rescue trip, while Trek rules restrict students’ use of cameras, cell phones, and money. Though these encompass, together, a spectrum of relationships to abjection, I argue that these two trips both offer a window into a kind of exchange of foreign beauty and domestic dullness. Bringing Sari Bari into the analysis clarifies this for the Trek, where even though students are not invited to have quite as much fun as the Destiny Rescue trip advertises, there are still beautiful products for sale, many of which they bring back as gifts to the donors who sponsored their trip.

The narrative pleasures of evangelical missionary commitment illuminate the always-present storylines of the imperial imaginary: that the foreign is meant to be tamed and dominated, rescued and rehabilitated, but also that it presents a place in which the

Westerner can go to be tested, revived, re-animated. In fact, part of what the Trek speaks to is the adventure of imperial imaginings. This, too, is imagined as a racialized sense of the ‘global’ — one in which the ‘abject’ and the ‘exotic’ constitute the space of transformation.249

249 It is useful here to consider Darieck Scott’s work on abjection and blackness, despite obvious differences in subject and scope. Scott utilizes the history of white supremacy and physical, psychological and psychic violence against blackness, black masculinity,

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Obvious outsiders wary of accidentally coming across as tourists, or in Robert

Lupton’s terms “vacationaries,” Trek participants face the challenge of engaging a forbidden world of sin with the posture of a missionary and the presence of a neighbor.250

As a missionary with Word Made Flesh, one of the mission organizations that

Bessenecker highlights in The New Friars, Heather Coaster navigated this boundary with women she had come to know in a local brothel.251 “[Coaster] attached herself to the women whose inextricable poverty has pushed them into the sex industry,” according to

Bessenecker, though originally only serving for four months in the field, Coaster eventually returned full-time.252 In the interim, Coaster offered the following, which

Bessenecker included as a cut-away in The New Friars, required reading for all Trek participants.

There’s not much more I can do, not tonight. And lucky for me, I don’t have to. I have the unfathomable luxury of walking away, of signing off, of saying good night. While my conversations are coming to very neat, concise closes, she’s tucking her kids in, putting her shoes on and taking the rest off. The red glow of her night is on and she’s tossed from one set of dirty hands to another. and the black body to work (with and through) a theory of blackness-as-abjection. See also: Kathryn Bond Stockton who explores black and queer debasement in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: When “Black” Meets “Queer” (2006); Robert Reid-Pharr’s Black Gay Man: Essays (2001); Gary in Your Pocket: The Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher (1996)

250 Lupton, Toxic, 21.

251 Though Coaster was stationed in Bolivia with WMF, TNF includes multiple excerpts with her writing (one of which is the afterword to the book) making her voice a clear choice within the trek leadership as applicable across geographic locations. WMF is also the org. that launched Sari Bari, which I talk about more later in this chapter, in Kolkata.

252 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 61.

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There are rules in place, rules against going without protection, rules against sexual violence. But once her door is closed, the only rule is his desire. She only knows that tomorrow her kids will again be hungry, and this is the cost of her love for them. It matters tonight, because there are still six hours until morning. And while we can afford those six hours, she cannot. If all I have to offer her is conversation, awareness, words, then yes, I will give the rest of my life to the talk. But it’s not. It can’t be. It’s not all I have and it’s not enough.253

The woman Coaster is describing is never named, and certainly the details of her night in

Coaster’s fantasy are meant to stir the reader with feelings of enchanted internationalism and vacationary anxiety akin to those aroused by the prayer walk through the red light district. Coaster implies a skepticism about the systems of sex work, even in places where there are, as she says, “rules in place.” Yet, the content of Coaster’s narrative is ultimately less about the woman in the brothel, tossed from “one set of dirty hands to another.” Coaster’s concern is apparent, and the object of that concern is most obviously the “he” behind his (ruling) desire, capable of violence and watched by no one. However, her guilt is the implicit other predator in this story, and, when read as a confession, is the only one of which the reader can be sure. The “unfathomable luxury” of going to sleep, indeed of going home at all, is what Coaster is truly sickened by as she reflects on her ideas (informed by experiences in the field, almost certainly, yet still imagined in this narrative of tortured testimony.) The response of talk, conversation, awareness, words— the tools of testimony and storytelling—leaves Coaster bereft and grieving, not just for the women she knows (and those she imagines) she has left behind in a brothel, but for herself.

