## *A Historical Treatment of Protestant Home Missions Toward Immigrants from 1880-1920* ## Abstract The United States is experiencing what many call its second great wave of immigration. The country with the largest population of immigrants, the United States serves as home to over 40 million, making up approximately 20 percent of all global migrants. In 2018, the foreign born share of the United States population hit its highest point since 1910 at 13.7 percent, or 44.5 million people. Furthermore, the United States is the most diverse country in the world, housing immigrants from virtually every other nation on the planet. While many of these people are lawful arrivals to the United States, the number of undocumented and unlawful entries has peaked to unprecedented levels since the pandemic. In the seven months between May and November of 2023, United States Customs and Border Patrol removed or returned over 400,000 individuals, most through the southwest border of the United States. That number is approximately the same as the entire year 2019, and more than the totals of 2015-2018. News coverage uses language similar to that used during the first wave of immigration. Immigrants once again surge and overwhelm. Despite the adage that history repeats itself, each era and context is unique in its own right. False comparison is a tempting ditch for the historian. Nevertheless, key points of contact do exist between various ages and contexts in the history of Christian mission which allow missions history to serve as a tutor. Gilded Age missions, especially to immigrants, provides one such mirror today. The present missionary moment in the United States, though unique, shares significant points of contact with the era surrounding the turn of the century. This paper presents several important implications based upon the analysis of Protestant American missions methods toward immigrants during the period. American Protestant missionary methods toward immigrants were diverse, but one can discern themes that run throughout the array of methods. First, Protestants viewed the missionary occasion presented by immigration either as an opportunity for the Great Commission or a threat to building the kingdom. Second, a growing tension between an individual and social salvation marked missionary methods as the Gilded Age shifted into the Progressive Era. Finally, despite these tensions, the vast majority of Protestant Americans agreed that Americanization was an essential characteristic of the Christian mission. --- ## Thesis: An analysis of Protestant American missions efforts toward immigrants from 1880-1920 reveals striking similarities to contemporary discourse concerning the same, providing a helpful framework through which we can interpret contemporary missions methods. ## Advanced Organizer: This presentation will first develop a snapshot of Protestant American missions to immigrants at the turn of the last century. This snapshot will provide an opportunity for analyzing particular missions methods and themes for comparison with the contemporary missionary occasion to immigrants. Finally, these themes will be summarized in categories that provide guidance for contemporary missionary practices toward immigrants in North America. >[!Note] *Caveat Emptor* >The following includes excerpts taken from my dissertation. Some are modified slightly, while others are included verbatim. It is not intended to serve as a complete research paper. Instead, I've selected key passages which, taken together, demonstrate the thesis and provide a rough argument that I hope leads to further research by others. With that caveat, excuse a lack of logical transitions and eloquence one would rightly expect in a complete paper. --- ## A Snapshot of Immigrant Missions from 1880-1920 In the year 1883, Emma Lazarus penned words that would mark an American generation. The Statue of Liberty displayed the stanzas of Lazarus’s poem, which were prophetic in their description of what would occur at the ports in the United States for the next four decades. The words set in bronze an American ideal: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and along with the rest of the sonnet, they stand today erected on the base of the statue for which they were written.^[Emma Lazarus, *The New Colossus*, (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/the-new-colossus, 1885)] On June 17th, 1885, the French frigate Isere appeared out of the distance carrying as its cargo the statue titled, Liberty Enlightening the World. On June 19, the frigate delivered its cargo to Bedlow Island.^[American Committee of the Statue of Liberty, *Inauguration of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World* (New York: D. Appleton, 1887), 10.] Placed in New York harbor June 19, 1885, the statue welcomed millions of newcomers. Immigration was not new for the United States. Even by this point there was a long history of international migration with various waves of significant movement. However, the immigration of the Gilded Age was different in two significant ways. First, the number of people coming was unprecedented. The thirty-five years that followed the placement of the statue saw the largest mass migration of peoples in United States history until the present era. Latourette wrote, “Here was a movement of peoples which for magnitude was unapproached in the nineteenth century. It has seldom if ever been equalled in the entire history of mankind.”^[Kenneth Scott Latourette, *A History of the Expansion of Christianity: The Great Century in Europe and the United States of America*, vol. 4 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 224.] Second, the types of people coming were categorically different. Before this time, immigrants tended to come from areas where Protestant Christianity was the norm. In other words, most came from Britain or Germany, and many came as evangelicals. However, during this first great wave of immigration, the tides turned and the majority entering the country were Catholic or Jewish, both groups evangelicals considered in need of the gospel.