The Lost World of Missionary Diplomacy
And the Long Reach of Those Nineteenth-Century Missionary Diplomats
I have sometimes wondered how it has developed that U.S. citizens who get into trouble in other countries are so confident their government will get them out of trouble. I am not insensitive to their distress and endangerment, or to the profound injustices many of them have experienced. I too rejoiced recently when U.S. citizens were released from Russian prisons. But I do find the expectation striking. The prevailing assumption seems to be that U.S. citizens have a moral claim on their nation’s resources, diplomatic or otherwise, to gain their release. So much so that I feel I am treading the edge of treason in wondering about this!
Well. It turns out that the history of American missionaries in foreign lands, and something called missionary diplomacy, has a lot to do with this. It is a fascinating story that opens up new vistas on Americans abroad, and their long reach into the present.
Earlier I mentioned Emily Conroy-Krutz’s book, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024). This is an impressive study. And though it touches on a broad range of global locations where missionaries were active in the nineteenth century, the focus often swings back to China.
It is difficult to do justice to this book in one entry. So I will pick out some highlights and give you a feel for its overall scope and significance.
Conroy-Krutz frames the book with individuals representing four generations of a family that was in one way or another involved in the culture of US Protestant missions. And regular readers of this Substack will not be surprised that I applaud this approach!
She begins with Divie Bethune McCartee,1 a Northern Presbyterian medical missionary to China, who in 1861 became involved in a U.S. delegation’s negotiations with the Taiping. McCartee understood himself as first a missionary evangelist, but through his exceptional linguistic ability he made himself useful to his country.
Like many other US Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century, he found that his evangelistic work was deeply entwined with diplomatic work. In order to serve his God, he would also have to serve his nation; if he was able to advance the interests of the United States, he believed he would also be advancing the interests of Protestantism (27).2
He was far from alone. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the state regularly turned to missionaries to assist in US foreign relations. Missionaries served as consuls and translators. They corresponded with and advised US diplomats, sometimes even testifying before Congress about international affairs. They were trusted experts who wrote for US domestic audiences about the world and its people. Their mission boards regularly corresponded with the State Department, and they advocated for the appointment of their favored officials in international posts. At moments of crisis, they called for political and even military support for their missionaries around the world. Missionaries found that expanding the reach of the US state would result in the expansion of Protestant missions—and vice versa. Christian foreign missions, in turn, were an essential part of the toolkit for US diplomacy” (28).3
Conroy-Krutz points out that “The story of missionary diplomacy is one of overlapping political and religious narratives that are far too often told separately.” And she seeks to remedy that. As she puts it, “If we want to understand the development of US diplomacy across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, it is essential that we uncover the significant role of Protestant foreign missions in shaping the project of US foreign relations” (40).
I suspect that would be news to many Americans, including Protestants who are supportive of missions today. Undergirding so much of this story is the commonly expressed belief of nineteenth-century benevolent societies that Christianity was a civilizing force, a humanizing, progressive and modernizing pathway into the future (29). Missions were seen as conduits of the blessings of Western culture to the non-Christian world. And this transcended the typical goals of international relations: trade and commerce. In time, the missionary response to humanitarian crises would also find its place in U.S. foreign relations.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, “both the State Department and the mission movement were small and weak, with outsized ambitions for eventual influence over the whole world. Examining the evolution of both the state and missions together reveals how entangled their roots were and the ways that they would shape each other’s growth over the century and into the next” (41).
“Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the United States as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. This is where many historians begin the story of religion and US foreign relations. But it has far deeper roots that stretch back into the nineteenth century. By the time the United States entered the First World War, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionaries introduced Americans to new places, people, and problems, and in so doing, their missionary diplomacy shaped America’s strategic interests around the globe.” (43)
Take, for example, the missionary Samuel Wells Williams (1812-1884), who was an important producer and purveyor of knowledge about China for mid-nineteenth-century Americans. His work was one example amidst a profusion of such literature, in addition to the journals and newspapers. And the knowledge produced and promulgated was not sequestered in a “religious” realm. As Conroy-Krutz notes, there was a “genre-blurring” in which “the missionary project was closely linked to other branches of US cultural influence” (91).
