This dissertation uses a Foucaultian genealogy to examine the intersection of the U.S.'s federal campaign to eliminate human trafficking with American Protestant Christianity. I argue that the understanding of human trafficking and the imagination of freedom codified in The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) and enacted in federal anti-trafficking initiatives are constituted through this set of religious sensibilities. Not only do these religious sensibilities shape the U.S.'s anti-trafficking laws, under the presidential administration of George W. Bush they have become a prominent part of the U.S.'s anti-trafficking project.

In its legislative moment, or the processes through which the TVPA was created, I show that while the TVPA is not a piece of "religious" legislation, it is situated within a discourse of religious freedom rooted in Protestant Christianity. Hence Protestant conceptions of what freedom entails condition the legislation's vision of freedom from trafficking. In its executive moment, or how the anti-trafficking legislation has been enacted, I show how the Bush administration has installed as the lynchpin of the U.S.'s anti-trafficking stance a set of religious claims that are particular to American Protestantism. In both moments, conceptions of gender and sexuality crucially construct the emergent conception of freedom from trafficking. Insofar as the U.S.'s anti-trafficking stance employs sensibilities rooted in American Protestantism, the freedom that this project endorses corresponds to conventionally Protestant norms of sex and gender. Especially as applied to women, the U.S.'s anti-trafficking project functions as a Protestant disciplining of "appropriate" gender and sexuality.

The Protestant norms that undergird the U.S.'s foreign policies on human trafficking are not constitutive of freedom in any universal sense, yet these norms are imposed all around the world. Because in a democratic, pluralistic society the state must not be permitted to compel ascription to any particular religious perspective, I conclude that the religious overtones and undertones of the U.S.'s anti-trafficking stance are problematic. The elimination of trafficking requires an approach that does not rely on sexual regulation as the primary ethical imperative of opposition to trafficking but, instead, one that protects and promotes practices of freedom.