American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions Research Articles

A Marxist Approach to Bostonian Missionaries in Hawaii

For centuries, the United States has euphemized their imperial endeavours across the North American continent as they have continued to rely on providential rhetoric to justify their means of colonial expansion. This research critiques beliefs of American exceptionalism in an attempt to expose the hidden ills of America’s colonial efforts. It looks at the activities of Boston’s missionaries in Honolulu, Hawaii, in the nineteenth century and examines the way American identity and understandings of their own exceptionalism manifested on the ground via imperial pursuits. Sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Boston’s missionaries entered Hawaii in 1819 with the intent to civilize what they perceived as an uncivilized nation. In colonial Hawaii, we will see the extensive blurring of lines between informal and formal empire, which this paper positions as a deliberate transition pivotal for the archipelago’s 1898 annexation. These actions will be observed through a Marxists-based approach to examine how the gradual subjugation of Hawaii’s Indigenous population occurred through religious and educational institutions. Religion and education will therefore be observed as tools used for grander imperial pursuits in colonial Hawaii. As this paper attempts to deconstruct beliefs associated with American exceptionalism, it will look at its origins—that is, Christian belief structures that informed ideas of America’s superiority—and its practical workings on behalf of Bostonian missionaries.

Amerikan Misyonerlerinin Yayınlarında İkna İlkelerinin Tezahürü: Yunan Alfabesiyle Yazılmış Türkçe Çocuk Dergisi Angeliaforos Çocuklar İçün Örneği

IIn the 19th century, many missionary organizations effectively infiltrated Ottoman society through their missionary activities. Among these organizations, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which has been active in Ottoman lands since 1820, stands out as an important missionary institution. Within the framework of its missionary activities, the ABCFM meticulously gathered information about the daily life of Ottoman society and sought to establish meaningful ties with them through educational, health and especially publishing initiatives. The ABCFM primarily focused on non-Muslim communities in Ottoman society, including the Karamanli Orthodox community, which was perceived as Greek due to their religious affiliation. The ABCFM aimed to succeed by converting all target groups, including the Karamanlides, to the Protestant faith. However, achieving this goal depended on their persuasiveness. Therefore, this study focuses on the compliance of ABCFM publications with the principles of persuasion. For this purpose, Angeliaforos Çocuklar İçün (The Messenger for Children), an illustrated children's magazine that ABCFM missionaries began publishing in Istanbul as the Greek-lettered Turkish equivalent of the Armenian-lettered Turkish Avedaper, was selected as a case study. The study analyzed the first volume of Angeliaforos Çocuklar İçün in 1872 in terms of the principles of persuasion. The findings show that the ABCFM largely adhered to the principles of persuasion in Angeliaforos Çocuklar İçün. The findings show that ABCFM adhered to persuasive principles to a great extent in Angeliaforos Çocuklar İçün. This result can be interpreted as an indication that ABCFM was very meticulous in their publications and that their success was not accidental.

Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War against Their Faith by Jason Bruner.

<i>Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War against Their Faith</i> by Jason Bruner.

