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
Lazaro Cardenas. 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 Home" is 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.
General
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