Agency, Race, and Christianity in the Strange Career of Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce

Abstract

For several decades, agency has been a central concept in the historical study of Christian missions, yet it remains more frequently invoked than analyzed. This article explores the formulation of evangelical protestant beliefs about human agency in the context of efforts to evangelize the world. It does so by examining the fraught relationship between a Sierra Leonean Christian missionary named Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce and the United Brethren in Christ, an American denomination that first championed and later disfellowshipped him. Wilberforce experienced a fleeting American celebrity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely because his story could be told to promote competing interpretations of African agency. This article details the temporal and spatial components of evangelical conceptions of heathenism and human agency, their use by Wilberforce, and their collision with notions of human nature grounded in scientific racism. It draws on private and public interpretations of Wilberforce's story, including his dramatic fall from favor among his evangelical supporters, to argue that historical constructions of agency informed and were shaped by missionary activity. The recovery of Wilberforce's story, and of the debates that swirled around him, advances a new way of studying the relationship between agency and Christian missions.