A Note on Mark Twain and Chinese Missions

In his essays “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics,” published in the North American Review for February and April 1901, respectively, Mark Twain expressly disparaged foreign missions in China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. He was particularly critical of William Scott Ament (1851–1909), who as a longtime agent of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had extorted reparations from Chinese villages where Christians had been killed or their property destroyed. Ament's actions, Twain averred in the first of these two essays, consigned “pauper peasants” and their families “to inevitable starvation and lingering death” and “concrete a blasphemy so hideous and so colossal that, without doubt, its mate is not findable in the history of this or of any other age.”1 In the second essay, rather than retract his allegations, Twain doubled down on them, repeating that Ament was guilty of “theft and extortion” of “tainted money.”2A few months later the foreign correspondent Henry Fischer, whom Twain had known in Berlin and Vienna, sent him a cartoon clipped from the German humor magazine Ulk. In a letter dated 3 January 1902 Twain acknowledged its receipt. “My best thanks, dear Mr. Fischer, for that delicious Ulk cartoon, which could not be improved except by the addition to its reverend bandits of Ament, D.D., Reed, D.D., &amp; the oily Secretary of the American Board.”3 Twain referred to W. S. Ament; Gilbert Reid (1857–1927), founder of Mission among the Higher Classes in China in 1894; and the Reverend Judson Smith, D.D. (1837–1906), who as secretary of the ABCFM had demanded that Twain apologize for libeling Ament.The cartoon Fischer sent Mark Twain was likely the image entitled “Christenthum in China” (Christianity in China) published in Ulk for 18 October 1901 (figure 1).4 It depicts a western millionaire speaking to a roomful of Chinese boys from the podium of a mission school as teamsters haul away a telescope and a globe—teaching tools and the symbols of scientific enlightenment—under the supervision of a guard. The millionaire asks, “Kinder, wie lautet der Spruch Apostel 20, 35? (“Children, what does the apostle teach in Acts 20:35?”) “Die ganze Klasse” (the entire class) replies, “Geben ist seliger denn nehmen.” (“It's more blessed to give than receive.”)

Chronicles of Bailundo: a fragmentary account in Umbundu of life before and after Portuguese colonial rule

Abstract‘Chronicles of Bailundo’ is a fragmentary account of life in Bailundo, Central Angola. The manuscript, whose authorship and exact date are unknown, is available at the archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) at Houghton Library, Harvard University. It was written in Umbundu, the vernacular spoken in Bailundo, by North American Congregational missionaries between 1903 and the 1930s. Although the source mentions no dates, it refers roughly to the period between the seventeenth century and the gradual establishment of Portuguese colonial rule and Christian missions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It gives access to both the Umbundu then spoken in Bailundo and the perspective of Umbundu-speaking subjects on what it was like to live in this polity. The source addresses socio-cultural, political and economic aspects of life in Bailundo as well as significant historical events, such as the Bailundo War (1902–03). The text in Umbundu, published as supplementary material with this article, has been transcribed, translated into Portuguese and English, and annotated. The version published following the main introduction of the article presents an annotated sample of the source in English. The full version, published as supplementary material, comprises the complete original in Umbundu, its complete annotated translation into English, and a complete annotated translation into Portuguese. The article addresses the authorship, contents, form and context of production of the source.

A brief history of natural history museums in the Ottoman Empire

Natural history collections and museums made their appearance in the Ottoman in late 19th century through various attempts to build collections through field excursions, donations and exchanges among researchers, individuals and institutions around the world. Among them, the Imperial Medical School of the Ottoman Empire, schools of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and other American educational groups and French colleges stand out with their vast collections from various parts of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. While these museums were created and built by eminent curators and researchers, a considerable amount of work was carried out by uncredited staff and the students. The history of these museums was often obscured by catastrophic events such as the great fires in Istanbul, the passing of the curators and other administrators and, particularly, the devastating effects of the First World War. However, long-lasting commercial science objects networks and the establishment of global natural history collections and museums are still operational today, supported by scientific exchange between other countries and the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing an outline of the history of the natural history collections of the Ottoman Empire can shed light on the evolution of both the naturalistic movement within the Ottoman society and an embryonic scientific network around the Middle East and the rest of the world.

Lyman Bartlett’ın Kayseri İstasyonu Raporu, 1877-1878

The aim of this study is to evaluate the essential topics that came to fore in the 1877-1878 Kayseri Annual Report, which was written by one of the prominent missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Lyman Bartlett. Apart from those subjects which other missionary reports had usually dwelled on (such as detailed and quantitative information about the missionary schools, the pupils who were attending these schools, education, missionaries’ native laborers both in Kayseri and its out-stations), subjects such as the architectural design of their recently built worship place, the extraordinary developments that took place in the Protestant church of Yozgat, and the country’s deteriorated economic situation caused by the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877-1878 were also pointed out. In addition to these, the formation of the Protestant congregation in Ankara (which would become modern Turkey’s capital city), and the British Consulate’s support came to the fore among the important topics mentioned. Evaluation also demonstrates that some events which were touched upon in Bartlett’s report were reflected in a different way in other missionary sources of the period.

