A Literature Review on African Americans, Race, Racism, and Methodist Mission History

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

As I discussed last week, black Americans are underrepresented in missiology. One corollary is that topics related to African Americans, race, and racism are neglected within mission history. Yet, these subjects are not absent. What follows is a literature review on African Americans, race, racism, and Methodist mission history. I hope it is of use in future teaching and research on the subject. If you are aware or resources not listed below, please add them in the comments.

I will start with the start of American Methodism. It is commonplace for scholarship on the first 50 years of American Methodism, before the organization of formal mission structures beyond the annual conferences themselves, to talk about race and evangelism among and by African-Americans. It’s almost de rigueur for books on this time period to have at least one chapter on black Methodism. Book length treatments are less common; the best and most recent is J. Gordon Melton’s A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Part of what makes Melton’s treatment so good is that he foregrounds the agency of black Methodists. In his account, black Methodists (from all Methodist denominations) are not just the objects of white mission evangelism, but are active in carrying out mission evangelism themselves.

After the first fifty years or so of Methodist history, the literature diverges into several separate fields: histories of the development of American Methodism generally and its relationship with the broader society, histories of foreign mission, and histories of domestic or home mission.

Within the field of histories of the development of American Methodism generally, race is a significant theme. There is, of course, a slew of literature about race, slavery, and the Civil War, some of which deals specifically with Methodism. There are several good book-length treatment of predominantly white Methodism and race in the 20th century, such as Peter C. Murray’s Methodists and the Crucible of Race, 1930-1975 (Columbia University Press, 2004) and Morris Davis’ The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of the Jim Crow Era (New York University Press, 2008), though those these books do not interact with the literature on mission.

Ever since the “cultural turn” in mission studies forty years ago, it is common place to talk about the racial attitudes held by missionaries. When the focus is foreign mission, the discussion is usually focused on the prejudices missionaries held about the people with whom they work. Occasionally, connections are made to domestic racism in the United States and Britain, though not always. A few books draw parallels between U.S. missionary experience with and attitudes towards Native Americans and subsequent attitudes towards and techniques of foreign mission. William Hutchison's 1987 classic
Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (University of Chicago Press), but also newer books like Emily Conroy-Krutz's Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2018). Both of these books are focused more on Congregationalists and Baptists than Methodists. I am not aware of a book that draws similar connections between domestic plantation missions and foreign missions, though Jay Riley Case’s An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2012) touches on both topics (along with a discussion of AME foreign missions).

There is a bit more, though still too little, on African Americans as foreign missionaries. Jon Sensbach’s Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2005), is an excellent study of a slave woman who became a Moravian missionary evangelist in the Caribbean and West Africa. It has inspired subsequent scholarship on the black religious linkages across the Atlantic, though not always with a missiological slant. Sylvia Jacob’s 1982 book Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Greenwood Press) is the only thing approaching a comprehensive take on the subject of African American missionaries. Robert Stevens and Brian Johnson published the more recent Profiles of African-American Missionaries (William Carey Library, 2012), which includes a couple of stories of Methodists, including John Stewart, the self-appointed missionary whose work inspired the founding of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the earliest denomination-wide mission organization in American Methodism.

For Methodist foreign mission specifically, Eunjin Park wrote White Americans in Black Africa: Black and White American Methodist Missionaries in Liberia, 1820-1875 (Routledge, 2001), and Anne Streater Wimberly wrote a Methodist History article, “Called to Witness, Called to Serve: African American Methodist Women in Liberian Missions, 1834-1934.” There has been some work done on AME foreign missions, such as James T. Campbell’s excellent Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Jay Riley Case's previously-mentioned An Unpredictable Gospel.

There is more scholarship about race and home missions, though as indicated in my blog post last week, the boundaries of what is labeled home mission and what is labeled something else have often been drawn with implicit racial assumptions that have excluded many stories of African Americans as mission practitioners from being included in discussions of mission, with those ending up instead in community development, practical theology, social ethics, homiletics, and other fields.

