What is Your Heart For?: Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere

In the summer of 2006, I interviewed a man in his early thirties, who told me that he had always wanted to be a missionary, although he instead now ran an organization that provided assistance to single mothers in North Carolina. That was OK, he said: "I have a heart for widows and orphans." A few years earlier, Christianity Today had interviewed Franklin Graham, who called for American churches to begin searching for people in their congregations who "had a heart for HIV/AIDs," so that they could begin to support prevention and treatment in Africa.¹

Almost everywhere one looks in US evangelical culture today, people explain their commitments in this very specific language: "I have a heart for x or y." Since at least the mid-1990s, "having a heart" has been used to evoke a passion that goes beyond mere predilection: it suggests an unplanned moment of contact with an issue that leads the believer to an understanding of the particular walk God has in mind for her. Having a "heart for" something is simultaneously God-given and unusual in its intensity. It often, although not necessarily, involves crossing national borders.²

This essay explores how evangelical hearts have enabled evangelical political commitments, especially internationally; that is, I am interested in the intersection between evangelical global visions and the politics of affect. There is, of course, a long and checkered history of Christian internationalism of the missionary sort.³ But perhaps the key difference in the current moment is that US evangelical internationalism increasingly constitutes Christians outside the US as part of "us."

Americans, of whatever race or background, are already a minority of the world's Christians: according to Philip Jenkins, as many as 70% of Protestant evangelicals, for example, live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.⁴ US evangelicals are increasingly conscious of—and often quite enthusiastic about—the reality that the burgeoning evangelical communities of the "global South" are transforming their own faith.

In the last ten years, evangelicals have also asserted their own authoritative voice in international politics, playing ever larger roles in shaping US foreign policy, such as in the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, and in influencing US policy on Israel–Palestine, Sudan, HIV/AIDs, sexual trafficking, and international debt relief. In general, evangelicals supported the Iraq War strongly and have also tried to alter US policy toward Saudi Arabia and China, though with far less success. Rather than directly examine these political interventions, which I explore elsewhere, I ask broader questions about what has constituted the enabling cultural logic that makes the world available, in specific ways, to the "hearts" of US evangelicals.⁵ One fundamental claim in this essay is that it is no longer possible to understand US evangelical politics or culture without understanding its border-spanning investments. Another claim is that these investments, which have profound consequences for social relations both within and beyond the US, are constituted in significant ways through cultural products and cultural practices.

In keeping with the call of this special issue of American Literary History to meditate on key developments within literary and cultural studies in the last 20 years, what follows is organized around three scholarly conversations in the fields of religion, cultural studies, and transnationalism. I discuss each of these in relationship to various components of a single cultural text that participates in the logic of evangelical internationalism: the 2004 album Share the Well by Caedmon's Call, a Christian folk-rock band based in Houston.

Caedmon's Call is a mainstay of the contemporary Christian music scene, with more than 10 albums and several EPs since the mid-1990s. The band has had an evolving membership over the years, built primarily around a married couple, Danielle and Cliff Young, and, intermittently, Derek Webb and Andy Osenga, both well-regarded singer-songwriters.⁶ In 2004, when Share the Well was released, Caedmon's was not a megastar of Christian rock (unlike, say, Reliant K or Switchfoot, two rock/anthem bands that have been enormously popular within the Christian music community...