Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic by Emily Conroy-Krutz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic by Emily Conroy-Krutz J. Susan Corley Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic. By emily conroy-krutz. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. 244 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Christian Imperialism by Emily Conroy-Krutz is one of more than twenty volumes comprising the series The United States in the World, which explores how people, ideas, processes and events have transcended national borders to shape U.S. history from the antebellum period to the present. Historian Conroy-Krutz is a professor at Michigan State University specializing in global history of the early American republic. Her articles and essays focus on the American evangelical movement, the development of an American imperial mindset in the early republic, and the reliance by American evangelicals on British imperial connections outside North America. This is her first book, and she uses it to advance these interests on a broad, global scale by tracing the activities of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which operated within the Cherokee Nation and at more than forty foreign locations in the Mediterranean, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific during the years 1810 to 1850. The ABCFM was the largest, most successful, and best-documented American foreign missionary society during this time period. Founded in 1810 by a small group of Williams College students [End Page 584] who had been energized by the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening, the ABCFM operated out of Boston and sent its first group of missionaries to India in 1812. The centerpiece of Conroy-Krutz’s argument is that American Christian missionaries acted as imperialists because they intended that their global evangelizing would also further the United States’ political expansion. It is not necessary for the validity of her argument, she states, to demonstrate that the United States was at that time an empire or that the missionaries in fact acted as political agents because Christian imperialism was “a vision” for the missionaries, not “a reality” (p. 10). She infers an imperialistic mindset from the evangelicals’ belief in “their own cultural superiority and their right to alter foreign cultures” to align with the Anglo-American civilization model (p. 13). Further proof of an imperialist bent comes from the fact that American evangelicals sought Anglo-American governance protection to work within territories controlled by British imperial power (p. 8). Conroy-Krutz informs the reader that she uses the term “imperial” vis-à-vis the United States as an analytical tool to evaluate unequal power dynamics between proselytizing Americans and proselytized heathens (p. 10). Conroy-Krutz confines her research to the activities of the ABCFM, and she refers to them simply as “American missionaries,” frequently without society identification. The reader learns little about their theology or how ABCFM evangelicalism is distinguished from American Methodist, Episcopalian, or Baptist theologies, all of whose societies also proselytized abroad during this same time period. It is essential to Conroy-Krutz’s argument that she demonstrate a widespread American imperialistic mindset. She concludes from her research that the U. S. government, ABCFM missionaries, and the American public at large held a commonality of belief about the role of the young republic (p. 8). She keeps her focus squarely on the ways Americans viewed the rest of the world as she examines different mission models and their relationships to British and American imperialism (p. 16). Historiography identifying Christian missionizing as one of several prongs enabling British imperialist expansion in the Pacific has been well developed over several decades and tracks the same strategy used by ABCFM missionaries worldwide: civilize to Christianize. Greg Dening, for example, pointed out in his 1980 work, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880, that the host culture must be eradicated in order to install Western civilization, and that civilization is the precondition to Christianization. Later historians have directed attention to the role of women in the missionary field, syncretization of [End Page 585] Christianity with native traditions, and the activities of native preachers. More recently, Catherine Hall and Andrew Porter—both cited by Conroy-Krutz—have explored the role of nineteenth-century British Protestant missionaries...