Breaking the Body of Evangelical Whiteness: A Womanist Ethic of Encounter for Faith-Based Anti-Trafficking Work

Abstract

For the last thirty years, white evangelical Christians have been one of the most prominent groups in the anti-trafficking movement in North America. Whether advocating for policy changes on behalf of survivors, interacting with populations vulnerable to sexual exploitation, or staging rescues, these moral actors use Christian religious practices and values to respond to trafficking and commercial sex work. Anti-trafficking work is coated with and coded by evangelical whiteness, which uses the norms of sexual, social, and racial purity in their interactions with and recovery of trafficking victims and survivors. In response to the white evangelical stronghold on anti-trafficking interventions, the womanist ethic of encounter utilizes womanist frameworks to center the historical realities lived experience of Black women and talk back to the history of evangelical whiteness in anti-trafficking work. Secondly, it focuses on how to interact with the holistic body of Black women in the urban mission field of anti-trafficking. Finally, the womanist ethic of encounter seeks to bridge the gap between the Protestant moralistic centering of the word of the Gospel that coats rescue and recovery efforts and asserts a Catholic centering of the Eucharist to clarify the power of sacrificing and breaking the body of whiteness in anti-trafficking work.

1. Introduction

When I initially encountered New Daughters and Sons1 ten years ago as a prospective volunteer, I was struck by the organization’s composition—a predominantly white and primarily women’s organization located in the middle of the demographically mixed city of Atlanta. In the meeting room of a multicultural church situated in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, I was one of less than five Black people in attendance who watched a video about young Black women who ran away from home and into the arms of pimps and traffickers. The stories of the young Black women were book-ended with happily-ever-after narratives of white women who escaped the grasp of the commercial sex industry and went on to get married, have children, and start their own anti-trafficking ministries. In the context of NDS and organizations like it, I read the white women as being saved to continue the legacy of anti-trafficking work. Meanwhile, the Black girls were destined to slip through the cracks of society and to be beyond recovery—but still served as a subject to be pursued. This was the implicit message delivered by NDS’s depiction of trafficking victims.

Young and middle-aged white women expressed sympathy for women in sex work and convinced prospective volunteers to join the frontlines of responding to trafficking in Atlanta. Joining NDS as a volunteer, then, was a demonstration of one’s commitment to freeing women from the bondage of sex trafficking and, even if just implicitly, standing in agreement with the religious values that guide evangelical anti-trafficking work, values such as sexual purity, the principle of the imago dei, and distinguishing good from bad.2 Five years later, I attended another orientation, this time as a PhD student beginning my research on faith-based anti-trafficking work, and the same narrow script was still running. I was again one of a handful of non-white people in the room and the same narrative about the lost Black woman versus the recovered white woman was playing.

One could argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with this scene if one remains in the realm of (only) giving people credit for their good deeds. After all, it can be argued that regardless of how the narrative is framed, NDS is focused on rescuing women in danger. The NDS wants to do its part to eliminate commercial sex exploitation in Atlanta by visiting neighborhoods where the exploitation is most prevalent, discerning who is at risk, and removing coerced and exploited laborers from the industry. I recognize the promise of this work, but I contend with their method of conducting the work in predominantly Black neighborhoods and imposing the values of evangelical Christian whiteness upon people. Beneath the innocuous appearance of NDS, I discovered practices that perpetuate evangelical whiteness. These included the orienting mechanism of worship, the volunteer’s affect in outreach, and the organization’s perspective on race in their work. Over the course of five years—and possibly longer—NDS did not change the way it presented trafficking to its majority white, middle class audience of hopeful actors. There was no concern with how workers are formed in a manner that replicates the whiteness of evangelical piety, and no interest in acknowledging, considering, or recognizing that encounters with racial and ethnic difference require more than good intentions. This is not (just) specific to NDS, but representative of the marketplace of anti-trafficking organizations, its largely North American white actors, and the Christian religious tradition from which they arise and in which they abide. These actors generally represent white conservatives and white evangelicals, groups that hold significant religious and political power in North America. These are the factors that compelled me to conduct the qualitative research for my dissertation at NDS and motivated me to propose a womanist ethic of encounter for anti-trafficking organizations broadly construed. In working toward a womanist ethic of encounter, I seek an alternative to the racialization of Black bodies and sexual purity—and preoccupation with sex in general—that have long shaped evangelical involvement in social reform. Centering Black women in this ethic of encounter also displaces the apparition of the white woman who has haunted the efforts of anti-trafficking activists for centuries.

