The Trafficking in Persons Report and Evangelical Power in the George W. Bush Administration

In 1999 Gary Haugen, the founder of International Justice Mission, declared that the “God of Moral Clarity” intended for Christians to participate in “the right exercise of power.” The statement, found in his book Good News about Injustice, launched American evangelicals on what is now a two-decades-long campaign against human trafficking. This paper tracks how Haugen and other evangelicals in the 2000s lobbied the George W. Bush Administration to exert diplomatic power on foreign governments around the world. It looks particularly at how the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report was used by “compassionate conservatives” to launch a benevolent war against injustice in Southeast Asia, essentially functioning as a soft-power complement to the unfolding “war on terror.” Many in the region, however, including Thais, Khmers, and even some American evangelicals, did not see the TIP Report as a just instrument of power. They pointed out how the new evangelical rhetoric of social justice, especially as it played out in methodologies of rescue and diplomatic pressure, sustained colonial patterns of economic and political inequality. Indeed, these critics began pioneering new methods of prevention and partnership in Thailand and Cambodia. The result was an incoherent evangelical antitrafficking movement, though one that also revealed a capacity for evolution, especially after it lost influence in the White House in the 2010s.