CESNUR - Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni diretto da Massimo Introvigne

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George Leslie Mackay, Miscegenation, and Mormonism: Having the Courage or Lack Thereof to Cross the Color Line for Christ?

by Dr. Clyde R. Forsberg Jr. (Oxford College/Aletheia University)
A paper presented at The 2009 CESNUR Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 11-13, 2009

George Leslie Mackay, the famous Canadian Presbyterian missionary to Formosa, was a man of science and faith, defender and practitioner of miscegenation, proponent of a radical “native ministry” and “indigenized gospel” that both conformed to and challenged the racial thinking of nineteenth-century Canadian polite society. Mackay was a unique product of Victorian Upper Canada and a truly remarkable individual in so many ways. Indeed, one is surprised that more has not been written about him, for he is worthy of more serious and substantive study. A very private man, he wrote comparatively little—his diaries notwithstanding. It is doubtful that he wrote his autobiography, From Far Formosa; his editor, Rev. J.A. MacDonald, claimed full credit after Mackay’s death and for good reason. Mackay may have been many things, but a writer he was not. As Mackay scholar James Rohrer writes: Mackay’s “correspondence and even his diaries reveal relatively little about his inner life, leaving us in many cases to read between the lines and to conjecture.”[i] Mackay had the temperament of a soldier rather than a scholar and, according to his successor William Gauld, spent the bulk of his time “rushing around the country like a madman.”[ii] In too many respects, the real Mackay is something of a mystery.

Although widely regarded in Taiwan as a monumental figure in the Christian mission to China writ large, Mackay is rarely mentioned in North American histories of the Presbyterian Church and its somewhat unique place, along with his, in the Social Gospel movement. Brian J. Fraser’s The Social Uplifters: Presbyterian Progressives and the Social Gospel in Canada, 1875-1915[iii] makes no mention of him whatsoever. Alvyn Austin’s seminal Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom[iv] devotes a mere five pages to him and much of this less than flattering. Austin is hard on the so-called “Zorra Boy,” or southern Ontario county from which he comes and perhaps “the strangest characters nineteenth-century Canada ever produced” (p. 30). In addition to being “odd,” the Mackay that his fellow Canadians loved to hate was “touched with … madness,” prone to fits of “egomania” (p. 32) and insanely jealous—taking issue with the appointment of Jonathan Goforth to the Honan mission. There were two Mackays: the indefatigable “barbarian missionary” living and working abroad and the firebrand at home. Both proved no end of trouble and, indeed, something of an embarrassment to Presbyterians high and low.[v] Austin casts doubt on Mackay’s medical qualifications, his Queen’s University Doctorate of Divinity purely honorary and problematic from a purely academic standpoint.

Mackay scholars do not completely agree on the essence of the man and his mission. Dominic McDevitt-Parks contends that Mackay was an “Orientalist” as Edward Said has redefined the word and thus allegedly a pawn of western imperialism.[vi] He was rabid in his anti-Catholicism, building so many chapels and in record time, in part, to thwart Dominican priests from the Philippines who came to Formosa in 1886.[vii] There may be a grain of truth to the charge of “cultural genocide” laid at his feet by Mark Eric Munsterhjelm, the destruction of Chinese idols and ancestor tablets, as well as Mackay’s famous collection of Formosan native artifacts--and rightfully the property of the Taiwanese people—now the property of the Royal Ontario Museum and extraordinarily problematic from a post-modern point of view.[viii] Michael Stainton contends that Mackay’s support for the “southern theory of Taiwanese origins” was essentially anti-Chinese.[ix] Finally, in concert with Austin’s newest book, China’s Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Soceity, 1832-1905, Rohrer will argue in a forthcoming biography that Mackay should be seen a charismatic or cult leader and founder of a new Taiwanese “sect.”[x]

That said, Mackay enjoys a cult status among Taiwanese Presbyterians of another kind, his fame equal to that of Chiang Kai Shek in the estimation of some. An oriental opera, entitled “The Black Bearded Bible Man”[xi] and staged at the National Chang Kai Shek Center in Taipei (2008) drives home the point, as well as a Mackay memorial in Tamsui on the second of June.   

Among the many accomplishments that set Mackay apart as a Christian missionary to the so-called “heathen,” was his belief in the necessity of an “indigenized gospel” which proved extremely successful among the “Pepohoan” or Taiwanese lowland aboriginals. More than a hundred years after his passing in 1901, and in a country where only three percent profess an abiding faith in Christianity, upwards of seventy percent of the indigenous population are members of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT).[xii] Pilgrims from all over Taiwan travel to Tamsui to have their pictures taken in front of the historic, red-brick missionary school that bears the name “Oxford College,” home to a museum and archive, and to offer up prayers of devotion and thanksgiving. Indeed, Mackay fought long and hard, and mostly with Canadian Presbyterians, to be left alone in essence, understanding better than anyone what worked in Taiwan and what did not. His goal was a native presbytery that would be completely independent of foreign influence upon his death. Mackay’s missionary vision had little use, or place, for Canadians as such, and the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Society only tested his patience.[xiii]

Friendship for Mackay was a native affair as well, his closest friend also his first convert, A-Hao, who played an instrumental role in Mackay’s understanding of the language(s) and culture(s) of Taiwan. His decision to take a native wife, Tui Chang-mia, was strategic rather than romantic in the main and crucial to his remarkable success among native Taiwanese women in particular. His practice and, indeed, defense of mixed marriages was of Chinese men and Taiwanese (Pe-po-hoan) women, an infusion of Chinese blood into the Malaysian-Taiwanese native mix, seasoned with a good deal of Presbyterian piety that would, in his view, save AND civilize the “heathen” of two competing cultures.[xiv]

