Missionary Interests: Protestant and Mormon Missions of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

By David Golding and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

In Missionary Interests, David Golding and Christopher Cannon Jones bring together works about Protestant and Mormon missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, charting new directions for the historical study of these zealous evangelists for their faith. Despite their sectarian differences, both groups of missionaries shared notions of dividing the world categorically along the lines of race, status, and relative exoticism, and both employed humanitarian outreach with designs to proselytize.

American missionaries occupied liminal spaces: between proselytizer and proselytized, feminine and masculine, colonizer and colonized. Taken together, the chapters in Missionary Interests dismantle easy characterizations of missions and conversion and offer an overlooked juxtaposition between Mormon and Protestant missionary efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501774454

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, Joseph Smith, Jr., grew up in western New York State, which was then experiencing a period of widespread religious awakening and enthusiasm. As an adult, Smith claimed that, when he was fourteen, God appeared to him, telling him that all the established churches of the time had departed from the true path of religion, and that Smith should join none of them. Seven years later, in 1827, Smith claimed to have discovered a collection of golden plates, buried in the ground, whose existence had been revealed to him by the angel Moroni. Smith averred that, with the aid of special stone and divine assistance, he translated the writings on the plates from a language he identified as “reformed Egyptian.” According to Smith, the writings on the plates comprised the original text of The Book of Mormon, which told of how a band of ancient Hebrews, at divine behest, fled the Middle East and sailed to North America, where they established a true prophetic Christian faith. Smith published his translation of The Book of Mormon in 1830, claiming that it contained a pure gospel, untainted by the contaminations of the mainstream Christian churches, which The Book of Mormon describes as “the mother of abominations, whose foundation is the devil.” The same year, Smith organized a church in Fayette, New York, which he hoped to use to restore Christianity to its original footing. Community intolerance and financial difficulties compelled Smith and his growing body of followers to relocate repeatedly westward, with sojourns in Kirtland, Ohio, and Independence, Missouri. In 1839, Smith led his people to Commerce, Illinois, which he renamed Nauvoo. Converts to his teachings soon swelled the town’s population to twenty thousand, making it briefly the largest city in the state. The Nauvoo community prospered until February 1844, when Smith, now mayor of Nauvoo, announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Disaffected by his ambitions and his acts of polygamy, a minority group in Smith’s flock denounced him in a newly created newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor. Smith declared the paper a public nuisance, ordered the paper’s press destroyed, and declared a state of martial law. Illinois governor Thomas Ford charged Smith with treason against the state of Illinois and had Smith imprisoned in nearby Carthage. On June 27, 1844, a mob of about two hundred men stormed the jail and shot Smith multiple times, killing him. After Smith’s death, his followers divided. The larger portion, led by Brigham Young, migrated to the Great Salt Lake in the Utah Territory and founded the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which now claims more than 13 million adherents worldwide.

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Cover: Missionary Interests by Edited by David Golding and Christopher Cannon Jones

MISSIONARY INTERESTS

PROTESTANT AND MORMON MISSIONS IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

EDITED BY DAVID GOLDING AND CHRISTOPHER CANNON JONES

WITH A FOREWORD BY LAURIE F. MAFFLY-KIPP

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Foreword

A Note on Terms

Introduction

1. Heathen Landscapes

2. Before Woman’s Work for Woman

3. Humanitarian Encounter in Late Ottoman Turkey

4. Dueling Orientalisms

5. Shoshone Worlds, Bannock Zions

6. Traveling Elders

7. Earthquakes, Mudslides, and Hurricanes

8. Inventing Rupture in India and America

9. Technological Christianity

10. Missing Missiology

11. American Missionaries and the Struggle for Control of Christianity’s Symbolic Capital

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Authors

FOREWORD

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Who cannot be fascinated by missionaries, those souls willing to renounce everything they have known in life for the sake of an ideal? Their work seems to me the most purely utopian of ventures. Incidentally (and this is something I only became aware of after beginning my own studies), I have a distant relation whose claim to fame resulted from the audacious decision to volunteer as the first Presbyterian missionary from Canada (Nova Scotia) to the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the 1840s. In 1848 the Reverend John Geddie, a Scottish immigrant and minister on Prince Edward Island, packed up his wife and two young children and moved over fifteen thousand miles to eastern Melanesia. He lived there until the end of his life some two decades later, with his chief claim to fame being that he was the first representative of the London Missionary Society in that area not to be eaten by the locals. When asked what motivated him, he answered, The love of Christ sustains us and constrains us. My heart pants to tell this miserable people the wonders of redeeming love.¹