2. The Historical Impetus for Project

This essay builds on historical and case study material from a larger research project, “Trafficking in God”3, which argues that issues of Christian paternalism and racialization in contemporary anti-commercial sex exploitation work have historical precedent that must be deconstructed. The historical portion of the project covers a time span of approximately 130 years from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries that narrate several significant moments not only in the making of America, but also in the faith-based employment of social reform such as white slavery, anti-vice, and Prohibition campaigns that amplified racialization as social categorization. Racialization, as human rights activist Steve Martinot argues, plays a role in the formation of the United States by producing racialized subjects: “One is not born black or brown; one becomes black or brown in being categorized as such by a white society that refuses or denies one full participation or membership through the imposition of that trait” (Martinot 2003, pp. 23–24), says Martinot in The Rule of Racialization.

The term “white slave” has several connotations. I use it in the way that the British reformers used it in the 1880s to refer to class and sexual exploitation, particularly forced prostitution. The “white” in white slavery referred not only to the race/ethnicity of the victims of prostitution or trafficking, but to their class and gender as influenced by Victorian notions of propriety and womanhood. The alleged “whiteness” of the slave is as much a reference to the victim’s race/ethnicity as it is to her moral status in a diversifying world. She was the moral subject par excellence that must be protected and saved from the non-native savages4 emigrating to her land. The efforts made to save the victims of and those vulnerable to the white slave trade by the anti-vice activists and reformers in cities such as London and Chicago were assiduously documented. These reformers, often white males, represented a variety of professional backgrounds (journalists, doctors, and pastors among them), but what they had in common was an interest in maintaining both the sexual and racial purity of white women and white people in general.

Prohibition was the political sibling of the social reform movement of temperance and it dispensed with the pleasantries of temperance as a personal decision for communal good and enforced Prohibition as a communal good. In particular, the method of gaining the Black Prohibition vote was the same as that for temperance: both involved convincing Black people of the benefit and virtue of sobriety. However, particular to Prohibition was the need to prove that a vote in its favor was in the pragmatic interest of Black people. In this campaign for Prohibition, politics was entangled with what historian H. Paul Thompson Jr. calls the “evangelical reform nexus,” which is the intersection of religious practice, theology, and ideology that formed social reform movements such as temperance and informed Prohibition (Thompson 2013, p. 16). Prohibition was intended to bend the moral arc toward virtuous living through the religious work of national organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Women’s Christian Temperance Union favorites such as Frances Willard and Sallie Chapin gave speeches to freed Black people advertising Prohibition as a benefit to their race and a guarantee for greater social freedom.

At the forefront of the social purity movement in North America was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest women’s organization in the nineteenth century. With a white ribbon as its logo and a mission to create a “sober and pure world” by abstinence, purity, and evangelical Christianity (Tyrrell 1991, p. 7), the WCTU was an active participant in women’s suffrage. Using Victorian modes of purity and morality, the women of the WCTU acquired the social capital and political power necessary to protect and promote Anglo-Saxon family values, values that were considered instrumental to combatting vice. The WCTU encouraged women to take their religious faith from the domestic sphere into the public sphere as a demonstration of what WCTU president Frances Willard called the “New Ideal of Womanhood”. This new ideal, which works against the Victorian era standard of women being restricted to the home, conceived the piety of woman as instrumental in changing the world.

“Trafficking in God” explores the history of social reform movements such as the white slavery panic (Stead 2011; Bell 1912), anti-vice (Willard 1890; Donovan 2006), and Prohibition (Thompson 2013) and reveals that they all have (at least) one thing in common: each of those reform movements, primarily lead by Cristian-identifying individuals and groups, depended on racialization if not outright racism as an underlying practice. White slavery could not compel actors without its depiction of non-white kidnappers of white women. Prohibition could not attract adherents without the assumption that the idle hands of freed Black people would be the death of white people—and the continued political disenfranchisement of Black people. Anti-vice campaigns could not recruit reformers without the fear that Black men and immigrants are prone to run wild and attack white women. Across these reform movements, white women in these narratives are pawns set to be either victim or savior, while Black women must eke out their place in history as mostly wanton jezebels or the innocent that are not worth rescuing, until now. As ethicist Yvonne Zimmerman points out in her research on the racializing precedents and contexts of Christian anti-trafficking activism, “for many evangelicals, saving poor, brown women in the developing world from sex trafficking was central to protecting the rights of these women to be our become Christian” (Zimmerman 2013, pp. 47–48). I add to her analysis that it is not just about protecting the rights of these women to be or become Christian, but projecting a fixed idea about what it means to be a woman in the first place. To be the ideal woman is to be Christian and white in the ways that their rescuers show up as white Christian women. This is demonstrated in how international Christian trafficking organizations implant themselves among poor, brown women and establish relationships rooted in the saving power of the Gospel. Poor, brown, third-world women can only become the paradigmatic Christians of the twenty-first century when they adopt the values of the Christians who are saving them. Thus, I am making a connection between the racializing impulses of Christian social reformers and the ways in which white women were utilized to forward the cause of reformers and now anti-trafficking workers.

