Rebuilding The Christian Commonwealth

The foreign missionary movement of the early 19th century grew out of the efforts of churches in New England to deal with the changes then taking place in society. The erosion of traditional institutional structures and social values plus the rise of Unitarianism threatened the destruction of the traditional faith. Mr. Andrew holds that the Congregational clergy used foreign missions not only to implant New England culture in heathen lands but also to awaken a sense of community at home.

The foreign missionary movement of the early 19th century grew out of the efforts of churches in New England to deal with the changes then taking place in society. The erosion of traditional institutional structures and social values plus the rise of Unitarianism threatened the destruction of the traditional faith. Mr. Andrew holds that the Congregational clergy used foreign missions not only to implant New England culture in heathen lands but also to awaken a sense of community at home.

In Perishing Heathens Julius H. Rubin tells the stories of missionary men and women who between 1800 and 1830 responded to the call to save Native peoples through missions, especially the Osages in the Arkansas Territory, Cherokees in Tennessee and Georgia, and Ojibwe peoples in the Michigan Territory. Rubin also recounts the lives of Native converts, many of whom were from mixed-blood métis families and were attracted to the benefits of education, literacy, and conversion. During the Second Great Awakening, Protestant denominations embraced a complex set of values, ideas, and institutions known as “the missionary spirit.” These missionaries fervently believed they would build the kingdom of God in America by converting Native Americans in the Trans-Appalachian and Trans-Mississippi West. Perishing Heathens explores the theology and institutions that characterized the missionary spirit and the early missions such as the Union Mission to the Osages, and the Brainerd Mission to the Cherokees, and the Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees. Through a magnificent array of primary sources, Perishing Heathens reconstructs the millennial ideals of fervent true believers as they confronted a host of impediments to success: endemic malaria and infectious illness, Native resistance to the gospel message, and intertribal warfare in the context of the removal of eastern tribes to the Indian frontier.

An exploration of how ordinary U.S. Christians create global connections through the multibillion-dollar child sponsorship industry Child sponsorship emerged from nineteenth-century Protestant missions to become one of today’s most profitable private fund-raising tools in organizations including World Vision, Compassion International, and ChildFund. Investigating two centuries of sponsorship and its related practices in American living rooms, churches, and shopping malls, Christian Globalism at Home reveals the myriad ways that Christians who don’t travel outside of the United States cultivate global sensibilities. Kaell traces the movement of money, letters, and images, along with a wide array of sponsorship’s lesser-known embodied and aesthetic techniques, such as playacting, hymn singing, eating, and fasting. She shows how, through this process, U.S. Christians attempt to hone globalism of a particular sort by oscillating between the sensory experiences of a God’s eye view and the intimacy of human relatedness. These global aspirations are buoyed by grand hopes and subject to intractable limitations, since they so often rely on the inequities they claim to redress. Based on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Christian Globalism at Home explores how U.S. Christians imagine and experience the world without ever leaving home.

