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From the early nineteenth century through the middle twentieth century, foreign and domestic missionaries ranked among the most conspicuous figures of American religious history. In many quarters they still do. "Don't apologize," one academic quipped at a conference in India. "All Americans are missionaries."1
Wherever one looks, missionaries turn up. They captured the attention of imaginative writers as perceptive as Herman Melville and Mark Twain, James Michener and John Hersey, John Grisham and Barbara Kingsolver. They won central roles in Hollywood epics, running from The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) to The Inn of the Seventh Happiness (1958) to The Sand Pebbles (1966) to Black Robe (1991). In the academic realm active and returned missionaries played roles in the founding of area studies programs, in the development of social and natural sciences (including vulcanology!), and in the establishment of institutes and colleges such as the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the American University of Beirut. In the Middle East, in China, and elsewhere, United States foreign policies and attitudes built on missionary policies and attitudes, as recent books like Robert Kaplan's The Arabists (1993) and Richard Madsen's China and the American Dream (1995) have made clear. The list could be extended. It suffices to note that in his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy promised that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and success of liberty." That sense of responsibility for the well-being of the entire world flowed from sources deep within U.S. history, and one of them was the missionary impulse.
To say that missionaries ranked as omnipresent artifacts of America's religious culture is not to say, however, that they captured a commensurate attention from historians. As late as 1968 John King Fairbank, the "dean" of American China historians, lamented in his presidential address to the American Historical Association that the missionary remained the "invisible man" of United States history. Fairbank exaggerated; the monumental...