That response speaks volumes about the world of Christian missions, with its mix of ardent idealism, its power to motivate intensely risky action, and its simultaneous love for—yet derision of—the current state of the unconverted. His words are confounding, enraging, and potentially deadly all at the same time, not unlike the characteristics of Nathan Price, Barbara Kingsolver’s Baptist minister in her novel The Poisonwood Bible, who seems constantly perched on a knife’s edge between a purified faith and utter insanity. Missionaries like Geddie and Price are driven by ideals and ego, fueled by a fervor that is hard for most of us to imagine.

But it is a mistake to focus exclusively on the zealous certainty and to forget that Christian missions are, by definition, experimental. The New Testament injunction from Jesus Christ to go and make disciples of all nations contains little more than the advice to baptize and teach the faith to newcomers. How this happened, and when and where it should happen to particular groups of people, was never explicitly stated. Nor are the desired results of this experiment detailed in the message. This fuzziness leaves plenty of room for interpretation and improvisation—not to mention argument—over the task at hand. What exactly is a Christian mission? And which (or whose) interests are we talking about?

In chronicling the historical laboratory of the missionary experiment, the various groups of Christians that emerged from the aftermath of the early Christian era tended to stick together. Later, Catholics, then Protestants, and finally Mormons picked up the mantle of evangelization and proceeded in distinct ways, with their means determined by differing ecclesiastical organizational models and definitions of what constituted membership in the Christian community. They parted ways over the most fundamental questions: Who is authorized to baptize, or initiate, new members? What are the practical requirements of membership? Where should these missions begin? Finally, what are we trying to produce, at the end of the day? Or is it enough that we are performing the work and leaving the results to providence?

For centuries, these investigations have been carried on with little comparative examination. Why consult with one’s rivals if one believes them to be wrong in the first place? The animosity between Catholics and Protestants, later joined by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormons, left little incentive for historians within these traditions to compare tactics (although, on the ground, many missionaries were clearly looking over their shoulders and borrowing strategies from their competitors). As the study of religion became more explicitly comparative in the late twentieth century, and as other historians grew aware of the importance of evangelistic activity to the construction of nations, races, and empires, this situation began to turn. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of Native American and African American history, including James Axtell, Francis Paul Prucha, and Albert G. Raboteau, highlighted the comparative strategies of Catholics and Protestants in their missionary endeavors.²

Mormon missionaries generally have been left out of this titanic ecclesiastical battle in the scholarship on Christian missions. Although they were relative newcomers to the evangelistic scene in the 1830s, followers of Joseph Smith Jr. jumped into the missionary enterprise almost immediately. But the general scorn they faced from other Christians, along with their relatively small numbers and (initially) meager means of support, meant their efforts were not treated in any serious way by those outside their own tradition. After World War II Mormons had gained considerable cultural and financial capital in the United States, but their oblique relationship to imperial projects rendered them anomalous in the missionary context. Scholars of nationalism couldn’t characterize them in a way that fit neatly into studies of empire, and their distinctive headquarters in the American West meant that their interactions with Indigenous peoples and African Americans took a unique path (one no less fraught, of course), making direct comparison difficult.

All these factors are what make this book so pathbreaking. It is precisely in the comparison of various methods, goals, and means that the full scope of the Christian missionary experiment comes into sharper focus. The German philologist Max Müller famously noted, with respect to religious traditions, that he who knows one, knows none—so, too, with missions. When we place Mormon, Protestant, and Catholic missions alongside one another, we see all of them in greater relief. We glimpse the differences in values, practices, institutions, technologies, and cosmologies that are otherwise implicit and assumed.

