A worldly errand: James L. Barton's American mission to the Near East

This dissertation investigates the ways that religion overlapped with politics in the United States' diplomatic interactions with the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It recovers the contributions of an underappreciated Protestant missionary named James L. Barton who, as an administrator of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), helped to guide U.S. foreign policy with the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent Turkish Republic from 1894 to 1930. It presents Barton's work in diplomacy and domestic politics as the logical conclusion of American Protestantism's global engagement through foreign missions and the Social Gospel. This study thus reconstructs Barton's career as a "missionary statesman," as he came to be known, in order to fill longstanding gaps in American diplomatic and religious history.This work fills those gaps in three ways. First, it recovers Barton biographically as a forgotten national figure and representative of the country's powerful Protestant establishment who at the same time wielded influence in American foreign relations. Second, by tracing Barton's extensive labors before, during, and after the years of Woodrow Wilson's administration, this study contends that World War I, rather than marking the denouement of American missions, represents a launching point of Protestant activity abroad in the areas of foreign policy, humanitarian work, and international development. Barton's diplomatic efforts can in fact be seen as a logical manifestation of the Social Gospel in a world increasingly marked by American economic, political, and military power. In Barton's eyes, the modern Christianity that had shaped and prospered the United States was the globe's only hope for post-war healing. Lastly, this study argues that one cannot fully understand the United States' relationship with the Middle East in general, or with modern Turkey in particular, without first knowing the impact of America's Protestant missionary enterprise in the Ottoman Empire and the role that James Barton played in it. Put differently, this worldly errand encourages another look at studies of international relations that have heretofore focused on economic, political, and military "hard power" at the expense of equally significant exertions of "soft" popular, cultural, and ideological power.