The Gospel of the Kingdom

In Christian Imperialism , Emily Conroy-Krutz begins with a description of “what we think we know about Americans in the early Republic.” While “the British were imperial and global,” Americans “were republican and continental,” focused on westward expansion (1). Mining the extensive papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) from the first discussions of the idea of creating the organization in 1810 up until the Mexican-American War, Conroy-Krutz explores a group of early American evangelicals who viewed themselves as part of a trans-Atlantic, Anglo-American network of Christians working to bring both “Christianity” and “civilization” to people around the world. This group of Americans, Conroy-Krutz argues, was “international and imperial in their thinking about their nation and the world” (5). Conroy-Krutz explores ABCFM missions in a variety of cultural contexts, showing how a coherent vision of “Christian imperialism” ran throughout all these missions, although the missionary ability to implement this vision varied greatly depending on their relationship to the political authorities in charge.

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