Still, there is a decent body of scholarship on the pre-Civil War plantation missions, both Methodist and more broadly. Janet Cornelius’ book on the topic, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (University of South Carolina Press, 1999), has a chapter on Methodist efforts. Robert Sledge discusses those in his volume on MECS mission, "Five Dollars and Myself": The History of Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1845-1939 (General Board of Global Ministries, 2005). Heather Rachelle White wrote an article for Methodist History entitled “’The Glory of Southern Christianity’: Methodism and the Mission to the Slaves.”

There is less scholarship about freed African Americans as a focus of home missions after the Civil War, though that was a significant phenomenon. The lack of any scholarship on the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Freedmen’s Aid Society is a major lacuna.

There is a bit more on race and home mission in the 20th century, especially as it relates to women’s work. John Patrick McDowell’s The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman's Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886-1939 (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), has a chapter on race. Alice G. Knotts wrote a book, Fellowship of Love: Methodist Women Changing American Racial Attitudes, 1920-1968 (Kingswood Books, 1996), on the role that Methodist women had in challenging racial hierarchies, much of that work done through the Women's Society of Christian Service and the Women’s Division of the Board of Missions. Ruth G. Carter wrote a history of women’s mission leadership in the segregated Central Jurisdiction that was published by the Women’s Division: To A Higher Glory: The Growth and Development of Black Women Organized for Mission in the Methodist Church, 1940-1968 (1980?).

There is also some scholarship on race and domestic mission beyond women’s work. Christopher J. Anderson’s edited collection of speeches from the 1919 Methodist Mission Centenary, Voices from the Fair: Race, Gender, and the American Nation at a Methodist Missionary Exposition (Emeth Press, 2012), reprints several speeches from that event about how African American Methodists are serving in mission and how Methodists of all races are working to address social problems affecting black people, though without much scholarly analysis or commentary.

The General Board of Global Ministries published a short book in 1985 entitled An Enduring Legacy: Black United Methodists and the National Program Division. There are sections on the variety of community development and urban mission initiatives that Global Ministries and its predecessors ran in the Charles Cole series on Methodist mission history, but the lack of sustained research into this phenomenon is another significant lacuna. The books in the Cole series, especially Linda Gesling's Mirror and Beacon: The History of Mission of the Methodist Church, 1939-1968 (2005) and Robert Harman's From Missions to Mission: The History of Mission of the United Methodist Church, 1968-2000 (2005), address mission and race more broadly as well, and there is an essay in the final book in that series, Christian Mission in the Third Millennium (2005) on “The Future of African Americans and Mission” by Anthony J. Shipley, a former Global Ministries staff member.

Whatever Happened to Marduk?

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

When Facebook first introduced the option to list one’s religious views, a theological school friend of mine jokingly listed his as, “Whatever happened to Marduk?”

The quick answer to that question is that Marduk went the way of the Babylonian Empire that worshipped him. The Babylonian Empire fell, and Marduk, its imperial god, did not long survive that fall.

Nor is Marduk the only deity to meet such a fate. Marduk has been joined in his fate by the likes of Ra, Zeus, Jupiter, Mithros, Quetzalcoatl, Pachamama and others. While at one point, each of these deities presided over an empire of devoted followers, when their empires collapsed, so did their religious cults.

The reasons why imperial religions go into decline with their empires are probably many and vary by the individual. For some, imperial religions have taken on an air of coercion, and newly freed people are eager to be rid of religious coercion along with political coercion. For others, the truth claims a religion makes about the order of the world no longer seem credible when the imperial order collapses and the world becomes chaotic. For others, the religion is no longer able to deliver the this-worldly goods, especially power and prestige, expected of it when it can no longer access those goods through decayed imperial structures. For others, the religion may just take on an air of the past, and they look for something more contemporary.

