The intersection of religious history and the history of the United States in the world has become a site of fruitful scholarly cross-pollination. Recent years have seen numerous studies of American Protestant missionaries, examining their roles as agents of cultural and political imperialism and (at times) as skeptics of American global hubris. Word across the Water emphasizes both dynamics, if not in equal degree. Tom Smith’s thesis, “that the relationship between religion, history, and empire was less straightforward than imperial ideologues liked to suggest,” seems modest (3). Nevertheless, patient readers will be rewarded once they dive into the text. Word across the Water adds a new level of sophistication to a rapidly growing subfield by interrogating U.S. missionaries’ production of historical knowledge in Hawai‘i and the Philippines during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Word across the Water is divided into two sections, each consisting of three chapters. The first three chapters detail the U.S. missionary-imperial project in Hawai‘i, which had been a site of an American Protestant community since the 1820s. Smith pays special attention not to the first generation of American missionaries, but to their Hawaiian-born children and grandchildren – figures positioned in the islands’ settler society “to assert their unique understanding of and connection to Hawaiian history” (33). Ironically, as Smith shows, missionary descendants’ “liminal” position as neither mainland Americans nor Native Hawaiians led them to insinuate themselves into the islands’ history through scholarship and cultural production. In doing so, these white settlers reinforced Hawaiian distinctiveness against the flattening effects of U.S. annexation.
Smith turns to the Philippines in the second half of the book. Across the Pacific, U.S. missionaries openly embraced their role as the vanguard of Protestant “civilization” and American power. Unlike their counterparts in Hawai‘i, however, American missionaries in the Philippines had to navigate a society in which Protestants were newcomers and Catholicism was deeply entrenched after centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Reluctance of Filipinos to convert, combined with ambivalence toward missionary efforts on the part of U.S. colonial officials, quickly dampened missionary expectations. In response, American missionaries deployed new understandings of history shaped by emerging social scientific thought. In these accounts, missionaries depicted Filipinos as long-suffering racial primitives in thrall to superstitious, materialistic Catholicism – historical legacies which “placed significant constraints on the speed and nature of the change” sought by American colonizers and missionaries alike (201).
As in Hawai‘i, though, American missionaries in the Philippines eventually began to co-opt indigenous histories for their own purposes. Appropriating the work of Filipino ilustrados (educated elites), Protestant thinkers in the wake of World War I began to reconcile with eventual Philippine independence. Reinterpreting the Philippines’ unique religious past, they also argued that Filipino Protestants were now ready to take the lead in evangelical work, both on the islands and throughout the rest of Asia. Missionaries’ embrace of decolonization in the Philippines might have represented a more “cosmopolitan” model of missionary thought, shaping liberal opinion back in the United States. Smith mentions this interpretation, as argued by David Hollinger in Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2018). However, Smith is also quick to note that American missionaries continued to reframe Filipino history to suit their own purposes, overlooking the indigenous, nationalist origins of much of their source material. Thus, American missionaries retained control over historical production even as actual U.S. political control over the colony began to wane.
Smith’s engagement with historical accounts from Filipinos and Native Hawaiians alongside the voluminous writings of U.S. missionaries represents a significant contribution to recent U.S. missionary historiography. Besides the “usual suspects” in the missionary archive – the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Hawai‘i, for example – Smith emphasizes Hawaiian and Filipino voices from primary sources as well as more recent works of secondary scholarship. The result is a sophisticated analysis of knowledge production and contestation in particular Pacific locales. Focusing on local particularity rather than grand narratives of American empire in the Pacific allows Smith to draw out fruitful comparisons between the two archipelagos. Digging into each nation’s historical production, Smith demonstrates change over time as new histories were constructed to fit changing conditions and serve new political needs. Smith also argues that his focus on Hawai‘i and the Philippines “decenters” notions of American empire, whether produced by nineteenth-century missionary scholars or (uncritically?) reproduced by twenty-first-century historians of empire (235 n. 1). Smith has little patience for either.
Word across the Water challenges these overweening conceptions of American power with its fine-grained analysis rooted in time and place. Despite this care and attention to detail, religious historians may quibble with Smith’s lack of interest in missionaries’ varied motives, even if their complicity in the American imperial project is undeniable. At times, Word across the Water also suffers from repetitious prose laden with academic jargon. Despite these issues, Smith’s book is original in concept and fascinating in execution. Word across the Water is a text from which we can learn a great deal about the complex interaction of religion and empire in the Pacific. Historians across multiple disciplines and sub-fields will benefit from this important book. Scholars of missionaries in particular can rejoice that their subjects are still providing such fresh insights. As Smith ably demonstrates, we have much to learn from our excavation of the missionary archive.
