‘God’s bringing people to us’: missional imaginaries and practices among resettlement volunteers in South Carolina

Refugee resettlement agencies in the United States have long relied upon volunteers to do the ‘work of welcome’. In the Southeastern United States, white-dominated evangelical Protestant churches were an important source of volunteers for co-sponsorship programmes created during the Biden administration amid surging refugee admissions. Drawing on qualitative research in South Carolina, this paper examines how evangelical volunteers were drawn to resettlement work not just to ‘welcome the stranger’, but also to share the Gospel with the ‘unreached’. Our analysis brings into focus the missionary ethos that pervaded evangelical volunteering despite strict rules against proselytizing, and it explains how evangelicals’ globalist imaginaries, including the valorization of ‘internationals’, shaped resettlement practices and encounters with refugees. Resettlement volunteering provided access to the intimate, domestic spaces of ‘unreached’ groups, where evangelical volunteers could ‘build relationships’ with refugees and start conversations about faith. Yet volunteers’ missional aims often came up against daily frustrations with the resettlement process and refugee non-compliance. We examine how volunteers held these conflicting experiences in tension with each other. In closing, we reflect on how this case can inform conceptualizations of the neoliberal welfare state and the role of religious actors in public, political life.