“Your Hands, Your Feet”

Evangelical Youth Culture and the Rise of Short-Term Missions

Abstract

This essay explores the rise of short-term missions among US Christian evangelicals. It traces the dramatic expansion of missionary trips among young evangelicals since the 1990s, and examines the ways in which these trips contribute to particular globalized imaginaries. A major argument is that these trips constitute a form of transnationalism that is too often ignored in recent explorations of transnational history – the religious practice and community formation of evangelicals, who are frequently presumed to be merely domestic in their orientation. This essay explores the intersection between evangelical global visions and the politics of affect, looking particularly at a form of affective politics here defined as “enchanted internationalism.