Whatever the reasons, there is a clear historical correlation between imperial decay and the decline of belief in and practice of the official or predominant religion(s) of a declining empire.

One may wonder why then we expect imperial Christianity to be different than other imperial religions.

These historical and interreligious comparisons are another reason to take seriously the idea that the secularization experienced in the West (first in Europe, then in its colonies such as Canada and Australia, and most recently in the United States) is more a function of those societies’ diminished secular and political role in the world than it is a product of modernity.

That may in some ways be bad news for Christianity in the West. The West is unlikely to regain its imperial power any time soon, nor should it, and one might fairly expect a rather lengthy post-colonial religious hangover. Europe’s has been going on for half a century and shows no signs of letting up.

Yet, at the same time, this analysis is good news for Christianity as a whole. Under this explanation, global religious belief is not doomed to some pre-determined decline based on increasing standards of living or the advance of science and technology. Instead, falling levels of religious belief are associated with particular historico-political situations, and outside those situations, one may fairly expect religion to continue to flourish, as it has in various forms for the duration of human history.

Moreover, there have been instances in which a religion has survived the collapse of an empire. Yet it almost always does so outside the core of that former empire.

One such example is Buddhism after the end of Ashoka’s empire in India. The Emperor Ashoka was a strong proponent of Buddhism, at least in his latter reign. But after his death, his empire began to fracture. When his grandson set about to rebuild the empire, it was Jainism rather than Buddhism that occupied the favored religious spot.

Yet despite its lack of support in India after Ashoka, Buddhism flourished in Sri Lanka, where Ashoka sent missionaries. Indeed, Buddhism continued to spread throughout Southeast Asia. The missionary impulse was strong enough in Buddhism, and the religion was flexible enough, that others were able to find value in it that extended beyond its associations with a single imperial system. They were able to make it their own and use it for their own purposes unconnected to Ashoka’s empire.

In a similar way, people around the world first encountered Christianity in its imperial version associated with Western economic and political expansion. But the missionary genius of Christianity, like Buddhism, has been that those who have encountered it have been able to take it out of its imperial trappings, make adjustments as they see fit, and make it their own.

This process is, of course, widely affirmed by contemporary missiology. Whether called inculturation, contextualization, or something else, the importance of people making Christianity their own is almost universally recognized. This process is important both for the sake of the people appropriating Christianity, that they may fully connect to it, and for Christianity itself, so that it may continue to cross cultural, political, linguistic, and other borders. The endurance of altered forms of imperial religion beyond the borders of empire is just another reason to affirm the continued adaptation, translation, and appropriation of Christianity by peoples around the world in ways that make sense to them.

As people continue to make Christianity their own, some will probably make of it an imperial religion for new empires, and those versions will eventually suffer for it. But the continued endurance of Christianity will come in its ability to connect with the lowly as well as the mighty, the poor as well as the rich, the marginalized as well as the central. Christianity will endure, not because of the might, power, or wisdom of its most vociferous proponents. It will endure because it continues to speak good news to people wherever they are, especially on the margins.

Recommended Reading: Out of Chaos ... Creation

While discussions about the future of The United Methodist Church have taken a backseat amidst the coronavirus pandemic and postponement of General Conference, a new group has formed to call others to new conversations about that future. The group is called Out of Chaos ... Creation.

Led by an international leadership team, the group has released a vision statement called "Out of Chaos, Creation: Seeds of a Vision for a Renewed United Methodism." The statement, available in six languages, calls on fellow United Methodists to "join us in doing the following:

• "Imagine how we might listen to the Spirit’s leading about a vision for a renewed and reimagined United Methodism grounded in the mission of God, identity, and core values.

• "Engage in a collective conversation about how we might conference differently and prepare a strategy for General Conference 2021 that might reshape the culture of our conferencing.

• "Bring examples of how we each might envision being the church and seeking intersectional justice in a post-corona world throughout the world and in our varying ministry contexts.

