To seek and save the lost: human trafficking and salvation schemas among American evangelicals

Abstract

American evangelicals have a history of engagement in social issues in general and anti-slavery activism in particular. The last 10 years have seen an increase in both scholarly attention to evangelicalism and evangelical focus on contemporary forms of slavery. Extant literature on this engagement often lacks the voices of evangelicals themselves. This study begins to fill this gap through a qualitative exploration of how evangelical and mainline churchgoers conceptualize both the issue of human trafficking and possible solutions. I extend Michael Young's recent work on the confessional schema motivating evangelical abolitionists in the 1830s. Through analysis of open-ended responses to vignettes in a survey administered in six congregations I find some early support for a contemporary salvation schema. It is this schema, I argue, that underpins evangelicals' framing of this issue, motivates their involvement in anti-slavery work, and specifies the scope of their critique. Whereas antebellum abolitionists thought of their work in national and structural terms contemporary advocates see individuals in need of rescue. The article provides an empirical sketch of the cultural underpinnings of contemporary evangelical social advocacy and a call for additional research.

Keywords:

• religion
• social movements
• slavery
• human trafficking
• human rights
• advocacy

Notes

1. I am grateful to Michael Young for pointing out the distinction with earlier evangelicals, who ‘still held to remnants of the collective covenant tradition. … [I]ndividual sins are punished by [God] in the afterworld but collective problems must be punished in the here and now – hence poverty, prostitutions, slavery, etc. were not just individual sins but collective failings and reformers promised divine justice in the here and now if the covenanted community did not repent’ (personal communication, 2010).

2. The General Social Survey is a major American institution and can be retrieved from here: http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/GSS1998.asp

3. Female, middle-aged (49), middle-class, college educated, politically liberal, theologically conservative. Believes in the importance of faith, the existence of heaven, hell and sin, looks to scripture and the church for guidance and considers Christ the only path to salvation. Not particularly opinionated about whether the world and human nature are fundamentally corrupt or good.

4. *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 (one-tailed tests).