Renamed: The Living, the Dead, and the Global in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Christianity

Abstract

Abstract Over the nineteenth century, thousands of North Americans and Europeans paid to sponsor and rename foreign children in mission stations across the world. This popular fundraising model has been largely unstudied to date. When the extant records are pieced together, it becomes evident that U.S. Protestants commonly renamed foreign children after their own beloved dead. As a result, these programs offer important insight into how Americans who never traveled abroad still cultivated global subjectivities—in this case, through their connections with other-than-human presences. By nurturing relations with what they viewed as globally active agents, such as God, angels, and the dead, U.S. donors cultivated a sense of themselves as subjects who were Christian, American, and globally active. For mourning families, renaming also seemed to impress their dead’s “qualities” onto foreign children, creating what they viewed as opportunities to collaborate with the dead and reconstitute some aspect of ruptured domestic relations. Focusing on a group often assumed to be the most disenchanted of nineteenth-century moderns—U.S. Protestants in the rising middle class—this article calls for more attention to the “otherworldly” in histories of global relations.