His initial impression of the peoples of Formosa is telling. “Aborigines,” he writes, “both civilized and savage, are Malayan, the Chinese are Mongolian … [and] have not to any extent mingled, and so there is no mixed race on the island…. The dominant race,” he continues, “first in numbers, intelligence, and influence, is the Chinese…. They are in the main industrious and aggressive, showing all the characteristics of their race.” His unique brand of Presbyterian “uplift” was matrimonial, crossing Oriental racial lines with a very clear and “Orientalist” purpose in mind: civilizing the savage. “[F]ew things require more attention than the placing of the right man in the right place,” he explains. “Who, then, should be sent to Pak-tau? Why, an able, earnest Chinese preacher whose wife was a Pe-pohoan, whom we brought up from childhood, and who received careful Christian instruction.”[xv] Indeed, one the striking features of his diaries are the copious references to the mixed marriages he arranged and solemnized,[xvi] whereas any reference to his own marriage to Tui Chang-mia (Minnie) is conspicuously absent. He made sure that his two daughters, Bella and Mary, were joined in holy matrimony to prominent native preachers.[xvii] Importantly, his only son, George Jr., studied in Canada at the University of Toronto like his father, but unlike the elder Mackay would marry a Canadian, returning to Taiwan to head up Oxford College and the mission in Taiwan. Although Mackay ruled with a steady, if not iron hand, the notion of a successor was quite foreign to him—excluding the possibility that his son, or someone in the immediate family, might occupy the throne.

What a contrast to the Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith Jr., who failed to cross the racial divide and despite the fact that America’s indigenous peoples were supposed to be the first order of Mormon business. Unlike Mackay, one is hard pressed to find a family photo of Joseph Jr., his wife Emma and their children, let alone Smith and his wives and THEIR CHILDRED, or God forbid a daguerreotype of the Mormon prophet in native dress with his wife or wives of color and their mulatto children for all to see. Post-Modern Mormonism’s cultured defenders shudder to think.[xviii] Pictures of Mackay are of a family man, medical doctor, and educator, whereas those of Smith are solitary and military in the main.[xix] Why the mere suggestion, or reminder, that Smith instructed others to take Indian wives—and there is no getting around this--[xx]proves so offensive to an “evangelicalized” Mormondom owes something to polygamy and/or racism,[xxi] the two going hand in hand Mormon history and culture, that is surely the question. The abject failure of Mormons, both LDS and RLDS (now the Community of Christ),[xxii] to stay the course as Mackay did and make the salvation of “dark-skinned people” their first priority, truly,[xxiii] and despite gains in Central and South America of late,[xxiv] proves somewhat more problematic given the fact that the Book of Mormon, the Mormon Prophet’s first testament to the world, was written for the American Indians, or “Lamanites.”[xxv] Importantly, the first missionaries of the Restoration were dispatched in 1830 to preach to Indians camped out on the Ohio Reserve, Jackson’s Indian Removal a God-send in the early Mormon mind--assuming all went as planned and the Kingdom of God was established across the way in Jackson County, Missouri.[xxvi] The problem, in short, to cross racial lines was early Mormonism failure to cross state lines and turn antebellum Missouri into the promised Mormon tri-color state.

Gen. Joseph Smith's Last Address to the Nauvoo Legion in 1844, Lithographic print, 1888

Alas, the early Mormon dream of a millennial kingdom of red, white, and black could not, and did not, proceed beyond the early planning stages.[xxvii] Southern antipathy for anyone or anything of Northern extraction and smacking of abolitionism or, worse, miscegenation,[xxviii] stopped the early Mormon dream of a native ministry more or less dead in its tracks--and for more than a century when the racism that had played such a central role in Mormon belief and practice would finally be overturned.[xxix]

That said, Smith clearly shared with Mackay a belief in the practical advantages if not necessity of an indigenized gospel after a fashion, but segregationist in the main. “[A]nd when you meet with an Arab send him to Arabia,” he mused, “when you find an Italian send him to Italy and a French man to France, or an Indian that is suitable, send him among the Indians and this and that man send them to the different places where they belong.”[xxx] One may compare this to what Mackay says in From Far Formosa. “Mission work in North Formosa is dominated by the idea of a native ministry. The purpose is to evangelize the people, to enlighten their darkness by the power of divine truth.” He continues:

All the reasons that led me to lay such emphasis on a native ministry in North Formosa … had to do with the language, climate, social life of the people, and the capabilities of the natives for Christian service. I was at first convinced that the hope of the mission lay not in foreign workers, and every year only confirms that opinion.[xxxi]

Mackay’s reasons for a native ministry, he makes clear, were economical in the main.[xxxii] Smith’s seem more a factor of race, that is, non-whites “belonging” in a certain place, and so his understanding of native ministry in the 1840s implies that dark-skinned peoples ought to preach to their own kind to save poor whites from having to go among them. In fact, Mackay makes a similar point without appearing as racist. “Natives can live in a climate and under conditions where any foreigner would die,” he explains.[xxxiii] And so, in some respects, Mormonism and the church that Mackay founded in the decades that followed can be seen as a denominational distinction without a cross-cultural difference. If a real difference exists, it is nuanced and not a simple case of one religion lacking something the other had in abundance, Mormonism’s moral turpitude and virulent racist/segregationist practices and Mackay’s pro-Taiwanese and “indigenized presbytery” two sides of the same nineteenth-century racial theorizing that cast Africans in the same negative light and unbefitting the gospel of truth.  

    Smith’s ideas and methods changed radically from the 1830s and the heady days of the Book of Mormon. One marvels at the character of Samuel the Lamanite in the Book of Mormon, an Indian preacher to whites in the narrative and quite unstoppable, the arrows and spears of his Nephite enemies deflected by some invisible hand allowing him to preach atop the walls of their cities with impunity.[xxxiv] But there are also the sons of Mosiah, white or Nephite missionaries to the dark-skinned and loathsome Lamanites. And so, the foundation text of Mormonism advances two seemingly contradictory positions on race and what constitutes mission fodder.  In essence, Mormonism had the option to go either way. Mackay’s diaries prove less amenable to an about face and changes of 180 degrees so typical of Mormonism, past and present, indeed so crucial to its long-term success in some respects.

