Claremont McKenna College

Reaching for the World: Korean/American Missionary Aspirations and Evangelical Encounters

JU HUI JUDY HAN

TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2013

Theories and practices link religion and political economy in various and contrasting ways. From faith-based welfare in North America to prosperity gospel in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and from Marxist-inspired liberation theology to transnational Islamic banking, the connections between “secular” political economy and “sacred” experiences of religion and spirituality are far from simple or stable across time and space. Reflecting such complex and intertwined dynamics, short-term evangelical Christian mission trips have become popular in the US and South Korea as a religious experience that combines cultural exposure, humanitarian and volunteer service, and development aid. Critics have rightly pointed out that such trips tend to emphasize notions of linear progress and short-term charity while obscuring divergent histories and persistent inequalities, but contemporary South Korean and Korean American evangelical missions also rely on something else: an affective idiom of shared experience of suffering from war and colonialism, based on which they articulate a relation of solidarity with the developing world. Drawing on critical ethnographic research of a Korean/American mission trip to Tanzania and Uganda and other evangelical projects, Ju Hui Judy Han examines the cultural politics of good intentions, purpose-driven travel, and humanitarian aid.

Ju Hui Judy Han (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley) is Assistant Professor in Geography at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include missionary mobilities, church growth and urban poverty, transnational political economy of English, conscientious objection to military conscription, and religious cultivation of political homophobia. She is currently completing a book manuscript concerning Korean/American evangelical missionaries engaged in religious, humanitarian, and development projects.