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 Had they stopped to consider the matter, the members of the Laos Mission would have described themselves as individuals of conventional piety and orthodox theology. They did not engage in creative, speculative theological reflections, partly because they felt no reason for doing so and partly because the pressures of missionary work left them little time for such exercises. Their writings and their activities, nonetheless, reveal a consistent worldview, which allowed them to make sense out of their mission and their personal lives. At the center of that worldview sat a fundamental observation about the nature of all of reality and, in particular, about the relationship between Protestant Christianity and northern Thai Buddhism. That observation provides an important introduction into the lager web of their beliefs.
One day early in 1882 workmen uncovered a long-buried Buddha image in the Chiang Mai mission compound, once the site of a Buddhist temple. Local tradition had preserved knowledge of the image, and people often entered the compound at night to leave offerings for it. Jonathan Wilson, a senior missionary, ordered the image dug up, and a large crowd quickly gathered to see the five-foot, headless sacred image. The next day, much to the horror of the people, Wilson took an axe to the image, destroyed it entirely, and spread its rubble on a compound foot path, a particularly sacrilegious disposal of the venerable image. A colleague wrote that his action cause "quite a stir."
Although as far as is known no other member of the Laos Mission ever desecrated a Buddha image, Wilson's radical act revealed the fact that he believed that a wide gap existed between Protestant Christianity and northern Thai Buddhism. They represented, in fact, two distinct, mutually antagonistic spheres that shared nothing.
Daniel McGilvary articulated this dualistic attitude about the world as clearly as any other member of the mission. In December 1867, for example, McGilvary explained to the chao muang of Chiang Mai that he had moved to Chiang Mai to teach "the true religion," an obligation he must fulfill no matter what the danger or hardship. When other people repeated asked why the McGilvary came to Chiang Mai, they replied that they came to Chiang Mai with a message of mercy and an offer of "eternal life from the great God and Saviour." The first sphere, then, encompassed the Christian religion, truth, mercy, and eternal life, and the Laos Mission acted as the agent of this sphere in seeking to expand its bounds into northern Siam.
In 1880 McGilvary described the second sphere, northern Thai Buddhism, as a decaying, tottering, comfortless edifice based on an absurd system of beliefs. People
Edna S. Cole, "From Chieng Mai," Woman's Work for Woman 12 (November 1882): 367-68. cf. Backus, Siam and Laos, 452-53. See also Holt S. Hallet, A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1890), 109.
McGilvary to Irving, 17 December 1867, vol. 3, BFM Records.
McGilvary, A Half Century,, 78-9.
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accepted it only because they had no alternatives. Twenty-four years later he debated with a young, articulate Buddhist abbot concerning the form and content of their two religions and proved, he felt, that Buddhism was unreasonable, abstract, and failed to base itself on fact. He called it a "philosophy of despair" and exclaimed, "what a gulf between the Buddha and the Christ!" At other times, McGilvary charged that Buddhism was an agent of darkness and Satan which propagated a system of lies an created in its followers a stolid indifference to the world. He extended this condemnation to include the animistic practices the people combined with their Buddhism into a popular religion. That combination, according to McGilvary, made the northern Thai demon worshippers as well as idolaters. In sum, McGilvary believed that northern Thai popular religion was inconsistent, incoherent, contradictory, and thoroughly false.
All the members of the Laos Mission up to 1889 shared McGilvary's dualistic views. Wilson, not surprisingly, believed that the missionaries went to northern Siam to fulfill the explicit command of Christ to convert the entire world to Christianity. He claimed that Buddhism involved little more than "silly rituals" based on a "cold and gloomy" philosophy. He despaired over the corrosive influences the false teachings of Buddhism had on the people. After a particularly frustrating day distributing tracts at a Bangkok temple, he complained, "this idolatry in Siam. How cold, forbidding, delusive, dark, degrading. The heart sickens at such sights." Wilson acted on his beliefs in 1882 when he destroyed the Buddha image. He also expressed his views in 1874 when he discovered a mission employee conducting a spirit propitiation ceremony on the mission's grounds. He seized the various pieces of equipment and the offering, angrily threw them out a window, and demanded that the employee leave the premises. Wilson, in fact, displayed particularly rigid, extreme views and an equally vivid, emotional disdain for Buddhism.
Yet, even missionaries like Dr. Vrooman, the man of "suspect" theological views, shared Wilson's general feelings about Buddhism. Vrooman disparaged Buddhism as a superstition involving the worship of evil spirits and "dumb idols." Chalmers Martin, a
McGilvary to Irving, 11 June 1880, vol. 4, BFM Records.
Daniel McGilvary, "The Buddha or Christ," Laos News 1 (October 1904): 109-111.
