ABSTRACT
One of the earliest Methodist missionaries to India, an Irish immigrant to America named William Butler, published a celebratory volume in 1885 for his fiftieth anniversary in the field. In it, he emphasized the power of Christianity-indeed, identified Christianity’s basic nature as empowering-the unity of all castes and races in equality of worship and life. “How Christian it looked,” he wrote of a worship service in Northern India, “to see all these varieties of color and race and class kneeling round that altar. The American, the English, the Sikh, the Rohilla, the Eurasian, along with the varieties of caste from the Brahmin to the Pariah, ‘all one in Christ Jesus.’”1 Yet in that same year, home missionary Josiah Strong published his famous work excoriating the “feeble races” and exhorting Anglo-Saxon Protestants to engage in religious and racial imperialism to which their God-given superiority entitled them.2
