American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam
400
American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam
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Overview
The surprising tale of the first American Protestant missionaries to proselytize in the Muslim world
In American Apostles, the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Christine Leigh Heyrman brilliantly chronicles the first fateful collision between American missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Levant. Pliny Fisk, Levi Parsons, Jonas King: though virtually unknown today, these three young New Englanders commanded attention across the United States two hundred years ago. Poor boys steeped in the biblical prophecies of evangelical Protestantism, they became the founding members of the Palestine mission and ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, where they sought to expose the falsity of Muhammad's creed and to restore these bastions of Islam to true Christianity. Not only among the first Americans to travel throughout the Middle East, the Palestine missionaries also played a crucial role in shaping their compatriots' understanding of the Muslim world.
As Heyrman shows, the missionaries thrilled their American readers with tales of crossing the Sinai on camel, sailing a canal boat up the Nile, and exploring the ancient city of Jerusalem. But their private journals and letters often tell a story far removed from the tales they spun for home consumption, revealing that their missions did not go according to plan. Instead of converting the Middle East, the members of the Palestine mission themselves experienced unforeseen spiritual challenges as they debated with Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians and pursued an elusive Bostonian convert to Islam. As events confounded their expectations, some of the missionaries developed a cosmopolitan curiosity about-even an appreciation of-Islam. But others devised images of Muslims for their American audiences that would both fuel the first wave of Islamophobia in the United States and forge the future character of evangelical Protestantism itself.
American Apostles brings to life evangelicals' first encounters with the Middle East and uncovers their complicated legacy. The Palestine mission held the promise of acquainting Americans with a fuller and more accurate understanding of Islam, but ultimately it bolstered a more militant Christianity, one that became the unofficial creed of the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. The political and religious consequences of that outcome endure to this day.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780809023998 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Christine Leigh Heyrman is the Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 and Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, winner of the 1998 Bancroft Prize.
Read an Excerpt
American Apostles
When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam
By Christine Leigh Heyrman
Hill and Wang
Copyright © 2015 Christine Leigh HeyrmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8090-2399-8
CHAPTER 1
THE AGE OF WONDERS
Let those of you who are willing to trade the life of this world for the life to come, fight in God's way. To anyone who fights in God's way, whether killed or victorious, We shall give a great reward. — Qur'an, Women, 4:74
Pliny Fisk's practiced eye scanned the coded entries. Then he opened the small leather-bound book and transcribed the cipher. It was the fall of 1818, and he expected to be gone soon, not likely to return. If none who remained knew the code, the Brethren's earliest records would be lost. When they had first gathered a decade earlier, not a soul knew of the Brethren's existence — not friends, teachers, or even parents. They numbered among the many secret societies in the early republic, groups that concealed the names of their members and the rituals at their meetings. There were spoiled city boys who partied in clandestine social clubs, young swells who preferred to keep their revels from public view. More respectable and far more numerous were the Freemasons, whose ranks had included Revolutionary leaders such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Now Masonic lodges drew otherwise sober lawyers and ministers, merchants and artisans, to conduct mysterious rituals in odd regalia. The Freemasons were also magnets for promising young men seeking useful connections, and Pliny Fisk would come to number among them. Here was someone who liked secrets.
Neither he nor any of the Brethren seem like the sorts of people who would have secrets worth keeping. They were farmers' sons and preachers' kids, young New Englanders who had banded together not to get drunk and rowdy but to get serious and holy — to feed their dreams of becoming missionaries. The Brethren numbered barely a dozen when the eighteen-year- old Pliny first encountered them in 1810, two years after their founding, and how they had impressed him. There was first an exchange of letters with the prospective recruit — written in cipher like the minutes of their meetings — followed by long discussions with individual members, all several years his senior and who, as he drolly recalled, "spake of each other in such terms, as gave me a most exalted idea of them all."
Exclusivity, like secrecy, appealed to the Brethren's founder, Samuel John Mills, Jr. He was a young man with a great deal to prove, blessed and burdened by his father's name. Remembered as a "giant in his physical frame," "Father Mills" was a patriarchal presence in every way, a preacher whose wit and eloquence made him the stuff of legend from his western Connecticut pastorate to Vermont's raw frontier settlements, where he often itinerated as a "domestic missionary." Alas, the junior Samuel, sawed-off and scrawny, favored his small, delicate mother; even friends described him as awkward, ungainly, and utterly humorless. He would make an unlikely leader of anything, this lackluster little fellow who spoke with a "croaking sort of voice." It was as if an eagle had sired a frog.
Or so it seemed until young Mills "caught the missionary spirit," in the saying of the day, gathered the Brethren, and discovered within himself a genius for networking and organizing. Bolder than his father, he dreamed of expanding the scope of evangelical missions far beyond Vermont into every corner of the world. He aimed to forge the Brethren into a powerful order, as he believed a secret society with contrary aims, the Bavarian Illuminati, had once been, perhaps were still. A learned conclave of Western European intellectuals and statesmen, the order of the Illuminati had actually existed for less than a decade back in the late eighteenth century. It lingered much longer in the minds of conspiracy-mongers on both sides of the Atlantic who claimed that the Illuminati had provoked the French Revolution and schemed to destroy Christianity everywhere. After about 1800, most Americans repented their having credited this crackbrained fantasy, and even Mills might have come to doubt whether the Illuminati still lurked. But he remained convinced that wicked people of some description still plotted to undermine Christianity, and with the Brethren as his beginning he aimed to thwart those schemes. If the "devil" of the Illuminati had "put an engine [organizing into secret societies] into our hands," Mills wrote to one of the Brethren in 1810, "let us turn it against him and wield it like skillful engineers." Far from dying out, their evangelical faith would spread across the globe through the labors of missionaries.
Being drawn into the Brethren made Pliny Fisk feel special, perhaps for the first time in his life. As the sixth of eight children, the fourth of five sons, he had no special claim on his parents' hopes or resources, and in any case they had little of either to spare. The Fisks eked out a competence from farming in Shelburne, a little upland village nestled into heavily wooded, rolling hills that marks the first step on the ascent from the Connecticut River valley into the Green Mountains. In this part of western Massachusetts, the ground is rockier and the weather colder than in Greenfield, Deerfield, and Amherst below, but its forests are even more brilliantly afire in the fall, and in the winter its tall trees glisten like the ramparts of an ice palace. Pliny's grandfather numbered among Shelburne's first settlers in the 1740s; after being routed during the French and Indian War, he returned and put down roots. His sons, including Pliny's father, Ebenezer, owned small farms and relied on the labor of their children, whose formal education consisted of a few months during the winter at a common school.
Not a few young people in early nineteenth-century New England dreamed of escaping places like Shelburne. Among them was Ezra Fisk, who, when he recruited his young cousin Pliny into the Brethren, had gotten as far away as Williams College and hoped to get farther still. Pliny had his eye on the same opportunities, so he, too, seized his chance to enter the orbit of the Mills family, joining the Brethren and making promises that might have given another young person pause. He signed their constitution, pledging to undertake "a mission to the heathen" and to keep free from any entangling "engagements" of a romantic nature. He professed "a firm belief in those distinguishing doctrines commonly denominated evangelical" and swore to keep secret all of the Brethren's dealings. Less than a year later in March 1811, he joined the sophomore class at Middlebury College and began his uphill battle for an education. He was obliged to break off his studies for months at a time, doing manual labor or teaching school to scrimp together the money to continue. He struggled to keep up academically as well, having had only the scantiest training in the classics. Still, it must have seemed a remarkable providence to Pliny, first his being admitted to the Brethren, then his father's agreeing to forgo his help on the family farm. Perhaps Ebenezer Fisk harbored some hopes of the boy's bettering himself. Why name a son after two noble Romans if not to set him apart from all those Ichabod Cranes?