Considering past and present social reform efforts, this essay analyzes NDS’s method of encounter and imagines an alternative womanist ethic of encounter in the context of anti-trafficking interventions. The ethic of encounter I propose unfolds in two parts: first, as a re-membering of history, and second, as a breaking of the body of evangelical whiteness through a preliminary consideration of eucharistic solidarity. To construct this ethic of encounter I begin with the conceptual framing of Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers and womanist ethicist Emilie Townes to talk back to the history of Black women in America (Townes 2006). Michel Foucault’s theory on history provides an ethical theory of re-membering history with epistemological humility. The preliminary consideration of eucharistic solidarity is informed by systematic theologian M. Shawn Copeland’s discussion of eucharistic solidarity. I expand on it to imagine it as a practice that can contribute to breaking the body of evangelical whiteness. In sum, this essay centers the voice of Black women, myself included, who are invested in both the representation and recovery of Black women’s bodies from the gaze and intervention of white people.

3. Methodology

I used the qualitative methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore what informs and motivates NDS volunteers and staff to engage in anti-trafficking outreach. I embedded myself as a volunteer and researcher in the community of staff and volunteers for nine months and carried out participant observation during weekly outreach trips for two months and in numerous organizational meetings, including a series of racial reconciliation meetings for four months. I also conducted eight in-depth interviews with staff and volunteers who voluntarily chose to be a part of the study in the summer of 2020. The criteria for participation in the in-depth interviews was that individuals had to be active volunteers in NDS’s work, either through their affiliation with the organization as core staff, volunteers (past and present), or as women who had graduated from NDS’s safe house program. All participants were provided with a summary of the project so that they understood the dynamics of my presence and their participation in interviews and participant observation. I recruited interview participants in three rounds with the assistance of the executive director.

4. Part 1: Re-Membering History

Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar”, “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother”, “Aunty”, “Granny”, God’s “Holy Fool”, a “Miss Ebony First”, or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus on confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.

(Spillers 1987, p. 89)

Many, if not all, Black women live in the wake of historical tropes and essentializing roles that assigned them value before they could assign themselves value. They are part of what Hortense Spillers calls “a locus of confounded identities, a meeting of grounded investments, and privations in the national treasure of rhetorical wealth” (Spillers 1987). These tropes and confounded identities make it difficult for Black women to live beyond those markers unless they choose to appear in ways that are read as respectable and legible to the dominant culture. The trouble with these tropes and roles is that even as their exact names disappear in current discourse on Black women, their historical existence is legion and continues to mark women. Black women who choose to reveal themselves before the public are compared to Jezebel, homely and maternal Black women are marked as Mammy, and any woman who speaks out of turn according to the dominant view is a Sapphire. The Black trafficked subject cannot be completely unlinked from the culturally-produced tropes of Jezebel, Mammy, and Sapphire when white saviors appear in their lives. Historically, the white social reformers ignored the Black trafficked subject because of the assumption that she chose that life for herself. On the other hand, white women in trafficking could not have chosen the life for themselves, and therefore, needed a special kind of attention. When white Evangelical workers position themselves as gatekeepers for social and religious salvation, they are repeating historical patterns regarding who needed to be saved and who did not. These white Evangelical workers saw white women as vulnerable subjects to be saved and Black women as subjects to control, and though contemporary anti-trafficking collapses a stark dichotomy, the methods of intervention reveal significant traces of old perceptions.

