Raising “Little Doves” or “Birds of Prey”: Protestant Parenting Discourses amidst the Early U.S. Foreign Mission Movement

In an 1814 essay in the magazine The Panoplist and Missionary Magazine – flagship of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) – an anonymous author complained that Early U.S. Republican parents had gone soft on their children. Too often did they call them endearing names, such as “pretty innocents” or “little doves,” when instead “their unfledged offspring, should prove birds of evil omen, if not birds of prey.” This damning assessment of children as young as one year old as immoral tyrants stood in contrast to other opinion pieces published around the same time, which warned against parental tyranny and praised young Americans’ pious potential. Whether damning or optimistic, many U.S. Protestant parents agreed: the ABCFM – the first U.S. foreign missionary organization founded in 1810 – offered an ideal avenue to teach young American citizens principles of charity, Christian collectivism, and self-denial. This presentation will discuss ambivalent Early U.S. Republican Protestant discourses on parenting through the lens of The Panoplist and Missionary Magazine in the 1810s. It argues that the popular endeavor of foreign missions proved a crucial battleground for parents, theologians, and pedagogues to grapple with the role that childhood and children would take on in the juvenile nation and its theological errand to convert the world.

As my overall doctoral thesis seeks to demonstrate, it was this ambivalent interplay of anxiety and hopefulness – displayed in 1810s public discourses – that incrementally led to the central rhetorical and material role of children in the U.S. Christian imperial project of the nineteenth century.

- this seminars is free to attend but registration is required.