To Restore the World: Anti-Human Trafficking Organizations in Thailand and Protestant Churches in the US

Abstract:

This project explores the long-term partnerships between anti-human trafficking organizations in Thailand and Protestant churches in the US, looking at how these relationships have the power to transform the beliefs and practices of the latter. Many scholars have explored how American Christianity has shaped both moral attitudes toward and political/organizational support for anti-human trafficking efforts in Southeast Asia over the past three decades; however, few have tried to understand how encounters with increasingly localized anti-trafficking efforts might be shaping the American churches who continue to support them. Through over thirty ethnographic interviews and field work with the congregants, ministry leaders, and elders of churches as well as the founders and staff of their partnering organizations in Thailand, I find that these relationships are a site of transformation for American Protestant Christianity. I argue that congregants' personal faith, church-level theological practices, and the church's outlook on sexuality as well as political affiliation are challenged and expanded by working in the Thai human trafficking space.