| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 1850–1924. By Jennifer C. Snow. (New York: Routledge, 2007. xx, 178 pp. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-415-95583-6.)
The purpose of Jennifer C. Snow's intriguing study is to demonstrate how the failed efforts of mainline Protestant missionaries on behalf of Chinese and Japanese immigrants (and the missionaries' silence on Indian immigration) shaped racial discourse on Asians in the United States between the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the National Origins Act of 1924. Snow maintains that the successful arguments of scientific racists, which resulted in the total exclusion of Asian immigrants from the United States by 1924, were formed in opposition to the advocacy of mainline Protestant missionaries.	1
Snow begins her study with the advent of Chinese immigration to the United States around 1850. Through missionary publications, northern evangelicals, who, fifty years later, formed the core of mainline, liberal Protestantism, promulgated the belief that the most important demarcation between world populations was the permeable line between "heathen" and "Christian." Missionary work was premised on the idea that it was both necessary and possible for "heathens" to become Christians. Snow argues that early missionary discourse about Asia and Asians was characterized by a "splendid non-attention to race"—its great concern was with "the souls of individuals" (p. 17). Missionaries saw the first immigration of Chinese and Japanese as unprecedented opportunities for evangelization. Conversion to Christianity, from the missionary viewpoint, would inevitably result in assimilation into American culture.	. . .

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