“Christianity is adequate to the work”

Scientific advances and a broader ethos of social reform during the Progressive Era set the stage for new models of foreign missions and public health. And yet, this ethos had problematic elements. The desire to address social ills in these movements was carried out in frameworks that were explicitly racist, so the era is marked both by admirable efforts to reduce social inequities and by an astounding blindness to the assumptions of white, Anglo-Saxon superiority. Politically, America continued its westward expansion and established a more robust, even confrontational, approach to foreign policy based on the idea of American exceptionalism that had its roots in American Christianity. By exploring these various movements, the chapter demonstrates the social-political influences of Christianity both in regard to social reform and to unabashed expansionism.