The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History. Ed. by Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. xii, 332 pp. $60.00, isbn 0-8173-1245-5.)

Abstract

Dependent on thousands of individual churchgoers for recruits and funds, the foreign missionary enterprise needed to cultivate its audiences at home as much as they needed to reach their audiences overseas. Although the literature that poured forth from mission presses was typically formulaic, the best essays in this collection reveal surprising and complex facets of the missionary enterprise's promotional work. They achieve this by looking beyond the self-referential texts of mission propaganda to real-world contexts, thereby demonstrating a dynamic interplay between missions and larger forces of social and cultural change. With one very fine exception, the essays in this collection were drawn from papers presented at a 1998 conference at Wheaton College, part of a major project on the “Missionary Impulse in North American History” undertaken by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The editors, two highly respected scholars, have organized the volume chronologically into three parts. The first part is remarkably coherent, with a general emphasis on the tension between egalitarian and hierarchical impulses during the nineteenth century. Essays by John Saillant, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, and Jay Riley Case specifically explore the connections between missions and race relations in the United States. They demonstrate that the missionary enterprise challenged prevailing racism through its conviction that African Americans were capable of acting as effective representatives of Christian civilization or of profiting from opportunities for higher education, but that challenge was premised on a high degree of acculturation that substituted a cultural hierarchy for a racial one and alienated African American protégés from the cultures of the African diaspora.