Williams’s first-hand expertise in China exemplified a sort of power that’s worth noting: “In claiming to be experts, missionaries were participating in the sort of knowledge production about the colonized world for Western audiences that marked many imperial projects of the nineteenth century. Experts knew the world, and as they translated and packaged that knowledge for Western consumption, they asserted a power over the people they described” (88). I don’t think this is overstated, and that power was exercised with various levels of discipline and self-awareness.
Likewise, it seems to me that historians—and Substack writers!—also exercise this sort of power and expertise in their production of knowledge of the “foreign country” of the past.
At one point Conroy-Krutz takes an inventory of the works on China that would have been available in the Essex Library in Salem, Massachusetts (94). Of one influential and non-religious literary journal, she notes: “Writers at the North American Review valued missionary contributions to knowledge, encouraging readers to see missionaries not only as spiritual figures, but as ‘men of liberal culture’ who possessed ‘a native breadth of vision and grasp of intellect.’” Missionaries, regarded as experts in cultures, languages, and foreign affairs, offered something Conroy-Krutz calls “missionary intelligence.” The effect was that, particularly in the early nineteenth century, “missionaries presented Americans with an alternate vision for the role of the United States in the world” (47).
But they also represented the United States to the world. This influence carried on throughout the nineteenth century. Significantly, “the decades from the 1840s through the 1880s were years of profound transition in global politics and the world economy” (112). Missionaries, who had been engaged with animating questions of power, justice, and civilization, were now operating in a world of unrest over the reach of Western power and colonialism. And while they relied on “the ultimate sovereignty of God,” it was clear to them “that God favored the sort of republican government, capitalist economy, and liberal educational institutions that they knew in the United States.” It is here that Conroy-Krutz identifies for mid-nineteenth-century missionaries, “a particular kind of missionary patriotism” (113).
And this missionary patriotism entailed a reliance on their U.S. citizenship:
Throughout the middle of the nineteenth century, their relationship to the United States mattered. Citizenship was both a practical issue of protection and a profound matter of identity. Missionaries continued their earlier role as unofficial ambassadors.… But as the missionary movement grew, it demanded that the US government grow along with it. Through years of turmoil at home and abroad, American missionaries wanted and needed connections to their home government. (113)4
Conroy-Krutz investigates the gamut of missionary diplomacy, from experts and foreign consuls to victims and troublemakers. From a diplomatic perspective, missionaries could be valuable assets or burrs under the diplomatic saddle. They could sacrificially promote good international relations or creatively interpret and bend the language of treaties to their own benefit. They could earn respect or make themselves odious. But not all missionaries agreed that missionaries should, for instance, turn to U.S. consuls for protection. Conroy-Krutz cites one anonymous missionary in China who warned that such behavior might lead to the conclusion that they were “merely propagators of the religion of a dominant power” (174).
Nevertheless, the overall trend of this missionary diplomacy was toward defining foreign policy and establishing a vision of America’s place among the community of nations. A U.S. consulate could ask, What is a missionary good for anyway? And a historian of diplomacy finds it here: “If we want to understand the development of US diplomacy across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, it is essential that we uncover the significant role of Protestant foreign missions in shaping the project of US foreign relations” (40).
I find this story of missionary diplomacy fascinating, but it is also a reminder of our frail humanity. Mingled with inspiring episodes of sacrifice and advocacy for others, we find—not surprisingly—attitudes and actions that are regrettable. And as I have commented before, I find the harnessing of gospel witness to American identity and empire (or to advancing Western civilization, or technology, or modernity, or progress, or even democracy) to be deeply problematic for the gospel of Jesus Christ.5
A Coda of Missionary Diplomacy
There is more than one historical quest riding in this Substack. I have a particular reason to be interested in the history of missionary diplomacy.
In the photo below, on the right you will see Jimmy and Sophie Graham’s son, James R. Graham III, my grandfather.6 Born in 1898, he grew up in China, returned to China in 1921 as a Southern Presbyterian missionary, left in 1936 as the Japanese were invading China, and in 1950 went to Taiwan as an independent missionary to the exiled Republic of China.7
In the center of the photo is the famous American evangelist Billy Graham, on a visit to Taiwan. (James Graham seems to be translating for him.)