The simplest example of the vantage offered by comparison can be found in the contrast over who is authorized to conduct missions and in what capacities they are allowed to work. The chapters in this book highlight the debates over these considerations: Can women be missionaries? If so, where, and who gets to decide? Can new converts themselves serve as missionaries? If so, at what stage of their spiritual development? Perhaps most significantly in our time, as several of the chapters pointedly explain, we are faced with the issue of whether newly converted peoples (e.g., those from Africa or South America) can evangelize among the unconverted in the United States or Europe, those original cradles of Christian tradition. If not, what does this say about assumptions regarding race and nation?

One can see how quickly comparison explodes any easy assumptions about missions, conversion, and even the nature of Christianity itself. These insights are important as historical statements, yes. But they are also important because they afford glimpses into the tenuous nature of the missionary experiment, a venture always in flux. As with all experiments, the scientists of Christian missions confronted frequent failure, missed and novel opportunities, and unanticipated consequences: the Shoshone who used Mormon temple construction to honor their massacred relatives; the young German who relied on Latter-day Saint technologies to resist the Nazis; the natural disasters that open new doors for evangelical outreach; and the social ruptures that lead, ironically, to fundamental changes in the cultures of the missionaries themselves. So, too, missions have brought out less than noble sentiments, as evangelicals have had to determine who is deserving of their calling or their message. Why white and not Black South Africans? Why men and not women? Why Ottoman Christians, not Muslims—and only those who were not Catholic?

This collection reflects an important starting point in that comparative scholarly labor, one that provokes those fundamental questions at the heart of the Christian missionary enterprise. While no single volume could encompass all the missionary experiments that deserve exploration, this book takes the first steps toward the juxtaposition of Protestant and Mormon labors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period when these traditions vied for converts from Africa to India to the Pacific. It may prompt intense discussions about whether their missionary endeavors were more alike than different and how their contests were engaged in specific political and social contexts. At the very least, the reader cannot fail to recognize that the stakes of these battles were about the foundations of Christianity itself.

One might well ask, of course, whether it isn’t more instructive to explore the millions of Mormons within the United States, or the many Protestant denominations there. Why not aim for the demographic or institutional center? Wouldn’t those experiences tell us more about these religious traditions than the study of some lone outpost in eastern Turkey or Washakie, Utah? The chapters in this book help to demonstrate that a tradition is put to its test at its geographical, ideological, and confessional peripheries. As the missionaries often lamented to their sponsors, You don’t understand what it is like here ‘on the ground.’ It is there that values are tested, that experiments are conducted, and that idealism runs up against pragmatism. Missions are, indeed, a Christian laboratory, one well worth investigating.

In another context, Julie Byrne has argued for the importance of studying separatist Catholics, those relatively tiny groups that declared independence from the mammoth Roman Catholic tradition: It is ‘other Catholicism’ because it is institutionally separate from bigger churches. But it is also ‘other’ because it harbors and tests that which is elsewhere disallowed.… It is Catholicism’s research lab. It is Catholicism’s arts incubator. It is Catholicism’s black sheep. In short, it is part of how modern Catholicism works. Through independents, then, one can see better the thoughts and unthinkables, centers and peripheries, flows and fault lines of Catholicism and American religion.³ So, too, we can analyze through these case studies the scientists of missions at the heart of Christian life: those workers who had to act on—and often improvise—their faith on the ground.

A NOTE ON TERMS

A technical nuance exists for the terms Mormon, Latter-day Saint, and Latter Day Saint that has implications for the chapters that follow. These terms apply to different groups and churches despite very often being used coterminously by the general public and in previous scholarship. (The appearance of both a hyphenated Latter-day and an unhyphenated Latter Day is not a typographical slip.) We use Latter-day Saint to refer to people or institutions associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, the largest institution within the broader Mormon movement and what the general public often takes to represent the Mormon Church. We use Latter Day Saint (without the hyphen) to refer to people or institutions associated with churches and movements beyond the church based in Salt Lake City that also trace a heritage to Joseph Smith’s earliest New York congregation. Mormon refers to the religious movement and culture that encompasses active adherents, lapsed members, regions, and communities associated with the broader Mormon cultural setting. The initialism LDS is short for Latter-day Saint; RLDS refers to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints headquartered in Independence, Missouri, which in 2001 was renamed Community of Christ.