As Pliny Fisk's dreams began to find their first fulfillment, so too did those of young Samuel Mills. Only two years after his first gathering of the Brethren in 1808, several like-minded ministers founded the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and their first cohort of missionaries sailed for India in 1812. Over the next decades, missionaries from the American Board and other Protestant organizations overspread the globe; at the height of their influence a century later, there would be a hundred missionary societies in the United States sponsoring about five thousand men and women overseas. Mention missionaries today, and chances are that someone within earshot will claim a great-grandmother who taught in China or a distant cousin who preached in Africa. For more than a century after its founding, the foreign missions movement played a major role in defining the culture of evangelical Protestantism, inspiring devotion and activism among millions of believers. It all began with Samuel Mills's band of Brethren: it seems that they did have some secrets worth knowing.
Here's one of them: Why did the campaign to build a global empire of the spirit draw its strongest original supporters from a narrow, exclusive elect of New England believers, nearly all immured in isolated farming villages and committed to an unbending Calvinism? How did such unlikely people — these self-righteous, tribal hicks — seize on so improbable a goal as the conversion of the world, including the Muslim world? It was as if a frog had sired an eagle.
* * *
The American foreign missions movement originated in an evangelical subculture known as the New Divinity. It claimed many, perhaps a majority, of small-town New Englanders during the decades around 1800, and its epicenter lay in northwestern Connecticut and western Massachusetts. The religious revivals that rippled throughout New England between the late 1790s and the 1820s also spread the New Divinity's influence east toward the seacoast and west wherever Yankees migrated — Vermont and New Hampshire, the Hudson River valley, and Ohio's Western Reserve. Dense webs of kinship and friendship knit the sinews of this body of believers, and women typically outshone men as the most committed members of the laity. Not content with regular attendance at worship, women were far more likely to possess the spiritual fervor that led to their converting in revivals and then joining the churches as full members.
But it was the clergy — their ranks opened only to men — who provided the public face of the New Divinity. Charismatic ministers such as Father Mills seemed almost shamans to their parishioners. There was the woman who recalled repeating her pastor's name when, as a girl, she walked home alone in the dark, "with a vague impression that the repetition of this magical name would keep off all evil agencies," and the man who remembered in youth regarding his minister as "a sort of oracle." Some preachers had also spent time in the militia or the Continental army during the revolution, lending luster to their reputations even before they won renown for igniting revivals in their own churches and evangelizing frontier settlements in northern New England and New York. There they faced down challenges from rival Protestants, most formidably from the upstart Baptists and Methodists. Those fellow evangelicals set the same spiritual premium on a new birth, but the New Divinity scorned their poorly educated clergy and the unrestrained emotionalism of their worship. They also battled religious liberals: the few but pesky deists who rejected the Bible, the Universalists who offered salvation to all, and those within Congregationalist ranks who inclined toward Unitarian beliefs and questioned the divinity of Jesus.
New Divinity ministers and laypeople alike embraced a starkly conservative theology and a doctrinaire moral code. They smiled upon the chaste pastimes of sleighing and singing schools but grimaced at the vanity of balls and "frolics." Like many of their fellow Congregationalists and Presbyterians, they took their ideas about the relationship between God and humankind from the teachings of John Calvin. But no believers in New England took Calvin's ideas more seriously than did the adherents to the New Divinity. Even as they joined with more moderate Calvinists to promote revivals, the members of the New Divinity drubbed them for assuring sinners that good works and better intentions would win salvation. Only divine grace could transform the corrupt heart, the New Divinity taught, rooting out pride and selfishness and instilling the capacity to act with "disinterested benevolence" for God's glory alone. They felt certain that even though the sovereign God had made men and women bad to the bone, these fallen human beings were nevertheless morally accountable for their sins. Nothing in that conviction struck believers as contradictory, and it aroused little debate, because they excluded from their churches anyone who did not share their religious views.