Historically, trafficking shows up in the American consciousness as worth people’s immediate attention because it was a threat to the security of white people, particularly white women. Strikingly, it was 246 years between when the first Africans who were held in captivity arrived at Jamestown and the Emancipation Proclamation, but 63 years between the earliest noted incident of white slavery and the enactment of laws against white slavery, such as the Mann Act. Such a fierce call to action was galvanized by the perceived high worth of white woman over Black woman, a perception grounded in white woman’s assumed morality and Black woman’s assumed immorality and their moral unpredictability as recently freed people. For the Black woman in a post-Emancipation Proclamation age, there was little to no concern for her holistic freedom. Her legalized freedom was all she deserved. There was no proper home made for the Black woman, nor was there equal access to employment; instead, she had to make a way out of no way. No matter what she did or what decisions she made, the Black woman found herself under the gaze of whiteness and subject to the intervention of well-meaning, usually Christian white people. These saviors arrived, as they did in anti-vice and Prohibition reform, to show her a more perfect way of life: their way. It is here that evangelical whiteness starts its insidious influence.

From then to now, the Black woman’s body has been seized upon as an object to rescue and correct. Reformers then and activists now (or abolitionists depending on to whom you talk) seek to restore Black women to an idea of womanhood that approximates, if not completely takes on, the role of normative white Christian womanhood and purity. Such was the case with a routine stop during a night of outreach with NDS.

After approximately two hours of stopping at various gas stations, motels, and strip clubs where we ministered to various women and business owners, we began to wind down. We pulled over on a small patch of gravel and Jennifer called row three, the row where I was sitting. We unloaded and walked through patchy grass and dirt to arrive at a sheltered bus stop where two Black men were sitting under the shelter and a young Black woman was standing just beyond it. We greeted the men, but we did not stop to talk to them; instead, we made a beeline to the woman. As we approached her, Jennifer, who was leading our group, greeted her and asked if she would like a rose. The woman accepted the rose. The leader then asked if she would like a card, and this is when the woman became visibly perplexed. With a quizzical look on her face, she asked, “Why?”

“I know it’s kind of weird to be standing here and all of a sudden someone is coming up to hand you a rose and a card”, said Jennifer.

“We are with a church that is out here ministering to men and women in the area”.

At this point, the woman’s perplexity seemed to shift to annoyance. Jennifer then asked if she was coming from work and headed home, to which the woman tersely responded, “Yes”. Jennifer asked if there was anything we could pray with her about and the same terse tone coated her response of, “No”. Sensing that the woman did not want to be bothered any longer, Jennifer gestured for us to walk toward the men who were sitting under the shelter. She handed both men cards and asked if they needed prayer. One of the men shared that he was having a baby soon and would have liked prayer regarding that, while the other asked for us to pray for the world in general. With those requests in hand, Jennifer prayed with the men, and we made our way back toward the van.

When we got back to the van, Jennifer debriefed everyone on what row three saw and heard. She explained the situation at the bus shelter by saying that though the young woman might have thought that we thought she was in “the life”, we were just there to love on her. Jennifer was determined to drive home the point that we should not or did not see the woman as involved in trafficking or prostitution, but that she was simply a woman in need of love. Though NDS was present in the area to “love on” women, their failure to demarcate clear boundaries between the trafficked and non-trafficked woman beforehand led to the irresponsible marking of a Black woman’s body as a problem to be solved. This woman could not explain herself out of her assumed identity because her saviors were armed with their pious enthusiasm and evangelical Christian sentimentality. NDS’s job was to disarm and make her feel that she needed to accept their presence in her life at that moment. Their perception was that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they needed to pave the way for her to find her rightful place. This fault may seem slight, as it did to the NDS leader that night, but it is part of the history of white people maintaining a paternalistic gaze over Black people. That is, the type of interventionist work that NDS and other anti-commercial sex exploitation organizations do often depends on identifying women of color as in need of a moral intervention. Because these women on the street are out of step with the tenets of evangelical piety, they are seen as having a disordered view of their sexuality and presumed to be incapable of distinguishing between good and bad without Christian intervention. This work is easy to conduct under the cover of night where one can assume that, if a woman is out, it is because she is selling something scandalous rather than, say, waiting for the bus after her work shift. These assumptions double down on a notion of the Black woman as morally corrupt and in need of saving, which is asserted in white evangelical Christian purity movements that presume that women of color must attain the purity (Klein 2021) that white women intrinsically have. This is a pervasive problem in Christian mission work that ventures into communities—and countries—usually not of their own.

