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The Council of Women for Home Missions this ain’t

The Council of Women for Home Missions this ain’t

Last updated on: June 2, 2015 at 3:44 pm by Fred Clark

The Council of Women for Home Missions this ain’t 2015-06-02T15:44:18-04:00 Fred Clark

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Let’s go back a hundred years or so. Back then, all of the major Protestant denominations in the U.S. had “home mission” agencies and women’s home mission agencies. (Keep in mind, too, that this was before the fundamentalists split off — so this isn’t just “mainline Protestants,” but all of the white Christians that today we call “evangelicals” too.)

Now, granted, the missiology practiced by these agencies a century ago wasn’t terribly sophisticated or self-aware. Entire libraries have been written about their colonialism and ethnocentrism, their struggles with condescension, and their frequent failure to distinguish between their own culture and the gospel they believed they were spreading. Their work with newly arriving immigrants was often approached as a form of “Americanization,” and whatever negative connotations you may imagine going with that often applied.

But still, these agencies were busy — and a lot of what they did was constructive, helpful and impressive. They provided food, clothing and shelter. They offered medical care, language lessons, legal assistance, job training and job placement. They ran day care centers and nurseries for immigrant families.

You can get a sense of the kind of work they did from this pamphlet, “Americanization: A Program of Action and Service for the Churches,” which was published by the interdenominational Council of Women for Home Missions in 1919. The introduction describes “The Spirit” of this “Americanization Program for the Churches”:

This spirit is more than toleration. Foreigners must not be thought of contemptuously, or even with indifference. In almost every instance some of their countrymen have contributed to America and to all the world the largest measure of genius in art, literature, inventiveness, exploration and leadership, and some of these foreigners, now about us, who seem strange, and because of their strangeness, uncouth, have still quite as much to give to us, as we have to give to them. The expectation of learning from the foreigner imparts zest to the effort of explaining to him things which he should know.

There must be in the churches the Christian spirit of interest in, and willingness to minister to, foreigners.

Despite all the negative aspects of “Americanization” — with its focus on converting “foreigners” into “Americans” — these churches made themselves present and available as a resource and a help to those newly arriving in America. They put time and effort (and their offering money) into assisting these new neighbors as best they knew how.

That’s what the Council of Women for Home Missions was like a hundred years ago.* And that was how the Christian churches of America responded to immigration.

The children of immigrant agricultural workers attend a Michigan nursery school run by the Women’s Council for Home Missions in 1940. (Photo by John Vachon via the Library of Congress)

Flash forward to the present.

This weekend, the right-wing website World Net Daily** convened its own Council of Women to discuss Christian values and how America should respond to immigrants. That council consisted of former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, conservative author Ann Coulter, and anti-feminist fundraiser Phyllis Schlafly.

Coulter, who is currently promoting her new book, Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole,*** said that America’s moral obligation to immigrants is “obvious”: “Stop all immigration now. Take 10 or 20 years to assimilate the immigrants already here. Deport lawbreakers.”

Schlafly said that most immigrants today are simply the wrong kind of people — people being brought to America by President Obama as part of a conspiracy “to dilute our standards, our values, our constitutional system and our pro-American population.” The president, she said, “has been bringing in so many foreigners who are not conservatives of any kind, who come from countries where government manages their lives, and who reject the idea of Christian values guiding our social mores.”

When it comes to immigrants, Schlafly said, the foremost thing that American Christians should be doing is voting in “the 2016 election and the Republican primaries where we can nominate candidates who are ready to fight political battles.”

And for her part, Michele Bachmann lamented that “Immigrants from Third-World nations aren’t expected to learn American values norms or culture, much less the English language.”

She added, “In fact, it is severely frowned upon to suggest new immigrants join America’s predominant Christian religion.”

This forum fascinates me because Schlafly and Bachmann seem determined to revive the absolute worst aspects of the “Americanization” programs from a century ago, while refusing to offer any of the support those programs provided. Many of the thousands of church women who ministered to immigrants in the early 20th century likely shared their sentiments about immigrants learning the English language — so they taught them English. Like Bachmann, they hoped that these new immigrants would “join America’s predominant Christian religion,” so they showed them hospitality and invited them to church and made them welcome there by incorporating services in their native languages.

But Schlafly and Bachmann aren’t interested in the “home mission” work of teaching language skills, helping to secure employment, or sharing their faith — they simply want to require and mandate that immigrants learn English, get a job, and become the right kind of real, true Christian.

And even that is secondary for Bachmann and Schlafly — a Plan B that should only be resorted to until Coulter’s Plan A is put in place and America simply “Stops all immigration now.”

For all the shortcomings of the “Americanization” efforts of the old Council of Women for Home Missions, they had a vision and a mission for what the church should be doing — out on the street, helping people and practicing hospitality. A hundred years later, some of the most visible spokespeople for America’s Christian Values can’t offer any vision other than banning immigration, and can’t imagine any mission for the church other than voting in the 2016 Republican primaries.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* The Council of Women for Home Missions, by the way, survives in the form of several other religious organizations, including Church Women United. CWU isn’t as well-known as it should be, considering the size and scope of its work — it has more than 1,200 local chapters and they’re still busy and still doing some really impressive stuff. But CWU is a “mainline Protestant” group, and everybody knows that mainline Protestantism is shrinking and irrelevant and that tens of thousands of mainline Protestant women doing something impressive is never as newsworthy as a few hundred white evangelical women doing something loud.

Still, though, even if you’ve never heard of Church Women United, you’ve probably heard of some of its more famous members — such as the long-time CWU member that Gallup says is the most admired woman in the world.

** That’s a World Net Daily link. If you’d prefer to avoid that, you can read summaries of this WND forum at Raw Story or Right Wing Watch instead.

*** I’m not sure what a “World Hellhole” is, nor where the first two are located. (Sunnydale and Cleveland, I’ve heard, but I may be thinking of something else.)

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