MISSIONARIES, MARTYRS, AND MODERNIZERS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND REFORM THOUGHT IN AMERICAN PROTESTANT MISSIONS. (VOLUMES I AND II) (MEXICO, CHINA, INDIA)

The autobiographical writings of Protestant missionaries played an important role in promoting the missionary enterprise with the American public. Through depictions of their experiences in the field, missionaries sought to demonstrate both the need for missions and the possibility for success in converting the "heathen." As such, these works reveal much about the expectations of missionaries in approaching their work. This dissertation argues that the ideal of self-denial in service to Christ was central both to the missionaries' self-image and to their expectations of converts. This ideal provides a starting point for a series of five biographical investigations that explore how missionaries translated their assumptions into strategies and how those strategies worked in practice. Although the dominant strategy sought to evangelize other cultures without exporting the trappings of American civilization, missionary thinking nonetheless rested on socio-ethical assumptions about the impact of conversion for the reform of indigenous societies. They struggled to sort out the essential from the non-essential aspects of Christian societies, but the ideal of self-denial remained almost entirely unquestioned. Missionaries consistently expected conversion to elicit acts of self-denial leading to the growth of self-sustaining Christian communities and ultimately to their socioeconomic uplift.Part I juxtaposes the careers of David Brainerd and Lyman Beecher in order to contrast the evangelical orthodoxy with the broad range of socio-ethical assumptions latent in missionary thought. Part II examines the tension between evangelical commitments and socio-ethical assumptions in the careers of three individuals. The individuals under study are: Melinda Rankin, a missionary to Texas and Mexico Yung Wing, a missionary-trained modernizer in China and John Everett Clough, a missionary to India. Of particular concern are the ideas and experiences that drew missionaries away from purely evangelical strategies toward approaches more involved with the socio-ethical aspects of modernization. The use of education as a component of mission strategy receives special attention. I conclude that the ideal of self-denial proved largely irrelevant to the aspirations of indigenous groups seeking better lives for themselves.