Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Engaging habits and besotted idolatry: viewing chinese religions in the american west

Through an analysis of late-nineteenth century “Asian invasion” literature and periodicals of the American West, this article compiles Protestant representations of Chinese religious practice in America. In pulp fiction and studies published by Bret Harte in his Overland Monthly, white Americans translated the peculiarities of the Chinese Other into manageable symbols and narrative conventions. While these representations appear flagrantly racist and reductive, they also reveal a genuine struggle for interpretation and commensurability. However, most scholarship in religious studies addressing Asian American encounter emphasizes the elite enjoyment of Asian theological and philosophical documents, avoiding the messier moral viewpoints of these pastoral observers and urban American Christian missionaries. I suggest that focusing instead on popular images of Chinese religions allow us to begin to reconstruct a history of religious encounter that ushers us into a different material world, one that highlights the interaction of physical bodies, buildings, and artifacts in time and space. Unless we can rewrite that Euro-American history of encounter (and include the physical and material dimensions as part of the equation), and link it conceptually to the experiences of real Chinese migrants and Chinese Americans, the story of those lost voices will always remain an interesting sidelight to the main show.

Keepers of the Covenant: Frontier Missions and the Decline of Congregationalism, 1774–1818. By James R. Rohrer. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. xii, 201 pp.

Rohrer challenges the traditional interpretation of the decline of the Congregationalists. Drawing heavily on unpublished manuscripts, the author shows that, rather than failing to adapt to the democratizing culture of the western migration, they were in fact aggressive frontier evangelists. In the course of proving this, Rohrer overturns many generalizations about the Congretationalists, and challenges conventional wisdom about church growth and religious declension.