Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century

INTRODUCTION: Evangelical Christianity and the Problem of Difference

Introduction Evangelical Christianity and the Problem of Difference Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do: and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Genesis 11:6 (ASV) The vail shall separate unto you between the holy place and the most holy. Exodus 26:33 (ASV) In the spring of 1882, Fung Chak, a missionary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS), penned a letter to the organization’s Executive Board in New York City from his post in Portland, Oregon. Fung supervised the city’s Chinese Mission School and wrote ostensibly to galvanize support for Baptist efforts among the over eighty thousand Chinese residing in the United States. But he also offered a criticism of the treatment his countrymen faced in America. A decade of virulent anti-Chinese protest had 2 introduction just culminated in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a federal law that barred the entry of laborers from China. It was the nation’s first immigration restriction targeted at a specific national group. Fung pointedly observed that Chinese “meet with all the vices but very few of [America’s] virtues. They see the worst side of all classes and very little of the better.”1 While Fung Chak voiced his concerns about anti-Chinese actions, Henry Martin Tupper, a white northern ABHMS missionary in Raleigh, North Carolina , was assembling his annual report to the same executive board. By any standard Tupper was a veteran missionary. In 1882, he had been proselytizing among black southerners for seventeen years, and in collaboration with other teachers, ministers, and students, could boast of having established Shaw University , the first black college in the South and a centerpiece of the northern missionary effort among former slaves. Yet even with this impressive institutional foundation, Tupper, in writing his annual report, had to choose his words carefully. Shaw had begun as a religious branch of the post–Civil War Reconstruction project, and Tupper and the mission continued even after the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877 marked the official end of Reconstruction . Tupper’s annual report, like other dispatches from mission fields, would highlight success and downplay conflict. While emphasizing the accomplishments of the mission’s African American participants, Tupper nonetheless intimated that his black brethren were working against mounting odds. “They seem to have developed will power, and have learned to push ahead,” reported the missionary.2 Fung’s letter and Tupper’s report indicate home missionaries’ growing concern as the storm clouds of white supremacy seemed poised to eclipse the hope of Emancipation and open immigration. Although legalized segregation in North Carolina was still decades away, the formal end of Reconstruction cleared the way throughout the South for white “redemption” led by the Democratic Party. As Tupper wrote his report, Democrat and former Confederate officer T. J. Jarvis occupied the governor’s mansion. Meanwhile, as Fung was composing his letter, the U.S. Congress was debating the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law’s passage in early May meant that Fung and others from China had to endure more than even the local threats of violence; they would now have to contend with state-sponsored surveillance and the threat of deportation.3 Yet even as Fung and Tupper signaled their anxieties, Chinese and black Baptists, affiliated with but separate from the ABHMS missions in Portland and Raleigh, demonstrated their resolve by shoring up their own institutions. Evangelical Christianity and the Problem of Difference 3 Fung’s mission had just collected money for the construction of a Baptist chapel in southern China run by Dong Gong, his predecessor in Portland. Dong’s work in Guangdong (Canton) was more than a continuation of the evangelical labors he had undertaken in Oregon. There he had established prayer meetings , Sabbath schools, and congregations throughout the state. Dong’s chapel in Guangdong was an extension of a network of Baptist institutions that linked Chinese brethren along America’s Pacific Coast and across the ocean, providing transnational migrants and U.S. immigrants alike with support and refuge. The loosely connected complex of churches, schools...