Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, by Heather D. Curtis

Abstract

In Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, Heather D. Curtis calls attention to the oft-overlooked influence of the Christian Herald, an evangelical newspaper popular during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in developing the human-itarian ideal within American cultural identity, religious practice, and political outlook. Although the paper “ceased publication . . . in 1992,” the association bearing its name continues to this day, supporting numerous charities, including the renowned Bowery Mission in New York City (276). Throughout Holy Humanitarians, Curtis weaves the little-known story of how the newspaper’s editors, Louis Klopsch and Thomas De Witt Talmage, employed creative advertising tactics to raise both awareness and funds for disaster relief around the world, as well as at home in the United States. “Couch[ing] their entreaties in explicitly theological terms,” they sought to cast a vision of humanitarian aid as a key aspect of evangelical faithfulness and of “American destiny” (12, 33, 86). Curtis makes a conscious and largely successful effort to present her archival findings in such a way that amplifies the roles and voices of groups and individuals on the societal and historiographical margins.To a certain extent, Klopsch himself falls into this category, as a former juvenile delinquent “who had been forced to quit school at an early age to help support his struggling immigrant family.” Curtis opines that it is in part Klopsch’s personal experience with the criminal justice system that fuels his compassion for those oppressed and suffering (18). As towering a figure as Klopsch appears in this book, Curtis stops just short of crossing into the territory of “great man theory.” Undeniably the protagonist of the book, Klopsch nevertheless finds a formidable sparring partner in Red Cross leader Clara Barton, as the two organizations vied for recognition as “the nation’s primary instrument for the collection and delivery of international aid” (100, 219).Klopsch’s story, a counternarrative of the history of American historiography of humanitarianism that lays responsibility for large-scale generosity at the feet of a few multimillionaires and secular relief organizations (5), is itself challenged by yet another counternarrative—that told by Indian revivalist Pandita Ramabai, who rejects the overly simplistic storyline in which American evangelicals heroically rush to the aid of helpless Indians suffering from famine. Ramabai, while appreciative of Klopsch’s efforts on her behalf, wants the world to remember the agency of Indians, including “former famine sufferers,” in rallying to support their own compatriots (166).Women and minorities appear in the book not only as antagonists to Klopsch and the Christian Herald, but also as partners in mission. Klopsch so admired Emma J. Wilson, an African American woman who founded a school for black children in North Carolina, that he served as treasurer of her school’s board and praised her strategy as one that empowered black Americans to help themselves (197). Holy Humanitarians is exemplary in demonstrating how World Christianity can serve as a historiographical approach that highlights the experiences of those whose stories the dominant Western narrative has sought to silence or obscure.Curtis dedicates a significant portion of the book to exploring the ways in which Klopsch and the Christian Herald as an organization failed to live up to their own ideals, especially in response to major shifts in American politics and culture. The first such shift corresponded to the government’s abandonment of noninterventionism during the Spanish-American War period and its acquisition of imperial territories. Resultantly, the Christian Herald, which had previously promoted pacifism, suddenly began portraying war itself as a potential channel for humanitarian aid (86). The second entailed the newspaper’s eventual reticence concerning controversial issues of the time—including injustice toward immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans—due to the editors’ desire to unite their readership in the midst of rampant political division, so as to enable “evangelicals to maintain their position as arbiters of American culture, shapers of the nation’s destiny, and premier providers of humanitarian aid” (211–12).This timely book is at once winsome and subversively political. Just as Arthur Miller ostensibly portrays the barbarism of the Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century in his classic play The Crucible, while actually constituting an allegorical protest against the eerily reminiscent finger-pointing of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, so Holy Humanitarians depicts American evangelicalism’s twentieth-century moral struggle with matters of race, immigration, and imperialism in a way that unabashedly evokes the continuation of this struggle to the present day. This book is poised to benefit scholars and students of American history, history of Christianity, media studies, and World Christianity.