The monumental and certainly revolutionary decision by LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball to end the Priesthood ban against men of color in 1978 did not disabuse the Saints of their racism,[xxxv] integrate non-whites into the Mormon mainstream, change in any significant way the all-white complexion of the senior leadership, or facilitate interracial marriages. Quite to the contrary, separate African- and Spanish-American Latter-day Saint congregations were formed—when numbers warranted—and the defense of such ecclesiastical practices recall that Justice Marshall in Plessy v. Ferguson.[xxxvi] Kimball’s position on inter-racial marriage, going back to the late 1950s, was undeniably racist and did not change significantly after 1978. Marriages were less likely to end in divorce, he believed to the end, if “Indians marry Indians, and Mexicans marry Mexicans; the Chinese marry Chinese and the Japanese marry Japanese; that the Caucasians marry the Caucasians, and the Arabs marry Arabs.”[xxxvii] An important factor in the end of the Priesthood ban under his term as President was the mission in Central and South America and converts of Indian and/or African ancestry in the millions. There were two problems: first, the vast majority of Central and South American natives eager to align themselves with Mormonism had more than a drop of African blood, disqualifying them for the Priesthood and thus assuming leadership positions in the region; and second, the erstwhile and deeply racist anti-African doctrine and practice that had, in some respects, served Mormonism all too well in the lean years of polygamy and its aftermath now stood in the way of real progress as the LDS Church was on the brink of explosive growth and an international/transnational metamorphosis.

As an aside, Polynesians in Mormon folklore are also Lamanites and thus a cursed and degenerate scion of the ancient Hebrews vis-à-vis the story in the Book of Mormon of one “Hagoth” and scores of white Nephites who sail into the Pacific at his urging.[xxxviii] Simon G. Southerton controversial Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church has taken the Mormon belief in the Hebraic origin of the American Indians to task on genetic or molecular genealogical grounds. Southerton’s discussion of the attitude of the Mormon Church toward the peoples of Fiji, New Guinea, New Caledonia, and other western Pacific island peoples, having mixed with “darker peoples” and thus problematic, is instructive. Unlike the Polynesians,” he writes, “the inhabitants of the western isles of the Pacific did not share a strong physical resemblance with the mainland descendants of Lehi. Instead, they bore an unsettling resemblance to members of the African race, who according to revelation had inherited the harsh racial curse from God.[xxxix] The Mormon presence in Polynesia, it is worth noting, is similar to that of Mackay’s Presbyterians in Taiwan. “Since the arrival of Mormons in the Pacific in 1843,” Southerton points out, “the LDS Church has been a major force in the religious life of Polynesians. There are about 300,000 Mormons in Polynesia. In no other place on earth, outside of Utah, has Mormonism penetrated so successfully. Of the nations with the highest proportion of Latter-day Saints, six of the top ten are located in Polynesia.” What is even more remarkable is the extent to which Mormons in Polynesia have resisted the temptation to “supplant Polynesian culture and traditions” (p.. 55).

Mormonism’s cross-cultural failure on American soil, despite success abroad, is often laid at the feet of persecution and anti-abolitionist mob violence. To be sure, a colonial enterprise that seemed to pander to Indians and Africans as second and third-class citizens, but citizens all the same, in Smith’s imperial and theocratic program for ante-bellum America and the world, begged to be put down for all the obvious reasons. However, Mackay’s mission to Formosa’s Chinese and Pepohoan had to contend with its fair share of popular resistance and mob violence, too, rebuilding constantly, morning native converts who were murdered[xl] and foreign missionaries, their wives and children, who died from malaria and dysentery. And so, how it was that the Presbyterian mission of Mackay to the aborigines of Taiwan and the early Mormon mission to America’s native peoples began with many of the same noble intentions should end so very differently is the focus. Moreover, to what degree these two very different mission outcomes can or ought to be attributed to “when” and “where,” antebellum America rocky soil indeed for an indigenized gospel of any stripe, Mormonism’s success in Polynesia a case in point, but Mackay’s remarkable success among native Taiwanese following suit.

Mackay can be held up as an example to the Saints, not so much of what might have been, but rather what an “indigenized gospel” and native outreach really looks like. Here, the differences are plain to see. And yet, these very different ecclesiastical phenomena were built on the same shaky anthropological and scientific foundations, Smith and Mackay intellectual twins and particular to the same monogenetic,[xli] environmental, and evolutionary understanding of Indian,[xlii] Mesoamerican, and Chinese origins known as the myth of Celtic-Anglo-Saxon superiority. As Harry Stout observed long ago vis-à-vis rival Puritan factions in American, a common discourse is often the basis for strong differences, Mormonism and the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan a case in point.

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 Coming to Formosa in the 1870s--the end of the Ch’ing era, beginning of Japanese occupation and lasting some fifty years--he welcomed this as an improvement vis-à-vis the influence of Chinese culture in the region. His general attitude regarding the Chinese and Taiwanese--decadent and inferior respectively--was typical of late, nineteenth-century Victorian thinking. Critical of Darwinism because it contradicted the Bible, but not “evolution” or  attempts to harmonize science and religion per se, is clearly enunciated in the following diary entry: “Read Origin of Species, and Genesis—Evolution indeed! Yes, but God back of all[,] moving the Universe—God is Creator, Controller and Redeemer.”[xliii] In concert with this, Mackay was prone to the racial stereotyping and colonial presuppositions of his day wherein aboriginal or Malay peoples were “less solid and stable.”[xliv] The Chinese, whom most in the West considered to be a highly civilized, were also thought to have crossed the Behring Straight en masse and to have given us the urbane civilizations of Central and South America which lay in ruin.[xlv] Indeed, the Oriential origin of the American Indians--to which Mackay most certainly subscribed--had the support of the great anthropological and linguistic luminaries of the day: Horn, Scherer, Jones,[xlvi] Paravey, Neumann, Humboldt, Brandford, Schoolcraft, Gallatin, McCulloch, and Squier.[xlvii]

Alexander von Humboldt, often cited by Mormon historians and critics vis-à-vis the Book of Mormon as a defense of the Hebrew origin of the American Indians,[xlviii] advanced the position that Toltecs or Aztecs descended from the “Huns” of northern Siberia.[xlix] In fact, the Hebraic and Oriental origins of Meso-America were connected at the hip; and if the Chinese were not direct descendants of the fabled Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, the existence of a Chinese-Jewish community, the Qiang People, for nearly two-thousand years in the northern most part of Sichuan was reason for pause.

