Missionary Millennium: the American West; North and West Africa
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MISSIONARY MILLENNIUM: THE AMERICAN WEST; NORTH AND WEST AFRICA IN THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION Bryan A. Garrett, B.A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2009 APPROVED: Nancy L. Stockdale, Major Professor Laura Stern, Committee Member Liljana Elverskog, Committee Member Richard B. McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History Michael Monticino, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Garrett, Bryan A. Missionary Millennium: The American West; North and West Africa in the Christian Imagination. Master of Arts (History), August 2009, 127 pp., references, 99 titles. During the 1890s in the United States, Midwestern YMCA missionaries challenged the nexus of power between Northeastern Protestant denominations, industrialists, politicians, and the Association’s International Committee. Under Kansas YMCA secretary George Fisher, this movement shook the Northeastern alliance’s underpinnings, eventually establishing the Gospel Missionary Union. The YMCA and the GMU mutually defined foreign and domestic missionary work discursively. Whereas Fisher’s pre-millennial movement promoted world conversion generally, the YMCA primarily reached out to college students in the United States and abroad. Moreover, the GMU challenged social and gender roles among Moroccan Berbers. Fisher’s movements have not been historically analyzed since 1975. Missionary Millennium is a reanalysis and critical reading of religious fictions about GMU missionaries, following the organization to its current incarnation as Avant Ministries. Copyright 2009 by Bryan A. Garrett ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the support and motivation offered by my professors. Dr. Nancy Stockdale gave me an excellent foundation in methodology, allowed me just enough liberty to get creative, and drew me back to earth in order to focus and complete this document. Dr. Laura Stern’s endless patience and source of ideas helped me grow into a hopefully qualified scholar. Dr. Liljana Elverskog presented me with the tools to understand the Arabic language and in the end, even more so, the English language. To these three amazing scholars I am forever indebted. I would also like to thank Ryan Bean at the Kautz Family YMCA Archives at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for his unparalleled assistance and patience, as well as the staff at the University of North Texas Interlibrary Loan Office. If it were not for them, I would likely still be drowning in documentation. And to the love of my life, I regrettably issue forth this work into the world on your behalf. Though I’m sure you will read this at some point, I am sorry you felt obliged to do so! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………...iii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………..1 2. THE KANSAS-SUDAN MOVEMENT IN THE MIDWEST YMCA……..37 3. MISSIONARY POSITIONS; THE GOSPEL MISSIONARY UNION’S PLANS FOR THE SOUDAN AND MOROCCO…………………………….66 4. THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT AND DIVERGENT TRANSNATIONALISM………………………………………………………..90 5. CONCLUSIONS; THE FARCE OF AVANT TODAY…………………..116 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………..120 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Hegel says somewhere that all great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.1 —Karl Marx, The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.2 —George Santayana, The Life of Reason Running the risk of being immediately labeled a Marxist from the onset, I have chosen to begin with the above quote because of the sense of irony it carries throughout my retelling of the history of George Seldon Fisher’s failed 1 “Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historical scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language.” Marx alludes to populist renditions of prior movements, shaping those precedents to fit the present need just as much as they shape the present to reflect aspects of the past. History becomes a tool of the present, but complicated by multiple variables determined by region, peoples, culture, political precedent, etc. 2 A former student of the American philosopher William James at Harvard University, Santayana uses crude psychological reasoning to emphasize the stages of human life, civilization or lack thereof; where “Progress…depends on retentiveness.” 1 Sudan missionary movement within the YMCA, and his subsequent autonomous missionary enterprise in Morocco, under the auspices of the organization of his own creation, the Gospel Missionary Union. This is not only a challenge to the scant, previous histories on this subject, but in many ways a rewriting of related historicity and methodology. It is suitable that Marx exposes the class conflict in French society leading up to the French Revolution, and that the preface to the 1907 English translation in America contains a comparison of that European event to the “recent populist uprising” in the United States.3 The history of populist movements in the United States inherently privileges social aspects regularly marginalized by consensus historians. To rebut the belief that history can be told from the perspective of elites, it is through marginalized groups that we can gain a more inclusive recounting of not only those peripheral social elements, but the ruling apparatus above them as well. Like the various populist movements throughout the histories of United States or Africa, historicity entails multiple elements and methods that cannot be easily pigeonholed into one particular system of thought. Even among Marxists, Leon Trotsky, like Martin Heidegger, determined that each region and people follow different historical trajectories given distinctive particular circumstances specific to their respective situations, and that “History does not repeat itself;”4 3Daniel De Leon, p. i, I believe certain social characteristics beyond mere economic distinction just as potent in defining movements, conflict, and influence, such as religious affiliation or political alignment. 2 explaining why the Russian Revolution cannot entirely resemble the French Revolution. However, Marx is correct in his assertions that humans retrieve history as a mirror for present circumstances, representing the continuously embroiled philosophical quandary of idealism versus realism. History does not repeat itself; though, agents can and do hearken back to past events as reminiscences and familiarities for contemporaneous conditions. Populist movements are complex and varied, finding different modes of expression and different outlets against dissent aired against different grievances. Manifold variables and preconditions affecting one event in the past are not necessarily present with another event as the two are frequently separated by time and space. Yet, agents and historical actors repeatedly, hermeneutically read their present conditions back onto past events, and vice versa; allowing to make comparisons that appear as repetitions in a linear historicity. In this sense, history can be mobilized as a litmus test to validate or invalidate present or future circumstances; or history can be used to justify certain actions or motivations. Nietzsche claims that “the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture.”5 In this context, history 4 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (New York: Verso, 2003), 123. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Peter Preuss, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1980), 10, emphasis in the original; “All acting requires forgetting, as not only light but also darkness is required for life by all organisms. A man who wanted to feel everything historically would resemble someone forced to refrain from sleeping, or an animal expected to live only from ruminating and ever repeated ruminating. 3 serves only in a capacity to critically reflect and learn in order to commit to some semblance of learning from past mistakes, and breaking away from forgetfulness which begets human reverberations to commit the same mistakes from generation to generation. History then becomes a tool for comparison and admiration, a mirror into which the next generation can gaze, reading the present back into the past and vice versa. By using conflict as a framework, each participant not only offers up a clearer identification of self and beliefs, but what in turn their opposition believes in or represents. Even marginal groups can have tremendous impact on organizations and even societies; stimulating repercussions that can extend nationally and even internationally. This history is a revelation of particular aspects of one of many populist protests in American history, in order to alter consensus narrative and determine more so this specific group’s antithetical counterpart, as well as how these groups influenced and developed religious, political, and