Christian Imperialism

Converting the World in the Early American Republic

Emily Conroy-Krutz

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781501725098
• eBook ISBN: 9781501701030
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The plans that motivated their voyage were ano less grand than taking part in the Protestant conversion of the entire world. Over the next several decades, these men and women were joined by hundreds more American missionaries at stations all over the globe. Emily Conroy-Krutz shows the surprising extent of the early missionary impulse and demonstrates that American evangelical Protestants of the early nineteenth century were motivated by Christian imperialism—an understanding of international relations that asserted the duty of supposedly Christian nations, such as the United States and Britain, to use their colonial and commercial power to spread Christianity.

In describing how American missionaries interacted with a range of foreign locations (including India, Liberia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, North America, and Singapore) and imperial contexts, Christian Imperialism provides a new perspective on how Americans thought of their country's role in the world. While in the early republican period many were engaged in territorial expansion in the west, missionary supporters looked east and across the seas toward Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Conroy-Krutz's history of the mission movement reveals that strong Anglo-American and global connections persisted through the early republic. Considering Britain and its empire to be models for their work, the missionaries of the American Board attempted to convert the globe into the image of Anglo-American civilization.

Chapter 1

Hierarchies of Heathenism

When a group of Massachusetts ministers gathered in 1810 to discuss the formation of an American missionary board, their minds were drawn to scripture. As they explained the importance of the work they were about to begin, they returned to Jesus’ Great Commission: “Go ye into the all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature.” For evangelical Protestants of the early republic, these words were a command, though a difficult one to enact. Preaching to all the world and every creature was no small task, and Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century were not the best-positioned people to take on that responsibility. Without an empire in which to evangelize, and with the Non-Intercourse Act curtailing the possible destinations of American ships, American missionaries did not seem to have many options for overseas missions.

Nonetheless, missionaries and their supporters surveyed the globe in 1810, seeking to learn about the state of the world in order to determine where they might begin their work. As they did so, they translated the “all the world” of scripture into the “most likely” sites of missionary success; it was in these places that the American Board would begin its work.

Missionaries did not want to go just anywhere, after all. The American foreign mission movement as a whole arose only when British missionaries reported success in India, and Americans wanted to join in that success. As the lackluster support for Native American missions in earlier decades revealed, missions only gained a major American audience if they could inspire Christians with tales of conversion from heathen paganism to Christian civilization. In the absence of this, missions were the project of a very small minority of evangelical true believers. British success in India, on the other hand, revealed to Americans that success was possible and that there was a mission field “white for the harvest,” to use their biblical imagery.1

Inspired by this British example, the American Board attempted to determine which places were ready for missionary work, and which places were not worth the effort, or at least not yet. As it did so, the Board and its supporters created a hierarchy of heathenism that helped them make sense of the seemingly endless possibilities for where to begin the immense task of converting the whole world. This hierarchy ranked the different cultures and peoples of the world with an eye to their level of civilization or depravity, with the ultimate goal of determining who would be most likely to be converted by missionary evangelism. At the top of this hierarchy was the United States itself, along with Britain.

Central to the missionary understanding of the world was the conviction that one’s position on the hierarchy could change as one’s culture did. These were not fixed positions. Mission work would improve and change these different cultures and communities. The Board and its missionaries sought to find those who seemed to have the potential to move upward toward the supposed Anglo-American apex of both culture and Christianity. Board members noted population size and geography, but far more important were their judgments about culture and their assumptions about what people from that part of the world would be like. Often, these judgments were heavily influenced by their assumptions about the effects of British and American imperial and commercial expansion.

Over the first decades of American missionary activity, this hierarchy guided missionary exertions and helped to determine where missionaries were sent and which missions were prioritized. It was this hierarchy that pointed American evangelicals toward Asia and away from North America in the early 1810s, and it would continue to shape the Board’s priorities throughout the early nineteenth century. The ideal mission location would occupy a certain point on that hierarchy somewhere in the middle range. To begin with a culture that ranked too low (as with most Native American tribes) would be an impossible endeavor, Board members felt, while those places nearly or fully “civilized” did not seem to have the same need for missionary efforts.

