Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism

6. Purpose Driven Planet: The Globalization of Evangelical Postsuburbia

114 > 115 in postsuburban life. Many Saddleback members are involved daily with such global processes. Irvine, just a fifteen-minute drive from the Saddleback campus, is an important node in the transnational operation of dozens of domestic and foreign-based corporations. Downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach, important transnational nodes in their own right, are within commuting distance, and several military and military-industrial sites (such as Camp Pendleton, or Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman) have been professional points of origin for many current south Orange County residents. In the small groups I observed, there were middle managers for transnational food suppliers, multinational environmental engineering firms, global travel-related businesses, and global recruiting firms. Several members had foreign experience through the military in Iraq, Japan, and Germany. While many of them were actively engaged in the local, embodied production of globalization, their conceptual tools for conceiving of south Orange County’s place within these global forces and processes were almost completely drawn from the constellation of binary distinctions produced by Saddleback Church performances. This constellation was not just the basis for easy dispositions toward “the Other,” a sort of micropolitics of withdrawn, anticosmopolitanism.2 It is true that because the suburbs and postsuburbs are marked by an increasing isolation and withdrawal into the privacy of the residential home, this anticosmopolitanism is what has characterized the paranoid, xenophobic style of the previous generation of more fundamentalist evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, and Tim LaHaye.3 This same domestic inwardness, however, has formed the symbolic scaffolding for a robust and energetic mobilization of thousands of Saddleback members in what might be regarded as a new evangelical cosmopolitanism. Launching P.E.A.C.E. In a sermon in fall 2003, Rick Warren launched what he called “a new phase in the history of Saddleback Church.” Warren declared, “We’re going global. We want to now help the whole world.” Through what he called the Global P.E.A.C.E. Plan, Saddleback Church would train and send out small groups of lay members throughout the world to fight “spiritual lostness” (later changed to “spiritual emptiness”), “corrupt leadership,” “poverty,” “disease,” and “ignorance.” This vision would become more focused over the following year and a half until it was ready for an official public launch at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California, during Saddleback’s twenty-fifth-year 116 > 117 were hardly problematic. In fact, the recent dissolution of this division does not appear to come from a grassroots desire for more hands-on transnational evangelism. Many Saddleback members had not considered missionary work at all until it was promoted through the P.E.A.C.E. Plan. And even then, most members choose not to go, and those that do often struggle with the decision. How, then, are short-term missions incorporated into the larger evangelical performances of postsuburbia at Saddleback? How are these transnational excursions—weeks long, in often difficult conditions, to parts of the world few Orange County residents consider vacation destinations— made into meaningful performances in their own right? In what ways does short-term missionary work fuse (or not) with personal and collective narratives of an evangelical homeland in postsuburbia? These questions were not important for every intended audience of Warren ’s P.E.A.C.E. Plan. He was not just attempting to mobilize his own church members. He needed churches from around the world with which to partner, and mass-mediatic attention to lend his vision credibility. For the former, Warren used national and international church conferences (held mainly at the Saddleback campus) to promote the P.E.A.C.E. Plan as a calling from God. To pastors and church staff, he spoke of Christian churches as “the hope of the world.” Referring to what evangelicals call the “Great Commission ,” Warren told an auditorium of church conference-goers in 2008, “‘Even as the Father has sent me, so I send you,’ Jesus said. That’s why this mission is to the entire world.” What is the nature of this mission? “Our mission is the global glory of God.” And this mission is undertaken by spreading Christianity and its seemingly adjunct benefits of health, prosperity, social order, and education. To each audience—Saddleback members, national and international church leaders, and the media—Warren laid out the elements of his P.E.A.C.E. Plan by first outlining the problems it would address...