Abstract
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the international missionary enterprise evolving in America made a dramatic, if not absolute, shift from an emphasis on religious conversion to an emphasis on introducing Christianity through education. In the formative decades of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (hereafter ABCFM), 1810–1860, the largest and most well organized of the foreign mission societies, its main architect, Rufus Anderson (1796–1880) articulated a philosophy of indigenization of Christianity through evangelism and respect for local culture. His vision for the indigenous church was embodied in his mantra of the three selfs: self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. The vision behind this was the propagation of indigenous Christianity that would take root in the form of a religion that was Christian in theology but local in culture. Anderson believed in the fundamental appeal of Christianity as a belief system and means to salvation, and he also believed that the propagation of Christianity had to come from planting local churches and allowing them to grow in their own ways. The job of the missionary was to bring the message of Christianity, the possibility of salvation, and the goodness of Jesus Christ. Beyond that, the missionary was to respect local culture, become fluent in the indigenous language, and when a local Christian church had taken root that could manage itself, the missionary could move on. Young churches were to be local from the outset, not colonial outposts of Western churches, nor copies of them. With notable foresight, Anderson recognized the dangers of using religion as a tool of colonization and coercive acculturation.
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Notes
R. Pierce Beaver, To Advance the Gospel: Selections From the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967), 10.
The Women’s Boards of the ABCPM were formed in 1868. For a full discussion of the women’s boards, see Noriko Ishii, American Women Missionaries at Kobe College, 1873–1909: New Dimensions in Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).
For histories of the early missionary movement, see, for example, R. Pierce Beaver, To Advance the Gospel: Selections Prom the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967)
Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Tum-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and Practice (Macon, G A: Mercer University Press, 1997).
There are several accounts of the famous “Haystack” meeting. Standard versions include William R. Hutchison, Prrand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 45
Clifton Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969)
Quoted in R. Pierce Beaver, To Advance the Gospel: Selections From the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967), 61.
See, Lian Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park, PA: Perm State University Press, 1997), 7.
R. Pierce Beaver, To Advance the Gospel: Selections From the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967), 14.
For a brief explanation of the social gospel movement, see Janet Fishburn, “The Social Gospel as Missionary Ideology,” in North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914: Theology, Theory and Policy, ed. Wilbert Shenk (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004), 218–242.
See Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890); and Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: McClure Phillips, 1904).
For a discussion of Bushneil’s theology, see Howard A. Barnes, Horace Bushneil and the Virtuous Republic (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991).
The most comprehensive analysis of the Mount Holyoke tradition and its relationship to the missionary movement is in Amanda Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (Oxford University Press, 1997). See also, Bess P. Vickery, Mount Holyoke Courageous: A Call to the Near East (New York: Carlton Press, 1994)
For histories of the New Divinity movement and its relationship both to social reform and to the ABCFM, see, for example, Leo P. Hirrel, Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998)
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestants on the Eve of the Civil War (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1957).
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, G A: Mercer University Press, 1997), 128.
Bess Vickery, Mount Holyoke Courageous: Young Christian Women go to the Near East, 1840–1872 (Wellesley, MA: Roundtable Press; Rev. and expanded edition, 2000).
Noriko Ishii, American Women Missionaries at Kobe College, 1873–1909: New Dimensions in Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 29.
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, G A: Mercer University Press, 1997), 129.
Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and the Heathen Lands: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s-1940s (New York: Garland, 2000), 213.
For a general history of the missionary enterprise in Japan, see Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity: The Great Century in Northern Africa and Asia, A.D. 1800–1914 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1944).
For a history of Shinto during this period, see Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988. Studies in church and State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 468–488.
For a detailed history of the laws affecting education during this period, see Herbert Passin, Society and Education in Japan (Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, 1965; reprint, Tokyo, 1982), 63
Richard Rubinger, “Education: From One Room to One System,” in Japan in Transition, ed. Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 195–230.
“Educational Rescript of 1889,” reprinted in English in Passin, Society and Education, appendix. Quotations in Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 132.
Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern, Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 127
Roberta Wollons, “The Impact of Higher Education on Women: The Case of Rockford College, 1870–1920” (Paper delivered at the Midwest Conference on the History of Women, St. Paul, MN, October 1977). For the importance of Mount Holyoke in American missionary history, see Bess P. Vickery, Mount Holyoke Courageous: A Call to the Near East (New York: Carlton Press, 1994)
For the history of the kindergarten movement in the late nineteenth century, see Roberta Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
Michael Shapiro, The Child’s Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1983).
For a history of the Women’s Boards of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, see Noriko Ishii, American Women Missionaries at Kobe College, 1873–1909: New Dimensions in Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).
For a detailed examination of the Japan exhibit at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, see Neil Harris, “All the World a Melting Pot? Japan at the American Fairs, 1876–1904,” in Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations, ed., Akira Iriye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 24–54.
Marius Jansen, Japan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 65.
Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 57
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Wollons, R. (2009). The Education of Annie Howe: Missionary Transformations in late Meiji Japan. In: DuBois, T.D. (eds) Casting Faiths. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235458_4
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