Joy Schulz. Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific.

Two centuries ago, the newly formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) dispatched seven men, “almost all college and seminary graduates,” along with their wives and children, on a half-year journey around South America to the middle of the Pacific Ocean; their purpose was to convert native Hawaiian Islanders to Christianity. Having “[given] away their earthly possessions in order to qualify for Christian missionary service,” there was no turning back, either for them or for another 140 or so missionaries following after them over the next three decades (17). Joy Schulz’s Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific focuses not on this purposeful first generation but rather on their children’s searches for belonging. In doing so, the author insightfully draws on their writings collected together by the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society (HMCS), founded by offspring in Honolulu in 1853 so as “to carve an identity from the larger Hawaiian society” (136).

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

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.

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

Reviewed by: Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic by Emily Conroy-Krutz Jennifer Fish Kashay (bio) Keywords Religion, Christianity, Religious history, Empire, Christian imperialism, Missions, Missionaries, Settler colonies Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic. By Emily Conroy-Krutz. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. 244. Cloth, $45.00.) In Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic, Emily Conroy-Krutz argues that a consideration of American [End Page 178] evangelism in the early nineteenth century forces scholars to rethink their understanding of empire and the role of Americans in the world. In particular, she focuses on the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and its missions to India, the Cherokee, the Sandwich Islands, Liberia, and Singapore. Conroy-Krutz contends that the ABCFM envisioned a Christian empire based on cooperation with western colonial governments. For the ABCFM, God’s providence meant that the expanding British Empire was to be used as a means of bringing Christianity and civilization to a world they considered heathen. Conroy-Krutz examines how the ABCFM’s concept of Christian imperialism shifted as its evangelists experienced the challenges of establishing mission stations throughout the world. At a time when most Americans sought to distance themselves from the British, the ABCFM maintained close connections to the London Missionary Society (LMS) and its evangelists. The ABCFM believed that common goals of evangelization and a desire to “civilize” the heathen meant they could easily establish a mission station in Calcutta and begin to convert millions. Instead, the increasing tension leading up to the War of 1812 and British rule under the East India Company (EIC) meant that the position of the ABCFM missionaries in India remained tenuous for years. While they had expected the EIC to support their goals, the American evangelists were frustrated that British administrators were more interested in their efforts to educate rather than evangelize Indians. In the end, the missionaries made few converts. According to Conroy-Krutz, both in the Sandwich Islands and the Cherokee Nation the ABCFM created “settler colonies” (104–105). She defines settler colonies as focused on obtaining land and removing the indigenous inhabitants rather than on acquiring commodities or labor. While the Sandwich Island missionaries did not remove the Hawaiians, Conroy-Krutz argues that the large number of missionaries, teachers, and workers sent to the islands—around 150 by 1850—and the fact that many of these eventually acquired large tracts of land meant that the American evangelists created a settler colony in the islands. Likewise, the large number and variety of people sent to evangelize the Cherokee meant that here too the ABCFM created a settler colony. While the Sandwich Islands proved to be one of the ABCFM’s most successful missions, the rise of Andrew Jackson and supporters of Indian removal caused the missionaries to become entangled in politics in a way the ABCFM never imagined. They went from receiving the support of [End Page 179] the American government for their “civilization” efforts to fighting the state of Georgia in the Supreme Court. Their failure to win against Jacksonian forces caused them to rethink the link between Christian imperialism and colonial governments. The experiences of the ABCFM missionaries in Liberia and Singapore further transformed their views of Christian imperialism. In Liberia, the American evangelists believed that they would have the support of the colonial government because ABCFM had close associations with the Maryland Colonization Society (MCS), which had founded the colony. However, when the MCS appointed an African American director who wished to induct native mission teachers into the militia, the relationship between the mission and the Liberian government soured. Eventually, the evangelists left Liberia and established a mission removed from colonial governments. In Singapore, the American missionaries investigated the creation of a Christian colony of lay workers and teachers operating separately from the ABCFM. When the Singapore mission sent its proposal for the American Christian colony to the ABCFM, its leaders vehemently rejected the idea. The problems with the U.S. government over Cherokee removal and the contention over militia service in Liberia had taught them to stay out of politics. Consequently, Conroy-Krutz...

