“Rescue Sells”: Narrating Human Trafficking to Evangelical Populists

Abstract

The antitrafficking movement in Southeast Asia suggests shifting evangelical approaches to social justice. American activists on the ground have moved away from “rescue” toward greater indigeneity and attention to social structures. Populist evangelicals back home, however, resist these new methods. They too want to address deep injustices in the world, but they do so with an emotive individualism and American triumphalism that drives a vocabulary of rescue. In a kind of bargain, humanitarians adopt structural methods even as they continue to narrate rescue for an American constituency overflowing with money, energy, and potential recruits. That “rescue sells” offers insight into how populists and cosmopolitans negotiate power and imagine authority in starkly divided evangelical networks.

Keywords:

• evangelical Protestant Christianity
• human trafficking
• International Justice Mission
• Thailand
• Gary Haugen
• human trafficking
• social justice

Additional information

Funding

Thanks to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion for a Jack Shand Research Grant that funded research for this article.

Notes on contributors

David R. Swartz

David R. Swartz is an Associate Professor of History at Asbury University. He is the author of Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism.