"Responsible to God and Not to Man": Lottie Moon and Southern History

"What women have a right to demand is perfect equality," wrote the Southern Baptist missionary Lottie Moon in 1883 from her remote post in China.¹ Her words were written in response to the restrictions imposed on women by their denominations. Moon, however, was not speaking of her personal situation. She and other single women at her station had been voting on mission matters, living alone, and venturing out into the countryside without male protection. Moon behaved as if she had equality with men. And when her board found out, they tried to remove her vote and restrict her actions. She threatened to resign. But this was no ordinary missionary who could resign and slink home to Virginia without notice. Lottie Moon was in the late 19th century the Southern Baptists' most popular and beloved missionary—and she remains so to this day. The irony of this fact is evidenced daily in a denomination that relies on the legend of a remarkable female missionary to raise money for its global mission efforts even while maintaining a strict policy of female subservience to men. Since 1889 Southern Baptists have raised over $3 billion for their international missionary efforts through the annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, which was named for her in 1918. As Moon's biography was increasingly mined for details, a legend began to take shape: Moon sacrificed her health on the mission field during her forty years of service and she starved herself to death to protest Southern Baptists' lack of financial commitment to missions. That this story is not true did not stop the denomination from using it regularly in promotions for the Christmas offering, especially in the latter decades of the 20th century.

Evangelism defines the Southern Baptist Convention's (SBC) self-concept and, from its start in 1845, has been the primary reason for maintaining an overarching denominational structure. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering has played a vital role in the denomination's success at missions. The offering has consistently provided one-third of the SBC International Mission Board's budget. The Woman's Missionary Union (WMU)—creators and promoters of the offering—made Moon the centerpiece of their extensive missions studies program, producing cookbooks, picture books, dramatic scripts, videos, and two full-length biographies. Indeed, Lottie Moon remains the most regularly remembered and celebrated of all 19th-century white southern women. But as women maintained Moon's memory for generations, historians of women overlooked her. Moon's life has been interpreted by her denomination, and her memory used to serve its institutional purposes. Despite a recent flourishing of scholarship on southern women and female missionaries, Moon has received only brief treatments or none at all. Yet her life offers an interesting counterpoint to scholarship that stresses elite southern women's conservative nature. Indeed, Moon's ideas and her willingness to act on them caused a debate over gender roles and the restrictions that Southern Baptist women faced in the late 19th century. Her words framed the argument, and Southern Baptist women embraced them and took action. The result was the creation of the WMU, auxiliary to the SBC. That this fight for female power took place within a religious denomination only confirms what scholars have long posited: that women took their first moves toward fighting gender inequality in churches, just as Moon and the women of the SBC did.² This action, in and of itself, was an overt form of resistance to male domination of the SBC and forever changed the power dynamics within it.

In 1873 Charlotte Digges "Lottie" Moon left Virginia and sailed to Shandong³ province in China to take her post as a missionary. Even before Moon left the United States, she was already chafing under the restrictions that she faced as a woman in her denomination. She asked why women were not allowed to do paid religious work and publicly questioned the reasoning that underlay these restrictions in an article printed in the Virginia Baptist newspaper the Religious Herald in 1871:

There is latent power in our churches which, following the wise example...