Religion and Theologies of Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Missionary Encounter

This paper elucidates the dynamics of moral social criticism in the transnational, cross-cultural missionary encounter, circa 1865-1900. It addresses the ways in which missionaries navigated questions of national identity and culture in the geopolitical interstices between nation-states. Turning to models of worldwide religious and cultural pluralism in American social life, such as the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, this paper investigates how ecumenical efforts to put religion on display, so to speak, galvanized the formal codification of cross-cultural missionary methods. Mining the discourse of seasoned missionaries (e.g., John L. Nevius), theologians (e.g., J. Gresham Machen), cultural relativists (e.g., Franz Boas), and grassroots efforts at missionary mobilization, I argue that cultural diversity on the world stage provided missionary-minded American Protestants a conceptual model for engaging religious diversity in their own nation. The outcome was the relativization of culture and intra-tradition criticism.