Transnational Sexual Politics: Global AIDS Work and American Evangelicals

This paper shows how American evangelicals transformed from the most implacable foes of AIDS victims domestically to the face of AIDS relief internationally. Drawing on never-before-seen sources, the paper traces the ways that missionaries in the 1980s-2000s reshaped US evangelicals’ views on AIDS and expanded abstinence-only education programs across the world. The paper demonstrates that missionaries shifted evangelicals’ understanding of AIDS by uncoupling the AIDS crisis from domestic fights about LGBTQ civil and human rights and recasting the epidemic as an opportunity to convert millions of souls, elevate themselves into positions of power over foreign suffering others, and impose heteropatriarchy around the world. Reframing AIDS work as a tool of empire made it appealing to US evangelicals.

Missionaries wrote and traveled back to the US and spoke to churches, colleges, and evangelical conferences about the opportunity and responsibility for US evangelicals to evangelize people with HIV/AIDS around the world. Missionary organizations partnered with the US surgeon general to publish curriculum for churches that encouraged evangelicals to shift from feelings of disgust or apathy to feelings of sympathy for people with HIV/AIDS. Through these teachings and appeals, missionaries taught US evangelicals that AIDS was not primarily about God’s condemnation for sexual sin but rather was about the suffering of black and brown families overseas that US Christians could relieve. Increasing evangelical support made possible the expansion of abstinence-only education that missionaries promoted as AIDS prevention classes. Missionary programs that imposed abstinence-only sex education around the world reassured evangelicals that supporting AIDS work meant not abandoning conservative sexual morality but rather imposing heteropatriarchal teachings as a solution to the pandemic.