Missionary Positions: How American Evangelicals Learned to Love Global AIDS Work, 1985–2005

Abstract: From the mid-1980s to mid-2000s, American missionaries conducted information campaigns across the United States to change US evangelicals’ perceptions of the AIDS epidemic and secure their support for global AIDS work. Drawing on colonial discourses about suffering foreign bodies and souls, missionaries conditioned US evangelicals to shift their feelings about AIDS from disgust to grief, which activated practices of compassion. Evangelicals then funded abstinence-only sex education courses packaged as AIDS prevention programs across the Global South. Missionaries’ messaging facilitated US evangelicals’ transformation in these decades from the most implacable foes of people with HIV/AIDS domestically to some of the biggest supporters of AIDS work internationally. Assessing US evangelicals’ changing attitudes about and involvement with the AIDS epidemic reveals how transnational religious networks linked US conservative political priorities to global health humanitarianism and how religious actors expanded American global power in a postcolonial context.