“We are writing this letter seeking your help”: Dakotas, ABCFM Missionaries, and Their Uses of Literacy, 1863–1866

At the age of twenty-three, Mr. Uses a Cane was imprisoned at Camp Kearney, in Davenport, Iowa, for his alleged role in the Dakota War of 1862. At Camp Kearney, missionaries affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), as well as camp elders, taught him to read and write in the Dakota language. With his newfound knowledge, he penned a letter to Stephen R. Riggs, an ABCFM missionary, on behalf of the prisoners. He wrote, “We are writing this letter seeking your help … we want to see our relatives, and we need your help to talk for us.”1 Mr. Uses a Cane entreated Riggs to fight for his release from prison and reunite him with his family, who he had not seen for over three years. Other letters by Dakota prisoners made similar demands. ABCFM missionaries, however, viewed literacy from a different perspective. At the time these missionaries first established stations (consisting of schools, churches, mission family homes, and plowed fields) in Minnesota in 1835, they planned to use literacy to promote the Dakotas’ Christianization and civilization. But Dakotas had other goals in mind when they appropriated the missionaries’ plan in the years following the U.S.-Dakota War.2 In the postwar era, Dakota kin found themselves separated from each other by hundreds of miles at Camp Kearney and at the Crow Creek Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory. (See figure 1.) From these two locations, literate Dakotas demanded better …

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

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...

American Missionaries in a Global Early American Republic

American Missionaries in a Global Early American Republic Maureen Connors Santelli (bio) Emily Conroy-Krutz. Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. xvii + 244 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $45.00. Christine Leigh Heyrman. American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015. 340pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00. Historical scholarship that emphasizes a connection between the history of the early United States and a global community is an important, yet recent, addition to the field. Rosemarie Zagarri’s “The Significance of the Global Turn,” published in 2011, called upon historians of the early republic to consider a global approach to studying “peoples and regions in parts of the world that have not usually been considered as part of the traditional narrative.”1 While historians of Colonial America, the British Empire, and Latin America had already embraced the global paradigm, historians of the early American republic still seem to resist this transition. Indeed, the scholarship of the early American republic has evolved dramatically in the last several decades, transitioning from New England community case studies to an expanded Atlantic World, connecting the history of the early United States with Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Within the last decade, the “global turn” has made inroads into early American scholarship. Historians of the Atlantic World have argued that early Americans were not isolated from the outside world, but were rather active participants. Nicholas Canny and Peter Coclanis, for example, have argued that the Atlantic World paradigm provides an important arena for analysis, but they conclude that there are clear links between the “Atlantic World” and regions much farther east, including the greater Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean trade networks. By expanding their focus outside of the Atlantic World, historians of the early republic can take up a new framework for considering a broader global significance of the period.2 [End Page 418] In light of the global turn combined with the current discussion about the war on terror, historians have delved into the origins of U.S. contact with the East. Historians such as Robert Allison, Lawrence A. Peskin, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, and Angelo Repousis have considered a range of subjects addressing these origins through U.S. merchants, sailors, reformers, and missionaries.3 These historians, and others, have demonstrated that a global perspective can offer not just an expanded vision of early American history, but can better explain the extent to which early Americans knew of a broader world and interacted with it. Further, they can question whether this contact made lasting impressions on the development of the early republic. Emily Conroy-Krutz’s Christian Imperialism and Christine Leigh Heyrman’s American Apostles provide useful perspectives on the contact made by U.S. merchants and missionaries in the eastern Mediterranean, Asia, and Africa. With particular focus on the development of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Conroy-Krutz and Heyrman contextualize the intellectual and religious origins of the foreign missions movement. In addition, both offer analysis on how contact with the greater world influenced the missionaries themselves as well as to what extent they won hearts and souls for an American understanding of Christianity and democracy. The two authors, however, take up different aspects of the foreign missions movement and suggest slightly different frameworks for how missionaries fit into a larger perspective on U.S. imperialism. Emily Conroy-Krutz’s organizational study of the New England–based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) reveals a global evangelizing effort that brought Americans not only to the western frontiers of North America but also to India, Burma (Myanmar), Singapore, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and Liberia. Operating from a perspective of empire that was concerned with the reform and improvement of civilizations abroad, the ABCFM was less interested in establishing an overseas American empire and more interested in spreading a Christian empire as defined by New England Protestant evangelicals. Addressing the organizational successes and setbacks of the ABCFM from 1810 to 1860, Conroy-Krutz provides a well-researched overview of how Protestant missionaries endeavored to spread what she calls “Christian imperialism,” a...

