Politics and Religion at the Dinner Table Part VI

(Image: George Leile. First American Missionary. Pencil drawing by Janine Bessenecker.)

The Corporate-Capitalist Non-Profit

Expanded and adapted from Overturning Tables by Scott A. Bessenecker. Copyright (c) 2014 by Scott A. Bessenecker. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com

The Western Hemisphere in the late eighteenth century was convulsing. A slave revolt in Haiti plunged that French colony into civil war, France itself was in turmoil and the colonies in America were asserting their independence.

The industrial revolution of that period had been feeding the rise of capitalism as a major global force, and it was shattering the boulders of wealth held by aristocratic families who governed the earth. The rise of Capitalism sent pieces of mammon hurtling to earth in the shape of corporations—a new, wealth-holding entity which was neither a family nor a state. This new body was ruled by tbose who knew how to take raw materials like cotton or iron, combine it with working class or slave labor and generate profit for themselves and their investors.

The modern Protestant non-profit and the foreign missions society which emerged during these convulsive years was indelibly marked by the capitalist landscape in which they were born. Many philanthropists earned their fortunes through massive capitalist industries; dynasties like the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts (also known as America’s “Robber Barons”) invested heavily in their Protestant churches and in the social programs associated with those churches. They were architects of the existing non-profit industry operating with a corporate-Capitalist worldview.

The Judson Mission

In the early 1800s, Adoniram Judson and a handful of other collegians forged a secret missionary society with the hope of bringing the gospel to foreign lands. The Congregational clergymen who supported their desire to become missionaries declared that “if a foreign mission were to be anything but a pious hope, a foreign missionary organization had to be formed to popularize the idea, raise money, disburse it, select missionaries, assign them to stations, support them and supervise their activities.”

This was, after all, the way successful people got things done. It was axiomatic that if someone had a passion to advance a cause, a corporation needed to be formed, complete with investors, boards of directors, executive officers, employees, recruiters and accountants. The result was the missionary corporation, a Christian version of the for-profit trading company, with whom early Protestant denominations partnered in order to bring the gospel to foreign lands.

The Congregationalist leaders referred to this new missionary society as a corporation, dubbing it the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM). The first two treasurers, Samuel Walley and Jeremiah Evarts were described as “shrewd Yankee Christian businessmen.” Evarts stated that “If we are to be the instruments of doing anything worth mention for the church of God and the poor heathen, we must exhibit some of that enterprise which is observable in the conduct of worldly men.”

By the late nineteenth century, the North American non-profit imagination had been bought and paid for by the Captains of Industry.

The Leile Mission

An African proverb says, “Until lions write their own history, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” For centuries the story of the first American missionaries were written by and about the white, Ivy League collegians in New England. Adoniram Judson has often been lauded as the first missionary from the United States and his place in history uncontested.

Then in the 1960s a man named E. A. Holmes wrote a shocking article for the Baptist Quarterly displacing that myth. It was the story of a freed black slave who went as a missionary to serve among slaves in Jamaica.

After the American Revolution, British loyalists, black slaves and Native Americans hemorrhaged out of the country on retreating war ships. Thousands immigrated to nearby Jamaica. The missionary zeal of freed slaves brought into existence an older, lighter structure for spreading the gospel. Black Christians freed from slavery were no less intentional or effective than the Ivy League collegians that built the missionary corporation thirty years later, but these leaner structures were not the ones Protestant mission societies hitched their train to.

In order to obtain passage to Jamaica for Leile and his family, he indentured himself to a ship’s Captain for a period of time. E. A. Holmes rocked the Baptist world when he wrote, “Though supported by no church or denominational agency, [Leile] became the first Protestant missionary to go out from America to establish a foreign mission, ten years before William Carey set out from England.”

Becoming More

There is, no doubt, much to learn from the capitalist corporation, but we have long since forgotten that social enterprise need not be tethered to large amounts of capital. Non-profit structures don’t necessarily require boards of directors dominated by those are savvy in business. There are causes which don’t require a commercial business structure to address, people who don’t need to be seen as products, and outcomes which can’t be measured by return-on-investment.

We are more than the corporations we are becoming.

The missionary and non-profit sector have been shaped by corporate styled capitalism for centuries. Today, the last bastions of altruism – health care and education – are succumbing to the corporate business mindset which has captured our affections. Let’s look to other places to inspire our imagination…

For a fuller discussion of alternatives – particularly in the world of Protestant mission – I’d be glad to send a copy of Overturning Tables for the price of postage. Leave a comment, and I’ll be in touch!