2018 Sally and Ken Owens Award from the Western History Association Twelve companies of American missionaries were sent to the Hawaiian Islands between 1819 and 1848 with the goal of spreading American Christianity and New England values. By the 1850s American missionary families in the islands had birthed more than 250 white children, considered Hawaiian subjects by the indigenous monarchy but U.S. citizens by missionary parents. In Hawaiian by Birth Joy Schulz explores the tensions among the competing parental, cultural, and educational interests affecting these children and, in turn, the impact the children had on nineteenth-century U.S. foreign policy. These children of white missionaries would eventually alienate themselves from the Hawaiian monarchy and indigenous population by securing disproportionate economic and political power. Their childhoods—complicated by both Hawaiian and American influences—led to significant political and international ramifications once the children reached adulthood. Almost none chose to follow their parents into the missionary profession, and many rejected the Christian faith. Almost all supported the annexation of Hawai‘i despite their parents’ hope that the islands would remain independent. Whether the missionary children moved to the U.S. mainland, stayed in the islands, or traveled the world, they took with them a sense of racial privilege and cultural superiority. Schulz adds children’s voices to the historical record with this first comprehensive study of the white children born in the Hawaiian Islands between 1820 and 1850 and their path toward political revolution.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was the country's first creator of overseas Christian missions. Founded in 1810 and supported by a coalition of Calvinist denominations, the ABCFM established the first American missions in India, China, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, and many other places. It was America's largest missionary organization in the nineteenth century, and its influence was immense. Its missionaries established the first Western schools and hospitals in many parts of the world, and they successfully promoted women's rights and other ideals from the Enlightenment. They also transformed oral languages such as Zulu, Hawaiian, and Cherokee into written form, and they preserved many elements of premodern cultures (albeit not always intentionally). The contributors to this book provide valuable insights on the work of the ABCFM (which exists today under a different name). Some of the contributors profile the lives of notable ABCFM missionaries, others focus on ideological shifts within the Board, and still others chronicle the Board's role in historic events, including the Opium Wars, the colonization of Hawai'i, and the Armenian Genocide. From reading this book, people will come to understand why the ABCFM is widely viewed as America's most historically significant missionary organization. Table of Contents: Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction The 1810 Formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions --Douglas K. Showalter The Great Debate: The American Board and the Doctrine of Future Probation --Sharon A. Taylor Commercial Philanthropy: ABCFM Missionaries and the American Opium Trade --Timothy Mason Roberts American Board Schools in Turkey --Dorothy Birge Keller and Robert S. Keller Dr. Ruth A. Parmelee and the Changing Role of Near East Missionaries in Early Twentieth Century Turkey --Virginia A. Metaxas From Brimstone to the World's Fair: A Century of 'Modern Missions' as Seen through the American Hume Missionary Family in Bombay --Alice C. Hunsberger David Abeel, Missionary Wanderer in China and Southeast Asia; With Special Emphasis on His Visit with Walter Henry Medhurst in Batavia, January-June 1831 --Thomas G. Oey Japanese Evangelists, American Board Missionaries, and Protestant Growth in Early Meiji Japan: A Case Study of the Annaka Kyokai --Hamish Ion Nellie J. Arnott, Angola Mission Teacher, and the Culture of the ABCFM on Its Hundredth Anniversary --Ann Ellis Pullen and Sarah Ruffing Robbins The International Institute in Spain: Alice Gordon Gulick and Her Legacy --Stephen K. Ault Early Nineteenth Century Missionaries to Hawai'i and the Salary Dispute --Paul T. Burlin Titus Coan: 'Apostle to the Sandwich Islands' --Donald Philip Corr Christianity Builds a Nest in Hawai'i --Regina Pfeiffer 'We will banish the polluted thing from our houses': Missionaries, Drinking, and Temperance in the Sandwich Islands --Jennifer Fish Kashay Domesticity Abroad: Work and Family in the Sandwich Islands Mission, 1820-1840 --Char Miller Afterword For Heaven's Sake --Char Miller Subject/Name Index

Between the end of the Revolutionary War in 1781 and Andrew Jackson's retirement from the presidency in 1837, a generation of Americans acted out a great debate over the nature of the national character and the future political, economic, and religious course of the country. Jeremiah Evarts (1781-1831) and many others saw the debate as a battle over the soul of America. Alarmed and disturbed by the brashness of Jacksonian democracy, they feared that the still-young ideal of a stable, cohesive, deeply principled republic was under attack by the forces of individualism, liberal capitalism, expansionism, and a zealous blend of virtue and religiosity. A missionary, reformer, and activist, Jeremiah Evarts (1781-1831) was a central figure of neo-Calvinism in the early American republic. An intellectual and spiritual heir to the founding fathers and a forebear of American Victorianism, Evarts is best remembered today as the stalwart opponent of Andrew Jackson's Indian policies--specifically the removal of Cherokees from the Southeast. John A. Andrew's study of Evarts is the most comprehensive ever written. Based predominantly on readings of Evart's personal and family papers, religious periodicals, records of missionary and benevolent organizations, and government documents related to Indian affairs, it is also a portrait of the society that shaped-and was shaped by-Evart's beliefs and principles. Evarts failed to tame the powerful forces of change at work in the early republic, Evarts did manage to shape broad responses to many of them. Perhaps the truest measure of his influence is that his dream of a government based on Christian principles became a rallying cry for another generation and another cause: abolitionism.