Daniel McGilvary, "Two Days among the Laos near Petchaburi, Siam," Foreign Missionary 23 (September 1864); McGilvary to Irving, 19 April 1867, vol. 3, BFM Records, 100; McGilvary, "Laos Mission.—Chiengmai," Foreign Missionary 26 (May 1868): 279-81; McGilvary to Irving, 12 January 1869, vol. 3, BFM Records; McGilvary, letter, 28 June 1869, Foreign Missionary 28 (March 1870): 229-32; and McGilvary, Annual Report of the Laos Mission, 1 October 1875 to 1 October 1876, vol. 3, BFM Records.
McGilvary quoted in Backus, Siam and Laos, 426; McGilvary, letter, 10 October 1876, Foreign Missionary 35 (February 1877): 282; and McGilvary, letter, 20 May 1878, Foreign Missionary 37 (October 1878): 153.
Wilson to Irving, 24 July 1868, vol. 3, BFM Records; and Wilson to Irving, 31 August 1882, vol. 4, BFM Records.
Wilson, letter, 8 April 1862, quoted in "The Missionary Work in Siam," Foreign Missionary 21 (august 1862): 82.
Wilson, letter, 5 June 1874, Foreign Missionary 33 (December 1874): 215.
Vrooman to Irving, 6 February 1872, vol 3, BFM Records; and Vrooman, report, Foreign Missionary 32 (July 1873): 55-6
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decade after his brief stay in northern Siam, published a vivid description of "heathenism," specifically including Buddhism," in which he emphasized the falsity, dishonesty, impurity, and hopelessness of heathen religions. A book published by the Presbyterian Church in 1884 based on missionary correspondence characterized northern Thai religion as a "hideous "superstition of "benighted" beliefs playing on the credulity of the people.
The first sphere, then, included truth and true religion while the second sphere contained falsehood and false religion. These two spheres, however, extended to include much more than just religion. The missionaries believed that every aspect of life shared in the characteristics of the sphere within which people found themselves so that, in this case, the whole of northern Thai culture and society was lost in hopeless sinfulness. In the midst of a severe malaria epidemic in 1884, Kate Wilson begged American Christians to send more help to northern Siam, pleading that the northern Thai not be left in the ignorance, helplessness, and loneliness of heathenism. She wrote, "Do not leave them while they are crying out for help, with tears of sorrow running down their cheeks. Do not leave them while they are groping their way to the cross." A year earlier, Edna Cole questioned whether even Christian converts could truly shed the taint of ignorance and deadness. She wrote, "Oh, these people, even the Christians are dead! dead!" McGilvary and his compatriots believed that the influence o Buddhism and of animism permeated and corrupted all of northern Thai life. McGilvary himself wrote about the power of the whole social system of customs and "superstitions" which went with "priest-craft" and claimed that Satan had for ages held "undisputed sway" over northern Siam. Summarizing in a few words his belief that heathenism tainted all of northern Thai society, McGilvary wrote that it was "a nation given to idolatry."
In that condition the nation, not just the religion, lacked the ingredients of a true civilization, making it not only heathen but also uncivilized. McGilvary felt the impact of that sociocultural condition from the moment he arrived in Chiang Mai in 1867. He found himself in a place that lacked everything he equated with civilization. He felt cut off socially and sensed that his family had "come out from civilization" to a place that had no presses, no schools, no commerce, and no European society. American and Europe mean civilization while northern Siam lacked it.
Religion, nevertheless, determined the condition of society and culture. Protestant Christianity encouraged the growth of civilization while Buddhism resulted in
Martin, Apostolic and Modern Missions, 106-08.
Backus, Siam and Laos, 504-09. For a similar by more extensive exposition of the same views, see Curtis, The Laos, 178ff.
See Hughes, Proclamation and Response, 7-12.
K.M. Wilson, "Shadows in Laos," Woman's Work for Woman 14 (May 1884): 149-50.
Cole, "The Laos Mission," Woman's Work for Woman 13 (March 1883): 83.
McGilvary, Summary of a report published in Foreign Missionary 28 (July 1869):31; McGilvary, letter [February 1859], Foreign Missionary 28 (September 1869): 82; McGilvary, Annual Report of the Laos Mission, 1 October 1875 to 1 October 1876, vol. 3, BFM Records; and McGilvary, letter, 10 October 1876, Foreign Missionary 35 (February 1877): 284
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an uncivilized condition, and that contrast meant that the Laos Mission looked upon northern Siam as a vast field of battle and itself as living in the midst of "enemy country." Satan commanded the enemy forces while it, on the other hand, represented the army of God invading Satan's territory. Quite often, in fact, the missionaries employed military allusions and terms when they wrote about their work. they called themselves "generals" and spoke of the Christian converts as the troops in "God's militia." They "invaded" new villages" and "consolidated their lines" when training new converts. Buddhist monks, temples, and revivals represented instruments of Satan and his forces of darkness.