Biblical prophecy, many believed, was not silent on the matter of the Orient, an obscure passage in the 49^th chapter of Isaiah concerning “the land of Sinim” a veiled reference to the Qin dynasty (221 B.C.) in the literature to which Mackay indentured himself.[l] The prophets had foretold of a day when all the children of Adam, including Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucians, would providentially find their way back to the Christian fold.[li] In his diary, Mackay writes: “How people in the west remain ignorant of the real worth of some Chinamen, Poor China! Let God arise and all His enemies be scattered, and let ‘Sinim’ get great light.”[lii] In From Far Formosa, he adds: “The Isles shall wait for His law! That Old Testament prophecy has been an inspiration in my life. I have seen it fulfilled in Formosa.”[liii] Mackay’s devotion to the myth of the Hebraic origin of the Chinese is hard to gage. “Poor savages of this my beloved Formosa have their own ideas,” he writes in his diary, “O what a world! Jews still! But Jesus reigns!”[liv] However, the connection is spiritual rather than material and anti-Semitic in the main.

The popular American understanding of “Sinim” at the time held that the Chinese--and by implication Taiwanese—descended from Ham, and if not Ham, then Japhet and not Seth. As William Speer explains in his seminal The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States,  

Sinim … is found in the Hebrew of Isaiah … in a prophecy of the conversion of the distant East to Christ; “Behold, there shall come from far (the south), and lo! These from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim [or the east] … by whom they no doubt mean the patriarch Shem, it is barely possible, may be the source of it. Yet the opinion of scholars lean more toward placing the Chinese among the descendants of Ham, one of the advocates of which view is Sir William Jones, or among those of Japhet. The Mohammedan writers hand us down an old legend of Persia and Arabia, that Japhet had eleven sons, of whom Gin or Chin was the eldest; that as such his father sent him for his portion to the fertile countries of the far East, and that his descendants early became distinguished for painting, carving and the cultivation of silk.[lv]

The rest of his argument concerns a pattern of migration, originating in Central Asia, that fans out in two directions: “Some of the ancient legends of Persia assert that Tsin, or Gin,” he explains,

was not the eldest son of Japhet, but that older than he was another, named Turk, who gave his name to the countless and widely-dispersed Turanian or Turkish tribes. In the Sanskrit of India also is found the name Turushka, applied to the same race. They were followed by Aryans, who pushed them to the extremities of the great peninsulas, to the large islands upon the coast of Asia, up into the mountain tracks, and out into the deserts…. The Aryans, who, as had been said, pressed forward the Turanians, and occupied the best lands of Southern Asia, and who gave us the inexhaustible literature of the Sanskrit, sent members of their race into the West. They are the Indo-European family to which we belong.

And finally, a passage hauntingly similar to the Book of Mormon leitmotif of a genocidal race war between Nephites (whites) and Lamanites (blacks), he concludes that “in the Indian wars of the New World, after a lapse of more than three thousand years, the renewal of the same transactions which occurred in Central Asia—the descendants of the more civilized Aryan race dispossessing and exterminated those of the earlier and barbarous Turanian.”[lvi] Importantly, in the Book of Mormon, the opposite takes place: the Nephites (Aryans in effect) are exterminated by the barbarous Lamanites and as punishment for allowing themselves to descend to a moral level beneath that of barbarism. Lamanites remain faithful to traditional family values; the Nephites do not and so pay the ultimate price—extinction.  

Makay defended Formosa’s aborigines, including the head-hunters, against the charge of being African in origin or in part. While certainly noble of him, it also suggests that in addition to his anti-Semitism, a degree of anti-African prejudice lay just beneath the surface. Mackay’s position on Africans, or “Ethiopians” as he called them, pandered to the worst of nineteenth-century scientific racism. He writes in his diary: “I spoke on Jeremiah 13:23, ‘Can the Ethiopian [change] etc., He can’t change, nor can the leopard,” adding only that he “can change [his] moral nature.”[lvii]

Mackay’s diaries suggest that he was open to the virulent and racist theory of Polygenesis and to which such distinguished defenders of the European Enlightenment as Atkins, Voltaire, Hume, Meiners, Foster, Virey, Pinkerton, Kames, and White were party. Polygenesis reached an intellectual high point (or low point depending on one’s point of view) in the brilliant, racially motivated, and iconoclastic scholarship of Louis Agassiz at Harvard,[lviii] Samuel G. Morton, and most vexing of all, the redoubtable Southern parson baiter, Josiah C. Nott.[lix]

Morton’s influential Crania Egyptiaca; or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from Anatomy, History and the Monuments argues, for example, that the ancient Egyptians were Caucasians; “Negroes were numerous in Egypt, but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is, that of servants and slaves.” His research, which consisted largely of collecting and cataloguing human crania according to their size and angle, led him to the conclusion that the American Indians were inferior to whites and just below Mongolians in the racial hierarchy. He also distinguished between two Mongolian racial types: Native Americans and Toltecan.[lx] Nott lumped dark-skinned peoples together as “Negro” in essence. In concert with Agassiz and Morton, Nott remained fundamentally opposed to mixing white and non-white (black) which he considered an “adulteration of blood [and] the reason why Egypt and the Barbary States never can again rise until the present races are exterminated and the Caucasian substituted.” Ironically, he attributed “whatever improvement exists in their condition [Cherokees and Chickasaws] … to a mixture of races,” notwithstanding.[lxi] Accordingly, one could be a racist and believe, or not, in miscegenation. Miscegenation was a door that swung in both directions.

