“Bringing New Hope and New Life”: The Rhetoric of Faith-Based Refugee Resettlement Agencies

Abstract

Faith-based organizations play an important role in the resettlement of refugees in the United States, though little is known about the function of faith in the organizations' assistance of refugees. Most literature about refugees also fails to attend to the intersubjectivity between refugees and other individuals or groups, focusing instead on a singular subject or group identity. This article bridges these gaps by rhetorically analyzing the ways faith-based organizations construct the subject positions of refugees and volunteers on their websites in order to draw volunteers and donors to support the organizations. Guided by theories concerning recognition and subjectivity, this article demonstrates that faith-based groups rely on dichotomized constructions of subjectivity where volunteers are positioned as full actors in the lives of refugees, and refugees are positioned as immobile in their own lives. The texts also produce (mis)recognition of the intersubjectivity of refugees and volunteers through deployments of discourses of difference and sameness. Not only do these constructions call volunteers to serve because they are positioned as full agents of change and upholders of Christian goodness, but the constructions maintain a modernist worldview of people, places, and events as autonomous and stable.

KEYTERMS:

• internet messages
• intersubjectivity
• recognition
• refugees
• religion
• subjectivity

An earlier version of this article was presented at the National Communication Association Conference, November 2006, San Antonio. I thank Karma Chávez, Daniel C. Brouwer, John Hammerback, Carolyn Stroman and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions in crafting this article.

Notes

This is particularly the case since 2001 when President George W. Bush established of the Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI). The OFBCI organizes the funding of community and faith-based grant projects related to the five federal departments: the Offices of Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor, Justice and Health and Human Services. Many organizations and programs that now provide key services to people in the United States and around the world gain access to funding through this federal office. One set of organizations to gain funding through the OFBCI is voluntary refugee resettlement agencies, otherwise known under the acronym of VOLAGs. Once the state determines who will be granted resettlement in the United States, these organizations do the work of organizing their arrival as well as providing the initial support and services.

Communication scholars have also richly taken up the question of what is necessary in a communicative interaction for there to be ethical communication. This article works through the psychoanalytic concept of recognition, as I am most interested in the discourses that play at a psychic level in the ways individuals see, know and engage with others. Communication scholars take up similar problematic in their work concerning communication ethics, dialogue and interpersonal relations (Cissna & Arnett, 1994; Lipari, 2004; Murray, 2003; Peters, 1999). As Lipari explicated, the work of these theorists established grounds to understand ethical communication as, “(a) acknowledging radical alterity, (b) decentering egoistic subjectivity, (c) privileging the ethical obligation, and (d) emphasizing the constitutive over the symbolic dimensions of communication” (pp. 127–128). Recognition is a derivative of these ethical ideals in practice.

Notably, the psychoanalytic focus of recognition articulated by Butler (2004b) and Benjamin (1998) is not uniformly accepted by critical theorists. Fraser (2000, 2001) and Taylor (1994) theorize recognition as a phenomenon of the social realm in which the question is about how individuals acknowledge the different identities and contributions of other subjects in society.