The centrality of children to the missionary movement has been a growing area of study in recent years. Scholars, such as Karen Vallgårda and Emily J. Manktelow, have focused on children as the targets of missionaries’ proselytization and conversion efforts and children within missionary families. Yet less research exists about the participation of children, especially children whose parents were not missionaries, in the movement. In Protestant Children, Missions and Education in the British World, Hugh Morrison addresses this lacuna by uncovering the ways in which children in Britain and white settler colonies, particularly New Zealand and Canada, were actively involved in and supported the missionary movement. Morrison draws attention to the expansive purpose of the missionary movement, showing how it was a key site of identity formation and informal schooling that facilitated children's participation in empire-wide networks of information exchange. In doing so, Morrison enriches understandings of not only the missionary movement but also children's importance and multifaceted engagement with it.
One of the key themes of Protestant Children, Missions and Education is how philanthropy and pedagogy were intertwined in the missionary movement. Morrison examines this interrelationship in the section, “Children's Missionary Support: The Educational Imperative.” Children's involvement in the missionary movement has traditionally been viewed in terms of their financial contributions, but Morrison argues that the missionary movement was fundamentally an educational endeavor and shows how missionaries sought to nurture a “missionary spirit” in children. The next section, “Children's Missionary Periodicals and Pedagogy,” explores the educational dimensions more fully, focusing in particular on the prolific body of missionary literature. Imperial themes appeared regularly in juvenile missionary periodicals, making them probably the single largest source of information about foreign cultures and the wider world and creating an “empire-wide shared classroom” (49). Yet their purpose went beyond simply informing readers; such literature encouraged a participatory relationship, actively engaging children and uniting them around the common cause of Christian missions. In this chapter, Morrison provides an in-depth study of the New Zealand Presbyterian periodical, The Break of Day, to show how the friendly writing style cultivated a sense that children belonged to a shared community.
The construction of imagined communities within missionary periodicals and the intersections of missionary and imperial rhetoric is further analyzed in the next part on “Children, Missions, and Citizenship.” In this section, Morrison details how juvenile missionary literature and pedagogy informed the racial and cultural attitudes of its readers and developed ideas of citizenship. As reflected in the often pejorative and exotic descriptions of non-Christians in its literature and education programs, the missionary movement adopted imperial language, imagery, and symbols for religious purposes, specifically to encourage children to participate in Christian imperialism. Morrison traces how imperialism, nationalism, and Christianity could mutually reinforce one another but also how they existed in tension with one another. For instance, religion could complicate understandings of national and imperial identities by encouraging children to realize their greater obligations and responsibilities as Christian citizens and members of an inclusive global family.
The last main section, “Children, Missions and the Emotional Turn,” is more theoretical than other parts in the book. Despite the recent growth of interest in the history of emotions by childhood scholars, Morrison observes that this approach has not been applied to children's religious and missionary support, even though emotions were central in the missionary movement. Missionaries engaged the senses to garner support for their work, and emotional expression was integral to children's experiences of religion. To illustrate these points, Morrison describes the formation and practice of emotions across three different religious communities. In his first example, he discusses the enthusiastic responses during meetings of Christian Endeavour, a Protestant youth movement, at the Elgin Church in Scotland and shows how, despite some members’ reluctance, the movement's adult leaders accepted youthful outbursts at meetings, believing that emotional and spiritual engagement reinforced one another, and sought to harness their energies for missionary purposes. The second example focuses on St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Dunedin and how, like many Protestant churches, it sought to cultivate the right emotions and qualities in children—including reverence, generosity, and loyalty—and contributed to the internalization of accepted emotional norms through children's sermons, the Young Soldiers of the Cross group, and its publication, St. Andrew's Bible School News. The final example concerns the different emotional communities of settler and First Nation girls who attended All Hallows’ School in British Columbia and analyzes an essay by a First Nation girl to show the negotiations of different identities and power structures.
Uncovering children's role in the missionary movement is not an easy feat. As Morrison notes, statistics for children's missionary support are inconsistent and by no means comprehensive. The lack of sources about and especially by children makes it even more difficult for historians to identify the activities and voices of young people. However, through his assiduous study of missionary records and specifically his careful reading and analysis of missionary periodicals, Morrison provides new insights into the myriad ways in which young people were informed and active agents of missionary support. The book's innovative global-historical approach reveals similarities and differences in how missionary literature, pedagogical projects, and religious ideas were experienced across a variety of settings. This approach opens productive avenues for future research and especially further study about how children's participation in the missionary enterprise was differentiated by race, class, gender, and geography. Protestant Children, Missions and Education makes important contributions to a variety of fields—including religious history, childhood history, colonial history, the history of education, and the history of emotions—and Morrison's work demonstrates the value of bringing these different areas of study into conversation with one another.
