Missionaries
Missionaries of the Christian gospel throughout American history have been men and women who have determined to carry out what they take to be Jesus Christ's command to preach the message of God to all lands, seeking to win disciples and church members. They inherited an impulse and a practice that dates from first-century Christian communities.
When European Christians first came to the Americas, this missionary motive was interwoven with commercial intentions. The Iberian Catholics who dominated in parts of what became the American South and Southwest included missionaries who worked among American Indians. While they were often agents of conquistadores, they also sincerely believed that if they did not convert the "heathen" or "savages," these "creatures of God" would be lost and would suffer eternally in hell. So pioneers like Junípero Serra, who established missions along the California coast in the eighteenth century, built compounds where they offered work and rudimentary education, even as they disrupted the Indians' faith and practices.
In Canada and the American Northeast and Great Lakes region, missionary orders of friars and priests from France similarly set out to convert and minister to the native peoples. But in what became the United States, the missions were overwhelmingly in the hands of white Protestants, chiefly from the British Isles, although in the Middle Colonies substantial numbers were, among others, German- or Dutch-speaking Lutheran, Reformed, and Moravian church members.
The English missionaries justified colonization in part as an attempt to bring the unredeemed heathen into the Christian fold, but despite their expressed motives, most of them failed miserably. The Indians generally resisted, especially as conflicts developed with the Europeans. Or they found the stories missionaries told them complex and confusing, again disruptive of their own outlooks and practices. Doing "God's work" among the natives turned out to be dangerous, and most colonial missionaries lost all taste for risking their lives to convert what turned out to be only a small number of Indians. It is fair to say that by the time the United States was born, Protestants had all but abandoned their mission.
A second chapter for missionaries began on United States soil in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Collegians influenced by religious awakenings and revivals became convinced that it was their mission to bring about the millennium by making the world attractive for Christ's return and extending the sphere of the true Protestant faith. At such colleges as Williams and Amherst, students after their own conversion resolved to try again with the Indians on the frontier and in reservations in the West. They met with some success, but again there were great dangers, and because of the strife between the United States government and many Indian peoples, the Indians were not attractive as converts.
Many missionaries, therefore, set their sights on other parts of the world. Some scholars have seen their efforts as endeavors to reclaim the Christian commonwealth they were losing on the American Atlantic coast. Others have looked upon them as agents of the United States in its expansion as a colonial power. But many observers have come to understand that most of them found sustenance in their decision to risk their lives to win souls for Christ in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), the Middle East, and eventually Africa and Asia.
Missionaries often played a part in developing American foreign policy and changing the boundaries of expectations in religious life domestically. Thus when early missionaries arrived in the Sandwich Islands, later Hawaii, after 1820, they conflicted with commercial and naval interests. Poised between native peoples and aggressive exploiters, the missionaries interposed themselves as friends of the Hawaiians and tried to protect them from victimization. At the same time, they worked strenuously to supplant native religion with Christian faith. In both cases they played a large part in bringing Hawaii to United States' consciousness and eventually helped lead to its annexation in 1900.
Meanwhile, some religious movements did not restrict themselves to activity among the "heathen" or in the "pagan" worlds, but instead tried to reconvert already Christianized nations, particularly in Europe. The most celebrated of these ventures was the move by Mormons into Scandinavia and England within a decade after the founding in 1830 of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By 1840 Mormon converts in Europe had grown to sufficient numbers that they were migrating to the United States.
The missionary front also allowed for new roles for women. In a century when almost no denomination ordained women to the ministry, widows of missionaries often carried on full ministries overseas. Others found their vocations as nurses or teachers in missionary outposts, and thousands more developed organizational and rhetorical skills in auxiliaries and voluntary agencies in support of missions.
The missionary enterprise came to be an agency not only for conversion but also for education and charity. In company with European missionaries, the Americans effectively spread into most areas of the world. Yale missiologist Kenneth Scott Latourette, examining both Protestant and Catholic efforts, has called the nineteenth century "the Great Century" of Christian missions. But reaction set in in the next century among those whom missionaries sought to convert. As adherents to other religions perceived the disruption to their cultures, they offered more organized resistance. Asian and African nations increasingly rejected Western imperialism and grew suspicious of the missionaries whom they saw as chaplains of conquerors and exploiters. The leaders of indigenous Christian churches on historically non-Christian soil often welcomed spiritual or financial support, but they and their governments generally stopped welcoming personnel from the West. Anticolonialism, or the new nationalism, represented secular movements that came to reject the concept of missionaries from America.
For their part, moderate and liberal Protestants, as well as Roman Catholics after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), reappraised their relations to other religions (or, as their evangelical critics would say, experienced a failure of nerve). In 1933 prominent laypersons issued a report, Rethinking Missions, which questioned most features of the missionary enterprise. Nevertheless, although Catholics and mainstream Protestants have sent fewer missionaries overseas, they have continued to support indigenous churches in other countries and have engaged in efforts to improve the education and living conditions of peoples there.
Missionaries by the tens of thousands, however, continue to be sent from America, chiefly from more conservative or charismatic Protestant churches: evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostal. These missionaries and their supporters still believe that those of non-Christian faiths are damned, so that love for Christ and for other people impels them to evangelize the whole world. They work to attract converts who, in turn, will themselves become missionaries. Through their efforts and those of indigenous churches, Christianity continues to grow at impressive rates in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the subcontinent of Asia, and the Pacific islands.
Bibliography:
David B. Barrett, ed., The World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, A.D. 1900-2000 (1982); Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (1981).
Author:
Martin E. Marty
See also Evangelicalism; Middle East-U.S. Relations; Mormons; Serra, Junípero.