The missionaries expressed the nature of their war with heathenism in moral terms. They battled the degrading influences that heathenism had on the moral fiber of northern Thai society with the truth of the Christian religion. Heathens lived in filth and dirt. They lacked ambition. They gambled, drank, and engaged in perverse sex. They lived in dark, unsanitary hovels dominated by family bickering and strife. Tough outwardly friendly, the northern Thai displayed cowardice, maliciousness, and hypocrisy. They had no honor. Christian converts, on the other hand, immediately displayed the moral benefits of their new religion. They became cleaner, happier, less ignorant, and even more ambitious as a result of their condition. They lived in better homes and exemplified the opposite of all the evil and filthy traits of the unconverted heathen."
Missionary dualism, then, divided the world into two incompatible spheres, one good and one evil, one moral and one immoral, one Christian and one Buddhist, and everything associated with each sphere took on the essential qualities of that sphere. The missionaries used dualistic thinking to explain their purpose for working in northern Siam. They used it, furthermore, to contrast the characteristics of their religion and society from those of the northern Thai, thereby gaining a secure self-definition in the face of an alien culture. Dualism allowed them to make moral judgments about what was good and bad and how they and their converts should conduct themselves. From dualism, in short, they justified their presence in northern Siam, their beliefs about it and themselves, and their goals and activities.
Without such self-justification, the Laos Mission could not have accomplished anything in northern Siam. the missionaries lived in what Peter Berger would describe as a "marginal situation" that threatened their definitions of reality with an alien, competing set of definitions. An alien society, Berger writes, poses a threat because it demonstrates that one's own beliefs, values, and ideas are not inevitable. There are alternatives. Berger also notes that people experience such marginal situations as a "night side" of life,
McGilvary to Irving, 19 April 1867, vol. 3, BFM Records; McGilvary to Irving, 17 December 1867, vol. 3, BFM Records; McGilvary, "Laos Mission.—Chiengmai," Foreign Missionary 26 (May 1868): 280-81; McGilvary, Summary of a report published in Foreign Mission 28 (July 1869): 31; and McGilvary, A Half Century, 70.
McGilvary to Irving, 12 July 1869, vol. 3, BFM Records; McGilvary, letter 10 October 1876, Foreign Missionary 35 (February 1877): 283-84; Dodd, Thai Race, 166; and Swanson, Khrischak Muang Nua, 40.
See Hughes, "Christianity and Culture," 74-5; Cort, The Laos, passim; Edna S. Cole, letter, Woman's Work for Woman 10 (September 1880): 319; Wilson to Lowrie, 23 July 1880, vol. 4, BFM Records; and S. C. Peoples, letter, 14 January 1886, Foreign Missionary 45 (June 1886). See also, W. A. Briggs, "Missions Among the Laos of Indo-China—1," Missionary Review of the World 12 (April 1899): 268; and Katherine Andrews Denman, "the Laos Woman's Ordinary Life," Woman's Work for Woman 16 (May 1901): 132-33.
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death being the paradigmatic "marginal situation." Missionary descriptions of northern Thai Buddhism and culture suggest that in their isolation from their own culture they experienced northern Thai society as a threat. It represented evil. It was the enemy. They often used the word "dead" to describe its fundamental condition. Dualism provided an over-all cognitive framework that allowed the missionaries to securely define themselves and cope with the apparently dangerous environment within which they worked.
The Laos Mission did not hold its dualism in isolation from the rest of the nineteenth-century American Protestant missionary movement. Throughout the world the Protestant missionaries acted time and again on the premise that the world divided itself into tow sides, those for and those against God. Nowhere in the world did Protestant missionaries make that distinction any more precisely and consistently than did the corps of men and women who worked among the American Indians. The dualism of the missionaries to the Indians was particularly notable because Indian missions preceded and influenced the emergence of the American foreign missionary movement.