253 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 62.

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In an afterword, also written by Coaster writes, “We are asked to carry light, to hold the hand of one of his beloved, to tell her she is remembered.”254 In what almost becomes a sexual narrative of spiritual consolation, Coaster continues, “He remembers her. He comes for her, to her, into the darkest of nights, into her darkest of rooms. He stands with her there and holds her hand. See, your savior comes.” She concludes by quoting Wendell Berry, a Christian poet, “‘It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.’”255

Although presumably upon her long-term return to the mission field Coaster did share news like this with sex workers abroad, this news is primarily a comfort not to the beloved in the brothel but to the readers of The New Friars, where writing appears. The thought of being not just needed, but remembered, is the call to service designed to link the harm of sex trafficking with the possibility of God’s rescue. Everyone is trapped by sin and alienated from God, and the promise of drawing near to the desperate is that they will reveal grace to you, not the other way around. The hopelessness of Coaster’s confession comes with the declaration, “There’s not much more I can do, not tonight.”

She is hoping that this is not the whole truth, and by the end of the passage of course it is not, but it is meant to convince Trek participants that there is also more they can do, tonight and in their lives.

It is not accidental that Coaster’s reflection on sex trafficking features prominently in Bessenecker’s text (and thus in Trek training.) While the monograph

254 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 175.

255 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 175.

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examines arrange of missionary organizations, portrays brief biographies of Catholic saints, critiques the American dream and executes Biblical exegesis, sex trafficking holds a unique position in the call to conscience within the book and within evangelicalism more broadly. Bessenecker writes, “Drug addiction, emotional resignation, greed, child prostitution, sweatshops—these are things dreamed up in hell, and they drive the feelings of despair that rule a slum.”256 Yet, of these despairing slum realities only Coaster’s notes on sex trafficking are included as an afterword to the text.

An unspoken element of both Bessenecker’s broader text and Coaster’s reflections on the brothel have to do with race. The suffering woman that beckons to Trek participants via Coaster is nameless, echoing Mohanty’s composite, singular ‘third world woman,’ whose suffering is homogenous across time, space and (non-western) culture.

Though the task of missionary here becomes to convey the reality that God has

“remembered” her, readers do not even have the chance.

The saving hero in evangelical narration is not exactly the figure of the global feminist, though some of its cosmopolitan longings may factor into the ‘first world good girl’ characterization that Bernstein offers of missionaries like Coaster. Crucially, the unique role of the suffering non-Western woman, and “the red glow” of her long night, also does the work of saving. Hasn’t she offered Coaster an opportunity to experience

God’s remembrance in a way that she could not with just “talk”? Far from arguing that the subjects of such evangelical, parafeminist romanticizing are a kind of secret, authentic agent in the story of renewal and rescue, what this shows us is both that the narrative of

256 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 57.

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transformation is designed to entice the Western. The woman in crisis is the mode of transformation and operate as a terrain upon which God’s rescuing work unfolds, for her but also, as Coaster illustrates, for you.

It is useful to read the logic of the Trek alongside this set of questions about possibility and spaces of death. As I will elaborate further below, the Trek demonstrates evangelical division between ideologies of race and ideologies of blackness, where the global operates as a racialized other to be understood and relationship-ed, while the abject and the slum constitutes a space of danger and despair in which one is to be tested and transformed. The short term mission trip in general, and the Trek in particular, offers a logic from which abjection is already presumed to be generative, offering the visitor the exotic to consume. The slum, in Trek logic, is a space of unique possibility constituted by its despairing and violent danger. The positioning of the global has a subterranean racial framing. Kolkata is a place of testing, in large part because it represents the racial discord of the foreign. This is part of what is for sale in the affective economy.

Missionary Encounter and Critique

The Trek plunges students into poverty, if only temporarily. In this sense, it is designed to be “incarnational,” a theological and logistical imperative to serve from within a community of need rather than as just a visitor. In a book called Toxic Charity:

How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse it), Robert

Lupton reflects on this strategy for evangelical engagement with the poor as a kind of handbook for churches and particularly, for missions. Lupton writes, “If trust is essential

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for building relationships and making enterprises run effectively, then we have to find a way for outsiders to become insiders.”257 Ultimately, the quest to become an insider is what the Trek embodies.

