UC Berkeley

Beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Christian reformers of the North American Young Men’s Christian Association and related organizations set themselves the task of training the rising leadership of nations around the world in a set of ideals they termed “Christian citizenship.” Motivated by ideas about God’s universal grace, by liberal ideals of personhood, and by fears of moral crisis, the middle class evangelical reformers of the YMCA, the YWCA, the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), and the World’s Student Christian Federation (WSCF) sought not only to “evangelize the world in this generation,” but to teach good citizenship and encourage fair play among individuals and among nations—to foster ideals of justice, equality, and democracy among their constituencies in China, Japan, India, and beyond, in a millennial project ultimately designed to save the world, politically as well as spiritually. From the 1890s into the 1920s, Christian reformers dedicated themselves to the work of imparting the ideals of “Christian citizenship” through educational, social, and religious programs, as well as through training in sports and sportsmanship. By the 1920s, many of these reformers had come to assume that democratic nationhood should be universal—provided that both the national leaders and a critical mass of citizens had acquired a particular kind of personhood. Ultimately, however, their responses to struggles for national self-determination in the 1920s would show that their universalist commitments were, in most cases, indefinitely deferred, contingent on a pedagogical process that was never complete.

This dissertation tells the story of the ideals of “Christian citizenship” as developed by these reformers between 1886 and 1925. On the basis of ideas and attitudes expressed by celebrated Association leaders such as Nobel Laureate John Mott, by less known figures such as YMCA Physical Director Harry Kingman, and more generally in institutional histories and surveys, official periodicals, newspaper articles, conference reports, memoirs and personal writings, and visual representations such as logos and architectural drawings, this dissertation argues that the project of fostering “Christian social relations” and instilling the ideals of “Christian citizenship” in the so-called “plastic nations” of the world was at the heart of the North American Associations’ Foreign Work during this period, and it suggests that the history of these ideas contributes to an understanding of the history of the democratic project more broadly.