Peak of foreign missions activity by AMerican Protestant churches (1 gen 1900 anni – 1 gen 1920 anni)

Descrizione:

One of the era’s dramatic religious developments — facilitated by global steamship and telegraph lines — was the rise of Protestant foreign missions. From a modest start before the Civil War, this movement peaked around 1915, when American religious organizations sponsored more than nine thousand overseas missionaries, supported at home by armies of volunteers, including more than three million women. A majority of Protestant missionaries served in Asia, with smaller numbers posted to Africa and the Middle East. Most saw American-style domesticity as a central part of evangelism, and missionary societies sent married couples into the field. Many unmarried women also served overseas as missionary teachers, doctors, and nurses, though almost never as ministers. “American woman,” declared one mission leader, has “the exalted privilege of extending over the world those blessed influences, that are to renovate degraded man.”

Protestant missionaries won converts, in part, by providing such modern services as medical care and women’s education. Some missionaries developed deep bonds of respect with the people they served. Others showed considerable condescension toward the “poor heathen,” who in turn bristled at their assumptions (see “America in the World”). One Presbyterian, who found Syrians uninterested in his gospel message, angrily denounced all Muslims as “corrupt and immoral.” By imposing their views of “heathen races” and attacking those who refused to convert, Christian missionaries sometimes ended up justifying Western imperialism.

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