Foreign missions and the politics of evangelical culture: Civilization, race and evangelism, 1810--1860

The foreign missionary movement during the first half of the nineteenth century linked American Christians with the world at large. The American foreign missionary movement emerged from both an activist trend in traditional Calvinist theology and a global consciousness that gripped religious and secular thinkers alike. While evangelical theology provided one impetus for global missions, a more broadly held belief in the superiority of western civilization, republican government and the free market buttressed efforts to spread Christianity. To promote their movement, missionaries published travel literature and accounts of non-western nations in books and periodicals, much of which blended sensationalist depictions of “heathenism” and “barbarism,” with more staid descriptions of geography, botany, religion and language.; By writing about “heathen” peoples missionaries and their in the United States also provided means of forging American identity. Missionary literature highlighted the confrontation between “civilization” and “barbarism,” between Christianity and “heathenism.” While most missionary literature rested upon the assumed superiority of the West over the rest of the world, evangelical literature opened up new possibilities for social criticism. Hawaiians, Indians, Native Americans and others challenged the worldview that linked Christianity and Civilization. Converts accepted some elements of western society while rejecting others and, empowered to speak up on their own behalf, told stories that complicated the Manichean story of the struggle between good and evil.; Missionary discourse about non-Christians also became an important language of criticism within the evangelical community as the issues of slavery and race relations polarized American Christians during the antebellum era. Abolitionists found that one means of criticizing southern slaveholders was to compare them to the “barbarous” nations of the world. Abolitionists also compared the segregation in non-slaveholding states to the institution of caste in India. Such comparisons cast doubt on the supposed superiority of the United States, and undermined the efforts of American evangelicals to spread Christianity abroad.