The main requirement for a place to be considered a good potential mission site was that it could show evidence or potential of civilization. This frequently coincided with proximity to a British or American commercial or imperial presence. A careful study of the Board’s decision making reveals not only what missionaries hoped the effects of evangelization would be (the adoption of Anglo-American cultural norms in addition to conversion to Protestant religious beliefs and practices) but also the things that mattered to Americans when they looked at the peoples of the world. In the process of deciding where to focus their evangelizing efforts, the members of the American Board worked to create order out of seeming chaos. The hierarchy that they constructed brought together their ideas about culture, race, and religion with the geopolitical realities of the world in which they lived to rationalize space and help them to go about the work of converting the world.

Civilization and the Draw of Foreign Missions

Both push and pull factors brought American evangelicals into the foreign mission movement. For generations, American Christians had supported mission work to some degree. This work was not overseas but was focused on Native Americans. By 1810, they had come to find this work largely useless. Missionaries saw few converts among the Indians and little enthusiasm for the work from the American churches. This state of affairs did not make them give up on the missionary endeavor, however. News of British missionary success in Asia instead alerted them to a new question. Perhaps their problem was not with missions as such. Perhaps their problem had to do with whom they were trying to convert. The North American continent, they decided, ought to be a lower priority than the rest of the world.

This was a profound shift. As recently as 1805, the Connecticut Missionary Society had insisted that it could not send missionaries even so far as Canada because it was a British colony. It would be inappropriate, the society feared, for American missionaries to be operating in British territory. The immediate postrevolutionary era had divided the Anglo-American evangelical network along regional lines. Though Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic continued to find themselves deeply connected to their brethren across the ocean, the first decades of modern British missionary activity saw a clear delineation between the duties of American and British Christians. The global mission field was divided along political lines, with missionaries from each nation working only in the places controlled by their own government. American missionaries accordingly had focused on the areas in North America that the United States claimed. Meanwhile in India, where the British East India Company had been expanding its territory in the years after the American Revolution, British chaplains and missionaries wrote that the way had been cleared for Christianity in Asia.

Anglo-American mission work had entered a new era in the 1790s, when the Baptist and London Missionary Societies were founded in England in 1792 and 1795 respectively, and across the Atlantic missionary societies were founded in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. While the British missionaries worked in Tahiti and India, American missionaries focused on converting Native Americans within the boundaries of their respective states. Along with nonevangelicals, Americans interested in missions turned their attention to the “large tracts of country still unsettled.” Just as many of their countrymen saw the future of the country in westward expansion into this new territory, evangelicals initially understood this to the proper domain of their evangelical efforts. Sounding a great deal like Jefferson describing his Empire of Liberty, the directors of the Connecticut Missionary Society expected that within the boundaries of the United States in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, “the field for missionary labors will therefore be extending itself for many years, if not ages.”2

In spite of these differences in scope, the directors of mission societies at the turn of the nineteenth century corresponded across the Atlantic, elected each other honorary directors of their own societies, and generally considered themselves “engaged in the same glorious cause.”3 The Great Commission was a shared project of all Christians, in their understanding, and Americans were responsible for spreading the Gospel through America. American and British missionaries imagined the conversion of the world, at home and abroad, as part of a single project in which each group had its own role working in the regions to which each had access and could rely on the protection of its home government. This larger project aimed to convert the whole world to an Anglo-American model of Protestant Christianity, defined not only by its theology, but also by its culture. Civilization was one of the benefits of the religion they preached, according to American and British missionaries in this period, and they sought to reform the gender relations, agricultural style, property ownership, dress, and recreation of the cultures that they encountered. For both British and American Christians, the expansion of their respective nation’s territory demanded the evangelization of the peoples who lived within their territories.4

Within a few years, however, this sense of optimism about the evangelization of North America was waning, and this had everything to do with the ways that missionaries and their supporters thought about Native Americans. For a number of years, missionaries had described the “heathen on our borders,” or Native Americans, as living “in a truly deplorable state of ignorance and barbarity.” They might even have been “in many respects more unfavorable to the reception of the Gospel, than…the inhabitants of the South Sea.”5 This comparison referenced the contemporaneous London Missionary Society mission to Tahiti, which Americans knew about because of their correspondence with British evangelicals throughout this period. It is indicative of changes that were beginning to emerge in American Protestant thinking, particularly as American missionaries began to think about the world beyond the North American continent. Connecticut Christians were well aware of what British missionaries were attempting on a global scale. As evangelicals in New England struggled to generate interest in their message among Native Americans, they read in the religious press and in their correspondence with England about the apparent success that British missionaries enjoyed in their early missions to India and Tahiti. Why was it, they wondered, that the British were finding converts when the Americans were not? These comparisons led them to begin thinking about what might make some groups more likely to convert than others.

