User:Sudsyque/Protestant Home Missions

Protestant Home Missions The term, “Protestant Home Missions”, describes the evangelism attempt made by the Protestant denominations in the United States in the late nineteenth century. In the wake of the Civil War, Protestants in the U.S. began to realize that their own country was in need of mission work provided by the church. The hub of Protestantism in the United States was in the Northeast, and coming out of the war, the northern churches were in a stronger position than the southern churches. The Protestants in the Northeast had managed to dramatically raise their standard of living since the early nineteenth century. Their goal after the war was to shift from individual salvation to corporate salvation in which they could “uplift” the uncivilized peoples to their standard of living and practice of Christianity.

The South
Following the Civil War the northern Protestants were in fear of losing political control because the freedmen would have the right to vote. They opted to send missionaries into the south to teach the freedmen how to read and exercise their political rights, and to start schools. Women were instrumental in this missionary process. Northern Protestant women were seen as the center of morality in their society. They entered the south as teachers and raised the literacy level by sixty five percent in forty years. The Blacks sought to model white Victorian morality in hopes that social decorum would weaken negative stereotypes and bring an end to racism.

The West
The Northern Protestants viewed the West as frontier land and those who lived there to be uncivilized. The goal for the Protestant missionaries was to bring civility to the westerners. To accomplish this they erected buildings, created institutional structures such as schools, hospitals, and orphanages, and establish patterns of living such as holidays and rituals. Women again played an instrumental role in the civilization of the west. They became missionaries and reached out to women of different ethnic backgrounds. They provided instruments of civilized living to the people of the west. They also protected women who were easily preyed upon by men.

The Cities
Cities represented a whole new complication for the Northern Protestants. They were full of non-English speaking immigrants and industrial laborers. To add to the issue, the Catholic Churches outnumbered the Protestant Churches, and the Catholic churches had parochial schools, colleges, and seminaries. The Protestants feared that society would lose its morality, so they set out to minister to the immigrants and workers. One response to this was a revival attempt made by Dwight L. Moody. He skipped the handouts to the poor and instead "fed" them with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The mainline response was to form social services like Goodwill Industries, The Salvation Army, and the YMCA. Another response was to attack the ill at its' root: Alcohol. The Women's Christian Temperance Union was born out of this movement and it sought to instill Prohibition in the United States in order to maintain societal morality.