“Bringing New Hope and New Life”: The Rhetoric of Faith-Based Refugee Resettlement Agencies

Abstract

Faith-based organizations play an important role in the resettlement of refugees in the United States, though little is known about the function of faith in the organizations' assistance of refugees. Most literature about refugees also fails to attend to the intersubjectivity between refugees and other individuals or groups, focusing instead on a singular subject or group identity. This article bridges these gaps by rhetorically analyzing the ways faith-based organizations construct the subject positions of refugees and volunteers on their websites in order to draw volunteers and donors to support the organizations. Guided by theories concerning recognition and subjectivity, this article demonstrates that faith-based groups rely on dichotomized constructions of subjectivity where volunteers are positioned as full actors in the lives of refugees, and refugees are positioned as immobile in their own lives. The texts also produce (mis)recognition of the intersubjectivity of refugees and volunteers through deployments of discourses of difference and sameness. Not only do these constructions call volunteers to serve because they are positioned as full agents of change and upholders of Christian goodness, but the constructions maintain a modernist worldview of people, places, and events as autonomous and stable.