This is a past event.

Dr. Kari B. Henquinet will present, "Exploring Roots of Neoliberal and Faith-Based Development: Evangelical Christians and Modernization Theorists in Wartime Korea and Vietnam."  

Abstract: The rise of neoliberal and faith-based development and humanitarian aid over the last three decades has become a focal point of theory building in the anthropological literature, although most of the cases studied have been from the 1990s to the present. These studies highlight the increasingly critical role of religious organizations in the delivery of overseas aid as states have downsized. This paper extends this discussion to an earlier period of U.S. overseas aid and policy to explore points of convergence and divergence in the 1950s and 1960s among adherents of modernization theory who drove key aspects of U.S. foreign policy and evangelical Christians involved in humanitarian aid.  I use the case of World Vision to explore a prominent evangelical approach, drawing on archival and oral history sources, in wartime Vietnam and Korea. The paper traces ways in which distinct ideologies/theologies and intervention strategies abroad are connected to temporal frames and particular beliefs about social change.  While clear distinctions emerge between evangelical and secular approaches linked to modernization, I further explore flows and exchanges across lines of “secular” and “religious” in shared perceptions of vulnerability, tradition, and the need for a new kind of socialization in Korea and Vietnam.  This results in moments of collaboration between World Vision and the U.S. government, which evolved over these two decades and beyond to position World Vision to flourish in a neoliberal age.