In international anti-trafficking missions, white evangelicals travel to Asia, South America, and other so-called third-world countries to protect poor, Brown women by offering them a new life modeled by white Christian actors. In North America, urban missionaries travel to neighborhoods beyond the suburbs to save the denizens of the inner city. In both cases, volunteers and activists are armed with a pious enthusiasm and American sentimentality about social outreach work. Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole highlighted such enthusiasm and sentimentality in a damning tweet, published at the height of KONY 20125, when he said: “The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm” (Cole 2012). Such is also the history of American missionary workers who descend upon war-torn, impoverished, and otherwise stricken areas, and use those areas as a site for problem solving through piety. This method of problem solving is rarely sufficiently reflexive enough to realize that Christianity is not a source of refuge and relief for all. Consequently, these international and domestic enterprises replicate what Emilie Townes calls the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” (Townes 2006), by maintaining the white evangelical imagination about people of color’s need for moral oversight. Evangelicals, as Anthea Butler notes, have long trafficked in the project of white supremacy that has undergirded the politics of North America and supported slavery, segregated churches, believed in African American’s inferiority to whites, supported Jim Crow, and opposed civil rights and interracial marriage (Butler 2021, pp. 11–12). Thus, in this active and generationally inherited imagination, the moral standard of evangelical Christianity in anti-trafficking activism often sets the tone for being human, and particularly for what qualifies as being a true woman. As such, it is easy to latch onto the Black woman as a morally vulnerable trafficked subject who exists to be saved by the project of evangelical whiteness, because to save her is to make her human again. It is in this imagination that the trouble with evangelical intervention reproduces itself by marking the Black woman at the bus stop, the Black woman in front of the convenience store, and even the Black woman at work in the strip club. These women are the objects of help, and if not help, then love, love that evangelicals believe she needs, love that is distributed on the grounds that a Black woman’s mere existence in a space at twilight indicates her need for moral correction.

I observed the assumptions of NDS workers come to a head several times as they approached Black women under the guise of helping and loving on them. The most memorable moment—aside from that moment at the bus stop—occurred in front of the convenience store of a gas station where a young Black woman was walking to her car. Our group was in hot pursuit of her with roses in hand. Once we arrived within a stone’s throw of the woman, she kindly laughed and said, “I actually do what y’all do and I live in this area, but tonight is my night off”. They asked her if she wanted a flower and she declined while stepping into her car, starting it, and pulling off, leaving the volunteers in the wake of her car’s exhaust fumes. The group marveled at this. This moment captured more than misperception. Rather, they were re-enacting a historical pattern of perceiving Black women as morally questionable and as, by necessity, the objects of white intervention. That was a defining moment that reminded me that the interventions of NDS cannot work on assumptions about Black women’s positionality. Rather, the interventions must be guided by a critical understanding of the history of social reform, Christianity, and racialization that is careful to not repeat that history’s mistakes.

A critical command of history that demonstrates how whiteness functions in anti-trafficking spaces can lead anti-commercial sex exploitation (CSE) activists, volunteers, and workers to encounter all persons with wisdom and discernment rather than pious enthusiasm and moral sentimentality. The historical re-membering that I recommend is a review of the history of white slavery and anti-vice interventions that volunteers can study to understand how they connect to contemporary anti-trafficking work. The approach to history that is operative in “Trafficking in God” and this article is informed by Michel Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” (Foucault and Bouchard 1977) which suggests that historical analysis ought to engage the genealogy of ideas and practices rather than a notion of universal truths. He provides a narration of history that is not orchestrated by the victor, but those people, places, and things thought to be without history. Foucault posits that an effective history functions in four ways. It departs from the idea that anything can be known, and thus centers intellectual and epistemic humility; it calls attention to what is studied in historical events by suspending chronology, historical succession, and notions of progress; it shortens its vision to the thing nearest it; and finally, it affirms perspectival knowledge. In thinking through how history ought to be used to address systemic issues, Foucault’s theory provides a framework for how complicated histories starring the victors can be interrupted to focus on the marginalized and practices that propagate marginalization. Furthermore, using Foucault’s critical theory of effective history to emphasize the marginalized and interrupt normative experience is in line with both feminist and womanist methods of knowing, being, and doing justice work.

