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.