Religious voluntarism, political individualism, and the secular: nineteenth-century evangelical encounters in the Middle East

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1819, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) began a mission in the Middle East. Though initially the missionaries sought to convert Muslims and Jews to the Christian faith, they soon turned to revitalizing their co-religionists. This puzzling situation of Christians proselytizing other Christians occurred because the two groups of Christians, American and Middle Eastern, held very different cultural and political notions of what that identity meant. In the end, the American mission remained minimally effective at conversion but influential in its secular goals of educating, furthering religious freedom, and modernization. Counter-intuitively, the missionaries’ religious proselytizing became implicated in a kind of secularization.