^[Robert T. Handy, *Undermined Establishment: Church-State Relations in America, 1880-1920* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 17.] Additionally, thousands began to come from East Asia’s radically different culture and religion.^[United States Immigration Commission, *Statistical review of immigration, 1820-1910. Distribution of immigrants, 1850-1900*, tech. rep. (United States Immigration Commission, 1911), 34–44 demonstrates a dramatic increase in Asian immigrants from 1880 through subsequent decades.] Protestant churches in America faced a new missionary task. The height of the immigration wave occurred from 1900 to 1909 when beyond eight million entered.^[David Ward, *Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth-Century America* (London:Oxford University Press, 1971), 53.] In 1907 alone, almost 1.5 million came.^[Latourette, *A History of the Expansion of Christianity*, 224.] An entire industry developed around marketing and transporting immigrants from various locations in Europe. Ship after ship pulled into Ellis Island, the country’s primary immigrant processing center, during the period. Foner wrote, “More than twelve million people passed through its halls between 1892 and 1954, the vast majority landing there in the first three decades of its existence as an immigrant-processing center.”^[Nancy Foner, *From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 1.] ### The Immigrant's Social Context Strong social networks developed among immigrant groups in the United States during the era. These networks perpetuated immigration, as families communicated with those back home, urging them to come. As initial migrants get in place in their new home, preexisting social networks facilitate the movement of more people to the same location. As more people from a particular group of people move, the pathways become easier, since these connections facilitate finding employment and housing, and even provide the resources necessary to make the move. Foner continues, >Contemporary social scientists theorize about the role of network connections in lowering the costs, raising the benefits, and reducing the risks of international migration. Among the mechanisms involved in what has been labeled ‘cumulative causation’ is the emergence of a culture of migration; migration becomes integrated into the structure of values and expectations so that it is seen as part of the normal course of events.^[Foner, *From Ellis Island to JFK*, 19.] Ethnic and family networks proved to be more than a precipitant for immigration, providing the immigrant with access to many necessities as well as a vital sense of belonging. Bodnar wrote, “Because families and friends were in close contact even when separated by wide oceans, immigrants seldom left their homelands without knowing exactly where they wanted to go and how to get there. Relatives and friends constantly sent information back regarding locations to live and potential places of employment.”^[John Bodnar, *The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America* (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 51.] These immigrant networks shaped into significant communities that became well established in various locations throughout the United States. The majority landed in major cities, like New York, Chicago, and Baltimore. These ethnic kinship ties maintained, and perhaps even strengthened, in the New World. Despite claims to the contrary in older scholarship, most ethnic immigrant communities did not want to lose their identity. Latourette incorrectly suggested, “Most of them, especially the young, tended to drop their old culture and to adopt that of their new habitat. The second generation especially were averse to being thought of as foreigners and wished to be known as Americans. They were inclined to be ashamed of the language, the dress, and the manners of the ‘old country.’”^[Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, 227.] One should rightly question such a claim, given the persistence of ethnic communities and the dogged insistence on maintaining language and culture by many groups. While assimilation was certainly a goal for most immigrants, it was not assimilation at the expense of their identity, as many in the host culture demanded. Foner argues: >At the time, a common concern was that the new arrivals were not making serious efforts to become citizens and real Americans. Public schools, settlement houses, and progressive reformers put pressure on immigrants to abandon their old-fashioned customs and languages. A popular guide on becoming American advised immigrant Jews to “forget your past, your customs, and your ideals.” The Americanization movement’s “melting pot” pageants, inspired by Israel Zangwill’s play, depicted strangely attired foreigners stepping into a huge pot and emerging as immaculate, well-dressed, accent free “American-looking” Americans. Expressions of ethnicity were suffocated in New York City’s schools, where, in the words of Superintendent Maxwell, the goal was “to train the immigrant child. . . to become a good American citizen.” Much of the scholarship concerning the earlier immigration emphasized the way immigrants were assimilating and becoming American; ties to the home society were often interpreted as “evidence for, or against, Americanization” and, in many accounts, were seen as impeding the assimilation process.^[Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, 182–83.] With this kind of pressure, ethnic communities worked to maintain networks vital to their identity and existence. A key to network stability was marriage. Ethnic communities placed high expectations on most immigrants to marry inside their own ethnic group. Bodnar wrote, “If no wife existed in the homeland, immigrant males quickly took whatever steps were necessary to find women of similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds with whom they could establish a household. Marriage patterns remained largely within the ethnic group during the first and much of the second generation.”^[Bodnar, The Transplanted, 75.] For Japanese, this meant finding “picture brides,” and a quarter of Italians in San Francisco made the journey back to their native village simply to find a wife.^[Bodnar, The Transplanted, 75.] ### The Immigrant's Physical Context The emphasis on maintaining ethnic networks naturally led to the establishment of ethnic communities. Foner rightly asserted, “Once an immigrant community develops, it tends to expand as compatriots are on hand to offer newcomers a sense of security and the prospect of assistance. Immigrants, as Charles Tilly puts it, create ‘migration machines’: sending networks that articulated with particular receiving networks in which new migrants could find jobs, housing, and sociability.”^[Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, 28.] As immigration swelled from 1880 onward, ethnic communities developed across the country. Some pushed out to rural areas, establishing farming communities.^[Antonio Mangano, *Sons of Italy: A Social and Religious Study of the Italians in America* (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States; Canada, 1917), 9.] Most, however, landed in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest, and very few immigrants headed to the South. By 1910 approximately half of the immigration population in the United States was concentrated in the Northeastern and North Central states such as New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.^[Ward, Cities and Immigrants, 60.] At the close of the era, in 1920, three of every four foreign-born residents lived in an urban center.^[Ward, Cities and Immigrants, 52.] However, various immigrant groups landed in differing locations. This was largely due to established ethnic networks that funneled people into specific neighborhoods and industries. For instance, Italians and Russian Jews settled in large metropolitan centers on the coast. Immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire were more likely to move to industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh in the interior.^[Ward, Cities and Immigrants, 79.] Nowhere gained immigrants like New York City did. Foner wrote, “Between 1880 and 1920, close to a million and a half immigrants arrived and settled in the city—so that by 1910 fully 41 percent of all New Yorkers were foreign born.^[Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, 1.] In these cities, homogenous ethnic neighborhoods quickly developed. These neighborhoods quickly gained distinct ethnic identities, and ethnic enclaves were born. Foner listed a few of these enclaves located in New York City: >Manhattan’s Lower East Side carried the sobriquet of a private city, “Jewtown,” while there were three Little Italys south of Fourteenth Street. In 1890, over half of New York City’s Italians lived in just three wards bordering Canal Street; in the same period, three-quarters of the city’s Jews congregated in the Lower East Side, south of Fourteenth Street and east of the Bowery, and the percentage was still as high as 50 percent by 1903.^[Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, 39.] These enclaves transformed their small plot of land into a radically new destination. The areas quickly took on a life seemingly independent from the city around them. Furthermore, the areas remained segregated. Even when two immigrant neighborhoods bordered each other, they kept distinct boundaries. As the immigrant groups continued to grow, they created other enclaves when they ran out of room.^[Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, 41.] Due to the relative poverty of immigrants and the high need for unskilled employment opportunities, these neighborhoods were often in the lowest cost areas immediately surrounding central commercial and industrial sectors. As ease of transportation increased and industrialization brought undesirable factories into cities, these originally wealthy areas cleared out, leaving undesirable residential areas to be filled by poor immigrants. Landowners subdivided buildings and turned them into tenements.^[Ward, Cities and Immigrants, 105.] ## An Analysis of Missionary Methods to Immigrants from 1880-1920 The majority of immigrants coming were no longer Protestant. Different language groups, different cultures, and different religions made these groups feel rather foreign. Furthermore, these groups were establishing ethnic enclaves, large communities that reinforced their cultural identity and provided vast social networks. Not every immigrant landed in an enclave, but these served as ground zero for access to new peoples from other religious backgrounds. A new missionary paradigm emerged. ### Religious Context The balance of religious adherence among immigrants tilted. Latourette wrote, “Of the thirteen and a half millions of foreign-born in the United States in 1910, probably at least seven and a half millions, or nearly 60 percent, were baptized Roman Catholics.”^[Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, 229.] However, a substantial minority of immigrants were from a completely different background. Judaism was a major religious background for many from Russia and surrounding countries, as the Jewish people fled persecution. Certainly, the majority of those coming from East Asia were not Christian. Religion, along with language and other cultural identifiers, proved a vital connection to the immigrants’ previous identity. Often, a renewed zeal for the home religion emerged as people migrated. Moments of transition forced people to grasp for ritual and tradition, and their religious background provided a fertile foundation for doing so.