Effective history departs from the notion that anything can be known and centers the practices of both an intellectual and epistemic humility. This is my interest in reaching back into the history of white slavery, anti-vice, and Prohibition because each of those historical moments was canonized to focus on the dominant culture of the time. That is, white slavery focused on white journalists, writers, and Christians as rescuers of white women; anti-vice focused on the white reformer and Christian notions of purity; and Prohibition focused on the white politician and pastor. In recent years scholars and researchers (Donovan 2006; Doezema 2013; Thompson 2013; Brennan 2014) have uncovered the racializing building blocks that lay beneath the narration of these historical moments, but the moral actors who respond to the modern-day corollaries to those historical moments rarely register an interest in a critical reading of history beyond the canonical. Thus, the history that anti-CSE organizations such as NDS use tends to lean on both sensational and questionable accounts of history that do more to pull at heartstrings than signal the complex realities and encourage critical thinking.

A critical command of history also requires the humility to acknowledge the silenced people of any history. Herein lies the third component of Foucault’s effective history, which encourages a shortening of its vision to the things nearest to it (Foucault and Bouchard 1977, p. 155). Like liberative ethics that advocate practice from the margins, effective history begins at the margins and searches the soul of the historian or reader. Thus, NDS and anti-CSE organizations wishing to orient people to the issue and the work of trafficking must solemnly approach the history that surrounds trafficking. They must prepare to be undone by both the vastness and the uniqueness of the historical circumstance, particularly how the Black woman shows up. Here, anti-CSE organizations must carefully tread with the histories they use to tell the story of commercial sex work, exploitation, and trafficking. I separately name these because the conflation of them into the single category known as “commercial sexual exploitation”, or “modern day slavery”, borders on stripping women of their agency to voluntarily participate in sex work. Of this, Anne McClintock offers; “Depicting sex workers as slaves only travesties the myriad, different experiences of sex workers around the world. At the same time, it theoretically confuses social agency and identity with social context” (Day 2016, p. 33). This does not disregard the potential exploitation of the work, but it does disrupt the historical pattern of denying moral agency to Black women. Furthermore, the challenge in the nomenclature of modern-day slavery would necessitate a critical conversation about what is behind the desire to assign commercial sex work a similar value to chattel slavery. This is toward an openness to the nuanced details of history or what Foucault classifies as history’s “most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations” (Foucault and Bouchard 1977, p. 154), as well as an openness to lived experience, which includes the complex decision-making of women who exist on the margins of society. Disrupting the pattern of conflating all sex work with slavery ensures that the long beleaguered Black woman, whose dominant historical beginning was as one without agency, is not reiterated and, at least, has the agency to decide when and where she enters.

With all this in mind, what follows are my suggestions for how evangelical anti-trafficking activists and workers might better see and respond to the needs of Black women in a precarious industry such as the commercial sex trade.

5. Part 2: Breaking the Body of Whiteness: A Eucharistic Encounter

Womanist systematic theologian M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom is primarily concerned with the redemption of Black women’s bodies through an engagement with Christology and theological anthropology. She sets the tone for this engagement in a simple, but profound statement: “The body of Jesus of Nazareth impels us to place the bodies of victims of history at the center of theological anthropology, to turn to ‘other’ subjects” (Copeland 2010, p. 84). I envision this as the turn that evangelical social outreach projects must take, they must break the body of whiteness and center the subjectivity of Black women.

In “Marking the Body of Jesus, the Body of Christ”, Copeland emphasizes an anthropological understanding of Jesus. She declares that Jesus’ flesh and body were and remain marked by the intersectional traces of race, gender, culture, religion, and sexuality. These characteristics caused him to be a character of contention in the age of the Roman Empire. Of Jesus’ ministry, she says, “Jesus lived and carried out his mission in the palpable tension between resistance to empire and desire for the reign of God” (Copeland 2010, p. 59). He inserted his body into the tension between resistance and desire. Copeland’s Christology meets her theological anthropology when she explains that the core of Jesus’ ministry was his deep relationship—not a fleeting one—with all kinds of people. The ministry of Jesus touched, handled, and embraced the bodies of those marked with blindness, paralysis, palsy, deafness, and leprosy. Jesus’ interaction with these marked bodies changed what Copeland calls the “village body” and restored them to the synagogue, family, kin, and friends. Copeland explains that Jesus’ intimate interactions with this village body enabled him to befriend them, not, as Marcella Althaus-Reid adds, “to preach and show his compassion in a detached, old-fashioned teaching mode” (Copeland 2010, p. 60). Jesus’ welcoming of the village body was rooted in his ability to make no distinction between himself and those he was befriending.