Missions chrétiennes en terre d’islam, Moyen-Orient, Afrique du Nord (XVII e –XX e siècles): Anthologie de textes missionnaires ed. by Chantal Verdeil (review)

Reviewed by: Missions chrétiennes en terre d’islam, Moyen-Orient, Afrique du Nord (XVIIe–XXe siècles): Anthologie de textes missionnaires ed. by Chantal Verdeil Heather J. Sharkey Missions chrétiennes en terre d’islam, Moyen-Orient, Afrique du Nord (XVIIe–XXe siècles): Anthologie de textes missionnaires. Edited by Chantal Verdeil. (Turnhout: Brepols. 2013. Pp. 407. €50,00. ISBN: 978-2-503-52649-2.) From the seventeenth century through the twentieth, Chantal Verdeil explains in her introduction to this excellent volume, Christian missionaries who ventured into the Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa rarely converted members of the Muslim majority. Instead, Catholic and later Protestant missionaries almost always converted people who were Christian already—if indeed “conversion” is the right word to describe the shift of, say, a Maronite Catholic in Lebanon to Latin Catholicism or of an Armenian in Turkey to some form of Protestantism. The goal of this volume is to explore this paradox: the tension between missionaries’ aspirations to convert Muslims and the reality of the circumstances that prevented them from doing so. It does so while examining the writings of Catholic and Protestant missionaries who came from France, Italy, Sweden, Great Britain, and the United States and who variously worked in the “land of Islam” from the early 1700s to the late 1930s. Arising from an interdisciplinary research group sponsored by the Institut Catholique de Paris, this volume belongs to a series that anthologizes missionary writings. The book begins with a superb introduction that surveys major trends in and debates about the history of Catholic and Protestant missions in the heartlands of the Islamic world. Seven strong chapters then follow; these are the work of a distinguished group of scholars based at French, Swiss, and Dutch institutions. Each chapter analyzes the work of missionaries in a particular region while presenting a selection of primary-source documents—mostly reports and letters from archives—that shed light on missionaries’ engagement with, or attitudes toward, Muslims and Islamic societies, often in the context of their work among local Christians and sometimes also Jews. The missionaries presented here were diverse, and yet striking similarities in their attitudes and concerns connect them in ways that give coherence to this volume. In her essay on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Iran, for example, Florence Hellot surveys the challenges that both French Lazarist and American Presbyterian missionaries faced when including Muslim students in schools alongside children who came from the very small and beleaguered local Christian communities that missionaries were trying to bolster. Covering the same period, Karène Summerer-Sanchez considers how both French Catholic and British Protestant missionaries in Nablus and Hebron (Palestine) offered schooling and medical care to Muslims while expressing concerns about what they perceived as the Muslim relegation and seclusion of women. If the missionaries could not convert Muslims to Christianity, then could they at least “convert” them to believe that females belonged unhindered in public spaces? This question preoccupied Swedish evangelicals in Bizerte (Tunisia), too, as Christian Chanel shows. Writing [End Page 966] in 1912, for example, one Swede in Bizerte described bringing schoolgirls to play outside during recess, only to see them frightened when a group of men came to stare at them. One of the most striking Catholic-Protestant parallels that surfaces in this volume relates to groups that French scholars call “dissident” Muslims but that Anglophone scholars are more likely to call “heterodox”: groups like the Alawites of Syria and the Alevis of Turkey. Bernard Heyberger presents the report of Carmelite priest Giacinto di Santa Maria who visited Alawites in Syria in 1709. Father Giacinto described how the Alawites seemed Muslim in some respects (for example, in avoiding pork and practicing male circumcision) and definitely not Muslim in others (notably, in their beliefs about metempsychosis, or human reincarnation into other animals after death). They occasionally seemed somewhat Christian, too, as when they practiced a secret bread-and-wine ritual. Jump forward to 1855, and a remarkably similar account about Alevis appears within the chapter of Hans-Lukas Kieser on the work of the (Protestant) American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in what...