^[Bodnar, The Transplanted, 145] Even if transition did open some to the Christian message, it pushed many to ensure that their own religious traditions continued in the United States. Bodnar wrote,“German-American leaders were so concerned in 1868, in fact, over the ability of newcomers to retain their religion that they appointed two agents in New York to meet incoming ships in New York and Baltimore to direct immigrants to German neighborhoods and churches. Between 1868 and 1890 over 16,000 German arrivals used this service.”^[Bodnar, The Transplanted, 146.] The result of large-scale immigration during this era was not simply a new population for Protestants to evangelize. These people were coming with a religion of their own to propagate. Both Catholic and Protestant immigrants coming during the era participated in their own missions toward people in the United States.^[Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, *The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy*, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 117–55, dedicate a chapter to Catholic missions in North America during the era, noting the significance of immigration from Catholic lands in their missionary endeavor. Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, 260-267, describes efforts from various European denominations to send missionaries to establish churches for their own people emigrating to the United States.] Most of these efforts were aimed at reaching their own ethnic people who also migrated, sensing an opportunity to reinvigorate their faith. At minimum, they desired to maintain their own vitality as well as that of their own ethnic group and religion. ### American Protestant Missionary Efforts This period in American history fell toward the end of the Great Century of Christian Missions, during which American Protestants invested greatly in the propagation of the gospel across the globe. The era was a highwater mark in missionary fervor among Protestants. Many American Protestants rose to the occasion presented by immigration to advance that same missions among new peoples at home. It is necessary to organize the many various efforts to provide a survey. This survey used two different schema for organization: the groups being engaged and the methods being employed. First, Protestants did missions primarily among three basic categories of immigrant: Jews, Catholics, and East Asians. In fact, there is reason to believe that at least some missions efforts of the time divided work into these three categories. Southern Baptists, for instance, spoke of missions to the Catholics, Jews, and heathens.^[*Proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention* (1906), 14.] Second, the various methods employed can be categorized as well. A truly unique feature of American Christianity is its diversity of expression. This resulted in an array of denominations each with their own missions agencies. Furthermore, the modern missions movement spurred into existence countless societies for the propagation of the gospel. Many of these worked across denominational lines. In such a setting, the missionary efforts to immigrants were assuredly diverse. Nevertheless, certain themes appear when surveying Protestant missionary methods toward immigrants as a whole. >[!Note:] Presentation Note: >For the sake of this presentation, I'm focusing on my categorization of methods employed instead of the categorization based on different immigrant groups. There's simply not enough time to discuss both. At least three different themes emerged in the growing tension among Protestants concerning immigrant missions, two tensions and on widely-accepted blindspot. First, Protestants wrestled with their posture toward immigrants, viewing them either through the lens of opportunity or threat to the kingdom mission. Protestants did not uniformly view immigrants as either opportunity or threat, and sources often speak of them as both. Second, Protestants grappled with the distinctions between social and individual salvation concerning immigrant missions. As with the tension surrounding Protestant posture toward immigrants, the issue of social and individual salvation was not fully-formed into a conflict. Tensions between two poles emerged as calls for both the individual and social salvation of immigrants resulted a variety of methods designed to accomplish those ends. Finally, while tensions existed concerning immigrants’ opportunity or threat and the need for social or individual salvation, a third theme emerged as nearly all Protestants appeared unified concerning the need for Americanization of the immigrants. Regardless of the tensions listed above, the cultural mission was clear: full Christianization required Americanization in some sense #### Tension One: Immigrants as Missions Opportunity or Threat Some individuals conceived of missions to immigrants in optimistic terms as an opportunity for American Protestants to hasten their work of kingdom building by the promotion of Christian and American ideals. However, others cast the terms in the ominous language of an impending threat. Through the lens of threat, Christians conceived of a mission to protect the kingdom they were establishing from incoming forces that could potentially undermine their Christian civilization. ##### Immigrants as Opportunity Several home mission manuals written between 1880 and 1920 approached the issue in a hopeful tone, promoting immigration and missions to immigrants. Notable among these were the works of Howard B. Grose. A Baptist minister and professor, Grose served as the editorial secretary for the American Baptist Home Missionary Society from 1904-1910 and authored two manuals addressing missions to immigrants: Incoming Millions and Aliens or Americans?