Diplomatic evangelism

The name of this magazine denotes its founders’ enthusiasm at the dawn of the 20th century for the Protestant missionary enterprise, which, the theory went, would soon convert whole sections of the world’s peoples to Christianity, ushering in not only a distinctive but a self-evidently superior historical era. This overly optimistic view became subject to self-examination in the Century beginning in the 1920s and then with greater force in the 1930s. Not only were rates of conversion abroad disappointingly meager, but serious questions arose in the wake of World War I’s intra-Christian slaughter—along with the continuation of colonialism, global racism, and gunboat diplomacy—about whether Western and Christian societies were, indeed, superior. Harvard’s William Ernest Hocking led a large-scale inquiry that recommended, in Re-Thinking Missions (1932), that missionaries downplay proselytizing and serve more as ambassadors between cultures. Unlike many other Protestant periodicals and against pushback by some readers, this magazine, which at the time ran missionary dispatches in every issue, endorsed this revised approach.

These aspects of the century’s past came to mind while reading Missionary Diplomacy, the engaging account by Michigan State University historian Emily Conroy-Krutz of the manifold interconnections between Protestant American missionaries and the US government from roughly the 1840s to the 1910s. Conroy-Krutz’s basic thesis is that Protestant missionary work in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific Islands impelled the United States to increase its diplomatic activities in these regions, especially through the creation of new consulates. Simultaneously, the growth of a more robust US state apparatus protected and extended the reach of missionary activities. Drawing on a wealth of sources—diplomatic correspondence, records of such organizations as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and of individual missionaries, and contemporary Christian and secular periodicals—Conroy-Krutz demonstrates that one cannot understand the growth of US diplomacy beyond Europe and Latin America without reference to the missionary enterprise.

Much of this interconnection was prosaic. In the mid-1800s it was not unusual for missionaries to staff consulates and embassies, not least because they were already stationed nearby and were likely the only Americans with the requisite language skills. More broadly, their reports, which went to politicians and general American audiences alike, often constituted the earliest firsthand accounts of the geography, cultures, and social and political structures of non-Western regions, thus serving—albeit sometimes with pronounced ethnocentric spin—as the kind of ambassadors for which Hocking would later call. And just as growing trade led to the opening of consulates, so did missions, whose staff might be subject to brigandage and other crimes and whose work might offend local authorities.