Performing the Persecuted Body: American Evangelicals, Islam, and Global Solidarities

This paper examines the emergence of a key international issue among evangelicals: the “persecuted body” of believers (the bodies of individuals, the “body of Christ”) around the world. Starting in the 1990s, both political activism and popular culture began highlight this persecution, particularly in Muslim countries, so that the anti-persecution movement became, implicitly and often explicitly, a front line in the performance of a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam.

In the evangelical public sphere --magazines, DVDs, internet sites, etc.-- the suffering of Christians in Africa or Asia was recounted and displayed. The experiences of the individuals involved were almost certainly genuine, but the emergence of the icon of the persecuted body among Christians, across lines of political affiliation, generation, race and nationality, was also productive: it helped to produce new kinds of affiliations and identities. The examination and display of those persecuted bodies offered Americans a new kind of Christian self-hood, one defined by its embodiment, its global knowledge, and the marks of shared victimization. This new evangelical internationalism is marked by fear and a sense of threat from Islam, but it is also defined by increased attention to the suffering and the needs of Christians outside the United States. This paper examines late 20^th-century evangelical Christianity as a global flow, a social movement, a (mass-mediated) subjectivity, and a form of transnational power.