On 6 Jun 2007 at 9:14, Hal Bush wrote:

> Sorry for the intensity of this response but I get tired of people
> mocking or disparaging the very fine efforts of good people. If you are
> going to base your ideas of missions on silly stories like THE
> POISONWOOD BIBLE, you might want to try balancing them with more
> edifying tales that highlight the courage and the good will of many
> other people out there....


Who mentioned The Poisonwood Bible? Are you suggesting that
questions about Twain's criticism of missionaries must be accompanied
by "edifying tales"? That sounds like George Bush saying that reports on
violence in Iraq must be accompanied by accounts of "all the good
things that are happening." Or, don't mention that Twain objected to
American missionaries in China demanding "head for head" for
Christians killed by the Boxers unless you are willing to go off-topic to
mention Mother Teresa or provide other "edifying tales" of Christian
missionaries (and only Christian missionaries, I assume) today.
Personally, I think discussions of Twain's religious beliefs are
appropriate on this list and that people who want to discuss them should
not be required to provide "edifying tales" to stroke your religious
beliefs.

To answer Camy's question, Twain's criticism of missionaries during the
early 1900s was primarily based on their relationship to U.S.
imperialism, and was most pronounced in relation to U.S. involvement in
China following suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. American
missionaries, backed up by the U.S. military, toured the country
collecting exorbitant indemnities and demanding executions of innocent
Chinese. "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" and "To My Missionary
Critics" are the primary texts but there were also a number of related
interviews, speeches, and short statements. They focus primarily on the
violence and injustice of "Christian" activities in China but hypocrisy is
highlighted when he picks up on a missionary's claim that they were
following Chinese custom in demanding that innocent Chinese be
executed. The quotes he uses at the beginning of "To the Person Sitting
in Darkness" are also presented as arriving on Christmas Eve. "By
happy luck, we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve -- just in time
to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm.
Our spirits soar, and we find we can even make jokes: Taels I win,
Heads you lose."

In "The United States of Lyncherdom" there is a different approach
when he calls for missionaries to return from China to solve the problem
of lynching in this country. His comment there seems to be less about
religious hypocrisy than a national hypocrisy of claiming to "Christianize"
and "civilize" the world while such problems exist at home. Twain's
"Review of a Biography of Aguinaldo," which was written at about the
same time, also includes comments linking religion and racial violence:
"For a year or two we have been accustomed to hearing the cruelties
and murders practised by the Katipunan [the Filipino revolutionary
organization] immeasurably denounced, and I wish to put the real blame
where it belongs. The pupils were not worse than the friars who taught
them these things. And they were not worse than were our Christian Ku-
Klux gangs of a former time, nor than are our church-going negro-
burners of to-day. And these native-American torturers and assassins
have not the Katipunan's excuse: for they had no teachers, they
invented their brutalities themselves."

The public conflict between Twain and the missionary organizations over
their activities in China dragged on into the summer of 1901. In October
1901, the president of the Christian Foreign Missionary Society reported
to their annual meeting that there had been a decline in contributions to
the organization that year. According to the Washington Post (Oct. 15,
1901), "President McLean said Mark Twain was directly responsible for
the falling off."

Twain also wrote about missionaries and imperialism in his 1873 letter to
the New York Tribune about Hawaii. He wrote: "The natives of the
islands number only about 50,000, and the whites about 3,000, chiefly
Americans. According to Capt. Cook the natives numbered 400,000 less
than a hundred years ago. But the traders brought labor and fancy
diseases -- in other words, long, deliberate, infallible destruction; and
the
missionaries brought the means of grace and got them ready. So the
two forces are working along harmoniously, and anybody who knows
anything about figures can tell you exactly when the last Kanaka will be
in Abraham's bosom and his islands in the hands of the whites." His
interpretation that "the two forces are working along harmoniously" was
similar to how he presented the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust" in the
early 1900s.

Because Spain's colonies were primarily Catholic, Protestant missionary
organizations argued for U.S. annexation of the colonies after the
Spanish-American War. Religion was a significant topic within the
debate about U.S. imperialism in the Philippines but there was less
focus on missionary activities. Twain cited the U.S. agreement to protect
the notoriously corrupt Spanish friars in the Philippines as one of his
reasons for opposing the Treaty of Paris, for example, and later wrote of
U.S. soldiers as "Christian butchers" in his comments on the massacre
of 900 Muslim Filipinos on Mount Dajo in March 1906. In "The
Stupendous Procession" (1901) he also criticized the Bates Agreement,
a treaty the U.S. made with Muslim Filipinos of the southern Philippines
in 1899. He and other anti-imperialists portrayed that as endorsing
polygamy and offering U.S. protection to Muslim Filipinos at the same
time the U.S. was fighting Christian Filipinos of the northern Philippines -
- all while supposedly "spreading Christian civilization." George Ade's
comic opera, The Sultan of Sulu (1902), was the most important literary
work created on that subject. Some of the same religious and cultural
tensions created by U.S. relations with Muslim Filipinos back then can
be seen in relations with various groups in Iraq today.

"Edifying tales" should not be mandatory but I'll provide one anyway.
Twain also had close relationships with missionaries a few years after
the dispute of 1901. In both the U.K. and the U.S., the first organized
efforts to end King Leopold's brutal rule of the Congo were organized by
missionaries, and they played a central role in the Congo Reform
Association which Twain served as an active vice president. Thomas S.
Barbour, who was Twain's primary contact within the American Congo
Reform Association, was Foreign Secretary of the American Baptist
Foreign Mission Society. Many of the speakers who toured the country
on behalf of the organization while he was a vice president were
missionaries who worked in the Congo -- Rev Herbert S. Johnson, Rev.
John and Alice Harris, etc. Most accounts of atrocities in the Congo and
the photographs of them also came from missionaries. Twain
acknowledged that in King Leopold's Soliloquy when he wrote that
"every Yankee missionary" sent home for a Kodak.

Jim Zwick