Abstract
This chapter examines the spiritual motivations and impacts of voluntarism in the USA through an investigation of international short-term mission (STM), a paradigm involving 1–2-week trips that amalgamate leisure tourism, evangelism, and voluntary development work and are carried out among Christian and non-Christian communities. Mainline and nondenominational bodies sponsor STM, but it is most popular among evangelical Christians. I argue that STM’s effects, while partially explicable in terms of the social capital that it may (or may not) engender at home and in mission fields, include challenges to secular norms and institutions. STM, especially as carried out among non-Christian communities, provides (1) experiential contexts for imagining a world in which divinity is reckoned as immanently and sensorially present, and (2) communicative tools for enacting that world. It thus may rework the categorical boundaries between secular and religious practices and spaces at home, as well as on mission sites. As such, STM can be understood as an artifact of an emergent postsecular imaginary—a characterization that signals the limits of the secularization thesis and the recognition of significance of plural religiosities, spiritual orientations, and faith commitments in social action and institutions. This chapter is based on ethnographic research in southern California conducted from 2009 to 2012.
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Notes
- 1.
“Evangelical” is usually used to describe Protestant communities whose core tenets include conversionism, activism, Biblicism, and crucicentrism (Bebbington 1989). While such traditions are longstanding in the USA, following the second world war, evangelical Christians, in an effort to distinguish their concerns and orientations from Fundamentalist Protestants, established a network of nondenominational seminaries, parachurch organizations, and media outlets to develop a more activist, mission-oriented identity. This resulted in the expansion of nondenominational churches and other sorts of agencies. This growth, which was centered in the “Sunbelt” (western and southwestern US), was entwined with the development of suburban settlements and small-government conservatism and produced alliances between white evangelical Protestants and conservative political interests—a phenomenon that resulted in their identification in the 2000s as a crucial political base for the Republican Party and related formations such as the Tea Party and Libertarian movements (Luhr 2009; McGirr 2001). While whites are indeed overrepresented within evangelical communities, there are also self-identified liberal evangelicals, as well as evangelical bodies dominated by African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Latin-Americans (e.g., Walton 2009; Wolfe 2000, 2006). Following the US Religious Landscape Survey (2008, pp. 16–17), I use “evangelical” in this chapter to refer to communities who espouse the tenets of evangelicalism; these communities in the USA encompass nondenominational bodies as well as Baptist Pentecostal, Restorationist, Holiness, and Adventist denominational families. “Mainline” is used to refer to Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican/Episcopal, and Congregational families.
- 2.
Both organizations draw on the theology of the “10/40 Window” and the “AD 2000” (later renamed “AD 2000 and Beyond”) movements founded in late 1980s, and their cartographic media, databases, and image archives are used by mission agencies (Han 2010). Collectively, these groups are rooted in premillennial dispensationalist theology, with its expectation that Old Testament covenants will be fulfilled in the near future with the Christianization of the world’s population understood as a condition that precedes the fulfillment of these covenants. Populations targeted for mission are located between the tenth and fortieth northern latitudes and defined as “least reached” by Christianity and most in the grip of poverty, illiteracy, disease, and other societal problems.
- 3.
See Hancock (Forthcoming) for a more extended discussion of these materials.
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Acknowledgments
Research was supported by grants from the Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research and the Academic Senate of the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA) and assistance provided by Audra Kosh, Steve Hu, Kerry San Chirico, Kristy Slominski, and Lindsay Vogt. Versions of this chapter were presented to audiences at UCSIA, the University of California Santa Barbara, the Society for Anthropology of Religion, the American Anthropological Association, and the UCHRI Working Group on Religion and Urban Place-Making.
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Hancock, M. (2015). Short-Term Mission Voluntarism and the Postsecular Imaginary. In: Hustinx, L., von Essen, J., Haers, J., Mels, S. (eds) Religion and Volunteering. Nonprofit and Civil Society Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04585-6_11
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