Evangelicalism Nearsighted: A Response to Melani McAlister

Melani McAlister's essay on US evangelical "enchanted internationalism" is a genuine gift: insightful, provocative, critical, yet generous, it both invites and deserves "thinking along" rather than challenges, rebuttals, or corrections. In what follows, I pursue two lines of thought in McAlister's essay, one having to do with the constitution of internationalism in contemporary US evangelical culture, and the other having to do with ways in which "enchanted internationalism" might be theoretically and historically situated within the vast phenomenon we call modernity. With respect to the former, I want to suggest the importance of the "look" in contemporary US evangelical internationalism, understood both as a kind of gaze or look of the eyes, and as aesthetic, or appearance. With regard to the latter, I want to suggest the continuities twenty-first-century evangelical enchanted internationalism might have with twentieth-century US liberal (theologically and politically) Protestantism, as well as with the eighteenth-century rise of the "aesthetic."

I start with a video found on YouTube featuring Caedmon's Call's "Dalit Hymn," apparently produced independently of the band, using the music as a kind of inspirational soundtrack accompanying an edited series of shots from the sort of missions trip McAlister describes in her piece.¹ Indeed, one thing that needs to be noted about this "Dalit Hymn" video, and other videos like it, is how it functions as a video travelogue. It consists of snapshots of foreign places and faces, and the aesthetic alternates between, and even blends together, the candid shot and the scene of spectacle, the mundane and the spectacular. This travelogue aesthetic could be attributed simply to the typical practices of picture-taking on trips—that is, it could be seen as the consequence of amateur photographic practices and production, rather than of "post-production" editing and packaging—except that the aesthetic carries over into a very "professional" looking video on YouTube featuring Caedmon's Call's "Share the Well."² Advertised on YouTube as, "A short video piece that showcases missions work being done all over the world," this "Share the Well" video relies on video camera shots that are rarely in full focus, almost always moving, stopping only sporadically with no particular subject in view. It is clear that the camera is looking, but its gaze is horizontal, almost always oriented toward a seen or unseen horizon. The only focused look we get in the video shots of this video is that of the subjects of the camera themselves. We see them looking back at the camera, and we see them looking at a large movie screen (upon which, I assume, is being projected the Jesus Film, a widely used missions film). These video images are interspersed with stillshots that aesthetically blend the look of amateur travelogue photos with a kind of National Geographic photojournalistic style for a result that is part vernacular, part photojournalist art.

What both the more colloquial looking "Dalit Hymn" video and the more professional looking "Share the Well" video seem to do is stress the act of looking, not just because they use visual media, but because the eyes of the subjects as well as the eye of the camera, which more often than not refuses to bring its subjects into full focus, draw so much attention. The videos perform what might be thought of as a transnational visual call-and-response, with the camera moving hungrily about doing the calling, and the subjects of the camera, who often are looking right back at it, doing the responding. This closely parallels the missionary effort, the euangelion, the announcement of good news—it is, in a certain sense, a form of indiscriminate dissemination for which there is the expectation of some response.³ But even more, it parallels the sensory experience of contemporary evangelical churches in America, especially so-called "mega-churches." It is as if by envisioning the "other" as not only subjects of a "look," but a particular kind of gaze—a hungry (or thirsty, if we follow the metaphor of Caedman's Call's "Share the Well") and undisciplined look—American evangelical Christians...