This week I’ve been re-reading William R. Hutchison’s Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. It’s a great book about a vital subject that too many people know nothing about.
Americans, even many American historians, don’t generally know very much about the history of our country. This is partly because we’ve stopped teaching much history in our schools and colleges. It’s partly because so much of the history we do teach rests on conceptually weak ideas about what is important. And, to be fair, it’s partly because American history is so rich, so diverse and it moves so fast that it’s not all that easy to understand.
In particular, we have a weak grasp on the history of the ways Americans have understood their identity and, closely related to that, their world mission. Reading Errand to the World is a little like turning on the light in a dark room; suddenly, a lot of things start to make sense.
The American missionaries of the 19th century are the kind of people who make our skin crawl today. They were utterly confident in the belief that western civilization was in every way superior to the dark barbarism of the rest of the world. They went boldly out into the world, setting up hospitals, churches and schools in Burma, the outposts of the Ottoman and Persian empires, the Pacific islands, in ‘darkest Africa’ and all over China. They translated the Bible into hundreds of new languages, taught English, introduced modern methods of agriculture, and established colleges and universities throughout what today we know as the ‘developing world’. By 1900 more than half the American missionaries serving abroad were women. They were, mostly, serenely and perfectly confident that Protestant Christianity as understood in 19th century America was the one true faith, that the superiority of American civil institutions to all other forms of government and social organization was due to American Protestantism, and that it was the plain duty of the American people to spread both their enlightened social ideas and the religion which made them possible to the rest of the world as quickly as possible.
At first glance, this cast of mind is so different from ours that it is hard for us to understand today. Once we begin to understand it, however, we realize that it is so exactly similar to ideas that we still hold today that we are appalled, embarrassed and stunned into rethinking some of our most basic ideas about the world.
Hutchison’s book is mostly about the period before the modernist-fundamentalist split. (A good concise introduction to this subject is George Marsden’s Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism.) In those days, the ‘high end’ churches like the Episcopalians and the Congregationalists were theologically more conservative and culturally more disposed to accepting Biblical authority than they are now; more conservative varieties of Christianity did not feel the depth of alienation from mainstream culture that they did later. American Protestantism today has rival mainline and evangelical groups of leaders and institutions; in those days a single Protestant establishment was home to various conflicting tendencies.
But the missionary movement in those days came predominantly from what would later be the mainline churches. As Hutchison says, the missionaries were “the Peace Corps before the Peace Corps.” They were often graduates of elite universities, and the vision that moved them had strong elements of secular developmentalism as well as of religious fervor. Over time, the secular side of the mission project seemed to gain ground. This was partly because the secular programs of uplift — founding schools and hospitals, for example — seemed to do more good and make more progress than efforts to convert individuals to Christianity. By the eve of World War I, with a handful of exceptions like the Hawaiian islands, the missionaries had made few converts, but their educational and medical work was changing the world.
These missionaries in other words were more the spiritual ancestors of contemporary secular ‘missionaries’ like Jeffrey Sachs and Human Rights Watch than of evangelists like Billy Graham. By 1910 the American missionary movement was largely centered around what today we would call development activities, and this is where the shock of recognition comes in. Our secular missionaries of democracy and development today seem to be as utterly and serenely convinced about the superiority of various western and American ways over those in the Third World as were their predecessors one hundred years ago. We like to think today that we are infinitely more sophisticated and intercultural than our predecessors; after reading Hutchison, I’m not so sure that we are. We are as confident as they were that American society was ‘advanced’ and had many things to teach the rest of the world; and while we express ourselves more tactfully and work harder to disguise our inbuilt sense of cultural superiority from ourselves than our predecessors did, we still basically believe that Americans have a mission to transform the world.
It’s even more interesting to see that the missionaries struggled with so many of the questions that we wrestle with today. In 1850, as much as today, there were thoughtful Americans who realized that there were problems with sense of national mission. What portion of our ‘message’ to the world is really about universal values, and what is culturally specific to our society? How do we help a country like, for example, Haiti? How much of their indigenous culture is valuable and needs to be protected and celebrated? What elements of their culture should they change (with our encouragement and support) in order to prosper? Should we step up our involvement and leadership in countries like Haiti, or should we step back so that Haitians can make their own decisions and develop their own leadership potential — even if this means that they make serious mistakes? Then as now we writhed on the horns of a dilemma; on the one hand, it’s obvious that something has gone badly wrong in Haiti. On the other hand, we are not without guilt in Haitian history and in any case how confident can we be that our answers are the right ones for them?
I find it fascinating and depressing that we are still debating these issues and in such similar ways after so long. More than that, I’m astonished that we are so little aware of how much continuity there is in our debates. Normally we take it for granted that we are much more enlightened and understanding than our racist and imperialist forebears. It’s surprising to find 19th century missionary figures who in some ways were more seriously committed to models of development that stressed local dignity and autonomy than some of our most ‘advanced’ thinkers today.
I’m going to keep reading mission history. It’s an important part of one of the biggest stories in world history: the Great Encounter between the west and the rest that has done so much to shape the last 500 years. Today in particular as Protestant Christianity in forms recognizably related to specifically American forms of spirituality is making waves from Brazil and Nigeria to China and Korea, understanding the role of missionaries in building our world order and world consciousness is one of the most vital tasks for the next generation of scholars.