The historiography of “conversions” in Portugal’s African colonies and the trajectory of Jesse Chiula Chipenda

The text below relates the trajectory of Jesse Chiula Chipenda (1903-1969) to the colonial context in the Central Highlands of Angola. Born in Bailundo in the last year of the region’s ‘pacification’ war (1902-1903) and the chief of Lomanda’s son, Jesse Chipenda was introduced to the missions of the Congregationalist American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and converted into Protestantism. He became a catechist and a prominent pastor. In analyzing Jesse Chipenda’s trajectory, one seeks to understand the constitution of a Christian habitus in the Central Highlands based on the indexing of elements from the local social structure. It is also shown how, due to his schooling and insertion into the missionary context, Jesse acquired dispositions that allowed him to leave the status of ‘indígena’ (native) for that of a ‘citizen’ upon his ‘assimilation,’ that is, his display of the behavior standards and skills expected from a ‘civilized’ person

Missionaries in Hawai‘i: The Lives of Peter and Fanny Gulick, 1797–1883 by Clifford Putney (review)

Reviewed by: Missionaries in Hawai‘i: The Lives of Peter and Fanny Gulick, 1797–1883 by Clifford Putney Ronald Williams Jr. Missionaries in Hawai‘i: The Lives of Peter and Fanny Gulick, 1797–1883. By Clifford Putney. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2010. Pp. xiv, 218. $34.95. ISBN 978-1-55849-735-1.) The nineteenth-century American Protestant mission to the Hawaiian Islands has been the subject of a wide range of histories seeking to shed light not only on this evangelical by-product of the Second Great Awakening but also on the social, political, and economic development of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Clifford Putney has added to this important discussion of transnational history a new work that offers a detailed look inside the lives of the missionary couple Peter and Fanny Gulick. The biography aims to offer significant information on these American evangelical agents and their influence within a foreign land, while addressing historiographical issues within the field of missiology that have created a problematic paradigm for the study of missionary families. [End Page 393] Putney explains the relevance of his book’s subjects by writing, “Of all the reform-minded families in American history, few were more active than the Gulicks” (p. 1), and noting the broader family’s 140-year service to foreign missions. Peter and Fanny, the founders of this evangelical clan, arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1828 as members of the third company of Protestant missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). In addition to the prolific record-keeping that often characterized these missions, the couple and their extended family produced and retained a vast collection of personal papers, making them, according to the author, “one of the best-documented middle-class families in American history” (p. 6). Putney accesses this material to bring the story of the Gulicks to the reader with detail, offering vivid description of their lives and their interactions with a people very foreign to these New Jersey and Connecticut natives. The book follows the couple through chapters that act as geographic markers of the differing mission stations where the Gulicks were assigned. This serves the overall narrative well, especially when the work allows for rich depictions of the kuahiwi (mountains), kahawai (rivers), and other natural features of these areas that were so prominent in the lives of their native inhabitants. Putney’s significant knowledge concerning the ABCFM and the evangelical movements of the period lend context to the writing, especially in areas such as when offering background on the Calvinism that motivated Peter and Fanny. The book’s sourcing is one of its strengths, but it also raises questions that are at the fore of a leading, current historiographical issue in nineteenth-century Hawaiian history. The Gulicks lived and worked in a foreign nation amidst a native population that by the 1860s was nearly fully literate and who produced a prolific collection of writing about their lives, their land, and their lāhui (nation). During the nineteenth century, there were nearly 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers published in the islands; the first in 1834. This prolific collection, nearly 125,000 over-sized pages, makes up only a part of the varied native-language source material available today. Additionally, the local mission institution to which the Gulicks belonged after 1854, the ‘Ahahui ‘Euanelio o Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Evangelical Association), printed all reports and records in Hawaiian and in English. The English-language annual reports, produced for the ABCFM, regularly differed from the native-language versions, often substantially. Although histories on nineteenth-century Hawai‘i sourced exclusively from English-language materials have added and will continue to add tremendously to our understanding of the islands of that period, any text that seeks to shed—as the book’s publisher expresses it—“new light on the democratization of government, the spread of capitalism, and the privitization of land” without accessing the native-language archive must be clear about what voice it is offering and what has been left behind. Putney raises his own important historiographical issue by pointing to the need for complex, balanced histories of the mission and missionaries that are neither hagiographic nor strictly condemnatory. In...

