The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home

by Bays, Daniel H.; Wacker, Grant; Svelmoe, William Lawrence (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780817312459
• ISBN10: 0817312455
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Alabama Pr

Summary

This volume is the first to examine at length and in detail the impact of the missionary experience on American cultural, political, and religious history. This collection of 15 essays provides a fully developed account of the domestic significance of foreign missions from the 19th century through the Vietnam War. U.S. and Canadian missions to China, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have, it shows, transformed the identity and purposes of their mother countries in important ways. Missions provided many Americans with their first significant exposure to non-Western cultures and religions. They helped to establish a variety of new academic disciplines in home universities-linguistics, anthropology, and comparative religion among them. Missionary women helped redefine gender roles in North America, and missions have vitalized tiny local churches as well as entire denominations, causing them to rethink their roles and priorities, both here and abroad. In fact, missionaries have helped define our own national identity by influencing our foreign, trade, military, and immigration policies over the last two centuries. Topics in the collection range from John Saillant's essay on the missions of free African Americans to Liberia in the 19th century to Grant Wacker's essay on the eventual disillusionment of noted writer Pearl S. Buck. Kathryn T. Long's essay on the ;Auca martyrs ; offers a sobering case study of the missionary establishment's power to, in tandem with the evangelical and secular press, create and record the stories of our time. William L. Svelmoe documents the improbable friendship between fundamentalist Bible translator William Cameron Townsend and Mexico's secular socialist president Lázaro Cárdenas. And Anne Blue Wills details the ways many American groups-black, Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon-sought to convert one another, stead- fastly envisioning ;others ; as every bit as ;heathen ; as those in far-off lands. The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Homeis an insightful, provocative collection that will stimulate much discussion and debate. It is valuable for academic libraries and seminaries, scholars of religious history and American studies, missionary groups, cultural historians and ethnographers, and political scientists.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: The Many Faces of the Missionary Enterprise at Home	1	(12)
Daniel H. Bays
Grant Wacker
PART I. THE NATIONAL ERA: YEARS OF EXPANSION
Missions in Liberia and Race Relations in the United States, 1822--1860	13	(16)
John Saillant
The Serpentine Trail: Haitian Missions and the Construction of African-American Religious Identity	29	(15)
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp
Revolution at Home and Abroad: Radical Implications of the Protestant Call to Missions, 1825--1870	44	(16)
Mark Y. Hanley
From the Native Ministry to the Talented Tenth: The Foreign Missionary Origins of White Support for Black Colleges	60	(15)
Jay Riley Case
Organizing for Missions: A Methodist Case Study	75	(20)
Russell E. Richey
PART II. THE HIGH IMPERIAL ERA: YEARS OF MATURITY
Mapping Presbyterian Missionary Identity in The Church at Home and Abroad, 1890-1898	95	(11)
Anne Blue Wills
The Scientific Study of Missions: Textbooks of the Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions	106	(17)
Nancy A. Hardesty
Open-Winged Piety: Reflex Influence and the Woman's Missionary Society of the Methodist Church in Canada	123	(11)
Marilyn Fardig Whiteley
``Hotbed of Missions'': The China Inland Mission, Toronto Bible College, and the Faith Missions--Bible School Connection	134	(18)
Alvyn Austin
``From India's Coral Strand'': Pandita Ramabai and U.S. Support for Foreign Missions	152	(19)
Edith L. Blumhofer
The General and the Gringo: W. Cameron Townsend as Lazaro Cardenas's ``Man in America''	171	(20)
William L. Svelmoe
PART III. AFTER WORLD WAR II: YEARS OF COMPLICATION
The Waning of the Missionary Impulse: The Case of Pearl S. Buck	191	(15)
Grant Wacker
To Save ``Free Vietnam'' and Lose Our Souls: The Missionary Impulse, Voluntary Agencies, and Protestant Dissent against the War, 1965--1971	206	(17)
Scott Flipse
In the Modern World, but Not of It: The ``Auca Martyrs,'' Evangelicalism, and Postwar American Culture	223	(14)
Kathryn T. Long
Evangelists of Destruction: Missions to Native Americans in Recent Film	237	(14)
Jay S. F. Blossom
Notes	251	(74)
Contributors	325	(2)
Index	327