Closely related to this was the pseudoscience of Phrenology, also known as Anthropometry, which captured the imaginations and respect of no less than Laveter, Camper, Blumenbach, Edwards (Founder of Societe Ethnologique de races humaines in Paris), Quetelet, Tiedemann, Gall, Spurzheim, Combe, and Morton in particular. The highly respected Phrenological Journal hailed from Edinburgh (1823). Phrenology, in short, looked for inherently physical attributes to support a fundamentally racist doctrine of immutable biological differences in the human family. It operated according to six basic rules or conditions:

1.     Physical shape of the head rather than skin color.

2.     Facial angle: the sharper the angle the less intelligent, the “Greek angle” 100%, African 70%, the others falling in between.

3.     Size of the brain.

4.     “Temperaments” based on the shape of head, bumps, etc..

5.     Genetic inheritance not environment.

6.     Growth: possibility of development, with exercise, but limited by the “original cerebral organization” or race, Caucasians credited with the greatest capacity for growth.[lxii]

In fact, Mackay rejection of the insinuation in some quarters that Formosa’s aborigines were African-Malaysian employs many of the above arguments and taxonomies. “It is contended by some,” he writes in From Far Formosa,

that the aboriginal inhabitants of Formosa were of the negro race, and that they were driven back into the mountains by the Malayans. I cannot admit the contention, as I have failed to find the slightest trace of the negrito element, nor is the presence within the mountains of such a people suspected by any known tribe…. They were all positive that there were not woolly-headed races within the mountains or anywhere else in the island…. “The Chinese in Formosa are round-headed, the aborigines medium beween long and broad. The sutures or lines where the bones of the skill are united, I find in the skulls of the young to be only slightly traced; the skull has the appearance of a round ball or bone. This is characteristic of the islanders belonging to the lower races. So, too, prognathism or projection of the jaws—‘mixillary angle,’ ‘facial angle’—pionts to kinship with the islanders of the Malay type. The hair is round, thus showing that in its possessor there is no trace of the woolly-headed race (95-98).

His diaries suggest a nominal interest in Phrenology, but adapted to his purposes: “Read largely of Hartman. Can’t see all his points. Much prefer Darwinism and Phrenology. But all their writings only strengthen my belief in a personal God.”[lxiii]

Mackay’s interest in Blacks or Africans per se is academic and marginal at best. It seems he had no real contact with Africans. One diary entry, written while in Hong Kong and en route to Canada in 1880, is rather benign compared to what Nott might say. “Negroes,” he notes, are called “Seedy boys” by the Chinese.[lxiv] Moreover, another diary entry is not as racist as it seems: “I preached Black=sin, Red= Christ’s Suffering, White=clean Sanctification and Yellow=Glory in heaven.”[lxv] “Yellow” refers is clear, Black, Red, White, and Yellow may or may not have a racial or ethnographical connotation. Importantly, it is the so-called “wordless book” to which Mackay refers here. As Alvyn Austin explains in China’s Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 1832-1905, “The wordless book … is a simple mnemonic device that consists of four pages of colors to explain God’s plan of redemption: black for sin; red for Jesus’ sacrifice; white for sanctification; and gold for heaven.”[lxvi] Austin points out an important cross-cultural irony that worked in favor of the Christian missionary in China.

When the four-color wordless book was taken to China about 1880, the strangest thing happened. There it encountered another wordless book, that is, the Chinese color cosmology know as wuxing the Five Elements, that assigned meanings to five colors—yellow, red, white, and black, plus green—correlated with the directions, elements, seasons, feng shui, and human destiny…. Unwittingly or wittingly, the missionaries were presenting the Christian message in colors that the peasants already understood—new wine in old wineskins, as it were.

That said, whatever anti-African prejudices Mackay may have entertained or duplicated, indeed how deeply they ran, can be blamed in part on his Scottish-Canadian national pride and belief in another branch of the scientific racism of the nineenth century: the myth of Celtic-Anglo-Saxon superiority. Accordingly, the Woodland Indians of New England were Icelandic in origin--a degenerate scion of Norse invaders and adventurers who stayed behind in the New World; either that or spread their seed far and wide with each and every eastern shore landing.[lxvii] As Speer explains,

In the East there were, beyond reasonable doubt, some who, from the tenth century and later, were descended from small colonies of Northman, who coasted the irregular shore of the Atlantic from the frozen regions when they ventured forth in their compact ships. This has been shown by the investigations of the Royal Antiquarian Society of Copenhagen…. Some men of learning do not doubt that the Scandinavian mariners traced our Atlantic coast from Greenland southward the whole length of our New England States, and deposited the seeds of communities which sprang up in wild forms there.[lxviii]

Mackay’s short reference in his diaries to the original location of the Garden of Eden “at the North-pole” as simply “wonderful” and “the cradle of mankind” is telling; so, too, his suggestion that natives of Hudson Bay are mostly likely to find it if sent.[lxix] Mackay’s delight after learning that science seemed to support a northern or Icelandic origin of all humankind most assuredly massaged his Celtic ego.

Importantly, this is not the Mormon understanding, Adam and Eve and their posterity spreading out from Jackson County, Missouri--the geographical center of the United States. That said, the Lost Ten Tribes in Mormon folklore are said to reside under the polar icecap, just above it, or in heaven where they await the coming of the millennium and when a great highway or land bridge from the north will deliver them to the Promised Land of Jackson County or Zion.[lxx] In fact, it is the tenth of thirteen LDS articles of faith and reads: “We believe in the literal gathering of Israel from the four parts of the earth, and the leading of the ten tribes from the land of the north.”[lxxi]

An argument for the Hebraic/Palestinian origin of the Indians popular at the time,[lxxii] the Book of Mormon departs from the Behring Strait and Mongolian/Chinese Theory by only a few degrees, in fact. Coming by sea instead of the land bridge, the Book of Mormon chronicles three transoceanic migrations from Asia to America, the first of these contemporaneous with the Tower of Babel, and then two more around the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem ca. 600 B.C.E. The migration pattern suggests an eastern or Asian point of origin, the settlement of the Americas from the west coast to east coast: “And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east.”[lxxiii] Moreover, the first to come, the Jaredites, land somewhere above the northern tree line where a reference is made to a “small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward” or the Aleutian Islands.[lxxiv]

