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Before Hinduism: Missionaries, Unitarians, and Hindoos in Nineteenth-Century America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Abstract
American interest in and knowledge of religion in India began before Americans imagined Hinduism as a coherent world religion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Americans used a variety of terms to describe, represent, and imagine the religious culture of India: Gentoos, Hindoos, religion of the Hindoos, Hindoo religion, Brahmanism, heathenism, and paganism. Each term meant different things to different writers at different times. But there was no Hinduism, a world religion originating in India and comparable to others, in America prior to the late nineteenth century. Americans read and wrote about “Hindoos” and “Hindoo religion,” something altogether different from Hindus and Hinduism. This article analyzes two examples of American representations of Hindoo religion before Hinduism. First, it examines American missionary reports about “Hindoo heathenism” written by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionaries and published in American missionary journals in the early nineteenth century. Second, it examines the Unitarian interest in Rammohun Roy and his growing popularity in New England during the 1820s and 1830s. Unitarian interest in Roy and ABCFM missionary reports exemplify the ways Protestant questions and interests shaped the American understanding of religions and the eventual construction of “world religions” such as Hinduism to suit American Protestant concerns.
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References
Notes
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2. Ibid., 22. Emphasis in the original.
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23. I use the term “evangelical” to indicate Trinitarian Protestants with an actively outward focus. Such Protestants were attracted to revivalism and missionary societies. Also, many missionary societies used the word “evangelical” in the titles of their periodicals. I use the term not as a substantive definition but in order to distinguish one sort of New England Protestant from others. In this sense, some New England Protestants thought of themselves as “evangelical” in order to distance themselves from other Protestants. This difference is most pronounced in the subtitle of Robert Baird's 1844 book, Religion in America: or an account of the origin, relation to the state, and present condition of the evangelical churches in the United States : with notices of the unevangelical denominations.
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51. While at sea on their way to India, the Judsons and Luther Rice had an awakening and became Baptists. Rice returned to America to organize a Baptist missionary movement, and the Judsons established a Baptist mission in Burma.
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91. “A Remarkable Hindoo Reformer,” 123; “Account of Rammohun Roy,” 69.
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112. “Rammohun Roy,” Missionary Herald (September 1824, 301): The use of “Hindooism” here is interesting. The term is uncommon in the American sources and used here by a Briton in Calcutta. Roy himself used “Hindooism” in 1816 and “Hinduism” in 1817. Lorenzen notes that despite its use here and there, the term Hinduism did not come into common British use until the second fourth of the nineteenth century. As I argue here, it did not come into common American use until much later. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?,” 631–632.
113. “Rammohun Roy,” The Missionary Herald (September 1824): 301.
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