From the early nineteenth century through the middle twentieth century, foreign and domestic missionaries ranked among the most conspicuous figures of American religious history. In many quarters they still do. “Don't apologize,” one academic quipped at a conference in India. “All Americans are missionaries.”

In 1873 an exhausted Catholic priest who had completed a successful mission reported to his bishop. Pleased with his priest's achievement, the bishop mused, “now that they are all in the grace of God, drown them in the river before they lose it.” How should we interpret this joke? It plays upon the belief that earthly life pales in importance to life after death. Even a cruel end such as drowning would be a small price to pay for eternal life. The joke also toys with the burdensome duties of the missionary as a supernatural agent of redemption. A mission demands exhausting days of preaching, exhortation, prayer, hearing confessions, and offering the Eucharist. The task, to lead sinners toward a state of grace, is onerous. So bishop and priest chuckle together. Murdering the laity—at the proper moment, before they sin again—would ease their pastoral load.

In the summer of 1756, Jonathan Edwards preached a simple yet extraordinary sermon to his Indian congregation at Stockbridge, Massachusetts where he had served as missionary for five years. He counseled his listeners that God “advises us to be friends to our own souls” by seeking after holiness. Edwards encouraged his Indian congregants to take tender care of their souls, to “forsake wickedness and seek after Holiness” and not to “act the part of Enemies of Enemies [sic] to your soul.“ This sermon could scarcely have been more different from one delivered to a gathering of the town's English children just a month earlier, in which Edwards railed at them that he would “rather go into Sodom and preach to the men of Sodom than preach to you and should have a great deal more hopes of success.” In this same sermon, Edwards demanded, “should I now think it worthy of my while to preach to you … were it not that I knew that God is almighty and he can make the word pierce your hearts tho' it be harder than a rock?”

In the last public act before his death, Benjamin Franklin parodied a proslavery speech in Congress by comparing it to a fictitious proslavery address “anno 1687” by a North African Muslim, a pirate named Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. Like proslavery southerners, the Algerian argued that he could not countenance the end of Christian slavery because it would hurt the interests of the Algerian state, there would be no way to compensate the Muslim slave masters, and nothing could safely be done with the freed slaves. Franklin's salvo against slavery was published in 1790 in major northern newspapers. His use of Muslims and Islamic images is one of the most famous in eighteenth-century America, but not unique. Islamic references pepper the public documents of early America, demonstrating that many were not only aware of the religion but also ready to use it as a rhetorical tool of argument. A close look at the uses of Islam in Anglo-American writing before 1800 shows that Franklin's use of the proslavery argument was another version of a well-established tradition: citing the similarities between an opponent's views and the “beliefs” of Islam as a means to discredit one's adversaries. Over the course of the eighteenth century, rhetorical uses of Islam became increasingly secularized. Early in the century, Islam was typically used for religious purposes in religious debates while later commentators often took knowledge “derived” from observations of despotic Islamic states to support political points. Although one should hesitate to describe early Americans as conversant with Islam, they certainly conversed about Islam regularly.

The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the modern American Protestant missionary spirit to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his self-appointed heirs, those Congregational ministers who came to be called New Divinity men. Edwards proposed a theology of cosmic redemption and supplied the exemplary missionary model in Life of Brainerd (1749), his most popular and most frequently reprinted work. Samuel Hopkins then furnished a theological rationale for missions by revising Edwards' aesthetic concept of “disinterested benevolence” into a practical one of self-denial for the greater glory of God's kingdom and the betterment of humankind.

In her controversial novel, No Graven Image (1966), former missionary and best-selling evangelical author Elisabeth Elliot described the visit of a zealous missions executive, Mr. Harvey, to observe her main character, missionary Margaret Sparhawk, working among the mountain Quichua Indians in Ecuador. Harvey, a pompous sort, arrived with two cameras slung around his neck and spent most of his visit snapping photographs. When Margaret suggested it was time to leave the home of Pedro, her Quichua language informant, Harvey demurred, not yet finished with his picture taking.

Figuring out exactly when the American missionary impulse started to wane is not an easy task. Some would say that the first nail in the coffin was Hannah Adams's 1784 Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects, purportedly an “impartial and comprehensive survey” of world religions. Others, looking at the millions of dollars that evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics continued to pour into the missionary effort at the end of the twentieth century, might well ask, incredulously, “What coffin?”