Introduction

Christopher Cannon Jones and David Golding

On January 12, 1853, two American missionaries met one another for the first time in a place far from home. Julius Beardslee and Aaron Farr shared much in common, though neither perhaps immediately realized it when their paths crossed in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica. The pair were born less than a year apart in New England. Each was raised in a devout Congregational home, and each felt a call at a young age to preach the gospel. Beardslee and Farr, furthermore, came to Jamaica with similar goals. As Beardslee put it in a letter to a friend before departing for the West Indies, he planned to carry forward the work of the Lord there, amid the workings of Emancipation[,] Moral Condition, and wants of the island’s formerly enslaved population. Farr likewise looked forward to Promulgat[ing] the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the inhabitants of Jamaica, whom he described as once bond, now free, Licentious [and] uncouthed.¹ For both missionaries, their missions to Jamaica were civilizing efforts.

In spite of their shared aims, Farr and Beardslee remained far apart in several respects. Beardslee was, at the time of their meeting, the far more experienced missionary, having first arrived in Jamaica fourteen years earlier. He spent most of his time in Jamaica connected to the American Missionary Association, an interdenominational Protestant organization composed primarily of Congregationalists and Presbyterians. Farr, by contrast, had arrived in the West Indies just a day before he met Beardslee as part of the first group of missionaries sent to the island by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Aaron Farr’s diary that day describes their encounter: Spent the day in Study and visiting a Local Minister by the name of Beardsley[, who] Said he should Preach in the Evening. After Beardslee invited the Mormon elders to hear his sermon, Farr asked him if there would be any objections to the An[n]oun[ce]ment of their own meeting the following night. Beardslee agreed, and that night, following his preaching, he invited Aaron Farr, Darwin Richardson, and Alfred Lambson to introduce themselves and make the announcement.²

This instance of cooperation later gave way to suspicion, rivalry, and occasional hostility between Latter-day Saint and Protestant preachers on the island. Less than two weeks later, Farr met another American Missionary from Newyork who would not so much [as] talk with us. The missionary—a Rev. Dr. Ware—had recently heard an expose of the Mormons’ doctrine and said he had a verry poor opinion of us. Only when Farr and his companion told him they were near starving did he agree to feed them (he said he would feed a hungry thief so his good lady got us a lunch) before sending the elders on their way. When the Latter-day Saint missionaries left Jamaica in early February, they blamed their general lack of success there on, among other things, the wicked influence of Reveren[d]s [and] Priests.³ Similar scenes of contest and conflict between Protestant and Mormon missionaries played out across the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In August 1852, Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called more than one hundred men as missionaries, sending them to the four quarters of the globe. The majority of those called were sent to strongholds and scattered outposts of the British Empire.⁴ In each area—Jamaica, Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, Australia, India, and Hong Kong, to name just a few—Latter-day Saints were preceded by Protestants from not only England but also the United States.⁵ In the early nineteenth century, as American Protestantism’s foreign missionary movement emerged, representatives from US missionary organizations collaborated with their British counterparts to try to convert the world.⁶ Due to Mormonism’s own success in attracting white Protestants in both the British Isles and the United States, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints identified those far-flung regions of the British Empire as prime spots to extend their own reach in spreading their unique gospel telling of restored prophetic authority, new revelation and scripture, and the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ.⁷

The competition for converts continued throughout the nineteenth century and intensified in the twentieth as Latter-day Saints expanded their global reach and established a more permanent presence in the mission field. Protestants, meanwhile, divided into rival camps, as mainline (or ecumenical) denominations began to question traditional modes of missionary work, and evangelicals attempted to reinvigorate the missionary enterprise their more liberal counterparts left behind.⁸ Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, those same evangelicals began to seriously wrestle with the imperial aspects of their missionary efforts around the globe and worked to empower local Protestant churches toward a missiology based on partnership instead of paternalism.⁹ While Mormons remained shut out of these internal Protestant debates, they confronted some of the same challenges concurrently. After Latter-day Saint leaders began discouraging the migration of new converts to the North American West at the turn of the twentieth century, the church experienced unprecedented growth in new regions. That growth accelerated in the wake of World War II, causing church leaders to confront the need to train local leadership to work with, instead of under, American missionaries.¹⁰