Incarnation, here, refers to the birth of Jesus. Describing Catholic, monastic orders, Bessenecker writes, “They took their cues from God, who, rather than saving humanity by asking us to become like him, chose instead to become like us. The incarnation of God in the man of Jesus Christ served as the foundational missiology and modus operandi of the old orders.”258 Theologically, this speaks to the core belief of evangelical Christianity: that Jesus was not only divine, but God, choosing to dwell on earth as human. To really reach humanity then, God went to where the people were and lived among them. Within this theology, the process of salvation, where Jesus’ death and resurrection rescues believers from their sin, is particularly meaningful because it depicts

God suffering as humans could suffer, and overcoming that suffering with the promise that humans can and will overcome suffering as well. In other words, God reached humanity by “dwelling” on Earth, as human.

Not only that, but God chose to dwell within the suffering poor. “God’s penchant for throwing in his lot with the poor showed up in its purest form in first-century

Palestine when the cries of another hungry mouth born into poverty pierced the ears of a young couple named Mary and Joseph.”259 Bessenecker, and the evangelical theology

257 Lupton, Toxic, 62.

258 Bessenecker, Trek Reader.

259 Bessenecker, Scott. The New Friars, 57.

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upon which he is drawing, see this as the crucial logic for belief and for missions— relocating, away from safety nets and privilege and into a community of danger and darkness echoes the moves of God. (The power dynamic of this metaphor is not accidental.) Bessenecker continues, “Why on earth would God choose to be born among a defeated people in a backwoods town under a shadow of dishonor through a dirt-poor, unwed teenager? Solidarity, that’s why.”260 The categories of “poor” and “unwed,” even of “dishonor” and “defeated,” remain intact (their imagined cohesion as the anti-West is actually crucial) but evangelicals are called to disrupt the presumed pattern of remaining safely ensconced in wealthy suburban churches. This is a glimpse into Monastic orders that seek “to be the gospel by becoming part of the communities of dispossessed.”261

Internally, this conversation allows western evangelicals to critique their cultural heritage. This requires “turning one’s back on the ‘American Dream’ and a life of conspicuous consumption, and turning toward God’s dream of a life of simplicity and compassion toward society’s rejects.”262 U.S. Christianity in particular is under fire in this logic, for producing “a church who had succumbed to the very self-absorption it was commissioned to combat.”263

Bessenecker’s title, The New Friars, reveals this critique as a solution in the form of a new kind of monastic movement, where Christians give up their piece of American

260 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 59.

261 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 20.

262 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 13.

263 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 22.

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capitalism and deliberately move to places of need. These are the new friars, missionaries like Coaster whose sending organization, Word Made Flesh, speaks to the theological process and imperative of the incarnation. “The new friars have been born out of a reaction to spiritual flabbiness in the broader church and a tendency to assimilate into a corrupt, power-hungry world.”264 By arriving in the urban slums, Trek participants hope to experience God in a way that the comfort of college in the West obscures. “When God voted with his birth, he voted for the poor.”265

In The New Friars, Bessenecker writes, “I believe we are at the front edge of another missional, monastic-like order made up of women and men, many of whom are in their twenties and thirties, burning with a passion to serve the destitute in slum communities of the developing world—not from a position of power but alongside them, living in the same makeshift housing, breathing the same sewage-tainted air, subject to the same government bulldozers that threaten to raze their communities. They are new friars, flying just below our radar because they have not come under any single denominational or suprachurch banner.”266 This, he acknowledges, is “an extremely potent but admittedly small phenomenon.”267 Yet, to leave it unexamined is to miss a fundamental shift in evangelical articulations of who the insiders and outsiders are today.

264 Ibid

265 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 60.

266 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 16.

267 Referring to Shane Claiborne & others, Bessenecker writes, “The New Monasticism, as it is being called, often consists of households of Christian men and women planed in dying inner city communities within their home country, attempting to live the Christian

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Despite the lack of denominational or church organizing, the potent phenomenon of evangelical critique of capitalism reaches beyond the members of New Monastic communities or participants on the Trek. In fact, though The New Friars consciously depicts those whose incarnational commitments move them to the slums, the same animating logic is pervasive in evangelical texts on reviving churches, reforming missions and re-engaging with youth and/ those who have left the church. In Toxic