Crossing the Pali : White Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and the Racial Divide In Hawai‘i, 1820–1898

Crossing the Pali: White Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and the Racial Divide In Hawai‘i, 1820–1898 Joy Schulz (bio) If all the seas were one sea, what a great sea that would be! And if all the trees were one tree, what a great tree that would be! . . . And if all the men were one man, what a great man he would be! —English Nursery Rhyme And today I take up my Hawaiian Bible to read a chapter in preference to the English version. It is beautiful Hawaiian. —Sam Wilcox1 The first white missionary children born in the Hawaiian Islands entered a culture engulfed by internal transformation and embattled by foreign pressures. Neither they nor their American missionary parents could have anticipated in 1820 the critical role missionary children would play in this international drama. Not only did the hundreds of missionary children born to American parents in the Hawaiian Islands during the nineteenth century propel the Hawaiian and US governments towards their 1898 conflagration, the children themselves became subjects of the imperial process, their American parents constructing and transmitting a colonial agenda for them, as well as for the indigenous Hawaiian population. Colonial childhood developed into a critical yet contested battlefield upon which US empire was built.2 For the 140 American missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to the Hawaiian Islands between 1819 and 1848, few questions existed as to the proper moral values they were to impart to the kingdom’s “heathen” population. In contrast, from the moment of their birth, missionary children faced enormous obstacles in developing their [End Page 209] own sense of cultural and spiritual identity. Isolated by their parents from the native Hawaiians and oftentimes stationed in remote regions of the islands, missionary children were brought up to adhere to the strict Calvinist messages their parents taught them. These ideologies of racial separation and religious superiority, along with a reverence for American religious institutions and republican political systems, were reinforced at Punahou School, the Honolulu boarding school established by the missionaries for their children in 1841. Mixed-race and indigenous Hawaiian children would not be invited to attend the school until the mid-1850s, by which time the children of American missionaries in the islands numbered over two-hundred and fifty.3 Upon entering adulthood, many missionary children chose to stay in the islands, taking advantage of newly opened feudal lands and planting themselves firmly at the head of numerous influential enterprises, from sugar plantations and newspaper publications to public education and government service. Even when sent to the United States to complete their collegiate educations, missionary children “almost without an exception,” in the words of one missionary son, planned to return to the islands. By 1887 no less than nine of the forty-nine members of the legislature were missionary sons. More significantly, in 1893, many of these missionary children participated in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. One missionary son—Sanford Ballard Dole—led the revolution and served as the Hawaiian Republic’s first president and, after US annexation, Hawaii’s first territorial governor.4 The first American missionaries to Hawai‘i did not seek government positions or financial reward, but they did demand economic security for their children, arguing to the ABCFM that they needed family stipends, subsidized private education, and the right to pass on to their children profits derived from the land. In the process, missionaries found acceptance among Hawaiian elites, including King Kamehameha III (reigned 1825–1854), who adopted Christianity, opened up ancestral lands to private ownership, and created a constitution limiting monarchal power. Kamehameha’s government—which included former missionaries—sold land to the missionaries at cheap prices to reward their service and keep them in the islands. Missionary children, who benefitted from these changes, were even more aggressive than their parents in pursuing political and economic success. Native Hawaiians noted the difference, arguing to the Hawaiian king in 1845 that white settler power had grown too strong. Hawaiian monarchs Kalākaua (r. 1874–1891) and Lili’uokalani (r. 1891–1893) retrenched against American missionary influence only to find that adult missionary descendents were willing to use violence...