• "Join us in webinars on July 7, 2020 for the beginning of this conversation."

The new initiative is worth exploring because of its international leadership, its novel approach to focus on conversation rather than another plan, the missional theological grounding of its vision statement, and because it represents the first significant new possibility for the future of United Methodism since the start of the pandemic.

Why Are There So Few Black Missiologists?

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

I have had several recent conversations, including among members of the American Society of Missiology and the United Methodist Professors of Mission, about the relationship between race, mission, and missiology. These conversations have left me pondering a question: Why are there so few black missiologists? There are, of course, many significant black African missiologists, but here I am thinking about black African American missiologists and their relative absence from white-dominant missiological conversations and organizations.

Before going further, I think it is important to state several caveats:

1.    This post focuses on the relationship between African Americans and white-dominant American missiology. It does not address the participation of other people of color in missiology or the racial systems in which that discourse is embedded, even though other people of color are a significant part of missiology, both domestically and abroad.

2.    This post draws from my general knowledge of the structure of American religion and American society, not extensive research into the subject.

3.    There are, of course, black and white exceptions to what I say below. My goal is to explain general patterns, not to account for every individual case.

4.    I write as a white man, and thus this analysis reflects my own, white-privileged perspective.

With those caveats in mind, I believe the reasons there are so few black missiologists lie in compounding levels of systemic racism and implicit bias. I will examine three.

Black Christians participate in mission, but in different ways than White Christians
This observation applies to both international and domestic mission, and black participation in international mission differs from white participation both in its extent and its focus.

Black missionaries have historically gone to different places than white mission practitioners. Africa and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean have been the overwhelming focus of black missionary interest. African Americans’ sense of affinity to Africa, racial assumptions by white-dominant missionary agencies about appropriate placements, and the racism of Asian and Latin American societies towards Blacks have combined to reinforce this focus. Yet that focus has meant that black missionaries lack the same sorts of inter-continental networks that white missionaries have had, networks which often foster missiological reflection.

Moreover, white Americans have more often served as international missionaries than black Americans. Because of systemic racial inequalities, African Americans in general earn less and have less wealth than white Americans. These more limited financial resources limit black participation in international mission, both short-term and long-term, especially when that participation must be self-financed or financed through personal social networks.

Domestically, many black churches have been and are extensively involved in what should fairly be termed mission, but often goes by different names: social engagement, social justice, community development, etc. Thus, black and white churchgoers participating in mission may use different language to describe and analyze their domestic mission activities, leading to separate discourses and the exclusion, often unintentional, of black practitioners from white-dominant mission conversations.

Black mission practitioners are less likely to become academically trained than white mission practitioners
Again, systemic racial inequalities are at play here: in income, wealth, and education. First come the educational consequences of growing up in different, racially segregated zip codes, which negatively impact African Americans. Then there the well-documented challenges to black access to higher education, especially graduate education.

When African Americans do participate in higher education, they are more likely than other Americans to end up at a historically black college or university (HBCU). HBCUs are good institutions, and the role of the premier HBCUs such as Morehouse, Spellman, and Howard in developing a black intelligentsia is unquestionable. Yet, advanced graduate study of mission almost always requires attending a white-dominant institution such as Fuller, Asbury, Boston University, or Biola. The perceived challenge of doctoral study of missiology may be greater for black students who have not previously been part of white-dominant educational institutions, with their unspoken expectations geared toward white culture.

Intertwined with that educational system are racial denominational differences in the educational requirements for ministers. Most white-dominant denominations, especially mainline Protestants, require a master’s degree for ordination. Many predominantly black Baptist and Pentecostal denominations do not. That makes a difference when pastors involved in mission consider whether to further study that practice academically. For pastors who already have a master’s degree, it is a smaller jump to consider a D.Min. or Ph.D. Racial differences also exist in the breakdown of part-time vs. full-time clergy and congregational ability to support continuing education for their pastors.

