Home Work: Religious Nationalism and the American Home Missionary Society

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In the early nineteenth century, missionary organizations emerged at the forefront of American civil society. Centering the perspectives of the American Home Missionary Society (AHMS), its administrators, and the ministers who belonged to it, this article argues that evangelical Protestants sensed tension between foreign, national, and local religious projects. As a domestic organization, the AHMS hoped the American public would focus on the evangelization of national rather than foreign space. Despite close relationships with foreign missions, many of its representatives believed that Americans should prioritize the evangelization of their nation over the world beyond its borders. Simultaneously, members of the AHMS sought to nationalize Americans’ religious imaginations by breaking down provincialism and directing attention to the spiritual needs of the expanding West. Americans would bolster the religious welfare of the nation writ large, the AHMS supposed, if they connected spiritual sympathies to faraway neighbors. Other AHMS ministers rejected this national project when they complained about a drain of resources, becoming more concerned with the needs of their own local churches. This article mines the tension between these several spaces of evangelical action—foreign, national, and provincial—to explore how ministers prioritized and argued over the proper objects of their proselytization.