Charity, Lupton shares his church’s strategy of “re-neighboring,” in which “scores of dedicated young (and not so young) visionaries have moved into our target neighborhoods to become neighbors alongside long-time residents who have endured years of neglect.”268 Toxic Charity is part of this genre of Christian writing, ultimately guiding churches to reframe their relationship with need, in part by re-positioning themselves as ‘insiders’ outside of the safety of the suburbs. Lupton and others note that such a project is rife with complication, but ultimately only by re-neighboring, and incarnationally being near to poverty, is there any hope of evangelical solidarity. In a similar text, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the

Poor…and Yourself, the authors summarize the common logic behind such a commitment, stating “the coexistence of agonizing poverty and unprecedented wealth—

ideal among their neighbors, drawing the lost, poor and broken to themselves. They resemble more the cloistered order. The new friars, on the other hand, have something of the spirit of mission-driven monks and nuns in them, leaving their mother country and moving to those parts of the world where little is known about Jesus.” Bessenecker, Scott. The New Friars, 22

268 Lupton, Toxic Charity, 156.

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even just within the household of faith—is an affront to the gospel.”269 Likewise,

Bessenecker notes in The New Friars, “in the new monasticism the inner-city poor and homeless find freedom from the pains of want, and the middle class and rich find freedom from the dangers of excess.”270 There is a promise for the believers who follow, of course, but it is not simply to feel better. Or if it is, it is through a kind of ritual forsaking of what has made their world, including their faith world, cohere in the west.

“We’re trained for an individualistic existence with self at the center,”

Bessenecker explains, “especially for those of us in white American culture who grew up in suburban, single-family dwellings, separate from our extended family, encountering neighbors only at a superficial level. The new monasticism, as it is being called, is partly a reaction to the self-absorbed life of material accumulation, career obsession and amusement fixation that is promoted in the West and that is now being exported around the world as a picture of ‘the good life.’”271 This is neither a fitting end to the political work of the powerful, conservative Christian leaders of the 70s and 80s, nor is it a complete departure from an evangelical tradition that has had strands of socialism and the social gospel woven into it since the days of the Jesus Movement. Yet, as the Biblical passages concerning poverty are reread in the face of contemporary globalization and staggering inequality, this missional movement within evangelicalism has developed an

269 Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009).

270 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 188.

271 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 187.

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urgent and unique specificity. Believers are to follow God’s call into the broken places of the world and prepare—hope—to be broken themselves, as missionaries and in repentance for a global order that is a spiritual and moral disaster to a gospel story started by refugees.

In a footnote to an article about evangelical investment in the missions market,

Elizabeth Bernstein writes, “Shane Claiborne and Brian McLaren, popular figures on the progressive evangelical speaker circuit, constitute important exceptions to this trend in highlighting the political-economic underpinnings of injustice.”272 In fact, these are not the exceptional figures they appear to be to her, but represent a large swath of evangelicals. Claiborne, in fact, is one of the most popular leaders of the New Monastic movement, and his community in Philadelphia, The Simple Way, has become a model for other commune-style living arrangements for evangelical believers seeking solace from capitalist Christianity in the form of “re-neighboring” together, where finances, ministry duties, neighborhood activism and chores are all shared. Describing their communities,

Bessenecker notes, “Instead of the freedom of private ownership they want freedom from private ownership and the chains that come with it.”273

Claiborne has helped to write a number of foundational pieces for the movement, one of which was the popular text Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals, a combination of exegetical readings, autobiographical testimony and artistic scrapbook.

The primary purpose of the book, though, echoes the call of the Trek. It is a tool of

272 Ibid.

273 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 171.

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evangelism, to be sure, but the object of conversion is hardly non-Christian readers (if there are any.) Instead, the “ordinary radicals” who Claiborne wants to reach are

Christians in the United States who grew up in what he now thinks of as a false version of church, where sanctuaries are adorned with American flags and conservative politics are unquestioningly considered moral. The trouble and promise of such a position is that

Claiborne, like Bessenecker, remains an evangelical for whom the Bible matters quite literally. It is simply that they are including passages that discuss treatment of the poor. In a section of Jesus for President titled, “When the Empire Got Baptized,” Claiborne asks,

“What was so evil about Sodom?” He then goes on to quote Ezekiel, from which we read,

“‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.’ (Ezek. 16:49)”

Claiborne concludes, “That’s not what we learned in Sunday school.”274 Here we see both the rootedness to scripture and the departure from tradition that this theology offers.