The attitudes of Presbyterian missionaries towards the Indians in the period 1837 to 1893, for example, revealed a pattern of beliefs strikingly similar to the dualism of the Laos Mission. Just as in northern Siam, so on the frontier Presbyterian missionaries divided the world into the "saved" and the damned." And just as in northern Siam, Presbyterian missionaries to the Indians extended the spheres of salvation and damnation to cover all of society. They believed, on the one hand, that all of the most impressive scientific, technological, philosophical, and intellectual achievements of the West must be attributed to the influence of Protestantism on society. Indian societies, on the other hand, displayed the essential unity of "heathenism." They fell short of the standards of western (American) civilization and needed Christianity to escape their condition. Presbyterian missionaries called the Indians pagans, idolaters, degenerate devil worshippers, wretched, lost, and superstitious, categories similar to those used by the Presbyterians in northern Siam. they, too, believed that this 'spiritual" condition corrupted Indian morality causing them to be unfeeling, sexually immoral, irresponsible, liars, dirty, and lazy, among other categorizations. The missionaries clung rigidly to their cognitive universe in which the distinct spheres of the civilized and the heathen stood in total and irreconcilable conflict. Even Indian converts remained tainted and suspect because they may not have cast off their old heathenism.
The Presbyterian missionaries to the Indians shared their dualistic attitudes with other Protestant missionaries. They all believed, to one extent or another, that they had to
Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 147-48; Berger, Sacred Canopy, 23-4, 44-5; and Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 125-27, 138.
Michael Coleman, "Presbyterian Missionaries and Their Attitudes to the American Indians, 1837-1893," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977), 79, 80, 86.
Coleman, "Presbyterian Missionaries," 97-110; and Michael Coleman, "Not Race, but Grace: Presbyterian Missionaries and American Indians, 1837-1893," Journal of American History 67 (June 1980): 41-6.
Coleman, Presbyterian Missionaries," 224-27.
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"civilize" as well as Christianize the Indians, and most of them believed that the two tasks were inseparable. They all believed in the essential unity of each of the two spheres, accepting as given that the sphere of civilization and Christianity was essentially good and moral. Heathenism and savagism, on the other hand, damned the Indians to a degraded, immoral, uncivilized existence.
Missionaries to the Indians did not stand alone in their dualistic views on distinctions between whites and Indians. Nineteenth-century white Americans in general hung their attitudes about the Indians on the ideas of "civilization," "savagism," and a rich set of cognate terms that, taken together, forcefully divided all of reality into two neat spheres. Dualism so insinuated itself into the thinking of nineteenth-century American culture that throughout the nineteenth century, white Americans tended to look on Indians as satanic. The Indians lived in a fallen, heathen, rude, unrefined, and immoral state. They failed to progress to a higher state of civilization, and by themselves they never could attain that higher state. Most white Americans, it seemed, concluded that the Indian failure to progress made them little more than wild beasts who posed a threat to frontier whites because prolonged contact with Indians could result in the "savagization" of whites, a reversal of the natural order of human progress. In the political arena, the Federal Government conducted its policy towards the Indians on the assumption that since the Indians lacked civilization it should Americanize and Christianize them. After the Civil War, the influential Indian Reform Movement encouraged the government to engage in a radical program of assimilation, which would turn the Indians into, settled, de-tribalized, middle class Christian farmers.
Dualism, in the context of white-Indian relations, served an important cognitive purpose. From colonial times onwards, white Americans defined the Indians as the antithesis of European civilization in order to preserve their sense of identity in a new, strange environment. European colonists, in danger of loosing their civilization in th wilds of North America, felt a deep-seated need to define themselves and their place as members of their new, apparently unique society. For generations thereafter, white Americans found solace and security in the fact that they were not like the Indians, that is dirty, immoral, backwards, and savage. They remained "civilized." Whereas the Indians had no future because they failed to progress, white American civilization seemed to them to have a glorious future.
Berkhofer, Robert F. Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 3-6, 11-13, 31-3.
Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), 22, 25, 48, 86-8.
Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979), 83-4; and Leroy V. Eid, "The Indian Contribution to the American Revolution," Midwest Quarterly 22 (Spring 1981): 282.
Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: the United States Government and the American Indians, abridged ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); and Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indians (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971).
Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, 4, 135; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1975), 127; Takaki, Iron Cages, 12-13; and Klaus J. Hansen, "The Millennium, the West, and Race in the Antebellum American Mind," Western Historical Quarterly 3 (October 1972): 379. Regarding the Presbyterians, see Fred J. Hood, Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783-1837 (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 75.
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The Laos Mission, thus, appropriated in dualism a cognitive tradition Americans had long used to define their relationship with an alien, threatening "other." In North America and in northern Siam, white Americans found themselves struggling to maintain their culture and identity at the margins of their own society. Dualism not only allowed them to preserve their own identity, but also created a satisfying set of categories for manipulating their world. Dualism made the world orderly and understandable even as it made social relationships manageable.
Although the English colonists in North America used dualism on the first alien people they encountered, the Indians, the English actually brought the inclination to divide the world into spheres of good and evil with them from the British Isles. They simply fit the Indians into an already well-established dualistic framework that had several sources. 7
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