The New Divinity faithful may have peered at truth through a one-inch pipe, but backward-looking they were not. Like their idolized Jonathan Edwards some fifty years earlier, their ministers mounted an intellectually rigorous defense of Calvinism for a post-Enlightenment world, fending off charges of its being fatalistic, unreasonable, unfair, and downright unrepublican. And as adroitly as evangelicals in the present day, they flexed their power to shape the United States through newfangled techniques. After 1800, that included founding an array of what were then novel institutions — religious presses and publications, libraries and moral reform associations, and domestic and foreign missionary societies. They established academies and colleges such as Middlebury, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Williams, as well as theological seminaries, beginning with Andover. Their aim was to cultivate in the laity, especially in young people, the piety and learning to promote the New Divinity's vision of the future.
If young Samuel Mills was their most fortunate son, Levi Parsons was almost as much a golden boy. A shirttail relative of Pliny Fisk's and the same age, Parsons boasted a background considerably more prosperous and genteel. As the young Fisk plowed his father's fields and mucked out the barn in Shelburne, Parsons passed his boyhood in the nearby village of Goshen, several slowly winding miles uphill from Northampton, Massachusetts. There his father — no hardscrabble farmer, but the learned Reverend Justin Parsons — ministered for many years before presiding over two fledgling churches in Vermont and itinerating tirelessly for domestic missionary societies.
That intensity his son more than matched. During his years at Middlebury, Levi matured into a magnetic religious virtuoso whose spiritual experiences met even the high standard set by the New Divinity. These he freely shared in letters to his mother and sisters, who thrilled to his pledges "to qualify myself to fight the battles of the Lord" and "to climb up higher and higher, to be swallowed up by the Lord." A revival in the fall of 1811 answered his striving: he experienced a classic New Divinity conversion, overcoming his repugnance to the dread doctrine "that such a God should reign" who "dispensed mercy to some and not others." After much anguish, he grasped at last the justice of himself, and all of fallen humankind, being sent to hell, whereupon "the world lost its charms — death was now only the gate to glory." New Divinity believers proved their spiritual mettle and gained assurance of their salvation by attaining such indifference to death's terrors, including the prospect of their own damnation. Such sentiments were proof of a regenerate heart, one so shorn of self-love that it had no other desire but to advance God's kingdom.
Levi's future now spread before him. He had come to share the missionary dreams of the young man who had become his fast friend when they roomed together at Middlebury, Pliny Fisk. By 1816, the Brethren had gathered Parsons into their ranks, and a year later, shortly before graduating from Andover Theological Seminary, he delivered a fiery address to his fellows that signaled his plans. In the non-Christian world, he believed, Islam was an even more formidable foe than paganism, for in Muslim countries, "the kingdom of Satan is firmly established — favored by the prejudices of the people — strengthened and upheld by the power of Magistrates — by the arts, and subtilty of Politicians, the craft and influence of superstitious Priests." In Islamic dominions "where every nerve is braced against the truth," missionaries "who, at the command of Christ," carried "the standard of the cross" must "expect to fight, and fall by its side." But now, as in the days of the apostles, he concluded, "the blood of Martyrs will be the seed of the church."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Apostles by Christine Leigh Heyrman. Copyright © 2015 Christine Leigh Heyrman. Excerpted by permission of Hill and Wang.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 3
Part One: American Orients
1. THE AGE OF WONDERS 19
2. "BY THE BEARD OF MAHOMET!" 44
3. "A PERFECT ROMANCE" 71
Part Two: Jihad
4. BRITISH CONNECTIONS 97
5. "OUR GREAT WEAPON" 122
Part Three: Hegira
6. TURNING TURK 145
7. AN AMERICAN MUSLIM 164
Part Four: The Hidden Man
8. EPIPHANIES 191
9. AT THE GATES OF DAMASCUS 221
EPILOGUE 251
NOTES 257
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
325
INDEX 327