In many ways Claiborne and Bessenecker are still conservative Christians. Most members of the new monasticism or the new friars remain against abortion and skeptical of promises of tolerance or a benevolent and distant diversity. However, “pro-life” commitments are much more likely to include rallying against the death penalty, fighting global poverty and other elements of “a consistent ethic of human life.” (One of the many new monastic commitments inspired by the old monastics, and Catholicism in general.)

Likewise, in place of a tolerant, individualistic society where everyone is free to do what

274 Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008): 187.

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they want without much interference from others, here the evangelical ideal is a messy, relationship-laden community where everything (from confession of sin to trash duty) is shared. “Reject anything that breeds the oppression of others,” Bessenecker leaves readers with at the end of The New Friars, including America.275 Why not leave?

In the collision of short term mission trips and sex trafficking outreach the theology and logic of evangelical missions reveals its contemporary complications. The mission field is viewed as a space of promise, transformation and adventure, particularly in its most abject and dangerous incarnation: the slum, the brothel, the site of modern slavery. Missionaries can be tested here as believers, but also as consumers intending to offer the world back home the true message of their testifying transformation. It is the consumption of evangelical normalcy that constitute the surest target of change.

275 Bessenecker, The New Friars, 181.

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Conclusion

In his introduction to Alain Grosrichard’s 1979 The Sultan’s Court: European

Fantasies of the East, Mladen Dolar describes the productivity of harem fantasies in

Grosrichard’s account of 17th and 18th century literature. “The despot’s copulation with an endless number of women,” Dolar writes, “speaks to the boundless excess that characterized Western perceptions of eastern sexuality and the fantasies of imagining captive women.” The significance of the time period on which Grosrichard focuses has tremendous significance for Dolar because of the emergence of these fantasies of the foreign alongside the Enlightenment. Dolar continues, “It is the time when the basic social and political structures of modernity were laid down and elaborated, along with its basic forms of subjectivity.” What this fantasy illuminates is the reliance of modernity on an economy of pleasure, particularly an imagined interior world of foreign women in bondage.276 Leading enlightenment figures were constructing a fantastic other to counterpose their project of a rationality-based society, both of which relied upon ideologies of sexuality. Like Edward Said’s Orientalism, Grosrichard helped to theorize what established the exotic and the distant in the minds of Western audiences and readers. Fantasies of harems, prostitutes, and sex marked the other.

Evangelical attention to sex trafficking is its own identity-making boundary that relies upon an idea of foreign women in bondage, and imagining captivity performs its own identity-securing work for the subjects of this dissertation. However, evangelical narratives of sex trafficking also collapse the very space that such distinctions create,

276 Mladen Dolar, “Introduction” in Alain Grosrichard’s 1979 The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East (New York: Verso Press, 1998): xi.

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inserting sex trafficking victims into the world of evangelical sex practices and faith journeys as promises of transformative encounter or as stumbling blocks of sexual sin.

The mechanisms by which evangelical ideas of race and sex trafficking come together to play this role in shaping, upholding, and ultimately disciplining a vision of

“home” and a threat of “abroad” were the product of the unique historical moment of the post-Cold War period. This idea of threat is rooted in a framing of violence that specifically creates the idea of a non-western woman in crisis, the third world woman, vulnerable and in need of rescue. Yet, it is not her rescue that any of these examples are ultimately able to guarantee. Rather, what they can offer is a promise that through engagement with narratives of sex trafficking, evangelicals will be transformed through their encounter.

In these chapters, I have sought to establish that a reading of evangelical narratives of sex trafficking that characterizes them as merely voyeuristic or purely altruistic will miss the mark. In these chapters, I argue that parallel slippages are at work across the spectrum of evangelical engagement with sex trafficking, from narratives of need that conscript readers in the work of rescue to explorations and adventures that beckon travelers and missionaries to go abroad. Within these evangelical narratives of sex trafficking, the articulated target is always, of course, rescue for an understood category of foreign women and girls, held captive in the sex industry. When soliciting donations, when encouraging awareness-raising campaigns, when promoting cultural products, or inviting on trips as missionaries, the focus on sex trafficking offers evangelical audiences a way to engage with urgency. Victims are captive, you must participate in their rescue. It is political, in that the fight against sex trafficking has

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mobilized evangelicals to write elected officials, form NGOs, become advocates, and testify. Yet, it is also neutral. Sex trafficking offers the affective umbrella of repulsing the left and the right in nearly equal measure. Located abroad, rather than in the mess of domestic politics about sex work, the abstraction of global space makes a discussion about sex distant and foreign.

