Over the last thirty years, issues of gender have been creatively explored within the field of mission studies. Whereas the life and work of female missionaries have been fruitfully reflected upon, male gender identity has often been understood as an unchanging category. This book offers a pioneering account of the relationship between missionary work and masculinity. By examining four individual men this study explores how self-making occurred within foreign missions, but also how conceptions of male gender informed missionary work. Changes that occurred in the lives of these men are placed within the broader context of how issues of gender were renegotiated within the contemporary missionary movement.

In Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: the Brethren in Twentieth-Century China, David Woodbridge offers an account of a little-known Protestant missionary group. Often depicted as extreme and marginal, the Brethren were in fact an influential force within modern evangelicalism. They sought to recreate the life of the primitive church, and to replicate the simplicity and dynamism of its missionary work. Using newly-released archive material, Woodbridge examines the activities of Brethren missionaries in diverse locations across China, from the cosmopolitan treaty ports to the Mongolian and Tibetan frontiers. The book presents a fascinating encounter between primitivist missionaries and a modernising China, and reveals the important role of the Brethren in the development of Chinese Christianity.

What kind of men were missionaries? What kind of masculinity did they represent, in ideology as well as in practice? Presupposing masculinity to be a cluster of cultural ideas and social practices that change over time and space, and not a stable entity with a natural, inherent meaning, Kristin Fjelde Tjelle seeks to answer such questions.

Taking up the challenge of Saba Mahmood to feminist studies in religion, that there is a liberalist understanding of agency and a tendency to mix the feminist political project with the analytical, the authors of this anthology discuss the relations between pieties and politics, pieties and methodologies, virtuous masculinities, and symbolic gender representations. Several articles discuss highly controversial questions: Muslim piety, religion in the European Union between the Vatican and the Muslim populations, the religiously motivated abstinence policies of the US. Furthermore, there is an interesting section about religious masculinities in a historical and contemporary perspective.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when the idea of religion as a private matter connected to the home and the female sphere won acceptance among the bourgeois elite, Christian religious practices began to be associated with femininity and soft values. Contemporary critics claimed that religion was incompatible with true manhood, and today's scholars talk about a feminization of religion. But was this really the case? What expression did male religious faith take at a time when Christianity was losing its status as the foundation of society? This is the starting point for the research presented in Christian Masculinity. Here we meet Catholic and Protestant men struggling with and for their Christian faith as priests, missionaries, and laymen, as well as ideas and reflections on Christian masculinity in media, fiction, and correspondence of various kinds. Some men engaged in social and missionary work, or strove to harness the masculine combative spirit to Christian ends, while others were eager to show the male character of Christian virtues. This book not only illustrates the importance of religion for the understanding of gender construction, but also the need to take into consideration confessional and institutional aspects of religious identity.

Addressing an important social and political issue which is still much debated today, this volume explores the connections between religious conversions and gendered identity against the backdrop of a world undergoing significant social transformations. Adopting a collaborative approach to their research, the authors explore the connections and differences in conversion experiences, tracing the local and regional rootedness of individual conversions as reflected in conversion narratives in three different locations: Germany and German missions in South Africa and colonial Australia, at a time of massive social changes in the 1860s. Beginning with the representation of religious experiences in so-called conversion narratives, the authors explore the social embeddedness of religious conversions and inquire how people related to their social surroundings, and in particular to gender order and gender practices, before, during and after their conversion. With a concluding reflective essay on comparative methods of history writing and transnational perspectives on conversion, this book offers a fresh perspective on historical debates about religious change, gender and social relations.

This is the first full-length historical study of indigenous evangelists across a range of societies, geographical regions and colonial regimes and the first to focus on the complex issues of authority surrounding the evangelists. It answers a need frequently voiced in recent studies of Christian missions. Most scholars now acknowledge that the remarkable expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia and the Pacific in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed far more to the efforts of indigenous preachers than to the foreign missionaries who loom so large in publications. This book addresses that concern making an excellent introduction to the role of indigenous evangelists in the spread of Christianity, and the many countervailing pressures with which these individuals had to contend. It also includes in the introductory discussions useful statements of the current state of scholarship and theoretical debates in this field.