Canadian Protestant Overseas Missions to the Mid-Twentieth Century: American Influences, Interwar Changes, Long-Term Legacies

Abstract

Popular stereotypes of colonial-era missionaries have not readily faded even in the face of research that has directly challenged those stereotypes. As iconic images of missionary heroes began to disappear in the 1960s along with hackneyed missionary jokes and cartoons, a new stereotype emerged, one that presented the missionary as ‘part and parcel of the imperial project’.¹ The resilience of this ‘new’ image, not only in the popular mind but also in the broad scholarly community, probably owes a good deal to the published discourses of the mission churches themselves. Proponents of missions showed a pragmatic tendency to speak favourably of imperial rule and sometimes even to urge its extension, notwithstanding individual missionaries’ private concerns about self-serving imperial policies and official or random acts of violence against colonized peoples. Several contributions in the present volume illustrate this pattern.² Other contributors deal with missionaries who, while they worked in British imperial terrain, had ethnic or faith backgrounds that differentiated them from, and sometimes put them at odds with, the mainly elite Protestant men who determined colonial policies.³