Portable politics and durable religion: the moral worldviews of American evangelical missionaries

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2007 by James K. Wellman, Jr., Matthew Keyes

INTRODUCTION

We began this study with the assumption that American international missionaries, having been exposed to a foreign culture, would relativize their own perspective on American culture, religion, and politics. In particular, we were interested in whether American international missionaries from the Pacific Northwest (PNW) exhibited similar traits to those found among evangelicals from the same region, and more generally the extent to which the international missionaries mirrored the cultural traits of the larger American evangelical community. (1) This set of common evangelical cultural characteristics, or what has been called a "civic gospel," includes the belief that evangelical conversion will address and solve social problems; the government should protect America's religious heritage; the United States was founded as a Christian nation; it is hard to be a political liberal and a Christian; the promotion of democracy around the world; advocacy for economic, religious, and political liberty, and by extension of these last two, support for the war in Iraq (Kellstedt and Green 2003:553; Wellman 2007). All of these characteristics were mirrored by the international missionaries and evangelical respondents interviewed in the PNW. (2)

As it turns out, the experience abroad did not relativize the core religious, cultural, or political values of the international missionaries from the PNW. The missionaries did exhibit a degree of diversity in their opinions, but no more than stateside evangelicals (Wellman 2008). Our major finding was the durability and portability of the religious, cultural, and political views of missionaries. By durability, we mean the ability of their worldviews to withstand criticism and alternative perspectives. By portability, we mean the relative ease with which they were able to maintain their religious, cultural, and political views in diverse cultural and political contexts. Indeed, most of the missionaries claimed that their political perspectives were either unchanged or strengthened by their experience abroad. We explain this by showing how the political views of international missionaries are linked to organic evangelical moral worldviews; their opinions, values, and convictions are not merely tools that they use, but are a part of a moral worldview out of which arise their religious and political perspectives. By moral worldview, we mean not only the ethical principles of what is right and wrong, but the symbolic boundaries by which preferences are molded, values are shaped, and behaviors are managed (Smith 2003). Analytically, we are not assuming that these moral orders are ontological givens. They are culturally created and we use them as heuristic devices to describe and explain these religio-moral constructs. As will be shown, the moral cores of our evangelical respondents may be personal and deeply felt, but they are relatively homogenous because they are historically and socially constructed.

The evangelical moral and political worldviews offer mutual benefits and form a reciprocal bond. The conservative American religious moral worldview supports a strong social conservatism, promotes a traditional family model, opposes the gay marriage movement, and advocates against abortion. The conservative American political moral worldview promotes a laissez-faire market economy, lower taxes and the creation of opportunities for entrepreneurs to found new markets, at home and abroad; it favors the spread of democracy abroad for the sake of its political and economic liberty and the religious markets it opens for evangelical proselytizing; finally, it advocates a government that maintains national security with a strong military, and deters wrongdoers, whether at home or overseas (Frank 2004; Sharlet 2005). The missionaries' stance on the Iraq War reflected this perspective on national security. Only three of 27 missionaries came out against the war while three more expressed some ambivalence. Another fifteen gave explicit support of the war efforts in Iraq. National surveys have shown American evangelicals to be in favor of the war, though not by such large pluralities. (3)

This conclusion about the political affiliations of evangelicals is disputed. While the most prominent American Christian political organizations, such as the Christian Coalition, are clearly both evangelically Christian and politically conservative, some scholars (Sider-Rose 2000; Smith 2000; Wolfe 2003) have challenged the notion that these special interest groups represent the political views of evangelicals as a whole. However, other scholars note an association between conservative American Christianity and conservative US politics (Bruce 2003; Lakoff 1996; Reimer 2003; Wilcox 2000). We do not argue for a necessary correlation between evangelicalism and conservative politics, at least not in the global evangelical community (Freston 2001). Nonetheless, a strong relationship is found among white evangelicals in national surveys, particularly those in the "traditionalist" camp of evangelical, mainline and Catholic groups; all of them share the evangelical moral worldview and identify as Republicans by 70, 59 and 57 percent respectively. Overall, this represents nearly a quarter of the US adult population (Green 2004:3).