In some important respects, Mackay and Mormonism are not far apart on the question of Celtic Israelites lost in the barrens. Indeed, Mackay’s reading of Isaiah 33:17 and the “land afar off” is reminiscent of the “star” or heavenly theory in Mormonism.[lxxv] The majority of early converts to Mormonism was from England, Scotland, Germany, and Scandinavia and conforms to the pattern—a search for lost Israelites of Celtic Anglo-Saxon heritage.[lxxvi] The Mormon nineteenth-century mission to Polynesia, likewise, operated according to the assumption that northern Pacific peoples were whites. Indeed, both Mackay and Smith as proponents of Celtic-Anglo-Saxonism and thus Nordic theories of Indian and Asian origins, justified their very different missionary outreaches according to somewhat similar anti-African racist argumentation. Celtic-Anglo-Saxonism, it is worth noting, served the political and economic interests of expansionists very well, providing a kind of scientific rationale for the inclusion and annexation of Alaska[lxxvii] and Hawaii[lxxviii] respectively.[lxxix] And so, Mackay and Smith must both plead guilty to a degree of intellectual complicity as small cogs in the big wheel of Western imperialism.

“Aryans follow the sun,” or so the argument went. Accordingly, the emergence of modern Europe, England, and the United States was thus a long westward trek that began in the Far East.[lxxx] As Reginald Horsman explains, “Those Aryan tribesman who had begun their march with the sun thousands of years before were now to return home. What had so long been prophesied was to come to pass: arts, science, religion, the whole of civilization were to return to their original birthplace after completing the circle of the globe.”[lxxxi] From this the “Dominion of the United States” was born, stretching,

the entire extent of America, the rich and fertile plains of Asia, together with the intermediate isles of the sea, in fulfillment of the great purpose of heaven, of the ultimate enlightenment of the whole earth, and the gradual elevation of man to the dignity and glory of the promised millennial day.[lxxxii]

For Robert J. Walker and British imperialist Arthur Davies, this pan Anglo-Celt, Norman Saxon empire would be the new Rome.[lxxxiii] Some believed that Asians would be washed away in a great tide of free trade and west-east immigration, simply unable to compete. Theodore Poesche and Charles Goepp in The New Rome; or, The United States of the World advanced the novel theory that inter-racial marriages between “the most perfect and the most gross examples of the same species” and that “the ovum of the latter being thus untainted … the ovum is improved.” They also imagined a kind of natural and logical “white washing … [of] all traces of the black race not capable of advantageous admixture with the white.”[lxxxiv]

The myth Celtic-Anglo-Saxon superiority was central to emergent imperial theories of manifest destiny in which both Britannia and the United States melded into one. The discovery of “Indo-European” provided a linguistic argument for a political amalgam that included Europe and Asia as the end of history and “one great family.”[lxxxv]

Celtic-Anglo-Saxonism was the invention of two Americans: Thomas Hart Benton, a Missourian, and a New Englander, Caleb Cushing, both of Celtic descent. Benton held up Mongolians, the color “Yellow” as he put it,

[a] race far above the Ethiopian, or Black—above the Malay, or Brown, (if we must admit five races), and above the American Indian, or Red: it is a race very above all these, but still, far below the White; and, like the rest, must receive an impression from the superior race whenever they come in contact.[lxxxvi]

Indeed, what Benton called “the arrival of the van of the Caucasian race (the Celtic-Anglo-Saxon division) upon the border of the sea which washes the shore of the eastern Asia,” or California and Oregon, promised to be the greatest event “since the dispersion of man upon earth.”[lxxxvii] Moreover, by “impression” he meant an injection of Western culture wherein the East would be reawakened to its imperial destiny and cultural and religious true identity.

As one might expect, it is the Northerner, Cushing, to take the hard line against co-existence and uplift, contending that genocide—cultural and physical—of all non-whites was inevitable, the command given Adam and Eve to multiply and replenish the earth also fulfilled in genocidal race warfare. “It is the Irish and Scotch and English and German blood of our fathers which constitutes our greatness, our power, and our liberty,” he writes, and thus America’s manifest destiny is “to Christianize and to civilize,” adding that “men, nations, races, may, must, will, perish before us. That is inevitable. There can be no change for the better save at the expense of that which is. Out of decay springs fresh life.[lxxxviii]

It began with trade, as George Fitzhugh, the famous pro-slavery historian, makes clear. “By the arts of peace under the influence of free trade, he can march to universal conquest … gradually extirpate or reduce to poverty the original owners … [and] oppress and exterminate the weaker….”[lxxxix] Its logical end was at very least cultural genocide if not worse. Importantly, defenders of both Monogenesis (Environmentalism) and Polygenesis (Innate Biological Inferiority), miscegenation and segregation, fell prey to the genocidal urge endemic to European expansion and conquest of in the New World as David E. Stannard sees it and however benign and well intentioned it might have been.[xc]

There is more than a grain of truth to accusations of late that Mackay engaged in a type of cultural genocide,” but this goes well beyond his destruction of Chinese idols and ancestor tablets, or even his famous collection of Formosan native artifacts, rightfully the property of the Taiwanese and now at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.[xci] His representation of Fomosan peoples in From Far Formosa, critics charge, are undeniably “Orientalist” in the sense that Edward Said understands the term, making Mackay yet another pawn of Western political and economic interests and a wicked imperialist.[xcii]

