Emily Conroy-Krutz (Michigan State University) will discuss her book Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell, 2024) at the Cushwa Center's fall 2024 Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion.
Commentators for this seminar are Heather Curtis (Tufts University) and Amy S. Greenberg (Penn State).
From the publisher
Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in 19th-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?
As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of U.S. citizens abroad and of the role of the United States as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the United States entered the First World War, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.
Inaugurated in 1980 and named in 2023 to honor the Cushwa Center’s founding director, the Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion convenes each semester at the University of Notre Dame to discuss a notable book recently published in the field.
Along with faculty and graduate students from Notre Dame, scholars from throughout the Midwest travel to campus to attend as invited guests of the Cushwa Center. The featured author engages with two invited commentators as well as the larger group. The Saturday morning seminar is free and open to all.