An American Errand into the South African Wilderness

Abstract

The flowering of foreign missions in nineteenth-century America owed so much to evangelical Protestantism in Europe, that historians looking for uniquely American features in missionary enterprises have had very little to go on. Historians who have attempted to identify the uniqueness of American missions have generally seized upon the links between the missionary spirit and ideas of manifest destiny. Ralph Gabriel taught a generation of historians to see American missions as one aspect of a “mission of America” with ramifications that went far beyond preaching to the heathen. Perry Miller traced the roots of the mission of America to the Plymouth Colony itself and rewrote the history of American development in terms of an “perrand into the wilderness.” Nineteenth-century foreign missions were for Miller the most typical expression of national self-consciousness.