These chapters have parsed the various ways that race is articulated and used to promise rescue to evangelical audiences, translating global need into domestic frameworks of sexuality and faith. Indeed, I argue that within evangelical narratives of sex trafficking, racialized bodies in foreign space are coded as exotic, dangerous, and vulnerable, offering a testing ground for evangelical change – the foreign body constitutes the terrain of transformation itself. Across the spectrum of evangelical cultural products about sex trafficking, this terrain is imagined and understood in distinct ways, with the dynamics of race function slightly differently, though in related ways, sometimes signifying innocence or brutality, sometimes indicating a foreign space of danger, and sometimes promising an enticing engagement with fantasies of the exotic, sensual, and authentic that are imagined to exist uniquely abroad. Race operates within this set of narratives as a productive force, separating spaces into domestic and foreign, safe and dangerous, boring and exotic.

In the first chapter, I looked at International Justice Mission, and introduced the concept of “missionary humanitarianism” to articulate work that combines spiritual motivations present in mission work with the practical goals of offering humanitarian and human rights assistance. Through close readings of IJM texts, this chapter clarified the role that narratives of sex trafficking play as a mechanism for reanimating lapsed or

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bored faith for U.S. evangelicals. Here the IJM slogan, “the rescued becomes the rescuer,” offered a critical, if unintended, insight into this promise as well as my larger argument, by inadvertently implying that IJM’s rescued victims themselves offer a form of rescue to the restless readers of IJM texts. I demonstrated that IJM’s evangelical audiences are promised a transformation, a revival, of their own as they join in the fight against sex trafficking as supporters, readers, and prayer partners with IJM’s work.

Bored, restless, or dry faith practices in the u.S. are animated by the urgency, need, and action abroad. Even if just by reading IJM texts and donating to the cause, the narrative of this chapter is that engaging with the fight against sex trafficking transforms evangelical faith. Such engagement is transformative. Racial imagery in this chapter facilitates such a transformation, establishing heroes, villains, and vulnerable victims as characters in the foreign backdrop, the space in which the fight against injustice happens.

Both innocence and brutality are translated to evangelical readers in racial terms, whether through imagery of foreign women and children in need in South and Southeast Asia, or in depictions of brothel owners.

In chapter two, I extended this transformation beyond the spiritual lives of supporters and addressed their sexual behavior. Here, I examined evangelical narratives that link consumption of pornography with sex trafficking globally, arguing that it is men who are promised rescue within this link. I examined close readings of the cultural products from the former evangelical megachurch Mars Hill, and satellite products that augment it, including the church’s sex trafficking ministry REST and Unearthed, an

Evangelical video production company. These texts establish a circuit of harm between

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pornography use, a global economy of sold sex, and crumbling marriages in the U.S.

Though it would appear that the focus on rescue within these narratives of sex trafficking would be focused on imagined victims abroad, I show that the true victim being portrayed within this circuit is masculinity itself. The consistent argument within the logics of these texts is that personal behavior, even in terms of what happens at home, has global impact, and conversely, global threat can motivate changes in domestic, and individual behavior. In this chapter, racial images established the danger of both types of captivity, where the sex industry itself is painted as a space of foreign temptation, even when accessed at home from a computer. Sex workers in these texts are exotic, exploited brown bodies, whose victimization in turns victimizes the sanctity of the domestic, safe bodies of married evangelicals.277

In the third chapter, I addressed travel and adventure within evangelical narratives of sex trafficking. Here, foreign space and foreign bodies do not code danger in the same way, as the danger itself is what provides the energizing possibility for transformation in the form of adventure and short term mission trips. In this chapter, the adventure of rescue joins an economic circuit of rehabilitation, transformation, and aesthetic

277 As with IJM, I am not interested here in arguing that a majority of evangelical marriages considered to be under threat from pornography addiction are “white,” but I am arguing that a threat from the foreign and exotic sex industry is imagined in contrast to an idea of safe, domestic, sanctioned sexuality that is itself painted in racial language. Marriage does not go hand in hand with light skin or the construction of American whiteness, obviously, but within this conception of good and bad sexuality — sexual captivity versus sexual freedom — racial images serve to distinguish between the two by way of establishing foreign, sexual, tempting, and dangerous space as one in the same. In other words, these distinctions operate with a racial logic, even for an evangelical reader in the U.S. who is not perceived to be “white,” just as they operate with the same logic of equating sexual freedom with heterosexual marriage, even if an evangelical reader in the U.S. is unmarried or LGBTQ.

