“You Must Protect the Blessing”: Evangelical Chaplaincy and the Governance of Migrant Farm Labor

This article examines the evangelical corporate chaplaincy program at Fresh Harvest, Inc., one of the largest US employers of H-2A agricultural workers. Drawing on Facebook Live broadcasts (2021–2025), interviews with chaplains, and company communications, it shows how religion is mobilized as a neoliberal technology of governance in agribusiness. Chaplains, all Mexican-American evangelical pastors, provide daily pastoral presence in employer-owned housing, accompany workers in hospitals, and extend their ministry transnationally through livestreams and WhatsApp groups. Their discourse reframes workplace discipline, family separation, and visa dependency as spiritual obligations, sacralizing precarity through idioms of blessing, obedience, and sacrifice. The article situates Fresh Harvest chaplaincy within workplace spirituality while extending it into migrant and transnational contexts. It argues that chaplaincy functions in three registers: as governance, aligning corporate rules with biblical injunctions; as a theodicy of precarity, rendering vulnerability meaningful; and as infrastructure, creating pastoral and digital networks that stabilize labor flows.