American Christian Orientalism

Though this recent publication focuses on 19th-century Protestants, there is a good deal of evidence that such essentializing orientalism lives on today in American evangelicalism, and Christianity more generally. Current views of, e.g., Christianity in the Middle East as seen in the eyes of many of my students would reflect this. In any event, a welcome new study: An American Biblical Orientalism: The Construction of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelical Piety by David D. Grafton (Fortress Press, 2019), 246pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

An American Biblical Orientalism: The Construction of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelical Piety examines the life and work of Eli Smith, William McClure Thomson, and Edward Robinson and their descriptions of the “Bible Lands.” While there has been a great deal written about American travelogues to the Holy Lands, this book focuses on how these three prominent American Protestants described the indigenous peoples, and how those images were consumed by American Christians who had little direct experience with the “Bible Lands.” David D. Grafton argues that their publications (Biblical Researches, Later Biblical Researches, and The Land and the Book) profoundly impacted the way that American Protestants read and interpreted the Bible in the late-nineteenth century. The descriptions and images of the people found their way into American Bible dictionaries, theological dictionaries, and academic and religious circles of a growing bible readership in North America. Ultimately, the people of late Ottoman society (e.g. Jews, Christians and Muslims) were essentialized as the living characters of the Bible. These peoples were fitted into categories as heroes or villains from biblical stories, and rarely seen as modern people in their own right. Thus, in the words of Edward Said, they were “orientalized."