That said, in Mackay’s estimation and that of most Christian missionaries at the time (although one is certain this matters little or nothing to any and all partial to Said’s work), the state was the handmaid of Christian mission, free trade with China in particular opening the door to evangelization--the chant Christian and democratic beginning with the latter not the former. For example, Mackay’s close friend, the Rev. R.P. Mackay (no relation) and author of The Life of George Leslie Mackay of Formosa, writes the following in defense of his friend: “While sometimes the missionary led the way, ordinarily the Church waited until the way was opened by national and commercial considerations.”[xciii] Indeed, George Leslie Mackay’s decision to marry a native woman is listed as proof that “he did not advocate … colonization.”[xciv] Missionaries and merchants in Formosa, as he points out in From Far Formosa, represented very different missions and cultural exchanges in a way, albeit not unrelated.[xcv] Mackay stands justly charged of Western chauvinism typical of the Victorian era, but his devotion to British, Scottish, Canadian, and American values and national pride stemmed from a devotion to science rather than the inherently racist and genocidal nature of the Christian tradition as Stannard sees it.[xcvi]

The Mormon case is only slightly different, too. And, as B. Carmon Hardy[xcvii] and Michael W. Homer[xcviii] have shown, biology and Freemasonry respectively account in large measure for the “Orientalist” tendencies of nineteenth-century Mormonism. Importantly, the way in which early defenders of Mormonism demonized their enemies in the East can be seen as a kind of “Occidentalism”[xcix] typical of Islamic anti-Western polemic. For Mormons, it was the evil white “Gentile” and black African that should be feared and hated, charter members of the same apostate priesthood order going back to Cain and Canaan in the Bible.

In the same way that Masonry may help to understand better such racist practices as the denial of the Priesthood to Blacks in Mormonism, Mackay’s colonialists sensibilities were due in part to his Presbyterianism and its somewhat racist attitude and foreign mission back in Canada. As Brian Fraser points out, the overarching agenda of Canadian Presbyterianism at home was the creation of a society “shaped by the spirit of Christ” with the church as moral center and vehicle for “a collective Christian conscience which would guide Canada to assume its destiny as a model for the world.” The mission in Canada, Fraser goes on explains,

Strove for an ethical Christian community characterized by those vital virtues they felt necessary for the regeneration of the world—a strong work ethic, sobriety, probity, thrift, charity, and duty informed by a democratic Christian conscience. They united evangelical zeal with moderated reason in their attempt to establish a universal consensus on individual morality and social responsibility. Taken together, these qualities of character would reform, in an ascending pattern, the family, the city, the province, the nation and ultimately the world.[c]

Much, if not all of this, describes Mackay’s mission in Formosa very well, in particular the way Canadian Presbyterians worked in conjunction with “the press, schools, and universities … to create a responsible Christian citizenry in Canada, guided by the best that Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture had to offer” (p. 94). Christian influence and lasting social change (regeneration) would come through the creation of institutions—medical and educational—for which Mackay is now famous in Taiwan.

The attitude of Canadian Presbyterians toward the so-called “problem of the foreigner” was central. For Christian missionaries in “heathen” countries, the idea was “civilization” through Christianization. In this case, Mackay and his entire generation are guilty as charged vis-à-vis Said. W.D. Reid of Montreal is a case in point, overseeing the mission in Alberta, Canada where Native Indians (Blackfeet), Irish Catholics, French and Russian Doukhabours, German/Austrian Anabaptists (Mennonites and Hutterites), Eastern European Russian Orthodox and Ashkenazi Jews, Chinese Buddhists, and even polygamous Mormons tilled the same red Prairie soil--all in desperate need of Christianity and thus civilizing as Canadian Presbyterians understood it. Importantly, Reid was another proponent of Celtic-Anglo-Saxonism. “Woven into the texture of the life of this great nation,” he writes,

shall be the impulse of the Celt, the endurance of the German, the patience of the Slav, the daring of the Northman, the romance of Italy, the suavity of France, the buoyancy of Ireland, the shrewdness of Scotland, and the enterprise and leadership of England. What a nation it should be.[ci]

Reid’s was a Canadian melting-pot theory and historical-evolutionary synthesis; and although it includes the French and the Slav, the important point is that it does not include Africans.

Mackay’s Diaries contain several allusions, indeed affirmations to the aforementioned. “Yes old English I love thee, let me die under the flag. Then next dear American stars & stripes I love thee. One race one religion,” he writes in 1885.[cii] One may compare this to something Hiram Bell of Ohio said in 1853, but to justify annexation, Canadians “bone, as it were, of our bone, flesh of our flesh, deriving their origin from the same Anglo-Saxon source.”[ciii] In 1892, moreover, as Mackay prepared to return to Canada one last time, he writes in his diary: “Germans seem more like Americans than like English men. A Britain has more reserve. But religion and science make all nations akin.—success to the Ethnologist.”[civ] In November that same year, full of national pride, he also writes in this Anglo-American vein: “O how I log to see the whole of Britain’s possessions united in one Great and glorious Empire—Rule Britannia, rule!”[cv] The little bit of fiction that Mackay found time to read, Sir Walter Scott in particular (and his hugely popular Ivanhoe one presumes) conforms to the pattern here of a true Celtic-Anglo-Saxon compatriot.[cvi]

At the same time, Mackay was critical of American foreign policy. “America haul down your boasted [hoisted?] flag of liberty!,” he wrote in 1893. “Shame on Christian America for such treatment of Heathen China.”[cvii] Ironically, too late in the day to be a statement against the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the U.S. that began in 1882, giving rise to considerable Chinese-American protest,[cviii] Mackay had been put off when Vancouver port authorities insisted that he pay the poll tax for his Chinese wife when she was “a British subject and of course [his] children too.”[cix] In fact, he was reduced to borrowing the requisite fifty dollars before entering  Canada. Indeed, by the time he got back to Formosa in 1894, his sense of national, cultural, and political oneness with America had clearly waned. Taking issue with the barbarism of the American West and its treatment of Asian immigrant workers, he writes in his diary: “Ah! American laws to debar a Chinaman from entering. How the land of Liberty is damaged by an ignorant mob out West! How thou art fallen O America! Britannia, My father land I love thee for Liberty is dominant there.”[cx] Of course, Britain had its share of problems and hypocrisies, too, the opium trade in China chief among them, but Mackay’s loyalty to the crown would not be shaken. That he writes glowingly of British expansion into Tibet and its possession of Christmas Island speaks volumes.[cxi] Unlike the British missionary to China, Chester Holcombe, Mackay does not criticize Britain for its imperialist advances into the region and exploitation of locals.[cxii]

