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 At some point around 1980 or thereafter, the Payap College Manuscript Division (now Payap University Archives) received a set of microfilm records of the Presbyterian Church's Siam and Laos Missions donated by Dr. Maen Pongudom. Dr Maen had just completed his landmark dissertation on American Presbyterian missionary attitudes towards Buddhism in Thailand, and he was kind enough to deposit this very important set of microfilmed records with the Manuscript Division. As the Head of the Division (and the only native language speaker of English on the staff), I took it upon myself to prepare the "finding aid" for these records and to that end began to delve into the contents of the microfilms. They contain the field correspondence and reports of all of the Presbyterian missionaries who served in Siam and northern Siam between 1840 and 1910, and the more I read these records the more upset I became. Back in the 1980s most missionaries and many Thai church leaders in the Church of Christ in Thailand believed that the Thai church was weak and leaderless because of the nature of Thai culture and society. One heard, not infrequently, the statement, "That's just the way they are," referring to "the Thai." What I found in the records of the missions, however, told a very different story. They revealed a massive prejudice against Thai culture, society, and religion embodied in missionary attitudes, behavior, and mission policies. Swinging to the other extreme, I came to feel that the churches were "the way they were" because of the missionaries!
 My first reaction was anger, and I vented that anger in my privately published book, Khrischak Muang Nua. My second reaction was a deeper puzzlement regarding American Presbyterian missionary strategy, especially in northern Thailand. The missionaries, so far as I could see, went about their evangelistic enterprise in a manner guaranteed to minimize the number of converts they would gain while creating a great deal of friction with northern Thai society. They, furthermore, emphasized modernization at the expense of work with their churches, which again seemed obviously counter-productive over the long run. Behind the vagaries of health and personality conflicts, there also lay an almost all-pervasive approach to missions that wittingly eschewed the contextualization or accommodation of the Christian message. Why?
It was clear from the records that the missionaries brought their attitudes and prejudices with them from the United States, and the answer to my question could best be answered by further study of the American sources of missionary ideology and behavior. In the Fall of 1984, my family and I moved to Laurel, Maryland, and I took up studies in history at the University of Maryland. From the beginning, I intended to find an answer to my question about the nature of Presbyterian missionary motivation. The result of my search is this thesis.
Although not without its challenges and problems, I enjoyed the research and writing process and came away from UMD with an M.A. in American social history. I returned to Chiang Mai in January 1988, however, feeling that I had not actually found a satisfying answer to my question. The immediate sources of Presbyterian missionary thought in nineteenth-century northern Siam were still not clear to me, although I did have a much better idea of the larger American cultural attitudes, values, and belief systems the missionaries drew on to shape their policies in the North. But, how did they acquire those attitudes, values, and belief systems? That question lay fallow for more than a decade, awaiting further research, which I was finally able to carry out in the research I did for my doctoral dissertation, "Prelude to Irony."
"This Heathen People," nonetheless, represents an important step forward in my own thinking about Presbyterian missionary attitudes and their practice of mission in northern Thailand. As much as I enjoy the study of the past, I was never particularly interested in American church history until I started to do the research for this thesis. What I found was that the study of American Christianity and the church in the United States encompasses a rich variety of subjects, fields, and exciting issues that touch directly on the life of the churches of Thailand. I also began to appreciate the complexities of the worldviews that Presbyterian missionaries inherited from their own culture and times. It became clear that they brought with them to Siam a conservative evangelical fund of "common wisdom" widely accepted in their own nation, a wisdom that only a very few of them ever questioned or tried to transcend. Another thing I discovered was the crucial relationship between Western philosophical traditions and church history in Thailand, a theme that only emerges with more clarity in my doctoral research.
This thesis also marked an important step in my understanding of how Western cultures, including my own, have dealt with other cultures around the world. While it is nothing new to many, for me the discovery of the Euro-centric concept of dualism, which European colonists imported into North America, has helped me to better understand missionary history and my own personal story. This is not to say that Asian cultures are without their own dualistic attitudes towards the world around them. Ethnic Thais, for example, have inherited a dualism that divides space into opposing spheres of civilized territory and wilderness. Anything having to do with the forest, thus, is considered dangerous and even evil, including the "forest people" (khon pa) who live there—hence the nasty prejudice many lowland Thais hold against hill tribal Thais (Karen, Lahu, etc.). Western dualism, however, has traditionally divided space on religious grounds into incompatible spheres of good and evil, God and Satan. In the United States, at least, this dualistic approach taints nearly all of American cultures. Ronald Regan's famous description of the former Soviet Union as an "evil empire" is a notable example of how Americans look at the world generally.
The years that I worked on "This Heathen People," 1984 through 1987, have many happy associations for me and for my family. We lived in Laurel, Maryland, and involved ourselves in the life of the Laurel Presbyterian Church. My history of that congregation is a by-product of the research I was already doing on Presbyterian missionary history. I did most of the research for this thesis at McKeldin Library in the days when the on line catalog was just coming into use. The endless hours at McKeldin were good hours. That was the "old" McKeldin with its dim & dingy old-fashioned stacks that snaked through the building here and there.
In the greater world of historical scholarship, "This Heathen People" is an exceedingly humble piece of journeyman's history. In the much smaller world of the study of Thai church history, it represents an important second step in the academic development of that field. I mentioned Dr. Maen's dissertation above. Dr. Maen first explored some of the themes that I later took up, and he was the one who initiated the critical historiographical study of the Western missionary movement in Thailand. Unfortunately, once Dr. Maen returned to Thailand his life took several turns all of them leading him away from further historical research and writing. For better and for worse, I took it upon myself to build on this work by pursuing further critical study of the Presbyterian missionaries (and, eventually, others).
"This Heathen People" is an important work in the study of Thai church and missions history, and I am glad to finally get it up and running on this website. I trust it will be of some use to visitors to herbswanson.com. Please do remember that the thesis is protected by copyright laws and that it is not to be downloaded or copied in full. Shorter quotations for academic purposes are, however, perfectly in order. Enjoy!
Herb Swanson
Ban Dok Daeng
July 2006
This electronic version of "This Heathen People" differs from the original paper version in a number of minor ways. While I have not edited or changed in any way the contents as such, I have corrected a number of spelling mistakes and changed awkward wording in a couple of places. One stylistic change is using italics in place of underlining for the names of books and journals in the footnotes and bibliography. The University of Maryland had not yet adapted its thesis style sheet for computers in 1987, which meant that underlining was still the mandated style.
This edition, unlike my doctoral dissertation, differs from the original in pagination and formatting largely because I originally wrote "This Heathen People" on a MacPlus. In the process of moving it through several generations of Macs since 1987, some of the original formatting has been lost. The Introduction and Chapter Three both actually disappeared from my thesis folder entirely at some point in the dim past, and I had to scan them in thus introducing a number of mistakes, which I hope have all been corrected. Unfortunately, I was not able to capture the Thai script that I used for some citations in Chapter One, and I have had to substitute a translated English title for the Thai title.
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