The Challenge of Race Relations: American Ecumenism and Foreign Student Nationalism, 1900–1940

Abstract

American missionary movements in the nineteenth century contributed to the increasing numbers of foreign students in the United States. Many of those foreign students came from non-western societies where American missionaries were active. The missionaries encouraged and helped young natives of other lands to come to the United States for Christian education with the belief that American education was a vital process for training indigenous leaders for Christianity. Missionaries of different denominations tended to recommend students to the educational institutions they were affiliated with. For instance, Methodist missionaries directed the students to educational institutions of the Methodist Church; the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the Catholics, and other denominations did likewise.William Wheeler, Henry King, and Alexander Davidson, eds., The Foreign Student in America (New York: Association Press, 1925), 270. They hoped that the students, upon completion of their studies, would go back to their homelands to assume leadership in spreading Christianity.