In Canada about the same time, the Metis prophet and politician, Louis Riel, after bringing Manitoba (the Red River Settlement) into Confederation was having second thoughts. Abusing his power as many in Ontario thought, he executed Thomas Scot for treason, only to be hung himself for treason and to the jubilation of Anglo-Canadians and Orangemen in Central Canada.[cxiii] Indeed, the treatment of the Plains Cree and the policies of Edgar Dewdney, Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the North-West Territory (ca. 1880), were shameful to say the least: using rations as a means of control; taking away Indian hunting rights along with their rifles; only feeding those who bowed to Canadian Law; and greatly expanding the R.C.M.P. (Mounted Police) at this time in order to subdue and control aboriginal peoples.[cxiv]

Indeed, as Howard Palmer argued long ago now, Canadians were “reluctant hosts” at best. Canadian immigration policies at the close of the nineteenth century, when Mackay found himself arguing with Vancouver’s port authorities over Minnie’s British citizenship and Canadian credentials, differed little from that exclusionary policies of the United States at the time.  “There has been a long history of racism and discrimination against ethnic minorities in English-speaking Canada,” Palmer writes, “along with strong pressures for conformity to Anglo-Canadian way.”[cxv] For British Columbians, Asian immigrants--Chinese, Japanese, and East Indians—were particularly worrisome amid fears that “Asian hordes” threatened to wash away Anglo-Saxon self-government. “The introduction in Canada of a head tax on Chinese immigrants,” Palmer points out, “was based in considerable part on the assumptions of Anglo-conformity—immigrants who were culturally or racially inferior and incapable of being assimilated either culturally or biologically, would have to be excluded.”[cxvi]  Indeed, Blacks from Oklahoma were turned away at the Canadian border on the grounds that Canadian winters might prove problematic.[cxvii]

Mackay’s own marriage and the marriages he performed, as already noted, went against the feminist-racist grain of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, too. Many Canadian Protestant women at the time and following argued vociferously against miscegenation as tantamount to “race suicide,” the commanding late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Protestant feminist understanding of the Canadian cultural mosaic a doctrine of 100% Anglo-Canadianism. Exercising considerable political influence if not power, Christian feminist lobbying had resulted in legislation that would stop foreigners from taking British names and thus disappearing into the Canadian woodwork.[cxviii] Women of the WFMS, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in particular lent their considerable moral and intellectual support to the “science” and practice of eugenics, what Bernard Semmet has rightly called “social imperialism.”[cxix] Mackay’s apparent sexism in this case must be taken with a grain of salt, for his mission to Formosan aboriginals and his marriage to Minnie was ahead of its time in this case. Mackay’s life and ministry locates him at the opposite end of the environmentalist, evolutionary, and social spectrum, devoting himself completely to the science of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and the idea that modifications to the environment produced observable physical and mental changes that were transmitted to the next generation. Christian Lamarckians and “proto-creationists” like Mackay made it their mission to improve the physical as well as spiritual quality of the lives of their parishioners at home and abroad via medical and educational reforms, as well as by means of racial mixing.

The Mormon case is both similar and different. The church that Smith founded did not stay the course vis-à-vis the so-called “Lamanites” and which included island peoples of the Pacific. Anti-African prejudice had restricted the LDS foreign mission in the Pacific in the 1840s, 50s, and 60s to French Polynesia, Hawaii, New Zealand, and Samoa where it was though a “white Lamanite” awaited the message of the Restored Gospel. Tonga and the Cook Islands would have to wait until the 1890s. Indeed, as Mormon attitudes toward peoples of mixed blood softened (and possibly African), and beginning the 1950s, missionaries were sent to Niue (1952) Fiji (1954), Guam (1955), New Caldonia (1961), Vanuatu (1973), Kiribati (1975) , Micronesia (1977), and the Marshall Islands (1977). Following the 1978 revelation lifting the Priesthood Ban against Africans and not before it is worth noting, Palau (1978), Papua New Guinea (1979), Easter Island (1980), and the Solomon Islands (1994) were dedicated to the spread of the Mormon Gospel. In some cases, missionary work was among whites only, such as the New Zealand mission in 1854. However, as Southerton explains,

In 1881 LDS missionaries were again directed by church leaders to take the gospel to New Zealand, this time specifically to the Maoris. The previous, awkward assumptions about connections to Africa were now forgotten, and within a few years, thousands were baptized. By the turn of the century, nearly one in ten Maoris were included on the church rolls…. As with most Polynesians, the Maoris were attracted to the claim that they were descendants of Jews, which missionaries assured them of, saying that the blood of Israel ran through the Polynesians, that their ancestors had descended from Abraham and had sailed to the Pacific va the Americas. This belief appealed to the native people of New Zealand because it suggested that they were members of a favored race that would one day be restored to greatness.[cxx]

Be that as it may, the very successful Mormon mission to the “Lamanites of Polynesia” before and after the 1978 revelation operated according to a segregationist platform. The Deity may have seen fit to give the Priesthood to all worthy men regardless of their race, but the races ought to—if possible—keep to themselves.    

The religious traditions synonymous with George Leslie Mackay and Joseph Smith Jr. began as foreign missions to indigenous peoples with the best of intentions, each a product of the times and racist science of their day. Both have changed dramatically over time and in recent history. Looking backward and forward, one is struck by how much Mormon Utah and the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan have in common, and yet the rather profound difference. As believers in the myth of Celtic-Anglo-Saxon superiority, it is interesting to see discourse in this case, and as Harry Stout observed long ago when comparing factions of American Puritanism, how a common discourse can be the basis for strong differences. In attempting to assess the place of both Mackay and Smith in the history of the Christian missions to the aborigines of the Pacific, an allusion to Puritanism is fitting.