American Missionaries and the Boundaries of Evangelicalism in the Philippines

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how American evangelicalism proved unstable as it crossed borders into the US colonial Philippines in the early twentieth century. Focusing firstly on the YMCA and then on the missionary Frank Laubach, the chapter shows how some American missionaries who self-defined as evangelicals came to revise their expectations that US colonialism would lead to evangelical Protestantism’s triumph over Roman Catholicism. Instead, albeit each for somewhat different reasons, the YMCA and Laubach came to argue that historical indigenous expressions of Christianity, and indeed Catholicism itself, had “evangelical” potential. Therefore, during an age in which the “evangelical” label in the United States was increasingly associated with a conservative faction opposed to ecumenism, missionaries and their proselytes in the Philippines were suggesting alternative futures.