In spite of their theological and ecclesiastical differences, Mormon and Protestant missionaries from the United States shared much in common. From the perspective of those they tried to convert, the different groups of missionaries often represented the same Western imperialist project, seeking not only to Christianize but also civilize prospective converts. Despite their proximity to (and ongoing rivalry with) one another, and the broader commonalities that occasionally linked them to each other, the missionaries’ experiences have largely remained isolated in scholarly research on the subject.

This book aims to correct that oversight. It brings together in a single volume some of the most exciting work currently being done by historians of Christian mission. These chapters grew out of a symposium held in Salt Lake City, Utah, in November 2019. The idea for that symposium originated just a year earlier, over lunch in Saint Louis, Missouri. That lunch included both editors of this book, as well as Spencer McBride (Church History Library), Emily Conroy-Krutz (Michigan State University), and Brian Franklin (Southern Methodist University). As we discussed our respective research, we realized that although each of us focused on a different group of missionaries—some mainline Protestant, some evangelical, and others Mormon—there was considerable geographic and thematic overlap in our projects. The conversation soon shifted to several other scholars’ research, and we began imagining the possibilities of bringing a group of historians together to present their work, respond to that of others, and see what emerged. With the generous support of the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University, those plans became a reality in 2019, when a dozen invited scholars convened in the Church History Library in Salt Lake City to workshop precirculated papers to one another and other participants from the local academic community. Those papers—expanded and revised based on the conversations that ensued that day—are presented here. This is the first book to compare and contrast Protestant and Mormon missions across time and space. We hope it will provide a starting point for future work exploring the two groups’ entangled histories.

The emergence of Mormonism coincided with an early surge in missionary activity among North American Protestants. Protestant home missionaries in the 1830s and 1840s United States tracked Mormon missionary movements throughout the country and mounted several campaigns to intercept potential converts.¹¹ Mormons launched their first overseas missions to Britain in the 1830s just as missionaries of the London Missionary Society reached Samoa. By the 1840s, Mormon missionaries had also begun work in the Pacific Islands and started making plans to venture even farther abroad.¹² Encounters between these missionary cohorts multiplied into the twentieth century but started to diverge when both introduced major transformations to their mission strategies. Efforts to modernize missions encouraged mainline Protestants toward but discouraged Mormons from greater ecumenism. As missiology increased in institutional support, Latter-day Saints remained unaware and apparently uninterested, continuing their global mission program from a centralized bureaucracy, though one forced to confront many of the same questions and challenges as their Protestant counterparts.

The chapters in this volume explore those entangled histories in a variety of ways. The book’s foreword by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, whose distinguished career has included work on both Protestant and Mormon missions, looks at the historiographical stakes of the project. The New Testament commission to go and make disciples of all nations left the task widely open to interpretation, setting up a missionary experiment Christians of all kinds could undertake—with or without stereotypical zeal. Maffly-Kipp notices how comparative analyses of the Christian laboratory evident in missions, like those represented in this book, bring greater focus to fundamental questions of world Christianity and the histories surrounding Christian and interreligious experience.

The chapters that follow are arranged in broadly chronological order, beginning in the early nineteenth century and progressing to the turn of the twenty-first century. Some address Protestant or Mormon missions and missionaries only; others bring the respective experiences of both groups into comparative perspective, or note momentary connections, cooperation, or competition between the two. While each chapter was written individually, some speak to others in particular ways, a result of both common interests and the dialogue that occurred between participants at the November 2019 conference. Throughout, certain key themes emerge, and we hope readers will discover connections between the various chapters and the respective histories they describe.

