I can’t think of too many times that I’ve wanted to scream in a reading room, but one moment stands out. It was 2008 or 2009, and I was at Houghton Library working on my dissertation on the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and empire. That day, I was working my way through the minutes of the ABCFM’s governing body as they debated how the organization should respond to the continued imprisonment of its missionaries after the Supreme Court’s decision in Worcester v. Georgia. The case was the culmination of the ABCFM’s efforts to oppose Indian removal and the refusal of the government to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision left the mission board unsure what to do. As the ABCFM’s leadership debated whether or not to raise another legal challenge, Rufus Anderson chimed in with his opinion: absolutely not. Not only should they refrain from taking action now, he continued, they should never have taken action in the first place. The ABCFM had gotten itself entangled in politics and been distracted from its true purpose, evangelism. They needed to stop.

Rufus Anderson, from the Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rufus_Anderson,_Mission_Houses_Museum_Archives.jpg.

Anderson’s words stood out to me for two reasons: his callousness and his willingness to comply with U.S. colonial efforts. This might have been the first time I had come across Anderson in the archives, and I had expected a very different kind of man from my reading in the secondary literature. Anderson, who would come to lead the ABCFM in the middle of the nineteenth century, is best known for his position in the missionary debates over “Christ and culture.” Early nineteenth century American Protestant missionaries understood religious conversion to require a complete cultural transformation and the adoption of “civilized” behavior. By the middle of the century, though, figures like Anderson questioned this approach. In part, this was about financial concerns: civilization missions were expensive and lasted a long time. But it could also reflect cultural sensitivity and an ability to imagine forms of Christianity that did not have to be reproductions of American Protestantism to be legitimate.

Anderson’s stance in these debates was that the role of the Western missionary was to turn the control of mission churches over to local control as soon as possible. He was against English-language mission schools, insisting on the continued use of vernacular languages and some adaptations to local cultures. His approach is often seen (sometimes even celebrated) as being less culturally imperialistic than the alternative.[1]

Was Anderson’s insistence that the ABCFM stay out of debates over Indian removal—in my eyes, a capitulation to the forces of American empire and an abandonment of the moral position to support the Cherokee in their efforts to claim sovereignty—really consistent with this approach? As it turned out, yes. Hence the impulse to scream.

As I continued my research, this scene seemed to echo over and over in American religious history well into the present. Anderson’s voice in the debates over Cherokee removal came to seem part of the same story as his later refusal to engage with the debates over slavery and abolitionism that were tearing American Protestantism apart. Rather than being a story of Christ and culture, I decided this was a story of how missionaries chose to define religion and politics. The dissertation chapter that grew out of this analysis eventually turned into my JER article “Between Two Fires.”

In the article, I move from the ABCFM’s fear of being seen as “political” in the context of Cherokee removal to its insistence a decade later that it could not take a stance on abolitionism because that was a political—and thus not a religious—question. As I discuss in the article, the missionary definition of what issues were “political,” “moral,” or “religious” were incredibly flexible. There are, after all, plenty of issues that are both moral and political. The porousness of the boundary between religion and politics is an important subject for scholars of American religion for good reason.

A funny thing happens when you decide to define something as political, and thus of no concern to a religious body, though. You start to see things like Rev. Calvin Stowe, the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, responding to abolitionist demands that ABCFM missionaries speak against slavery in the mission field, proclaim that he “would sooner die than say a missionary ought to enter his open protest against all the evils he may come in contact with.”[2] How on earth are we to make sense of such an overblown and cowardly reaction?

Calvin Ellis Stowe, daguerrotype by Southworth & Hawes, ca. 1850. From the George Eastman House Collection, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calvin_Ellis_Stowe.jpg

While I would generally not advise waiting over a decade to turn a dissertation chapter into an article, in some ways I am glad that I did in this case. As painful as it may have been to update the historiography to reflect the exciting developments in the historiography of religion, slavery, and abolition, I found this story to be particularly timely right now. As I revised my article about the ABCFM’s rhetorical efforts to define slavery as outside of its purview, I watched contemporary American denominations struggle to come to terms with their own political/moral questions around gender and sexuality. Sitting in the pews of my own church on Sunday mornings and taking part in discussions about LGBTQ rights in that context, it was hard not to see parallels to the history I was writing.

Nineteenth-century American missionaries, like other American Christians before and since, have often had their religious convictions shape their political actions (and vice versa). And they, like those who followed after, have had to navigate these dynamics in a country that theoretically values the separation of church and state.

Such a separation demands the rhetorical distinction between political and religious/moral questions. It also provides cover for religious organizations that are too afraid of the possible divisions that could result from full discussion of the moral questions that have political implications.[3] In the early republic, this ultimately meant that organizations like the ABCFM used the line between politics and religion to uphold the institution of slavery; in our moment, it has allowed religious bodies to stand in the way of LGBTQ rights. A better understanding of these histories could help us to imagine a different future.

Endnotes

[1] On the Christ/culture dualism, see William Robert Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago, 1993).  For more on Anderson, see Paul William Harris, Nothing But Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (Oxford , UK, 1999).

[2] Quoted in Parker Pillsbury, “The American Board and Slavery,” Liberator (Boston), Nov.14, 1845, 182, emphasis in original.

[3] For some recent examples of contemporary discussions of LGBTQ issues, for instance, in Protestant denominations, see “With a Deadline Looming, the United Methodist Church Breaks Up,” New York Times, Dec. 18, 2023; “United Methodist Church Reverses Ban on Practicing Gay Clergy,” New York Times, May 1, 2024; and “Largest Presbyterian Denomination Gives Final Approval for Same-Sex Marriage,” New York Times, Mar. 17, 2015.