^[Danielle Loftus, *LibGuides: Howard B. Grose: Overview* (https://libguides.usd.edu/grose, February 2015), 11.] In the preface to *Aliens or Americans?*, Grose himself notes the tendency to cast the missionary occasion of immigration as either opportunity or threat, claiming it should be seen as a hopeful opportunity. He writes, “Immigration may be regarded as a peril or a providence, an ogre or an obligation. . . The author is a Christian optimist who believes God has a unique mission for Christian America, and that it will ultimately be fulfilled.”^[Howard B. Grose, *Aliens Or Americans?* (New York: Young People’s Missionary Movement of the United States; Canada, 1909), 10.] If Grose does employ threat language, the threat is Christians’ inactivity that allows unsightly American vices to grip the immigrant after his or her arrival. Grose continues, “How are these aliens being Americanized? For the most part the vote-buyer, the saloon keeper, the bribe-taker, the Jew sweater, the owner or agent of wretched and unsanitary tenements, are the ones who are teaching them what America is, what America stands for.”^[Howard B. Grose, *The Incoming Millions* (New York: Revell, 1906), 84.] Immigrants themselves wrote another category of manuals, which saw promise in immigration. Marie Buhlmaier’s Along the Highway of Service recounts her ministry at the docks in Baltimore among incoming immigrants. An immigrant herself, Marie served with the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention distributing literature, welcoming immigrants, and helping connect them to various churches at their final landing places in the country.^[Marie Buhlmaier, *Along the Highway of Service* (Atlanta: Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1924), vii.] Buhlmaier writes with passion and sympathy for the plight of the immigrant and challenges her fellow Southern Baptists to see God as the “Great Director” of immigration.^[Buhlmaier, Along the Highway of Service, 1–7.] In New York, Antonio Mangano served as the Director of the Italian Department at Colgate Theological Seminary. An immigrant from Italy, Mangano became a Christian through the influence of a Baptist church in Long Island. In Sons of Italy, he provides an in depth look at Italian immigrants and provides a plea for churches to see the opportunity they present for promoting Protestant Christianity.^[Mangano, *Sons of Italy*, xi.] Mangano urges hospitality toward the immigrant, asking, “How can America hope to weld these people into good citizens if good Americans constantly look upon them as inferiors, studiously avoiding contact with them?”^[Mangano, *Sons of Italy*, 133.] ##### Immigrants as Threat All Protestants did not view immigration with such optimism. It was perhaps more likely that American Protestants, largely from English or Western European descent, would see the waves of immigrant coming ashore each year as a threat to the civilization they were working so hard to build. Protestant Americans were concerned particularly about the provenance of the new immigrant stock. In the 1880s, the largest surge of immigration came from Catholic lands and a different ethnic stock.^[Handy, Undermined Establishment, 17.] The threat language is perhaps most clear in the writing of Josiah Strong. Significantly, Strong’s revised edition of Our Country shifted the tone concerning immigration from providence to peril. Strong lists seven perils throughout his work that threaten the progress of building America into the kingdom of God. The first peril listed is the threat of immigration.^[Strong, Our Country, 30.] Strong writes,“So immense a foreign element must have a profound influence on our national life and character. Immigration brings unquestioned benefits, but these do not concern our argument. It complicates almost every home missionary problem and furnishes the soil which feeds the life of several of the most noxious growths of our civilization.”^[Strong, Our Country, 40.] Strong directed his perils as much, or more, toward threats to the Anglo-American way of life. Deichmann Edwards writes, “In all of this, he virtually equated the U.S. republican institutions which he perceived to be endangered by the seven perils with the foundations of Christian civilization.”^[Wendy J. Deichmann-Edwards, “Forging an Ideology for American Missions: Josiah Strong and Manifest Destiny,” in *North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914: Theology, Theory, and Policy*, ed. Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 163–91.] As noted above, Strong’s Our Country was one of the most influential treatments of home missions for decades to come. It was published at the beginning of the era and, along with Strong’s other writings on home missions, became an oft-cited source in subsequent manuals.^[See Harlan Paul Douglass, *The New Home Missions: An Account of Their Social Redirection* (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States; Canada, 1914); William Payne Shriver, *Immigrant Forces: Factors in the New Democracy* (New York: American Baptist Publication Society, 1913); Sherman H. Doyle, *Presbyterian Home Missions: An Account of the Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.* (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication; Sabbath-school Work, 1902; Charles Alvin Brooks, *Christian Americanization: A Task for the Churches* (Council of Women for Home Missions & Missionary Education Movement of the United States; Canada, 1919); Grose, *The Incoming Millions*; Grose, *Aliens Or Americans?