In 2001, when an Israeli military incursion into the West Bank town of Bethlehem left three Palestinians dead and twenty-seven wounded, activists protested outside the Israeli consulate in Boston. The demonstrators included “three conspicuously attired” Episcopalian bishops, clad in “billowing purple cassocks and large pectoral crosses” who declared their commitment to “Christian-Muslim solidarity” (1). Objecting to the complaints of members of Boston's Jewish community, who suggested that the bishops had shown an anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish animus, one bishop insisted that their participation signaled solidarity with Anglican and other Palestinians grounded in a Christian obligation to reject oppression. As an Episcopal Church priest and historian, Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr. found the bishop's statement disconcerting, since “censure of Israel without any reference to the disparities of power that had long colored interactions between Christians and Jews appeared strangely lacking in historical awareness” (2). Shattuck investigated and wrote Christian Homeland, a meticulously researched study of the messy and fascinating history of American Episcopalian engagement with the Middle East and its peoples.
Christian Homeland draws on Episcopal Church archives in Texas, New York, Washington, DC, and elsewhere; over a dozen church periodicals; and an impressive base of secondary studies to examine prominent American Episcopalian leaders—missionaries, priests, and lay supporters. While this focus on intellectuals can make it hard to see what rank-and-file American Episcopalians thought about the Middle East, Shattuck gleans hints from church convention records to suggest that views from the pews were heterogeneous and ambivalent.
The first American Episcopalian missionary to the Middle East, Horatio Southgate of Maine, reached Ottoman Istanbul in 1836 and later visited Mesopotamia and Persia. In contrast to Congregationalists and Presbyterians of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), whose first emissaries reached Jerusalem in 1820, Southgate and his associates proved unable to establish enduring schools and hospitals.
Obstacles to institution-building were internal; Episcopalians disagreed over mission priorities. “Low church” Episcopalians wanted to collaborate with other evangelical Protestants in converting Muslims and Jews. “Anglo-Catholic” or “high church” Episcopalians (whom the Middle East seemed to pull like a magnet) admired the Eastern churches (Russian, Greek, Syrian Orthodox and so on, plus the Assyrian Church of the East) with their rituals and liturgies. “Admired” is too mild a term: they developed an abiding romantic fascination for Eastern churches and an eagerness to develop liaisons, sometimes at the expense of relations with the ABCFM and other Protestants. Unhappy with the “High Churchmanship” of men like Southgate, believing that “no Middle Eastern mission at all was preferable to supporting one. . .harmful to the Protestant cause,” and unconvinced about the need to address people who were Christian already, evangelicals in the Board of Missions cut Middle East funds in 1852 and directed money towards African and Chinese “heathens” instead (47).
American Episcopalians went on to play significant roles in the region by supporting local Christians. They mobilized in the 1890s when massacres struck Armenians in what is now Turkey. Henry Yates Satterlee, rector of Calvary Church in New York City, helped Armenians living nearby and invited an Orthodox priest to conduct services for followers in an Episcopal church. Satterlee drafted reports for the church's national convention, pleading for Armenian aid. He also petitioned political leaders to intervene—US President Grover Cleveland plus the Archbishop of Canterbury and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Episcopalians like Satterlee showed that they knew people in high places or had the confidence to appeal to them anyway.
Efforts for Armenians anticipated three early twentieth-century initiatives. In 1906, Episcopalians founded the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches Union as an ecumenical alliance of US churches. Following the annihilationist campaigns against Armenians that began in 1915, Episcopalians assumed prominent roles in coordinating aid for survivors through Near East Relief, a precursor to the humanitarian NGOs of the twentieth century. Convinced that they had a mission towards “immigrant races” in the United States, including Chinese “Orientals” in California (166), Episcopalian leaders began in 1920 to plan what Thomas Burgess, another priest from Maine and an expert on Greek Orthodoxy, called the church's “Christian Americanization” department, holding that “true citizenship must be founded on religion” (pp. 98–99). Burgess's declaration to a New York Times reporter that Jews posed special threats to American society raised the hackles of figures such as Leo Lerner of New York's Hebrew National Orphan House, who expressed dismay at Episcopalian “Jew baiting” and calls to proselytizing (98).
In the 1920s when American nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment was soaring, some Episcopalians tapped into the deep history of anti-Semitic imagery to denigrate Jews in church journals and the popular press. An illustration for a 1924 feature on “Our Home Missions,” for example, depicted a hook-nosed man leering over a tenement labeled with the words “ignorance,” “vice,” and “our foreign born” (156). Episcopalian anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States merged with opposition to the Zionist movement and Jewish colonization in Palestine, which the British government had supported through the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Charles Bridgeman, an Episcopal priest and missionary who reached Jerusalem 1924 to work with Armenians and British Anglicans, became a conduit for anti-Zionist thought. Bridgeman expressed grave concerns about the future of the region's Arab, non-Jewish majority—the Christians and Muslims later known as the Palestinians—while championing Britain in Palestine. In the 1930s and ‘40s, Bridgeman advanced theological arguments to oppose Zionism in letters, church memoranda, and publications. Jews had rejected and crucified Christ, he repeated, and had forfeited God's favor and claims to the Holy Land.
Bridgeman and like-minded Episcopalians experienced grave disappointment when Britain withdrew from Palestine in 1948, precipitating the emergence of Israel, the Palestinian refugee crisis, and, in time, the disproportionate emigration of Christians, or what Shattuck calls Christian “extinction in the lands of its birth” (205). In the United States, Episcopalians continued to hold mixed attitudes towards the Middle East while their church refrained from issuing simple policy positions towards the complex events transpiring.
Shattuck tries to end on a hopeful note by suggesting that pro-Palestinian American Episcopalian leaders have recently made a “small measure of progress” in dispelling the “specter of Christian anti-Judaism” in the church (247). Yet he ultimately presents a damning assessment of leaders who “seldom extended to Jews in any part of the world” the “sympathetic attention” that they “showered on Middle Eastern Christians;” who “consistently viewed [Jews] with a combination of fear and contempt, based on. . .a loathing buried deep in the psyche of institutional Christianity;” and whose potentially “sound reasons for opposing the Zionist movement [. . .] were [. . .] warped by an anti-Judaism that had been corrupting the soul of Christian theology for hundreds of years” (231).
Christian Homeland is an excellent book that covers some troubling material. It will interest historians of the United States and its foreign relations, Middle Eastern and Middle Eastern American Christian communities, and American anti-Semitism. Subtle, honest, and raw, Shattuck's study should prompt Episcopalians to engage in some serious soul-searching about their church history.
