Go East, Evangelicals

At least half of the old quip that the “moral majority” is neither moral nor a majority is true.

Evangelical Protestants have never constituted a majority in the United States. They have never dominated any aspect of the American scene: not society, not culture, not politics, not religion. They have never been the sole influence behind any American change or tradition. Sure, President Ronald Reagan catered to evangelicals rhetorically. Sure, before him, the pollster George Gallup declared 1976 the “year of the evangelical.” And sure, President George W. Bush was an evangelical in the White House. But perennially, evangelicals have been one subgroup among many, each vying for authority and influence.

Evangelicals have received and continue to receive far more attention than their numbers warrant because of their intense commitment and activity. They have also been eager to make public and political their piety — to shine, biblically, as lights in the darkness. Evangelical leaders tend to love the spotlight. When the megachurch pastor Rick Warren has a good idea, like how to lead a “purpose-driven life,” he publishes it and promotes it. When CNN calls, Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, responds.

Increasingly since the 1980s, historians have been drawn to the power and influence of evangelicals and evangelicalism. Depending on which book or article one reads, evangelicals seem to factor on every side of historical problems — often on opposite ones. They are responsible for ending slavery and perpetuating the peculiar institution, for freeing women and subjugating them, for liberalizing the United States and keeping it mired in conservative traditions. Evangelicalism became a cottage industry for historians and reporters with George W. Bush’s presidency and then the 9/11 attacks. Hardly a month goes by during which a major publishing house fails to issue some insightful work on evangelicalism.

Christine Leigh Heyrman is one of the reasons the study of evangelicalism has become so important to historians. When the University of Delaware historian published Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (and won a 1998 Bancroft Prize), George W. Bush had yet to be elected president. The World Trade Center still stood, and the evangelical rhetoric of “good versus evil” seemed dormant during the sex-scandal-ridden presidency of Bill Clinton. What Heyrman accomplished in Southern Cross was to demonstrate that there was nothing inevitable about the American South’s becoming a bastion of evangelicalism. Through meticulous research, eloquent prose, and subtle argumentation, she described how Baptist and Methodist evangelicals emerged and expanded during the late 18th and early 19th centuries to become the most important religious culture in the region. She helped put evangelicalism on the map as a vital player in United States history.

Now, after the attacks of 9/11, the waging of wars throughout the Middle East, and the unlikely presidency of a man with a Muslim-sounding name, Heyrman’s new book, American Apostles, is a striking narrative of how a handful of New England evangelicals in the early 1800s transformed the ways in which Americans thought about Islam in the Middle East. Not only that, but this hardy crew of missionaries, as well as their editors and supporters at home, changed the fundamental nature of evangelical Protestantism within the United States.

Three apostles stand at the center of Heyrman’s tale: Levi Parsons, Pliny Fisk, and Jonas King. Young New Englanders, they were sent to the Middle East by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, one of the many new organizations of the new American republic. During their few years in the Ottoman Empire, they beheld scenic vistas and awe-inspiring wildlife. They attempted to learn new languages and navigate diverse cultures. They worked to understand other faiths while reconfiguring their own in the process. While Fisk grew to appreciate some Muslims and aspects of Islam, King moved in a more militant manner. He used his encounters to call evangelicals back home to a bolder, stronger form of faith, one that Heyrman sees as a continuing thread in evangelicalism to this day.

American Apostles is about much more than Fisk, Parsons, King, and their adventures. Heyrman deftly shows how before them, American writings and attitudes toward Islam were complicated and becoming more so. Just as Amanda Porterfield detailed in her excellent Conceived in Doubt, evangelical Protestants of the early republic were anything but a majority voice in American conceptions of faith, politics, and the world. For every five or six denunciations of Muhammad as a violent fanatic, Heyrman locates a sympathetic assessment or two of him. For every 10 or 12 assaults upon Islam as injurious to women, there was an article about how American men treated their own women.

The evangelical crusaders and especially their publications in the United States tipped the balance, and not just about Islam. By claiming personal experience and insight, the missionaries (and how their articles were edited and distributed) asserted authority when describing Islam, Muslims, and Middle Eastern cultures and politics. Moreover, and especially from the writings of Jonas King, evangelicalism defined itself as crusading and masculine, the defender of women who needed defending — and they all needed defending.

Some of Heyrman’s arguments seem exaggerated. Most obviously, is it possible that these few men and their publications could have swayed such wide swaths of American opinion? As Timothy Marr showed in his extraordinary book, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, the depth and breadth of American considerations of Islam and the Middle East were vast. Long before these three apostles had been to the Middle East and long after them, American preachers, theologians, novelists, explorers, and many others had been dreaming dreams and recounting visions of the Middle East.

Second, and perhaps more subtly, did this adventure really leave “little impress on the Middle East”? They may have failed to convert anyone to their Protestantism, but to assume that Fisk, Parsons, King, and the others who traveled had no influence there is to slight the power of small interactions. In American Evangelicals in Egypt, the historian Heather J. Sharkey explored how a similar set of Protestant missionaries engaged Christians and Muslims in the Middle East and, although these American interlopers failed, for the most part, to convince anyone of evangelicalism’s truths, they subtly elicited important legal and cultural shifts in local religious traditions. Sharkey examined texts in Arabic and located several arenas where the missionary “outsiders” pushed local Muslims to alter certain legal codes and approaches to foreigners.

Perhaps Heyrman is not to blame, however, for endeavoring to find more in microcosms than simply the micro. Perhaps we should hold accountable the tradition of promotional historical writing that has us wondering if the Irish actually “saved civilization” or if one British map could “change the world.”

If we match this disciplinary penchant for inflation with that of evangelical rhetoric of certainty and bravado, we have a perfect storm of hyperbole.

Evangelicals then and now tend to speak and write with such confidence that it is easy to mistake their hopes for historical realities. They believe so earnestly that their belief almost seems real. After reading American Apostles, I am certain of at least one thing: This is a beautiful book and a delight to read. Americans of the early 19th century found the travels and insights of the missionaries inspiring. They asked new questions of themselves and the world. This reader in the 21st century feels similarly with Heyrman as his guide.