And on the left is Chiang Kai-shek, the famous revolutionary general and leader of the Guomintang (Nationalist Party of China), and president of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Professedly a Christian. Manifestly a dictator. But a complex man. To this day Chiang’s life has been repeatedly laid out on the autopsy table and analyzed.8
This photo may be from the 1950s, possibly from the early 1960s. But there was another similar scene that took place in the early 1970s, when Billy Graham conveyed a message to Chiang Kai-shek from President Richard Nixon. In any case, it is a snapshot of missionary diplomacy. James R. Graham, the missionary evangelist and educator, a public figure in Taiwan, was a friend of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Madame Chiang (Soong Mei-ling).
So I read Conroy-Krutz’s book with great interest, since it builds up a thick historical context, setting my particular interest within a current of missionary diplomacy that extended back into the early nineteenth century. By mid-twentieth century the terms had changed. Now the focus was on Communist China, and the precarious status of Taiwan. And on this point (as on many others), James R. Graham III was never reticent to passionately express his view. Even in a letter to President Richard Nixon.9 Taiwan, “Free China,” must not be abandoned. It is an issue that is critically relevant today, a half century later.10
But there is something else to understand about some of these missionary diplomats. Sometime in the 1960s or 70s, in a recorded address to a mixed audience in Taiwan (in both English and Mandarin; he effortlessly translated for himself), James Graham, the old “China hand” and ex-U.S. Marine, interjected:
“I love China. Sometimes I think I love it more than my own country.”
However we might contextualize and understand that statement (a rhetorical sentiment perhaps?), beneath it lies something real. And in that moment I see at least a few of those gray-haired nineteenth-century missionary diplomats quietly nodding their heads in agreement. Their intercultural lives, planted on the two-way avenue between the U.S. and China, had worked changes on them.
She sets up the book’s Epilogue with Dr. Yamei Kin, and her son, who died as a U.S. soldier in the Great War. Dr. Kin was the adopted daughter of Divie Bethune McCartee, and a medical missionary who was an influential interpreter of the “Orient to the Occident” (420).
Digressing from my usual footnoting practice, I will put page numbers from Conroy-Krutz’s book in parentheses after quotations. However, these numbers will not correlate with the print edition. I have been reading an ebook version from the subscription service Everand.
Conroy-Krutz’s book serves as a nineteenth-century historical preface to David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017). An older book that is useful but foreshortened in perspective, for having been written too close to the events, is Paul A. Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890-1952 (Princeton University Press, 1958).
This raises an interesting question regarding the Southern Presbyterian missionaries I have been following in China. While their regionalism, or sectionalism, remained part of their identity, it has seemed to me that they had a strong sense of national identity and allegiance. In what ways might their missionary experience have modulated their regional identity and allegiance to the “Lost Cause”?
I find myself in agreement with mission thinkers such as Michael W. Stroope, Transcending Mission: The Eclipse of a Modern Tradition (IVP Academic, 2017).
If you are new to this Substack, Jimmy and Sophie Graham are my missionary great grandparents, my quasi avatars, or “feet on the ground” (from 1890 on) as I explore The China We Never Knew.
James Graham was fully supported and sent by Billy Graham. This is an interesting story in itself, which I won’t go into now. But I should clarify that there was no “blood” relationship between these two Grahams. The personal tie was via Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth Bell Graham, whose parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries in China, at Qingjiangpu. There Jimmy and Sophie Graham, James Graham’s parents, were surrogate aunt and uncle to Ruth throughout her youth. James Graham III was a contemporary of Ruth’s parents.
Most recently in Alexander V. Pantsov, Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-shek, China, 1887-1975 (Yale University Press, 2023). But also Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009). Taylor is more explicit in pointing out Chiang’s Christian orientation, including his daily reading of the devotional book Streams in the Desert. (James R. Graham attests to having seen Chiang’s personal Bible, in which he had highlighted passages in color crayon. Note: The mandarins of Substack would put insider dope like this behind a paywall!)
On this I will say more. But that will come later.
I write in the final days of a contested 2024 U.S. presidential election season, in which Donald Trump overtly views the U.S. relationship to Taiwan in strictly transactional terms. This runs against the grain of the story of U.S. international relations we have been considering in this post.