Thus, to the significant extent that missiology is a scholarly conversation, it is one that African Americans are less likely to join for reasons both internal and extending beyond the field.

Black conversations about mission are segregated from white-dominant conversations about mission
Even when African Americans participate in mission and/or make it through the obstacle course of academic study of mission, there are still several reasons why they may not end up participating in white-dominant missiological conversations.

The first challenge is the question of terminology raised earlier. Black and white scholars/practitioners may describe similar things but use different, racially conditioned language. For instance, despite the similarities between the white-dominant missional church model and black patterns of community engagement, my impression is that much of the missional church conversation does not look to black models and has a presumed white-dominant audience in mind.

A second challenge is white implicit biases about the place of African Americans in mission. From an early focus on plantation mission to recent racial connections between African Americans and poverty, white Americans have often seen African Americans as “recipients” of mission, rather than practitioners of mission. While thinking of mission in terms of actors and recipients is inherently problematic, it is even more so when assumptions about those actors and recipients reinforce racial hierarchies. Because of these associations, when prompted to discuss race and mission, white Americans have an implicit bias towards framing the conversation as about predominantly white mission practitioners working with African Americans, rather than as about black mission practitioners doing their own work. Such a framing serves to exclude or mute the voices of black missiological thinkers.

A third challenge is white implicit bias towards seeing black Christianity as a contextual expression of Christianity with limited relevance to white-dominant Christianity. American religion is structurally segregated along racial lines. But for White Americans, seeing black Christianity as a distinct phenomenon from white Christianity often means seeing it as a tradition that is irrelevant for their own faith. Deep seated white assumptions about the normativity of white Christian practice and white theology make White Americans less interested in learning from black Christian practice or black theology. Moreover, when black voices are raised up, white Christians are often only interested in listening to those black voices speak about racial issues. Thus, white interest in other forms of black Christian practice and theology, including mission, is limited. Certainly, one hopes that missiologists, with their appreciation of context, would be less prone to such biases than others, but they still exist.

White Christians should be learning from black Christians, though, about mission and all other Christian beliefs and practices, just as black Christians have had to learn about white Christianity for a long time. That is why it is important to broaden the scope of missiological focus, to challenge the labels used to describe Christian practice, to support black students in studying missiology, to question white theological normativity, and to listen to black voices.

These are not easy or quick reforms, and they cannot be accomplished apart from larger societal changes that will benefit black economic and educational outcomes. Yet for a whole host of moral and theological reasons, missiology as a white-dominant field must engage these issues.

Recommended Listening: Real Faith - Real World Podcast

World Methodist Evangelism publishes an every-other-week podcast, entitled "Real Faith - Real World," hosted by UM Professors of Mission member Dr. Robert Haynes. The episodes, which are approximately a half hour long each, cover a variety of topics related to evangelism and practicing and sharing the Wesleyan faith in the contemporary world. Each episodes features a guest speaker whom Dr. Haynes interviews. Several recent episodes tackle issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Secularization and the Collapse of Empire

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

Within the sociology of religion, the secularization thesis states that religion becomes a less significant part of societies and individual lives as history progresses. The evolution of religion in Europe in the past century has been the main evidence cited in support of this theory, though recent declines in religious belief and identity in the United States have injected new life into this debate.

A variety of causal mechanisms are suggested as the driving force(s) behind secularization. These include modernity broadly, the rise of science and de-mythologizing of people's worldviews, urbanization, religious and social pluralization, the rise of market capitalism, an increase in individualism, and others. I will not rehearse the details of this debate here.

But as I've been thinking about the relationship between religion and power recently, another possibility has occurred to me: What if the process of secularization in Europe and the United States was actually related to the collapse of empire?

