Evangelicalism Nearsighted: A Response to Melani McAlister

Abstract

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 eighteenthcentury 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