US Missionaries and Empire

This class examines the history of American missionaries from the early 1800s to explore the role of religion and US (and other) imperial projects. Even though missionaries often facilitated and defended the “civilizing” aims of western empires, they also developed a Christian imperialism that served to critique some aspects of colonialism. The class begins with the origins of the US Protestant foreign missionary movement in the 1810s, and then tracks the expansion of Protestant “foreign” and “home” missions with a focus on places like Hawai’i, Cherokee Nation, Liberia, India, as well as the western United States. We will compare the established Protestant missionary movement’s practices and goals with the growth of the Latter-day Saints’ missionary movement, American Catholic missions, and “faith” missions operated by Pentecostals and holiness groups as well. Through working with archival collections at the Burke Library, we will examine case studies of the role of missionaries in humanitarianism and education in the early twentieth century in Congo and China. The final part of the class turns to how Protestant and Catholic missionaries related to US foreign policy during and after the Cold War. We conclude by examining how the missionary movement forged strong ties among “global Christians” that is both a legacy and a challenge to the nineteenth-century missionary movement’s Christian imperialism.