*; and Isaac Newton McCash, *Horizon of American Missions* (New York: Revell, 1913), as examples of home missions manuals that reference Josiah Strong’s writing.] #### Tension Two: A Social or Individual Salvation Like the broader theological conversation concerning the rising Social Gospel, missionary method demonstrated an undeniable tension concerning the scope of missions and the nature of salvation. Proponents of social Christianity were no less vocal about missions than other Protestants. Missionary methods infused with social Christianity treated immigration as a social evil or problem to be corrected. For some, it was the immigrants themselves who were morally dubious. Josiah Strong, an early proponent of the Social Gospel, claimed, “As we have already seen, it is immigration which has fed fat the liquor power; and there is a liquor vote. Immigration furnishes most of the victims of Mormonism; and there is a Mormon vote. Immigration is the strength of the Catholic church; and there is a Catholic vote. Immigration is the mother and nurse of American socialism; and there is to be a socialist vote.”^[Strong, *Our Country*, 43.] Others, however, held the immigrant in higher regard and blamed an unfair system for the injustice that occurred due to their mass importation. In his home missions manual, Douglass asserted, "Home missions are the attempt of religion to turn the immigrant tide into channels of progress."^[Douglass, *The New Home Missions*, 113.] Regardless of the exact pressure point, immigration was a social dilemma to be fixed, and missions became redeeming the system by Christianizing it. This mission was accomplished primarily through education. Douglass wrote, “Home missions direct the local church in its large immediate ministries of social betterment, but are more fundamentally concerned with the duty of advocacy and education.”^[Douglass, *The New Home Missions*, 152.] As an example of healthy missions practices, he described a mission agency mediating labor negotiations in a small city where the workforce had begun to strike.^[Douglass, *The New Home Missions*, 137–42.] Gladden argued, >A great part of the inspiring work committed to your hands, my brethren, is to awaken and foster the sentiment of community, the spirit of fraternity, the feeling that business of citizenship is a high and sacred function. There may be some who would doubt the wisdom of socializing, to any greater extent, the mechanism of the state, but there can be none who will question the immense importance of socializing the individual, — of teaching every man in society to think and speak and act with the welfare of the community continually in view.^[Washington Gladden, *Social Salvation* (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1902), 1–247.] The mission was to enlighten the masses, in this case immigrants, so they would better contribute to society. Ultimately, the mission centered around transforming society into the coming Kingdom of God, and in doing so loosed its moors from the local church and deemphasized evangelism. Douglass wrote, “Frequently when civic agencies of social betterment are perfected the institutional church is found to be no longer necessary. But where it is needed and when it is needed it is a fundamental form of Christian service.”^[Douglass, *The New Home Missions*, 105.] Douglass continues by insisting that adherents of other religions, such ad Jews and Catholics, would eventually experience an evolution of their own religion into "essential Christianity."^[Douglass, *The New Home Missions*, 122–23.] Thus, the social gospel reimagined the missionary task. Missions methods in this vein of Protestantism reimagined the immigration situation as a primarily social problem that needed a social solution. Others reacted against its message, reasserting the primacy of evangelism in the mission of the church. In a missions manual from 1920, Roy Guild critiqued the efforts of the social gospel movement, “By common consent the entire Church is saying, ‘We need the evangel of the Son of God’—the note which the Church first sounded and which is the keynote on which her whole message is based. No social gospel can take the place of a spiritual gospel. It is rather the spiritual gospel which must precede and embody every social message that is to help the world.”^[Roy B. Guild, *Community Programs for Cooperating Churches: A Manual of Principles and Methods* (New York: Association Press, 1920), 61.] Missionary efforts among immigrants by those unconvinced of the Social Gospel placed a priority on gospel proclamation and a necessity of spiritual conversion. Their writings are permeated with the cry for gospel witness among the strangers in their midst. Sherman Doyle pleaded with his fellow Presbyterians, “If we are called upon to send the gospel to foreigners in their homes, an infinitely greater obligation rests upon us to preach to them in our own land.”^[Doyle, *Presbyterian Home Missions*, 240.] Likewise, Antonio Mangano asked of his Baptist brethren, “What is necessary to make the church awaken to her great responsibility and duty? She cannot help but hear the cry of the man from Macedonia, pleading in an unknown tongue for help to learn about God. Will the young men and the young women of today turn a deaf ear to the call of the foreigner in America?”^[Mangano, *Sons of Italy*, 184.] This did not, however, lead to the neglect of compassion or the meeting of human needs. Guild asserted, “The evangelism that does not plan for the community is socially deficient and the community service which is not evangelistic in its spirit and program is spiritually deficient.”