In this version of the theory, a decrease in collective and individual religiosity within a society is connected to a decreased sense of national power and efficacy brought on, at least in these recent cases, by the collapse of formal or informal imperial systems. In Europe and North America, there has been a lengthy and tight relationship between Christianity and government. When European empires expanded, Christianity traveled with them, though it was admittedly a complicated relationship. Given that sustained history of connection, we should not be surprised, then, if a decline in imperial power should have implications for the religion which for so long had been connected to it.

This explanation would make sense of the timing of secularization in most of Europe (1950s and 1960s) and its later onset in the United States (2000s and 2010s), despite similar levels of modernization on other scales. It would also explain the greater resilience of religion in Eastern Europe (which had lower participation in the age of imperialism) than in Western Europe, though there are certainly individual outliers, such as the Czech Republic.

Moreover, this explanation might account for the different trajectories in the United States between mainline Protestants and Catholics, on the one hand, and evangelical Protestants, on the other, given that mainline Protestants and Catholics were impacted by post-colonial critiques much earlier than evangelical Protestants, who were forced to reckon with the United States' changed role in the world more significantly only after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It also could explain differences between white and non-white religiosity. The religiosity of white Americans, who have been the primary beneficiaries of American empire, has declined faster than that of people of color, who have been farther from the seats of American imperial power.

This explanation also fits with general impressions I have about the difficulty that American Methodism has with providing a theological accounting of failure of any type and the difficulties that British Methodism has faced in providing an accounting for Britain's changed role in the world since the 1960s. In both cases, a loss of confidence seems to be both cause and effect of membership decline.

This thesis (and secularization theory in general) may well be incorrect. I have not done extensive research to substantiate it. But if there is at least a kernal of truth in it, it has several implications for the fields of missiology and World Christianity.

First, the amount of research that missiologists have done on the relationship between Christianity and empire makes them well-prepared to investigate this connection. While most of this research has looked at the relationships as they have played out in imperial territories, there is more of this story to be written about the relationship between Christianity and imperial power in imperial metropoles, and mission historians could easily be the ones to write it.

Second, if secularization is caused by the relationship between Christianity and secular power and declines in that secular power, rather than modernization or other factors, that would give scholars of World Christianity curious or concerned about the future of Christianity outside of Europe and North America a new set of indicators to pay attention to.

Rather than wondering whether economic development will undercut religious belief, this thesis would lead scholars to pay more attention to the relationship between Christian groups and local political power and the power trajectories of nations. In many cases where Christianity is far from political power, there should be little concern about secularization. Furthermore, even when Christianity is proximate to political power, but that power is not waning, Christianity should (at least for the time being) be unaffected.

Finally, such a connection would give missiologists another consideration in setting evangelistic strategy as it relates to proximity to secular power. The proper relationship between Christianity and societal elites has been a debate for hundreds of years within mission circles, with pros and cons enumerated on both sides. This thesis would, however, suggest that those "who take the sword will perish by the sword."

Recommended Readings: European UMC Churches Begin to Reopen

The wave of new coronavirus cases has passed its peak in almost all European countries. While concerns about the virus remain high, and while life is very different in many ways from what it was pre-pandemic, some European Methodist Churches are taking tentative steps towards reopening.

It is clear, however, that worship services will be different after reopening than they were before. For instance, UMC leaders in Austria and Hungary have given guidelines about social distancing, wearing masks, and cleaning surfaces.

In Germany and Switzerland, a few churches have reopened, while most others continue to be closed, relying on online and TV-broadcast worship instead. These alternatives are available at both the national and, in some cases, local level. Where they have resumed, services have been made shorter, and fewer people are admitted. Some reopened churches are holding multiple services to accommodate demand within these new restrictions. Congregational singing is not part of resumed services.

In this regard, the European experience reflects that in the United States, Africa, and the Philippines, all of which have also seen tentative or limited resumption of worship services, with significant changes from before. In all of these places, practices of social distancing and limiting of congregations indicate how the coronavirus pandemic has wrought a change in church life around the globe.