Kathryn Gin Lum’s opening chapter on the conception of the heathen world in the minds of early American missionaries sets the stage for much of what follows. In spite of the very real differences between the various regions of the globe to which missionaries went, they collapsed them into a single wilderness that could only be tamed by the Christian conversion of its inhabitants. Additional chapters throughout the book build on this framework. In chapter 4, Taunalyn Ford argues that both Protestant and Mormon missions in mid-nineteenth-century India were inflected with a decidedly Scottish orientalist gaze, thanks to the early leadership and influence of missionaries like John Murray Mitchell (Church of Scotland) and Hugh Findlay (Latter-day Saint). By contrast, chapter 6 by Jeffrey G. Cannon explores how Latter-day Saint missionaries in early twentieth-century Africa used photography to reify the continent’s inhabitants as exotic Others in need of both Christian conversion and Western civilization.

Cannon’s focus on the technologies of missions is extended further in Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye’s discussion in chapter 9 of cultural technologies, those techniques used by missionaries to facilitate relationships with converts and organization in their missions. Comparing the efforts of missionaries from the London Missionary Society, the True Jesus Church, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Inouye notes the portability of each group’s religious rites and organizational structures as they were transported to new regions and divergent peoples around the globe.

In much the same way that the missionaries in Africa analyzed by Cannon used photography and those compared by Inouye utilized church structure, schools, and language reform in their efforts to connect with and organize the people they encountered and converted, other missionaries saw humanitarian aid as a way to do so. In chapter 3, Devrim Ümit examines the Eastern Turkey Mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) from 1876 to 1909, as American missionaries sought to expand the reach of the post–US Civil War benevolent empire at the same time that Ottoman Turkey was struggling to maintain its standing as a Muslim empire. In chapter 7, Lauren F. Turek takes readers from the nineteenth-century Middle East to late twentieth-century Latin America, considering how evangelical and Pentecostal American missionaries mobilized to provide aid to earthquake-ravaged Colombia, seeing in disaster aid an avenue to proselytize Colombians.

Emily Conroy-Krutz and Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, meanwhile, highlight the role women and families—as both an ideal and a lived reality—played in missionary work. In chapter 2, Conroy-Krutz analyzes women’s applications to the ABCFM, highlighting the central role women played in Protestant missions and the meanings those women found in their efforts. In chapter 5, Hendrix-Komoto, in turn, examines the competing efforts of Protestant and Mormon missionaries to convert the Northwestern Shoshone in the American West, comparing the groups’ respective approaches to marriage and other sacraments in appealing to their Indigenous audiences.

In chapter 8, David J. Howlett complicates narratives of both Protestant and Mormon missionaries by examining the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) mission in India. RLDS missionaries shared parts of their history with Latter-day Saints but had, by the mid-twentieth century, begun a move toward ecumenical Protestant Christianity, a process on display in their efforts to convert the Sora people in India. Howlett also offers important insight into the multiple meanings of conversion, the relationship of missionaries to the state, and the complicity (or lack thereof) of missionary agents in colonialism. In chapter 10, David Golding compares the development of Protestant missiology with the Latter-day Saint lack thereof and notices a difference of pragmatism in seeking proselytes. Their divergence over mission theory meant the groups could proselytize in parallel (sometimes in competition) yet remain mostly indifferent to each other’s motives. This trend has only recently been interrupted by Protestant and Mormon scholars working in missiology taking new interest in each other’s projects.

The book concludes in chapter 11 with David A. Hollinger’s analysis of American missionaries and their presence within broader cultural trends in Christianity at large. Efforts to spread the Christian gospel beyond the North Atlantic West sharpened rhetorics and notions of the nature of Christianity itself and the worldly projects carried out in the name of that faith. Divisions within global Protestantism reflected a setting less monolithic than often supposed by historians of missions and missionaries—an array of enterprises intent on fulfilling the Great Commission yet too diverse to direct much attention to Mormon missionary interests.

Within Mormon studies, the subject of missions has frequently elicited frustrations of a couple of varieties—that those studies within the field tend to keep a parochial focus and that well-established fields of history and missiology tend to overlook (or at times exclude) Mormon actors and episodes. Within broader historiographical subject areas in which Protestant missions appear, studies have frequently interrogated the absence of key actors, such as women, Black and Indigenous peoples, and working-class participants. All together, the chapters here offer a launch point for further integration and synthesis across a more diverse missionary laboratory. Whether from a Mormon or Protestant context, historians can proceed with awareness of the