Navigating Uncharted Oceans of Meaning:Kaonaas Historical and Interpretive Method

I ka ‘ōlelo nō ke ola, I ka ‘ōlelo nō ka make. In speech there is life, in speech death.—Hawaiian proverb ('ōlelo no'eau)“With You is My Life, with You My Death.” With these Words, the American Missionary Rev. William Richards Placed Himself Under the protection of the‘aha’ ōlelo, a Hawaiian chiefly council composed of the highest-rankingali'iin the Sandwich Islands. On the afternoon of 26 November 1827, Richards defended himself before the ‘ahaagainst a charge of libel brought by the English consul, Richard Charlton. Charlton had argued with Richards over a letter the minister had written to his Boston-based employers, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The letter, written in October 1825, contained the news that an English captain, William Buckle, had purchased a Hawaiian woman from a chiefess. The problem was not the letter itself but the fact that it had been made public, through American newspapers. It would take the news two years to make its way back to the islands from New England, a world two oceans and six months’ sail away. The purchase of the woman, according to Charlton, was slavery and constituted a violation of British piracy law (qtd. in Richards, Letter to Evarts, 6 Dec. 1827). When Richards refused to sign an oath swearing to the veracity of his letter, Charlton accused the missionary of libel. Now both parties had come before the‘aha ‘ōleloto argue their cases. The question before the chiefs was whether or not the American Richards should be turned over to Charlton to face the charge in front of an English jury.

The ‘Three Crosses’ of Mission Work: Fifty Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Angola, 1880-1930

AbstractIn 1930 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) commemorated fifty years of mission work in central Angola with a celebration that sought to unite thousands of Umbundu Christians into a community. Rituals such as the singing of hymns, daily church services, and bold performances of religious music by the 540-voice Jubilee Choir aimed at reinforcing Christian identity. A historical pageant dubbed the ‘Three Crosses’ was created in order to present a missionary perspective of Angolan history, one that juxtaposed Christian societal improvement with indigenous scenes of death, violence, and ignorance. This paper provides an account of the pageant and argues that its program also transmitted prominent subtexts associated with colonial discourse. Theories of social evolution and racism were widespread among early twentieth-century Americans, and ABCFM missionaries used this rhetoric to preach self-improvement through Christianization by disparaging indigenous Umbundu beliefs. Although providing Western education proved an effective tool for attracting converts and a lasting measure of the ABCFM’s influence in Angola, the legacy of the mission preserves these contradictions of colonial missionary work.

The Gospel of Science and American Evangelism in Late Ottoman Beirut

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Protestant revivalist and millenarian movements swept the shores of the Atlantic. Wesleyan Methodism captured the imagination of English enthusiasts, while their overseas brethren witnessed two ‘Great Awakenings’. Numerous prophecies foretold the triumph of Christ's spiritual rule over the earth and the conversion of all the world's peoples, particularly the Jews, who were expected to return to the Holy Land and there embrace a reformed faith on the path to salvation. With the coming of the Saviour and the destruction of all the Men of Sin a ‘thousand years of peace, brotherhood and justice’ were expected.1 Inspired by the spirit of ‘disinterested benevolence’ of Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins — and by visions of America's ‘manifest destiny’ in the world — American Protestant disciples set out to prepare the road for Christ's return and to sow the seeds of peace, justice and brotherhood among the heathen and unreformed.2 In 1810 a fraternity known as the ‘Brethren’ at the Calvinist Divinity College (later the Andover Theological Seminary) founded what would quickly become one of the largest interdenominational missionary societies in the north-eastern United States: the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).3 From the start, theirs was a project with global ambitions: ‘Prophesy, history and the present state of the world’, announced the Board in 1811, ‘seem to unite in declaring that the great pillars of the Papal and Mahommedan impostures are now tottering to their fall... Now is the time for the followers of Christ to come forward boldly and engage earnestly in the great work of enlightening and reforming mankind’.4