The colonial and missionary literature reaching New England in the first decades of the nineteenth century was extremely influential to this way of thinking. American evangelicals were eager consumers of the news of British missionary efforts. As early as 1800, the reports of the London Missionary Society and its missionaries in Tahiti, South Africa, and India were printed in the American religious press. These dispatches were shared frequently enough that even the nonevangelical Christian Observer, a publication of the American Episcopal Church, informed its readers that by the time the annual report from the London Missionary Society reached its desk in 1805, “the greatest part of the information which it contains, respecting the progress of their missions, has already been communicated to our readers.”6

Americans could read about India’s readiness to convert to Christianity in the writings of Claudius Buchanan, whose sermon “The Star in the East” received a ready audience on both sides of the Atlantic. William Carey, the British Baptist missionary in Serampore, was similarly widely read. Both of these authors made specific reference to India and to the Christian community’s responsibility to the subcontinent. Buchanan insisted that the time had come “for diffusing our religion in the east.”7 The new access to India provided by the expansion of the British Empire required a Christian response, they said. Given the rich Anglo-American evangelical network and the participation of Northeastern merchants in trade with Asia, it was only a matter of time before this sentiment extended to American Christians as well.

Among those who were reading Buchanan and Carey were a group of divinity students at Andover Theological Seminary, including Adoniram Judson, Samuel Nott, Samuel Newell, and Gordon Hall. In 1810, they approached a group of ministers in Massachusetts to ask if they might create an American foreign missionary society. These students explained that their minds had “been long impressed with the duty and importance of personally attempting a mission to the heathen,” and that after a serious and prayerful period of consideration of their likelihood of success and the difficulties they might face, they had decided to devote themselves “to this work for life, whenever God, in his providence, shall open the way.”8 These hopeful missionaries asked if they ought to offer themselves to one of the European missionary societies, or if an American group might be formed to support them. In response, those ministers created the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

These students met such quick approbation of their project because they were not alone in their sense that the time had come for an American involvement in foreign missions. For America was in the midst of a series of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening, and Protestants throughout the country were talking about how their religious convictions required social, and even political, response. Within the churches, they worshiped in more emotionally expressive styles, proclaiming a faith that the world could be made perfect if only individuals and societies accepted the grace and salvation of Jesus. For these Christians, individuals could gain salvation only through belief in Jesus Christ. For those Protestants who would come to support missions, this was an inclusive vision, for it meant that salvation was possible for all, if only individuals could learn of Jesus and his church. Conversions, they believed, could occur on a large scale. They looked around them, at home and farther afield, and worried about the souls of those who did not yet believe. Those who embraced the mission movement were particularly concerned about those who did not yet have access to the word of God. They threw themselves into reform movements with a wide range of social and political aims, including increased access to the Bible and education, the colonization of African Americans to West Africa, the end of slavery, the defense of Native Americans against forced removal from their ancestral lands, and more.

It was out of this rich mix of religious revivalism and social reform that the foreign mission movement was born. Among those who felt this way were a group of students at Williams College in 1806. During a rainstorm, they gathered for shelter under a haystack. They prayed together, and decided to dedicate their lives to the cause of missions. They formed a missionary society at the college in 1808; a similar group, called the Brethren, was founded at Andover Theological Seminary by many of these same students who had moved on to prepare for lives in the ministry. Between its creation and 1870, the Brethren would produce some two hundred missionary candidates. At Andover, mission-inclined students worked with teachers who were similarly passionate about the duty of American Christians to convert the world.

Americans saw Providential signs in the expansion of the British Empire, in the possibility of passage on American ships to Asia, and in the new knowledge of the world obtained by explorers. ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. Hierarchies of Heathenism
• 2. Missions on the British Model
• 3. Mission Schools and the Meaning of Conversion
• 4. Missions as Settler Colonies
• 5. American Politics and the Cherokee Mission
• 6. Missionaries and Colonies
• 7. A “Christian Colony” in Singapore
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index