The Missionary Republic: Missionization, Improvement, and the Remaking of American Protestantism, 1787-1837

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to explain the rise of missionary activism to a place of cultural prominence in the early American republic from the 1780s, when missions were dilapidated holdovers of British philanthropy, to the 1830s, when an ever-increasing army of missionaries worked to revive the frontier, convert Native Americans, and evangelize the world. My thesis asks why and how missions went from relative obscurity to cultural dominance in American Protestantism. The explosion of missionary enthusiasm, I argue, first developed in the 1790s, influenced by events in Europe, where the French Revolution prompted a wave of missionary activism that rapidly reached the United States. New regional missionary societies sought to evangelize the frontier. These societies were tied to an evangelical project of nation-building that aimed to provide a stable basis for virtue and republican government through what I term the “missionary republic.” The participants in the missionary republic hoped to enter the United States in the ranks of Christian nations as a full participant in the evangelical international. Especially after the foundation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810, which built upon a new youth movement of missionary enthusiasm, American evangelicals came to understand participation in missions as a binding requirement on themselves. In part because of a shift towards a practical, populist exegesis, the definition of a missionary became democratized even as the formal missionary role was expanded to include women. Especially in the 1820s and 1830s, a process of “missionization” spread missionary influence beyond its original base of support among northeastern Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, leading to missionary movements in non-anglophone, sectarian, and heterodox denominations, as well as among freemasons and African Americans. Increasingly, missionary activism became the benchmark of religious truth. For missionaries and their supporters, the language of “improvement” was omnipresent. On the frontier, they believed, the religious future of the country would be decided. The improvement driven by Christian advance created small outposts of civic virtue and gospel order that could form the seedbeds for the advance of “civilization” across the western United States. A similar fixation on improvement governed Indian missions and the African colonization movement, which sought to transform Native Americans, Africans, and African Americans through missions. These were also nation-building projects, which sought to Christianize the United States by establishing the missionary republic as a surrogate national establishment while building a new missionary republic in West Africa. Not all Protestant denominations participated in missionary work, including the Society of Friends, whose engagements with the Indians should not be termed “missions.” The Quakers focused on cultivating agriculture and educating children and did not demand immediate conversion to Christianity. But the Senecas with whom they worked ultimately preferred to tie themselves to the conversionistic evangelicalism of the missionary republic. Between 1787 and 1837, the missionary republic remade the contours of American Protestantism.