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

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

All of the missionary respondents except one were American citizens who had served or are currently serving abroad. The sample included missionaries whose primary purpose was church-planting, missionaries who focused on humanitarian aid, and missionaries who served other auxiliary roles within the missionary community (for example, respondents included teachers at schools for missionaries' children and an engineer who spent his life building facilities for missionaries). Two of our respondents had participated only in short term missions (less than a year). The rest served long term missions to various destinations around the globe. The median time spent abroad in our sample was 6 years. Of those who served long term missions, six had served in Europe, eight in Africa, three in Asia, seven in South America, five in Pacific Islands, and two in Jamaica. Most of these missionaries had served long term missions in multiple locations and sometimes on multiple continents. The two respondents who had served only short term missions had worked in Europe, Africa, Central America, and Asia.

Our total sample is well educated, reflecting the PNW in general, the larger pool of PNW evangelicals, and the recent rise in the socioeconomic conditions of the American evangelical community (Hout, et al. 2001; Killen and Silk 2004; Smith 1998; Wolfe 2003). There was a time when conservative Christianity was popularly identified with working class affiliations and lower levels of education. This is perhaps a product of the fundamentalist retreat from the world, detailed earlier. However, our research underscores the fact that evangelical identities are no longer incompatible with higher socio-economic norms, habits, and education. Indeed, recent findings show that switching between evangelicals and mainline Protestant churches has declined precisely because evangelicals no longer see any need to switch due to status interests (Hout, et al. 2001:498). In other words, evangelical churches embody many of the same markers of middle and upper-middle class identity that evangelicals might have sought in mainline Protestant congregations in the past. These facts correspond with Smith's (1998) findings and underline the coincidence of values shared between the evangelical worldview and values of American market capitalism (Frank 2004).

We divided our 27 respondents into three groups according to how their experiences abroad affected their socio-political views.

1. Those whose socio-political views were challenged and changed (18.5%; N = 5)

2. Those whose views were challenged and strengthened (74%; N = 20)

3. Those whose views were unchallenged or unchanged (7.5%; N = 2)

Our goal in this article is to explain this pattern of response to international missionary experiences among PNW evangelical, focusing particularly on the difference between those whose views were changed and those whose views were strengthened.

At the outset we acknowledge several alternate explanations of our data. One might assert that the reason our participants' moral worldviews are so resilient is that by choosing to serve a mission they self-select as the most dedicated proponents of their worldviews in their communities. This is true. Many participants expressed how they always knew God had a plan for them, and that God wanted more than just "Sunday commitment." Undoubtedly, this is a partial explanation of the resilience of our participants' moral worldviews; however, the trends in our data detailed below suggest that, while all respondents demonstrated above average commitment, certain respondents were more or less likely to change their socio-political views and that these variations can be theoretically explained.