Protestant Missionaries (U.S. history)

""Reviews
"... Engagingly and accessibly written... deserves wide readership among everyone interested in US religion, ethnicity, organizations and urban culture." -- Choice

"...fascinating...offers valuable insights...This book will be of great interest to scholars of religion in America..." -- Sociology of Religion Fall 2006

"...highly readable... easily used in an undergraduate course...engaging...useful for a graduate course...I look forward to reading Marti's future work." -- Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

"...of methodological value to students of new religious movements...will help observers of other groups as well." -- Novo Religio, 10, 3 Feb. 2007

"Marti's argument seems to be that such a complex project can succeed..." -- Contemporary Sociology, 36, 1 Jan. 2007

"Anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of American evangelical diversity, of the emergent church movement, and of intriguing congregational efforts to bridge ethnic divides, will want to read this book." --Christian Scholar's Review

Mosaic in Southern California is one of the largest multiethnic congregations in America, and also one of the most innovative. This book takes us inside this unusual church. It shows how the church has achieved multiethnicity, not by targeting ethnic groups, but by providing multiple havens of inclusion and commonality that render ethnic differences moot. These havens are arenas for multiethnic companionship, cooperation, and camaraderie that arise out of a union of creative volunteer resources and the ambitious global mission of the church. A Mosaic of Believers examines the structure of the church and the innovative aspects of its mission. It reveals a congregation aiming to reconstruct evangelical theology, personal identity, member involvement, and church governance in an attempt to create an institution with greater relevance to the social reality of a new generation. Based on interviews and participation with the congregation and grounded in contemporary sociological theory, the book presents a rich portrait of an emerging religious community.""

This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.

In the year 2010, the Christian world, and especially those engaged in mission, will commemorate one of the major Christian meetings of the twentieth century, the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. 1 This conference was undoubtedly one of the most important gatherings of the modern missionary movement: for the first time, a multi-denominational group of more than 1,000 persons representing global Protestantism meUor common strategizing, theological work, and missiological reflection.

Elias Riggs was a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Greece between 1832-1838. This article reviews the early life of Elias Riggs, investigates how he became an American missionary in the Middle East and examines his missionary activities in Greece.

Several theses and dissertations have been written about the religious, political and cultural effects of the American missionary enterprise in the Middle East. This study lists the theses and dissertations which examine the missionary activities of the several American denominations and organizations including Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Mormons, Quakers and Methodists in the Middle East throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

"In the widest sense the transformation of attitudes to authority, which found its way into the mainstream of [Irish] politics with surprising speed, suggests a reassertion of attitudes in some areas of life in the Republic that are - with a lower case p at least – protestant."
R.F. Foster, How the Catholics became Protestants, in Luck and the Irish, Penguin Books, 2007, p.37.

"The problems of the unmarried mothers had been explained comprehensively by Mr. Michel Viney in the Irish Times, although the articles had dealt primarily with the Roman Catholic population."
Mrs Katherine F Glover, SRN, Matron, 42nd annual meeting of the Bethany Home, Irish Times, 29 April 1965

Introduction

During Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations in 1921 Britain threatened ‘terrible war’ if acceptance of partition between north and south and an oath of allegiance to the British monarch was not forthcoming from the Irish side. The southern Irish Free State’s political elite was born of such compromise and victory in a subsequent civil war. A pulverised industrial infrastructure, endemic poverty, mass emigration, lack of economic development, combined with a perceived failure to complete the national revolution, ensured that a sense of fragility endured.

Conservative and right wing social forces were consolidated in the attempt to ensure survival. The Roman Catholic Church, which had become institutionally robust during the final phase of British rule, was the strongest conservative force in the new state. Having failed to rule successfully through Protestantism, the British government attempted to cultivate institutional Catholicism in the mid to late 19th Century. While this too was a political failure, it facilitated Catholic organisation, which, combined with a Protestantism in retreat, ensured a century of triumphant growth. From a position of outlawed non-Britishness to that of incorporation under imperial rule, Independence proved a further stepping stone for a Roman Catholicism that became identified as ‘Irish’. It offered Catholic solutions to social problems affecting Catholics, the vast majority.

Autonomous religious bodies exercised control over health, education, welfare provision and youth detention. Religion invested society with a sense of meaning, one generally supportive of and that helped to mould the status quo. In the absence of a destabilising republican stamp of approval, a Catholic ethos emerged and substituted.

Was the state that emerged from this process conservative because of Catholicism, or was the latter merely the most significant influence? The emergent dominance of the Roman Catholic Church and its more recent erosion were considered central to the suppression and then advent of a more secular and pluralist polity. In Luck and the Irish (2007), Roy Foster linked southern Irish authoritarianism to a nexus of Catholicism and nationalism and its demise to the emergence or a return to an implicitly liberal protestant sensibility. In Foster’s ‘widest sense’, Protestantism was considered to be part of a subterranean strain of liberalism. If that is so, examining what Protestant organisations did should supply evidence of a submerged liberal ethic, repressed by this alleged alliance between nationalist ideology and the Catholic Church.