Copeland states: “To privilege suffering bodies in theological anthropology uncovers the suffering body at the heart of Christian belief and it lays bare both the human capacity for inhumanity and the divine capacity for love” (Copeland 2010, p. 1). Thus, the suffering body of Christ places a mirror in front of suffering bodies on earth that reminds them of their being created in the image of God. Moreover, a corrected theological anthropology facilitates an understanding of the meaning and purpose of existence within the content of divine revelation. Copeland posits three convictions as central to an understanding of theological anthropology: (1) human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, have a distinct capacity for communion with God; (2) human beings have a unique place in the cosmos God created; and (3) human beings are made for communion with other living beings. Considering Black women’s embodied experience, these convictions become integral in enfleshing freedom because they rupture repressive and oppressive religious and social histories. In this recovery and rupture, the body of Jesus compels us to place the bodies of the victims of history at the center of theological imagination and ethical response. I am not suggesting that the bodies of Black women are, by default, suffering bodies. Instead, I am suggesting that Black women can look in the mirror to see an image of God in themselves, and that the work of organizations such as NDS is to encounter women not as clients in need of service or objects in need of conversion, but as human beings, friends, who are already a part of God’s cosmos. For NDS to get here, they must reconfigure their Eurocentric Christology and anthropology which currently favors Jesus as a white male and white women as the prevailing subject of virtue. Only then can evangelical outreach organizations begin to root their work in the actual needs of Black women and people of color, as opposed to assuming needs that are just an imposition of the organization’s myopic mission. Transitioning from white savior to meeting the needs of people requires the capacity to relinquish preexisting knowledge and ideas of what is needed to recover communities and people considered beyond the pale. As Foucault states, “knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting” (Foucault and Bouchard 1977, p. 154).

We cut knowledge by maintaining epistemological humility about histories and the silenced people in those histories. We also cut knowledge by recognizing that known histories are not just rooted in events, but in constructions of morality, truth, and human being. These constructions of morality, truth, and human being are the heart of my analysis and critique of evangelical social outreach work. My interest is in tearing down these constructions to create something new. This is what I mean by breaking the body of whiteness. I want evangelical actors to disabuse themselves of histories and practices that reinforce their knowledge and whiteness rather than rupture it. The point is for NDS and similar organizations to untether themselves from a limited range of practices and emotions around anti-CSE work. Certainly, emotions such as love, grace, and inspiration affectively do a great deal to compel people to do the work of rescuing women from commercial sex exploitation, but they are insufficient on their own.

I began this essay with the particularity of the historical and lived realities of Black women and a critique of universalizing ethics that fails to take that particularity seriously. I offer an invitation to a more complex range of histories and knowledges as part of the formation of people interested in and committed to anti-commercial sex exploitation work. What NDS currently gives volunteers is a limited range of emotions such as love, grace, and inspiration and little to no historical grounding. This ahistorical approach merely gives people the wherewithal to enthusiastically labor in the anti-trafficking economy. Enthusiasm and empathy are not enough. Only functioning with these emotions produces a myopic view of what is necessary for effective engagement and solidarity with women involved in the global sex economy.

I suggest that in addition to emotionally responding, we should also respond with a nuanced critical historical knowledge. For example, critical historical knowledge shines a very different light on the practice of white women hopping out of vans in neighborhoods they do not know to hand out lipstick roses to Black women. The volunteers believe that they are sharing God’s love for all people. I argue that they are enacting an historical pattern of whiteness asserting itself, assuming it is needed and always helpful. Breaking the body of whiteness in the kind of eucharistic encounter that Copeland envisions means insisting that the women at the bus stop or in the gas stations do not need the Jesus van to connect them to God. They do not need lipstick and roses from white women to know that they are beloved by God. Whiteness does not need to bring God into the neighborhood at all. Breaking the body of whiteness in a eucharistic encounter means centering the Black body in history and perceiving God’s unmediated presence in the lives of Black women.

