This dissertation is a study of conservative white evangelical discourse on HIV/AIDS. Specifically, I look to the continuities and changes in evangelical rhetoric about the disease since the early 1980s, and the ways that race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation intersect and are utilized in these discourses. I argue that beginning in the late 1990s the baby boomer generation of conservative evangelicals began reframing the culture wars discourse around AIDS, which had controlled evangelical responses to the disease during the 1980s and 1990s. This paradigm constructed HIV/AIDS as a disease that was a problem for gay men (typically white gay men) and drug users as the product of sinful behavior. As a result, this earlier generation frequently denounced public funding to fight the disease and remained disengaged from work to help people with AIDS and battle the epidemic.

However, this discourse shifted when the baby boomer generation of conservative evangelicals started taking over leadership of the movement, and they reworked the culture wars framework in order to convince their coreligionists to change their perspectives on HIV/AIDS and become engaged in addressing the disease. This generation has changed the evangelical outlook on and government responses to AIDS in four main ways: acknowledging the potential for missionary activity; presenting the disease as a global (mainly Third World), heterosexual problem; emphasizing the opportunity to teach conservative evangelical sexual standards; and calling attention to "innocent" victims of the disease, particularly orphans and some women. In this way, baby boomer evangelicals have maintained underlying commitments to culture wars concerns, especially to heteronormativity, while shifting the larger framework.

With a strong emphasis on AIDS in the Third World, the epidemic in the United States has been written largely out of the baby boomer narrative on the disease, despite the continuing devastation it causes here, especially in communities of color. This dissertation contains three chapters. The first chapter is a historical survey of evangelical AIDS discourses and emphasizes both continuity and change over time. The second chapter is a case study of Rick and Kay Warren and their work to reframe the disease. The third chapter is an analysis of the impact of baby boomer evangelicals on U.S. government AIDS policies and funding, both domestic and international.