by Laura Stevens
in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of Early America’s Religious Landscape, edited by Mark A. Nicholas and Joel Martin, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 179-200.
Through a survey of publications of the Society in Scotland for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) before... more
Through a survey of publications of the Society in Scotland for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) before the American Revolution, especially its anniversary sermons, occasional “Account[s]” and “State[s]”of the Society, this paper will consider the impact that this organization had on the discourse of British mission. It will attend especially to the parallel and mutually reinforcing positions that American Indians and Highlander Scots held in these texts as icons of domestic and foreign savagery, or residents of realms described, in a popular biblical reference, as “the dark places of the earth…full of the habitations of cruelty.” By presenting these two “uncivilized” peoples alongside each other, by stressing the ongoing need to convert them, and by proclaiming the dedication of a Scottish organization to this two-fold cause, the SSPCK was able to assert the centrality of a fully assimilated Scotland to Britain’s stability and global prominence, to argue that a shared goal of eradicating heathenism overrode minor differences between Englishmen and Scots, to define Britishness through sentiment and missionary effort rather than through ethnicity, geography, or sect, and to strengthen ties among Britons on both sides of the Atlantic. Objects of both compassion and fear in these sermons and tracts, Indians and Highlanders assisted in the development of a transoceanic British identity as one that combined Protestant Christian tenderheartedness with Enlightenment ideals in a determined effort to spread civilization both at home and abroad.
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