^[Guild, *Community Programs for Cooperating Churches*, 79.] The immigrant’s greatest need was the gospel; however, this did not remove his other needs. >[!Note:] Presentation Note: >Due to space constraints, I've omitted the examples I discovered in my research of evangelistic mission that included the meeting of physical needs. Several denominations and churches had examples of such ministry that included meeting new arrivals at the pier, gospel tracts in hand, and helping newcomers get settled in the new country. Other examples met the needs for employment or training in skills that would allow immigrants to get jobs. Some denominations, like the Southern Baptist Convention, employed fulltime missionaries in port cities to work directly with immigrants. Among those who prioritized evangelism, a focus was also placed on the local church, a focus often lacking in the works dedicated solely to social Christianity. #### A Blindspot: Americanization as a Missions Imperative While home missions methods toward immigrants varied concerning convictions about social Christianity and the overall posture toward immigrants, virtually all Protestants were in agreement in terms of Americanization. For their part, Protestant Americans agreed with the imperative of Americanization for new immigrants and made it a significant piece of their missionary methods toward those immigrants. Handy writes, “Most Protestants in the America of 1890 saw themselves as belonging both to a denominational tradition and to the national religion, a religion of civilization, and they experienced little or no tension between them. More than they knew, evangelicals were convinced that theirs was a Christian civilization on the way to victory and perfection.”^[Handy, *A Christian America*, 99.] Missionary methods followed this confidence in the imperative to Americanize the immigrant as part of the Christian mission. Josiah Strong’s Our Country, written in 1885 and one of the most influential home missions manuals of the era, forcefully asserts the imperative of Americanization in Protestant home missions. Strong claims world evangelization is the spiritual responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon, American Protestants and that this goal included the civilizing of other peoples as part of the Christian mission. He claims, >It is not necessary to argue to those for whom I write that the two great needs of mankind, that all men may be lifted up into the light of the highest Christian civilization, are, first, a pure, spiritual Christianity, and, second, civil liberty. Without controversy, these are the forces which, in the past, have contributed most to the elevation of the human race, and they must continue to be, in the future, the most efficient ministers to its progress. It follows, then, that the Anglo-Saxon, as the great representative of these two ideas, the depositary of these two greatest blessings, sustains peculiar relations to the world’s future, is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper.^[Strong, *Our Country*, 161.] Dealing with immigration is one of Strong’s primary perils for Protestant Americans concerning home missions. Strong writes, “We may well ask—and with special reference to the West—whether this in-sweeping immigration is to foreignize us or we are to Americanize it.”^[Strong, *Our Country*, 45.] In many ways, Strong’s framework of immigration as peril sets the stage for subsequent commitments to Americanization of immigrants as a necessary aspect of the Christian mission.^[Strong, *Our Country*, 180, speaks of the Christian mission in a conditional manner, noting that the perils listed in his work must be overcome for the kingdom to be realized in the United States and subsequently across the world.] Grose, who wrote with sympathy and optimism concerning immigration, holds Americanization and Christianization together as twin sides of a coin, one almost inevitably requires the other. He writes, >There are three great bonds which bind men together: community of race, language, and religion. Religion is strongest of the three. The Christian is interested in the immigrant as a FOREIGNER [sic] and as a MAN [sic]. As foreigner he needs to be Americanized; as man he needs to be Christianized; and to Christianize him is to make his assimilation easy. Irish Protestants are much more easily assimilated than Irish Roman Catholics. The same is true of the French and German. The Welsh, like the Scotch, sink into the great stream of our national life as snowflakes sink into a river, and the reason is that to a man they are earnest Protestants.^[Grose, The Incoming Millions, 197–98.] To be a good American, one must be a good Protestant; to be a good Protestant, one must be a good American. The weaving of Christianization and Americanization together worked in both directions. ## Moving Toward Contemporary Missionary Practice The United States is presently experiencing what many call its second great wave of immigration.^[Greg Toppo and Paul Overberg, “Second Immigration Wave Reshapes Nation,” *USA Today* (October 2014). See also, Mark Hugo Lopez and Jeffrey Passel, *Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065*, tech. rep. (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2015), 127.] As the country with the largest population of immigrants, the United States serves as home to over forty million, making up approximately twenty percent of all global migrants.^[Abby Budiman, Key Findings About U.S. Immigrants, tech. rep. (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, August 2020.] In 2018, the foreign-born share of the United States population hit its highest point since 1910 at 13.7 percent, or 44.5 million people.^[Sabrina Tavernise, “U.S. Has Highest Share of Foreign-Born Since 1910, with More Coming from Asia,” The New York Times (September 2018).] Furthermore, the United States is the most diverse country in the world, housing immigrants from virtually every other nation on the planet.^[Budiman, Key Findings.] While many of these people are lawful arrivals to the United States, the number of undocumented and unlawful entries has peaked to unprecedented levels since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the seven months between May and November of 2023, United States Customs and Border Patrol removed or returned over 400,000 individuals, most through the southwest border of the United States. That number is approximately the same as the entire year of 2019 and more than the totals of 2015-2018 combined.