Christianity's Role in United States Global Health and Development Policy

To Transfer the Empire of the World

John Blevins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351127486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, the role of religion in influencing international health policy and health services provision has been seen as increasingly important. This book provides a social history of the relationship between religion and America's international health policy and practice from the latter 19th century to the present. The book demonstrates that the fields of religion and public health have distinct moral frameworks, each with their own rationales, assumptions, and motivations. While these two frameworks share significant synergies, substantial tensions also exist, which are negotiated in political contexts.

The book traces the origins of religion's influence on public health to the Progressive Era in the latter half of the 19th century, examines tensions that arose in the first half of the 20th century, describes the divorce between religion and international health from the 1940s through the 1980s, identifies the sources of the renewed interest in the relationship between religion and international health, and anticipates the future contours of religion and international health in light of contemporary political and economic forces.While the influence of religion on international health practice and policy in the United States serves as the focus of the book, the effects of US policies on international health policies in general are also explored in depth, especially in the book's later chapters.

This ambitious study of religion's social history in the United States over the last 150 years will be of interest to researchers in global health, politics, religion and development studies.

1 The religious origins of America’s relationship to the world

The providence of God, the founding of a nation, and a mission to the world: America’s religious roots

On March 22, 1638, Mrs. Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated from her Puritan congregation and expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Raised as an Anglican in England, Hutchinson followed the Reverend John Cotton to America after Cotton was forced to leave England due to his Puritan beliefs. While her personal life and religious practice were marked by strong faith and devotion, Anne Hutchinson was also a skilled nurse midwife and key health provider to the young colony. Her brother-in-law, the Reverend John Wheelwright, heaped praise on her nursing skills and her compassion:

Mrs. Anne Hutchinson was a woman of remarkable force of character, intellectual power, and acquirements, as well as of unaffected piety. As a nurse of the sick, especially in the ailments peculiar to her sex, she was singularly skillful, and cheerfully rendered gratuitous service to all who were in need; so that in the infant settlement, where few means of alleviating suffering were to be found, it is not strange that she came to be esteemed as little less than a ministering angel.¹

Anne Hutchinson was also strong-willed and possessed a keen intellect, traits which did not bode well for a woman in the American colonies in the mid- seventeenth century. She was tried in the civil court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and found guilty of heresy for her interpretations of the Biblical texts, especially in relation to the nature of God’s grace. As evidence of God’s wrath for her wrong thinking, prosecutors in the trial cited the malformed stillbirths experienced both by Hutchinson and her husband and by some families who had the misfortune to seek her medical expertise during labor.²

The Reverend John Eliot was one of the judges in Hutchinson’s trial. Eliot was a Puritan pastor who had immigrated to the Massachusetts from England. Eliot’s wife, Ann, was also a medical provider and herbalist in the colony.³ However, Ann Eliot seemed less inclined to question religious teachings; she was not accused of heresy, tried, and convicted as Anne Hutchinson was. Like his wife, Eliot valued medicine and health care, but neither of these trumped religious faith; the teachings of Puritanism and its call to follow Christ took precedence.

In the years following the Hutchinson trial, Eliot became a missionary to the Native Americans who inhabited the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He learned the Algonquin language and subsequently produced an Algonquin language translation of the Bible. Preaching in the Algonquin tongue, Eliot converted the first groups of Native Americans to the Christian faith in the early 1640s. In his sermon to the Native American leader Waban and his family in 1646, Eliot preached these words:

Jesus said they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick … These words are a similitude; that, as some be sick and some well; and we see in experience, that when we be sick, we need a Physician, and go to him and make use of his physic; but they that be well need not do so, they need it not and care not for it; so it is with soul sickness. And we are all sick of that sickness in our souls, but we know it not. We have many at this time, sick in body; for which cause we do fast and pray this day, and cry to God, but more are sick in their souls … Therefore, what should we do this day, but go to Christ, the Physician of souls? He healed men’s bodies; but he can heal souls also. He is a great Physician; therefore, let all sinners go to him … Such as see their sins and are sick of sin, them Christ calleth to repentance and to believe in Christ; therefore, let us see our need of Christ to heal all our disease of soul and body.⁴

While one might assume that Reverend Eliot’s tenacity in learning the Algonquin language and eloquence in delivering these words might have had an effect on the conversion of Waban and his family, the illnesses and widespread death among the Algonquin and of other Native American tribes from smallpox and other infections undoubtedly played a role. Numerous Native American settlements had been decimated by infections introduced by the English to which they had no immunity. Estimates of mortality in the years following the first arrival of the English settlers ranged up to 90% among the Pequots, Pawtuxets, and Pokanokets,⁵ a devastation described by Neal Salisbury, a historian of Native American cultures, as “a vast disaster zone, comparable to those left by modern wars and other large-scale catastrophes.”⁶ Under such circumstances, John Eliot’s description that “some be sick and some well; and we see in experience that when we be sick, we need a Physician” likely held a rhetorical weight they would not have had not the Native Americans been defeated in battle and decimated by disease.