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enhancement. I argued that beauty is an unspoken promise within this work. Participation in the work of fighting sex trafficking, whether by going on a mission trip or an adventure oneself or by supporting the cause as a donor or shopper at home, is a process that puts evangelicals in contact with a kind of beauty that underwrites the “ugliness” of captivity and harm narratives. This includes the natural beauty of foreign countries, the physical beauty of the (predominantly) women in red light districts, and the created beauty of promotional products that have their own missionary tone, blankets created by former sex workers, for example, or journals made of saris whose sales donate to anti- trafficking organizations. Imagery and depictions of racialized figures, even when still conveying harm and danger, offer the promise of beauty.

In the cultural texts of these chapters, images of foreign harm, exotic sexuality, violence, and abjection are woven together with a fairy-tale esque cast of heroes, villains, and maidens. To make sense of these stories together, a set of promises is made to the reader, and that is what I have explored. Wild at Heart includes this passage, “Once upon a time (as the story goes) there was a beautiful maiden, an absolute enchantress. She might be the daughter of a king or a common servant girl, but we know she is a princess at heart.” Eldridge continues, “But this lovely maiden is unattainable, the prisoner of an evil power who holds her captive in a dark tower. Only a champion may win her; only the most valiant, daring, and brave warrior has a chance of setting her free.”278

278 Eldredge, Wild At Heart, 180.

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Wild at Heart’s publication in 2001 sparked a boom in the cottage industry of products designed to explain, discipline, and encourage Christian manhood.279

Eldredge’s text capitalized on the cultural anxieties that had shaped the 1990s and led to the creation of The Promise Keepers and movements to empower men. Worry that men were losing ground, and losing a core essential masculinity, pervaded religious and secular spaces in the United States, as discussed in Chapter Two. Reciprocal products about Christian womanhood accompanied that cultural production, including a companion book to Wild At Heart, co-written by Eldredge and his wife, Stasi,

Captivating: Unveiling the Mysteries of a Woman’s Soul, published in 2003. The two offer together a primer on evangelical gender performance, drawing pop cultural cues and fairy tales together.

In Wild At Heart, Eldredge asserts that men long to have a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. In Captivating, readers learn that these rescued beauties, in turn, long for three things themselves: to be romanced, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, and to unveil beauty.280 He is the active fighter, rescuer, and adventurer. She is along for the adventure, after she is able to escape the dark tower. Within this gender scaffolding, a relational dynamic between the longings of men and the longings of women emerges: he lives an adventure that she participates in, and she unveils a beauty that he fights for, romances, and rescues. This passage echoes and confirms the core tenets of the Eldredge’s vision for both masculinity and femininity.

He is a daring warrior and she is a beautiful captive. The promise of rescue is not just

279 Merritt, “Christian Manhood,”

280 John and Stasi Eldredge, Captivating: Unveiling The Mysteries of a Woman’s Soul (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2005).

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that the captive princess will be freed, but that the hero himself will come to the valiant conclusion of his own battle-strewn journey. Indeed, without the test of the battle, the promise of the adventure, and the allure of the beauty, his heroism goes untested and unknown. “Do I have what it takes?” is the core question every man asks himself, according to the Eldredges. This is not a question that “he” can answer on his own, however, it is one that must be determined in relation to a set of outside circumstances

Bessenecker, Scott. The New Friars particularly a damsel in distress who can be rescued.

This reveals masculinity as much more vulnerable than the Gladiator references and

Ultimate Fighting of Eldredge and Driscoll would admit.

Indeed, when the threads of threat and longing are untangled within masculinity and evangelical narratives of sex trafficking, it becomes much more clear that the surest target of rescue is not actually the foreign sex worker, the but the “hero” himself. This hero in need of real rescue mirrors the evangelical audiences of this study, whose good intentions and even devotion do not obscure the fact that their relationship to sex trafficking has left them caught, captive, and ultimately captivated.

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