^[*CBP Releases November 2023 Monthly Update*, Press Release (https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-releases-november-2023-monthly-update, December 2023).] News coverage uses language similar to that used during the first wave of immigration. Immigrants once again surge and overwhelm.^[Alicia Caldwell, “Migrant Surge Overwhelms Border Agents as Smugglers Target Remote Stretches,” *Wall Street Journal* (December 2023).] As concerns mount among the general American population, evangelicals also navigate their response to immigration. During the Gilded Age, missions toward immigrants fell into divided paradigms of opportunity and threat. The contemporary evangelical response suffers the same stratification. According to Darren Sherkat and Derek Lehman, religious commitments among United States citizens account for both positive and negative dispositions toward immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants.^[Darren Sherkat and Derek Lehman, “Bad Samaritans: Religion and Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Muslim Sentiment in the United States,” Social Science Quarterly 99.5 (November 2018): 1791.] Furthermore, sentiment concerning immigrants and Christian engagement are not consistent based on denominational affiliation, with constituencies ranging across a spectrum of positions inside each denomination. Some evangelical leaders communicate concerning immigration from a threat paradigm.^[Carol Kuruvilla, “Here’s How Franklin Graham Justifies Trump’s Expected Refugee Ban,” *Huffington Post* (January 2017), recounts the rationale of Franklin Graham concerning Muslim bans in the United States, and notes that he both called for them in 2015 and supported Trump’s call for a Muslim ban in 2017.] Others urge tolerance and positive engagement.^[Sarah McCammon, “Evangelical Groups Tell Political Leaders: ’Jesus Was A Refugee’,” *NPR* (November 2015).] One difficulty in discussing sentiments today is the lack of clarity in how Christian leaders are defined. If one differentiates between religious leaders and political leaders who claim adherence to an evangelical denomination, differences begin to emerge. Many evangelical religious leaders—those whose role is within the church or an adjacent institution—across denominations urge an openness and tolerance toward immigration for the sake of the gospel.^[Sherkat and Lehman, “Bad Samaritans.” See also McCammon, “Evangelical Groups Tell Political Leaders,” for coverage of the National Evangelical Association’s statements concerning care for immigrants.] The threat paradigm, on the other hand, is more prominent among political leaders who claim to be evangelical. Sherkat writes, “[P]olitical leaders who identify with conservative Protestant sects like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assembly of God are almost uniformly opposed to immigration reform, many are supportive of building a wall on the southern border with Mexico, and there appears to be considerable support for excluding Muslims from immigration.”^[Sherkat and Lehman, “Bad Samaritans,” 1793, lists Republican Congressman Kevin Goode, a Southern Baptist, as one example who claims allowing Muslims into the country will endanger the preservation of American beliefs and values.] While policy positions concerning rules that govern immigrant intake do not equate to positions concerning missions methods by Christians toward immigrants, the threat paradigm is often given as a rationale and inevitably impacts perceptions of ministry toward immigrants as well. Sherkat concludes that the majority of Americans who identify with conservative Protestant denominations and, in particular, biblical literalism are more likely to agree with their political leaders than the religious leaders urging tolerance and opportunity for ministry.^[Sherkat and Lehman, “Bad Samaritans,” 1801.] Calls for Americanization of immigrants in home missionary practice may not be as explicit today; nevertheless, contemporary missions practices and implicit sentiments toward immigrants commonly require proficiency in American culture to understand the gospel and fit into a local expression of the church. Stockhausen details contemporary evangelical attitudes toward immigration, noting that evangelical openness toward immigrants and refugees in the middle of the twentieth century once again gave way to fears and resistance in the 1990s and since that time, certain branches of evangelicals have persisted in viewing immigrants as a threat to American society and Christian mission.^[Ulrike Elisabeth Stockhausen, The Strangers in Our Midst: American Evangelicals and Immigration from the Cold War to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 2.] Craig Ott reveals a level of dissonance between contemporary evangelical leaders and laity in response and sentiments concerning immigrants and refugees, claiming official evangelical organizations and national leaders encourage compassion while surveyed laity consistently register distrust and resistance even to the point of standing in tension with classic evangelical doctrines concerning human dignity, evangelism, and biblical authority.^[Craig Ott and Juan Carlos T´ellez, “The Paradox of American Evangelical Views on Immigration: A Review of the Empirical Research,” Missiology 47.3 (July 2019): 265.] Additionally, a recent Lifeway Research article indicates only two percent of evangelical respondents claim their local church is an influence on their understanding of immigrants and that only one in five respondents said their church had ever encouraged them to reach out to immigrants, let alone to do so in a way that is culturally sensitive or contextual.^[Evangelical Views on Immigration, tech. rep. (LifeWay Research, 2015), 16–17, http://lifewayresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Evangelical-Views-on-Immigration-Report.pdf.]