For Eliot and the Puritan faithful, conversion entailed not only an assent to the tenets of the Christian faith; it required a new way of living. One of Eliot’s first reports detailing the work of the Puritans in the American colonies to their brethren back in England described their early efforts to convert Native Americans to Christianity. The report, published in 1643 and entitled New England’s First Fruits; In Respect, First of the Conversion of Some, Conviction of Divers, Preparation of Sundry of the Indians, details the first conversion of a leader of a Native American tribe. That leader of the Pequot, named Wequash, was exhorted to forsake his wives, his family, and his tribe in his conversion to Christianity. Filled with fear at the power of the Puritans’ God who had equipped them to so easily defeat the Pequot, Wequash converted not only to a new religion but a new culture. As a Christian, he lived among the Puritans. The report recounts the death of Wequash. As he lay on his deathbed, some Pequot who had come to visit Wequash exhorted him to go to the Wigwam, the healer of the Pequot people. Again, according to the report, Wequash refused, saying “If Jesus Christ say that Wequash shall live, then Wequash must live; if Jesus Christ say, that Wequash shall dye, then Wequash is willing to dye, and will not lengthen out his life by any such meanes.”⁷

John Eliot went on to help organize Native American converts to Christianity into “Praying Indian” communities: 14 localities across the colony with the same types governmental and civic institutions—including schools and medical facilities—found in British and American colonial towns. Like Wequash, the Native Americans who professed the Christian faith had to forsake their families and cultures and its spiritual beliefs and institutions. In return, they enjoyed greater trade with the European colonists, had access to better land, and received education and health care provided by the British settlers that they prayed would save them from an all-too-common death.⁸

The histories of John Eliot and Anne Hutchinson demonstrate the connections between religion and health. Eliot offered testimony to God’s Providential care of their community as well as their role in ensuring the salvation of the Native Americans. For the Puritans, such testimony never considered the cost of conversion to the Native Americans themselves or to the violence of conquest of the land, either through armed conflict or the introduction of disease. For the pious Puritans looking to understand the relationship between their faith in God and health, Hutchinson served as an object lesson that misguided beliefs expressed in her heretical perspectives on the nature of God’s grace—perspectives expressed as a woman, no less—would incur God’s wrath which took the form of miscarriages and malformed infants. For these Protestant Christians who were among the first Europeans to settle in the New World, religious beliefs and practices were entwined with conceptions of health and illness, not only in their own communities, but also (even especially) in their mission activities to the Native Americans they encountered.

Eliot was not the only person involved in Protestant missionary efforts to the Native Americans. By no means did they all share the same attitude toward Native Americans culture as the one reflected in the description of Wequash’s renouncement of his family and culture. The Moravians, following the expectation of their European benefactor Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf, made no demands on Native Americans to leave their families, communities, or cultures behind. The Moravians believed any mission work should be short-term and geared toward equipping the people to whom the work was focused to take on the structures for Christian worship and nurture according to their own cultural context.⁹ Quaker missionaries assumed that Indian culture revealed “the Inner Light” which could not be limited only to the structures of European civilization to be grasped. Quaker missionary John Woolman saw Indian culture as a resource for his own learning and a source for revelation claiming

I was inwardly joyful that the Lord had strengthened me to come on this [missionary] visit [to the Indians], and had manifested a fatherly care over me in my poor lowly condition, when, in my own eyes, I appeared inferior to many among the Indians.¹⁰

The Baptist missionary Roger Williams dissented from the approach of the Praying Indian communities, seeing his call to be a missionary among the Indian and not to them. Williams believed that conversion was not a matter of intellectual assent but a conviction that the Christian religion offered Native Americans a way to better live a life marked by love and humility.¹¹ This position stood in sharp contrast to that of Cotton Mather, an influential Puritan leader not only in Massachusetts but across the American colonies, who regarded the spiritual practices of Native Americans as a form of devil-worship and wrote that it would be “the most unexceptionable piece of justice in the world for to extinguish the offending savages.”¹²

Given these widely varying attitudes, it is little wonder Native Americans themselves were confused and wary. David Brainerd, a Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans in the mid-eighteenth century, recounted an exchange with Native Americans that demonstrates this confusion and wariness:

[The Indians] asked me why I desired the Indians to become Christians, seeing the Christians were so much worse than the Indians and were more adept at lying, stealing, and drinking, I assured them that the whites they referred to were the bad whites. I and the ones who sent me, I explained, were the good whites who would never steal Indian land. The Indians then asked, plaintively, why did not these good people send you to teach us before, while we had our lands down by the seaside? … [Their decision to become Christians] was a favour they could not now be so good as to shew me, seeing they had received so many injuries from the white people.¹³

The missionary programs established by various Protestant groups in the American colonies to the Native Americans whose home was the land these Europeans Christians claimed as their own are an early example of Protestant foreign missions. In this instance, however, they are examples of foreign missions undertaken by English Protestants, not American. That those mission enterprises were carried out hand-in-hand with the practices of colonization should surprise no one and this marriage between religion and empire will be a familiar trope in this book. The English Puritans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and other Protestants who traveled to America from England beginning in the seventeenth century had no conception of a new nation known as the United States. Their vision was grounded in theological conviction and not in a model of governance. For these early colonial settlers, the societies they were establishing in the American colonies were evidence of God’s plan for the redemption of the world. Missionary activities to the Native Americans residing in the colonies provided an additional rationale for their endeavors. In fact, the call to bring the message of the Christian gospel to the Native Americans was a primary driver of the English Puritans’ immigration to the American colonies.

In 1629, the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony listed a primary reason for the establishment of the colony: “the duty to win and invite the natives of the country to the knowledge of the only true God and Savior.”¹⁴ In 1649, the Long Parliament in England granted a charter for the New England Company to carry out business enterprises in the colony for the purpose of raising funds with the stipulation that they support the evangelization of the Native Americans.¹⁵ The “Praying Indian” communities that Eliot helped establish were a model of governance not only for the Native Americans tribes to whom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The religious origins of America’s relationship to the world
• 2 “Christianity is adequate to the work”: religion and social reform in the progressive era
• 3 The new century begins: 1900–1948
• 4 In-depth Christianization: evangelists, engineers, and reconstructionists
• 5 Blurring the lines between evangelists, engineers, and reconstructionists
• 6 American Protestantism in the Cold War
• 7 No longer on the mainline: other Christianities, other religions, and no religion
• 8 Not “either/or” but “both/and”: on seeing international health and development as a tragic profession … and why that should give us hope
• Index