This paper is centered around the image of Protestant ministers like Rev. Edward Hooker who, in a pique of frustration at his congregants’ seeming lack of interest in foreign missions, began to hand-paint large-scale maps of the world that he could hang behind his pulpit during the monthly missionary fundraising events known as the Monthly Prayer Concerts. For Hooker and his fellow map-enthusiast clergy, it was clear that missionary organizations had at least one major stumbling-block if they wanted to generate interest in the evangelism of the world: Americans were, quite simply, ignorant about the world and its peoples. It was the job of mission supporters, then, to educate American Protestants about the world around them and its need for evangelization.
This paper traces missionary creation and distribution of maps and geographic information through print as well as fundraising events known as the Monthly Concert. Starting in the late 1820s, missionary leaders turned to maps and other geographic information as a key part of the “missionary intelligence” they could share with American audiences. They hoped this intervention would make the far away and distant feel near. They expected it would help American Protestants take a livelier interest in the world around them. And to some extent, they were successful in these goals. Ministers who used maps reported increases in attendance, donations, and general interest in the missionary cause. In an age of lyceum lectures, utilizing maps allowed ministers to make their monthly prayer concerts into the kind of event that could entertain and educate, and that might even bring some new faces into the pews. These ministers sought to harness the power of visual aids and compelling narrative to turn public educational lectures into tools for the advance of foreign missions in the world at large. But their effects were not only felt in increased interest in missionary work. Their efforts to educate Americans about the world brought missionary conceptions of the hierarchies of world religions, cultures, and race into American geographic understandings.
The missionary use of maps worked alongside other mission-focused texts that spread information about the world. Often, these texts could be quite earth-bound and concerned with practical and political questions about peoples, governments, and civilization. They touched on a wide range of genres, including natural history, science, literature, comparative religion, politics and more. Missionary writings brought foreign landscapes to life. They included geographical and ethnographic information that excited readers interested in the world and its people. They were didactic by design. They contributed to the nineteenth-century American mental map of the world and, in turn, to Americans’ sense of how their country ought to relate to foreign governments. Missionary intelligence, then, ordered the world, corralling the territories of the globe into Protestant mappings and visualizations. The global world became, at least potentially, a socially and materially Protestant world.
Scholars have identified the early republic as a period of “geographic revolution” in the United States, and the missionary embrace of maps was part of this story. Technological innovations made maps cheaper to produce on a large scale at the same time that cultural developments made Americans eager to turn to maps as powerful symbols of national identity. But as the prevalence of foreign missionary geographic writings and mapping suggest, this geographic turn was not only about the nation. It was also about the world and about American ambitions to act as a moral leader in that world.
When ministers like Rev. Hooker made or purchased maps that they could hang on the walls of their churches to illustrate their missionary sermons, they were teaching their audiences to become the “missionary public”: Americans who were knowledgeable about the world and who understood that they had a responsibility to help those oppressed non-Christians who lived far away. This missionary public consumed and replicated a geography that was hierarchical and – when visually represented on the map – often shaded from light to dark. This vision of the world would go far beyond evangelical circles, as missionaries worked to position themselves as experts who could explain the world from a unique and informed position. Starting in the 1830s, geographic missionary intelligence would have a wide-ranging influence on American understandings of the world.
Missionaries published information for a domestic American audience with the expectation that their expertise over these places and people would be recognized by readers at home. By the middle of the century, leading geographers admitted their reliance on missionary sources, calling missionary periodicals like the Missionary Herald “the repository to which the reader must look to find the most valuable documents that have ever been sent over by any society, and where a rich store of scientific, historical, and antiquarian details may be seen.” In an era when Protestant missionaries claimed to be the American experts on much of the non-Western world, missionary maps shaped broader understandings of the world and its peoples in the nineteenth century. Geographic missionary intelligence, in fact, filtered well beyond the Monthly Concert audiences, drawing our attention to the scope of the full continuum of information about the world that missionary supporters might draw upon in these years. Much of this information was created by missionaries, while other information was created by others (merchants, explorers, colonial officials) and consumed by missionaries and their supporters. But all information shared at Monthly Concerts and related venues was at the very least filtered through a missionary lens that helped to determine which places, peoples, and issues were of interest and significant. That filtration could prove to be significant when missionary intelligence reached beyond the circle of active supporters and touched those with a more casual interest in evangelization or those who simply wanted to learn about the world and found the missionaries to be one of the most prolific and prominent sources of that knowledge.
Missionary geographic enthusiasm was a vital component of nineteenth-century missionaries’ attempts to inform the American Protestant public about the world, its people, and their supposed need for evangelism. Starting in the late 1820s, missionary leaders of Monthly Prayer Concerts turned to maps and other geographic information as a key part of the “missionary intelligence” they shared with American audiences. Maps served several purposes in missionary intelligence: to educate and entertain, to make the far away and distant feel near, and to help American Protestants take a livelier interest in the world around them. Ministers sought to harness the power of visual aids and compelling narrative to turn public educational lectures into tools for the advance of foreign missions in the world at large. But these efforts to educate Americans about the world brought missionary conceptions of the hierarchies of world religions, cultures, and race into American geographic understandings.