Missionary Positions: How American Evangelicals Learned to Love Global AIDS Work, 1985-2005

From the mid-1980s to mid-2000s, American missionaries conducted information campaigns across the United States to change U.S. evangelicals’ perceptions of the AIDS epidemic and secure evangelicals’ support for global AIDS work. Drawing on longstanding colonial discourses about suffering foreign bodies and souls, missionaries conditioned U.S. evangelicals to shift their feelings about AIDS from disgust to grief, which activated practices of compassion. Evangelicals then funded abstinence-only sex education courses packaged as AIDS prevention programs across the Global South. Missionaries’ messaging facilitated U.S. evangelicals’ transformation in these decades from the most implacable foes of people with HIV/AIDS domestically to some of the biggest supporters of AIDS work internationally. Assessing U.S. evangelicals’ changing attitudes about and involvement with the AIDS epidemic reveals how transnational religious networks linked U.S. conservative political priorities to global health humanitarianism and how religious actors expanded American global power in a postcolonial context.