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This article examines the missionary activities of Elias Riggs among the Greeks and Armenians in Izmir. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) sent Elias Riggs to the Ottoman Empire in 1832 and he became one of the most influential missionaries in the region throughout the nineteenth century. Although the Armenian, Greek and Catholic community leaders opposed American Protestant missionary activities since they feared losing their own followers, the operations of the ABCFM gradually developed in Izmir. Like the other ABCFM missionaries in the mission station of

While working among the Jews in the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries from Europe and the United States encountered with the Sabbateans/ Dönmes, the followers of Sabbatai Sevi, and the missionaries wanted to extend their activities to this community as well. In this article, the American missionary activities among the Ottoman Sabbateans are traced by focusing on letters, memoirs and reports of the missionaries who worked in the AB-CFM (American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) station in Salonica. The ABCFM mission to the Jews discontinued in 1856. According to the available reports, none of the Sabbatians in the Ottoman Empire converted to Christianity.

This study examines the history and current state of evangelical Christianity in the Dominican Republic. It focuses on two historical Protestant denominations: the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) and the Iglesia Evangélica Dominicana (I.E.D.). Each of these denominations was founded in the Dominican Republic during key moments in the country’s history. Using historical documents and interviews with church leaders, this article focuses on the ways that each institution has adapted to Dominican society in the twenty-first century while also maintaining ties to the United States. It additionally questions how factors such as social marginalization, racial discrimination, the growth of the Dominican evangelical community, and continued connections to U.S. institutions have affected the trajectory of these churches. Ultimately, this research analyzes how historical church leaders view their place within Dominican society and their historic and current ties to U.S. institutions.

Sul finire del XVIII secolo alla ragione divenuta imputata nel suo stesso tribunale, Rousseau contrappose il sentimento.  Si apriva così la strada al Romanticismo, per il quale l’ottimismo illuminista della ragione appariva ingiustificato e riacquisivano valore elementi come fantasia e tradizione.
Quest’ultima non più espressione del progressivo decadimento della storia, diveniva «garante del patrimonio di cultura che i popoli accumulano e trasmettono nel corso dei secoli»,  portando con se la rivalutazione della religione,“contenitore storico” delle culture dei popoli. In questa nuova sensibilità culturale aperta al “religioso”, nasce il secondo Risveglio. Sorto all’interno della Chiesa d’Inghilterra con l’Evangelical Movement, affermava la necessità di una rigenerazione attraverso la fede in Cristo e l’obbligo di condividere la propria esperienza di salvezza. Il sacrifico espiatorio di Cristo assumeva una valenza universale, pertanto andava comunicato anche ai “pagani”. Ogni credente, senza distinzione, era chiamato  ad interessarsi alla salvezza dei lontani dalla fede. Si  generò così il progressivo annullamento delle distanze fra clero e laici nel lavoro di evangelizzazione, che favorì la nascità delle Religious Societies.  Dedite ad attività sociali ed educative a sostegno dei meno abienti, queste associazioni di volontari divennero il nucleo da cui  prese le mosse il movimento missionario protestante che attraversò tutto il XIX secolo, per spegnersi agli albori del "900, a causa della incipiente secolarizzazione e dopo essersi spesso  colluso con il colonialismo.

Christian missionaries were crucial to the development of formal education throughout much of the world, including East Asia. They generally provided the first Western formal education, often initially against local resistance. They demonstrated the economic value of this education – which spurred later demand. They trained many of the teachers who staffed non-missionary schools. They pioneered education for women and poor people. They were the major early teachers of European languages, Western science, and Western medicine. These innovations had a number of important social consequences around the world, including East Asia (Woodberry 2004; 2006; Woodberry and Shah 2004; Etherington 2005). For Protestants, mass education was crucial because they wanted people to read the Bible in their own languages. Thus, wherever Protestant missionaries went they almost immediately imported printing technology, created fonts, and began printing Bibles, tracts, newspapers, and other texts for ordinary people. They also rapidly developed mass literacy programs to teach ordinary people to read. This was true even of Protestant missionaries with little formal education themselves. In areas where Catholic missionaries competed with Protestants, they too invested heavily in education and printing, often developing the best elementary and secondary schools (ibid.). In the literate cultures of Asia and the Near East, missionaries also invested in colleges and medical schools. Of course, missionaries founded such institutions in areas where inhabitants were not literate prior to missionary contact, but not nearly to the same extent as in Asia. In Africa and the Pacific missionaries could train the children of the elite by providing elementary schools. However, the dominant cultures of Asia already had extensive literary traditions and educational systems for elite men. Many Asians considered their own systems superior to Western ones. Thus, to get Asian elites to expose themselves to Christian teaching, missionaries had to provide a higher level of service, such as university education (see for example, Covell 1978). Protestant missionaries also generally believed that Western science and legal traditions had developed from Christianity, particularly in its Protestant form, and that science would undermine "superstition". Thus, many missionaries felt that teaching Western science, medicine, law, etc., was a helpful preparation for conversion (Covell 1978; Bohr 2000; Bennett 1983; Drummond 1971; Khalaf 2002).

But the purpose of straightforward remembering is to preserve something that really happened. We want to have access to scenes that were real in the past and to somehow preserve these things in our present experience; it is the search for the truth of what has gone before.