'Breaking the shackles of hierarchy': Race, religion, and evangelical nationalism in American Baptist Home Missions, 1865--1900

This dissertation is a comparative study of the late-nineteenth century domestic evangelical efforts of the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS) among Chinese migrants on the Pacific Coast and blacks in the U.S. South. Using an institutional analysis, it investigates the interconnections among the religious, racial, and nationalist ideologies of an organization of native-born, European-Americans as it encountered and ministered to migrants from China and ex-slaves. The study also examines the responses of Chinese and freedpeople to the ABHMS project as expressions of cultural and political agency.; Slave emancipation, African-American citizenship, and the increased migration and settlement of the Chinese challenged American assumptions about the racial and cultural composition of the nation's polity. Establishing institutions for the Chinese and for blacks, the ABHMS sought to incorporate these populations into the body politic through Christian education and conversion. As sites of intercultural contact, ABHMS missions provided the institutional bases for the formation of alternative, more inclusive imaginings of the nation even as most definitions of the polity grew increasingly narrow through segregation, disfranchisement, and exclusion.; Drawing on national organizational records, local church and mission documents, official and personal papers, legal cases, newspapers, manuscript census data, and other sources, the dissertation explores of two connected levels of mission work. First, it examines how ABHMS ideology constrained the egalitarian promise of its inclusive rhetoric in practice while implicating it in the process of racialization. The ABHMS envisioned an expansive Christian nation which was to serve as the point of origin for God's empire—an ideology termed here as “evangelical nationalism.” It offered an alternative to biologically-bound racial definitions of “American” by positing conversion to Christianity as the central standard for national inclusion. Yet, the inclusive trajectory of its project was undercut by a process—exemplified by the discourse of “uplift”—which required the delineation of cultural difference.; Second, the dissertation explores how the aspirations of African-American and Chinese mission participants drove ABHMS projects toward more democratic aims, and how evangelical programs served as institutional and expressive bases for black and Chinese community-building and congregation. Chinese and black proselytes used mission resources to struggle for autonomous churches and schools, forming networks—sometimes transnational in scope—of ministers, teachers, missionaries, and other co-religionists. They carved out space for communal worship and social congregation which helped them to sustain their dignity in an oppressive environment.