American Apostles

The ongoing ignorant and paranoid engagement with Islam that we have seen in American politics and culture over the past fifteen years has a prehistory, and not just in the oil crisis of the 1970s or the Iranian revolution. The story begins with the American missionaries of the early nineteenth century who crossed the world in a millennial spirit hoping to draw to salvation the followers of the “false prophet” Muhammad. In her recent book, Christine Leigh Heyrman, an American historian perhaps best known for her Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1998), offers an account of the first generation of missionaries to reach the Middle East and the aspirations, imaginary projections, and ambivalence of this encounter. The quantity of sources for the history of American missions in the nineteenth century is massive. Heyrman imposes structure on it through biography. Framing her account is the story of the life of Pliny Fisk (1792–1825), a provincial Vermonter who was enticed by the romance of mission and the idea of the “conversion of the world.” Heyrman sketches out the broader context through tangents from Fisk’s life, whether it be the theological background of the New Divinity, the early secretive society of the Brethren and their founding of a mission society, or the lives of his fellow missionaries, such as Levi Parsons (1792–1822) or Isaac Bird (1793–1876). Some of these other persons function typologically in Heyrman’s telling: William Bentley (1759–1819) becomes the enlightened liberal, whose gripes against missions demonstrate the antipathy that existed about such endeavors even from the very beginning. Jonas King (1792–1869) serves as a proto-promoter of “muscular Christianity,” a pushy aspiring martyr always looking over his shoulder at jihad, or at least jihad as Christians imagined it. George English (1787–1828), the wily renegade adventurer who becomes Muslim, at least for a time, thus intriguing Fisk, alloys “universalism” and “individualism” and becomes “the avatar of a spirituality lived by so many in the United States today” (186).

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