Rescue and Revival in Detroit Anti-Sex Trafficking Ministry: How sex industry outreach and the fight against human trafficking is reviving American evangelicals

Abstract

Despite evidence indicating an overall decrease in formal religious affiliation in the United States, the past ten years have seen a dramatic expansion of the faith-based non-profit sector. This study explicates this trend in relation to changing modes of public engagement and new forms of religious expression within America’s dominant religious affiliation: Evangelical Christianity. To do so it focuses on a prominent subset of the faith-based sector: the evangelical movement to end human trafficking and abolish ‘modern day slavery.’ Extant literature has analyzed religiously motivated anti-trafficking activism as an effort to enact morally conservative sex and gender reforms, focusing primarily on impacts to those directly involved in commercial sexual activity. This project focuses on the experiences of interveners. Taking Detroit, Michigan as a case study, this study investigates the politics and economics of faith-based public-private anti-trafficking partnerships. It also follows evangelical volunteers who combine missionary efforts with intervention outreach at sites where sexual services are sold. Over three years of ethnographic fieldwork primarily in Detroit, Michigan (also Chicago, Miami, and Portland), I attended rallies, trainings, and closed-door government task force meetings. I interviewed church leaders, volunteers, law enforcement, and social service providers and observed weekly outreach efforts in strip clubs, massage parlors, and outdoor locations where sexual services are sold. I also examined archival accounts from historical anti-prostitution campaigns and analyzed publicly available financial and tax data from faith-based non-profit groups and federal anti-trafficking programs.

This study demonstrates how the emergence of human trafficking as a prominent social issue has driven the expansion of American evangelicalism, by directing public investment to faith-based groups, by transforming the purview of evangelical social justice, and by facilitating opportunities for evangelical volunteers to pursue ministerial relationships with sex workers. To do so, this project investigates the racial dynamics of abolitionist rhetoric. It argues that the contemporary evangelical anti-trafficking movement extends the goals of historical religious reform campaigns, which leveraged anxieties about commercial sexual activity to defend racial segregation and to promote private philanthropy over government intervention. This project also analyzes stance in outreach interactions in order to problematize evangelical discourses of rescue, intervention, and missionization. It argues that within the evangelical anti-trafficking movement, domestic outreach to the sex industry represents an emergent form of relational ministry. Specifically, outreach represents a distinct interactional framework whose immediate goal is not to remove people from perceived conditions of exploitation, but rather to assert an alternative regime of sociality; a spiritually-based homosociality whose efficacy hinges on its contrast with remunerative sexual intimacy in outreach locales. As such, this project contributes to the field of Critical Anti-Human Trafficking Studies, the Anthropology of Religion, and Linguistic Anthropology. This project also speaks to the studies of public intervention, social movements, and race, sex, and religion in American public life.