Southern Baptists to the Northern Philippines

Abstract

With the famous cry “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” Commodore John Dewey defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, signaling the end of the Spanish-American War in the Pacific. Upon the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1899, the Philippines were officially ceded from Spain to the United States, to be ruled by the latter under McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation.” U.S. Protestant missionaries from denominations supporting McKinley’s vision began streaming into the islands. Prompted by an economic expansionism and humanitarian paternalism (see Clymer 1986: 11 ff.), the missionaries achieved significant successes in terms of converts and exhibited a high level of interdenominational cooperation, resulting in the relatively quickly established “Comity Agreement” in April 1901, in which various parts of the islands were designated for Presbyterians, Methodists, and United Brethren. By the following January (1902), the Disciples of Christ and American Baptist missions had also joined the pact, now known as the Evangelical Union. By most accounts, this comity agreement was one of the most successful of the many attempted among Protestant missionaries anywhere (Gowing 1967).