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