6. Part 3: Toward a Womanist Ethic of Encounter

I suggest that NDS and any other faith-based organization engaged in anti-commercial sex exploitation work would benefit from the liturgical element of the Eucharist that takes the body seriously. Of the Eucharist, Copeland proclaims:

Eucharist is countersign to the devaluation and violence directed toward the exploited, despised Black body...Yet such implicit pointing requires explicit resistance to the anti-liturgy that racism performs. Eucharistic solidarity opposes all intentionally divisive segregation of bodies on the specious grounds of preference for race or gender or sexual orientation or culture. Eucharistic solidarity contests any performance of community as “an atomized aggregate of mutually suspicious individuals” or as self-righteously self-sustaining or as historically innocent or as morally superior or as monopoly on truth

(Copeland 2010, p. 127)

Copeland’s articulation of the power of the Eucharist is significant on the grounds of the sacrament being a countersign and site of contestation. She regards the Eucharist as an invitation to a table where we gather as a community to break bread together and feast to be strengthened to do work in the world. However, before the work can be done, something must be broken. If the Eucharist functions as countersign and contestation in this context, the body of the Black woman must be centered and the body of whiteness must be broken. The body of whiteness as the norm, as the savior, as the most powerful and yet most vulnerable, as the center must be broken. Whiteness that remains preoccupied with saving something other than itself must be broken. The body of whiteness that insists on perpetrating and proclaiming the moral high ground must be broken. The body of Black women must be re-centered and relieved, and the body of Evangelical whiteness must be repeatedly broken.

This call to eucharistic solidarity with Black women that I am offering is a theoretical as well as a practical encouragement. What I have offered heretofore is the theoretical encouragement that theologically thinks about the change that NDS can make through a more rigorous reflection on the body and position of Black women. My practical encouragement is for NDS to establish a practice of the eucharist as a tangible reminder of the importance of holding the body with honor, dignity, and grace. What I suggest builds on the orientation that NDS currently offers via prayer, worship, anointing, and other religious practices to metaphysically prepare volunteers for a physical encounter. The eucharist is a way for a faith-based organization, particularly a predominantly white Protestant one, to remember that it is not the bodies of non-white people that must be broken and reformed, but the bodies of whiteness. White evangelical bodies need to be broken and their histories sacrificed so that they can take Black women’s bodies more seriously. In doing so, they can more faithfully, ethically, and efficaciously express their care and concern. How does this practically work?

Every evening, when NDS prepares for and conducts outreach, they function like a church. They worship, they pray, and they preach a word about the work that is ahead of them; then, they take to the streets to practice what they preached. Yet, in all NDS’s preparation for and conducting outreach, there is no moment that brings to the forefront the significance of embodiment. In my experience with NDS, I observed that their practices imply that bodies are only good so long as they are open to Christian godly intervention. The praying and worship that covers NDS’s enterprise underestimates bodies unless those bodies are compelled and ready to believe in a God who can turn them around by saving their souls. Yet, there must be something more than or even other than this, something that breaks in and touches NDS as much as they want to reach out and touch the women in trafficking. I suggest that NDS’s work lacks the sacramental imagination. In encountering Black women in sex work and commercial sex exploitation, they are participating in a sacrament that trains their hearts to encounter God in ways beyond the scope of their imagination. The encounter between NDS and the women demonstrates God’s work in the world not as an interaction between “us” versus “them”, but in an interaction that demonstrates interconnectedness. The Eucharist reminds us of this interconnectedness by ritualizing the power of the body, first the body of Christ and then our human bodies. NDS needs this sacramental reminder of interconnectedness as often as they endeavor to encounter Black women in commercial sex work.

A physical practice of the Eucharist before outreach would remind NDS of their interconnectedness to bodies that are too accustomed to being broken. Eucharistic solidarity, this awareness of interconnectedness, restructures the relationship. These women’s souls do not need saving—nor do their bodies need saving—what they need is their morality and vulnerability to be justly recognized. “Just recognition” starts with moral actors who acknowledge their interconnectedness and see their experience in encounters with these women as an opportunity to encounter God in the things they considered not of God. NDS’s current understanding is that God is in the darkness of the lives of the women they encounter, and thus they bring God into the light. Yet, what would it mean for them to see God as already in these women? To, as Ntozake Shange said, “find God and love her fiercely” (Shange 1975, p. 63). To love these women not with a distant, religious love, but a deep spiritual love that abides in the light and in the dark. This is a love that leads not by the coercive desire to transform Black women into a white imago dei, nor to replicate a history of problematic mission; rather, it loves through genuine concern and a mutually beneficial relationship. NDS cannot love in this way when they believe that they are the ones the women have been waiting for, but when they view themselves as those with whom the women can be in relationship. Breaking the body of whiteness and practicing eucharistic solidarity also teaches volunteers to see themselves as approaching God on the street rather than holding God as the gift behind their back.