Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Evangelical Missionaries and Racial Imagination: A Brief Example

Evangelical Missionaries and Racial Imagination: A Brief Example

Last updated on: November 14, 2022 at 3:00 am by Joao Chaves

Evangelical Missionaries and Racial Imagination: A Brief Example 2022-11-13T22:43:12-04:00 Joao Chaves

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

A few weeks ago, I delivered the J.M. Dawson Fall Lecture at Baylor University titled “For Jesus, Country, and Robert E. Lee: Not Your Momma’s History of Baptist Missions.” The lecture built on my latest book, The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South, and showed examples of encounters between missionaries and locals in Brazil to demonstrate how missionary racial imagination impacted evangelical missions in Latin America.

One of the examples of missionary behavior that I used in the lecture was that of Frank Purser. Partially because of Purser, in 1923, local faculty and students in the North Brazil Baptist Theological Seminary in Recife, Brazil, rebelled against American missionary personnel. A local newspaper, the Jornal do Rio, featured a translation of what Purser—who had been recently sent to work in the seminary—wrote in an article published by the Southern Baptist missionary periodical Home and Foreign Fields. In his piece, directed to a Southern Baptist audience and titled “Away from Theory, Up Against Facts,” Purser partially showed the shock that missionaries could have when they arrived in their respective fields. He seemed at least mildly misled by what he found when he arrived in Brazil. He wrote:

In the book “Brazilian Sketches,” the author, Dr. T.B. Ray, says that the people who live in Brazil are the “descendants of the Caesars—of the race that ruled the world for fifteen centuries”—Yes— but the majority of the members of the Baptist churches in Rio de Janeiro are also descendants of a mixture of races, which includes a strong element of blood from the blackest of negroes. And many of them still have far to go up the ladder of civilization.[1]

North Brazil Baptist Theological Seminary

When locals read the reasonably accurate translation of Purser’s claims, they did not rejoice! The minor local rebellion in the seminary resulted in Purser’s reassignment—but missionary Asa Crabtree, who would become one of the most influential figures in Baptist theological education in the region, defended his missionary friend to his superiors. In his correspondence with J.F. Love, then the head of Southern Baptist foreign missions, Crabtree dismissed the incident as a minor misunderstanding caused mainly by Brazilian communication style, which, to him, was at best “more delicate and ceremonial,” and at worst dishonest—unlike the American communication style, presumably more easily adaptable to Christian morality. And while Crabtree never really said it, it seems clear that he agreed with Purser’s opinion.[2] In Crabtree’s assessment, he implied that the Catholics that ran the Jornal do Rio were the true culprits in this situation for monitoring Southern Baptist publications printed in the United States and misrepresenting them to locals as a strategy against Protestant advances in the country.

Missionary Asa R. Crabtree was one of the most influential figues in the SBC mission in the country.

But if this incident represented an organized Catholic strategy of malicious translating, Crabtree’s Catholic opposition did a sloppy job; they missed so… many… opportunities to reveal Baptist missionary peculiarities. When Purser’s article was translated and printed by the Jornal do Rio, the flagrant racism of Southern Baptist missionaries was broadly advertised and proudly celebrated in missionary publications. If Southern Baptist missionaries in Brazil, while in the field, made their racism known primarily in private settings, U.S. missionary periodicals often made such tendencies public, given their consumption by a predominantly White southern audience drowned in White supremacy.[3]

In the same year that Purser wrote about the uncivilized Brazilian Baptist Blacks. B.C. Hening, then SBC Home Mission Board’s superintendent for Foreigners, Indians, and Negroes, argued in that same periodical that Black Americans themselves admitted to their inferiority and that:

The truth must be burned into our very consciousness that the well-being of both races is best subserved by a clear recognition of the strong demarcation between them and a strict and cheerful acquiescence in the inevitable decree of nature and her God everywhere and all the time.[4]

But even more pronounced than missionary anti-Black racism was their disgust for the idea of racial mixing, which was already a widespread characteristic of Brazilians before SBC missionaries arrived in Brazil. Home and Foreign Fields editor, Gaines Stanley Dobbins—who would later be known for his work on Sunday school pedagogy—was extremely subtle about this issue, writing in the 1920s that:

The Negroes have as much to lose in intermarriage as the whites and should be as bitterly opposed to it on biological and racial grounds. To be a pure-bred Negro is something for the black man to be as proud of as to be a pure-bred Caucasian is for the white man. The solution of the problem of living together is NOT that of amalgamation by intermarriage, and every illegitimate mulatto child is the evidence of some white man’s shame.[5]

Okay, perhaps not so subtle. Dobbins knew of the Brazilian context, and his apparent disgust for mixed races led him to use his missionary knowledge to frame racial segregation in the United States as a necessity for maintaining true American strength. He wrote:

The dread of social equality is the source of greatest bitterness toward the Negro on the part of multitudes of white people. The thought of inter-marriage and consequent negroid progeny is utterly repugnant to any right-thinking white man. One has only to go to certain Latin-American countries where this has occurred to be convinced of the terrible disaster which is involved. The standards of both races are lowered, the purity of the racial stock is destroyed, and irreparable harm done to both peoples. No catastrophe to the human race could be quite comparable to the loss of racial integrity of the American white people.[6]

SBC luminaries broadly shared their racial orthodoxy—were they in the mission field, theological seminaries, or missionary agencies. When William O. Carver—the most influential professor of missions in the SBC before the 1950s—went to Brazil, he wrote back home with a message much like the one that had gotten Frank Purser in trouble with locals: “when illiteracy is around 80 percent, and 80 percent are of Negro and Mulatto blood, the problems are not few or easy.” Later, the head of the Foreign Mission Board, Charles Maddry, felt compelled to tell his Southern Baptist supporters that in the mission field: “there is no social intermingling or intermarriage between folk of different color. It is for the integrity of the white and brown and yellow and black and red races that the race stock should be kept pure.”[7] I suspect that, as traveled and experienced as Maddry was, he knew better when it came to the issue of “social intermingling” between missionaries and locals. There was social intermingling in the mission field, as there was sexual abuse of local women. Though, that is a topic perhaps more suited for a future time.

[1] Frank Purser, “Away from Theory, Up Against Facts,” Home and Foreign Fields 7, no. 7 (1923): 15.

[2] From A.R. Crabtree to J.F. Love, September 15, 1923.

[3] James Cobb, The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005): 45–46.

[4] B.C. Hening, “The Separation of the Races,” Home and Foreign Fields 7, no.2 (1923): 29.

[5] G.S. Dobbins, “Race Prejudice,” Home and Foreign Fields 13, no. 3 (1929): 17.

[6] G.S. Dobbins, Home and Foreign Fields.

[7] Charles E. Maddry, “One Solvent for the Race Issue,” The Commission 2, no. 10 (1939): 346.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

November 11, 2022

Inquisitions, Witch Hunts, and Conspiracy Theories

Next Post

November 15, 2022 Treating the Dead with Dignity and Honoring Your Fathers and Mothers

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What Hebrew word, meaning "vanity" or "meaningless," is frequently used in Ecclesiastes?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Shalom Ruach Torah Hevel