Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend

Introduction

Introduction It is a small thing to be judged of man’s judgement. It is good to know that we are judged by God. he open defiance of authority expressed in the quotation above was notable in the writing of a female missionary, certainly. But this was not any missionary. This was the Southern Baptist icon Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, who had left for China in 1873 and, as I remembered, had starved herself to death out of devotion to the Chinese and to Southern Baptist mission work. The idealized Lottie Moon that I recalled from a youth spent in Southern Baptist churches seemed at odds with this intriguing quotation so I began to dig deeper. I soon found that Moon’s legend differed greatly from the actual life of the woman who inspired it. Yet her story was left largely unexamined during the flurry of scholarship on southern women and female missionaries in the 1970s and 1980s. Historians of southern women overlooked Moon because of her close association with her denomination. Scholars of female missionaries to China used primarily northern sources in their studies and so most missed Moon as well. What follows is a critical study of an exceptional woman who relied on a religious ideology and woman’s rights language to argue for an expansion of women’s sphere, for female equality in mission work, and for female organization . As a historian of American history and religion, my primary concern is placing Moon within her historical context in the United States. While T Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend 2 Moon spent forty years living outside this country, she had a profound and lasting impact on the women in her region and on her denomination. I have sought to strip away the layers of misinformation that have built up since her death in 1912. Rather than relying on Una Roberts Lawrence’s 1927 hagiography, Lottie Moon, as a definitive source, I have returned to the original documents to locate Moon’s family history and the environment in which she was raised. As I pushed aside the mythology, I found a woman whose life and work offers a view of nineteenth-century southern womanhood that corrects an understanding of them as passive and resigned to a domestic fate. Moon’s decision to support female organization and to argue for equal treatment openly and forcefully moves her into the realm of activist and advocate. Only by removing the artifice of legend was I able to reveal the story of Moon’s unusual upbringing, her willingness to challenge gender norms and to support female organization. This work also offers the first attempt to locate the antecedents of the starvation legend and to trace how this myth developed and was used over time. I left the Southern Baptist denomination just as the cracks in its edifice were beginning to reach the surface and moved far from the region of my birth and from the religion that dominated my upbringing in Arkansas. Yet as I began to delve into the history of the women who supported Moon and formed the Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), I realized that the women of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had provided me with strong models of womanhood. They were—and are—a power within the denomination . Despite conservative teachings that were reinforced culturally, many Southern Baptist women have been leaders and thinkers. Moon—as an idealized saint—has been presented as a model of Christian discipleship and womanhood to emulate. In part, this study honors the women who began this struggle for autonomy—as most women in traditional cultures do—from within their own religious tradition.1 It also uncovers a past that had been silenced. The Woman’s Missionary Union formed despite intense criticism of the women whose actions conflicted with the Southern Baptist ideal of female subordination. The organization was born out of a struggle with the male leadership, one that Moon catalyzed and supported publicly. Yet in histories of the WMU, this conflict and Moon’s role are missing. Instead, Moon protests her board’s policies by starving herself to death— Introduction 3 not by providing crucial support for female organization. This work brings what was hidden into the open by presenting a complete history of how the Woman’s Missionary Union formed and the vital contribution that Moon made to that process—not by...