American Protestant missionaries arrived in Syria in 1848 drawn to the Levant by the emotional resonance of the Holy Land, which figured prominently in American Protestant thought, and by a belief that the spread of American ideals could contribute to social progress in other nations. The early 19th century saw the Great Awakening, a Protestant American revivalist movement that spurred missionary work under the aegis of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).
Protestant missionaries in Syria were met with hostility from other Christians. The Ottoman government did not formally recognize Protestantism, and early missionaries often found themselves without institutional support. Missionaries themselves added to tensions within the wider Christian community by being unwilling to accept the legitimacy of other Christian rites, whether Orthodox or Catholic. The Maronite Patriarch successfully requested that the Ottoman Sultan prohibit the distribution of Protestant materials and threatened to excommunicate any member of the Maronite church who offered shelter to Protestant missionaries; the other Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches then did the same. The Ottoman ban on proselytizing to Muslims shifted missionary focus to non-Muslim communities, which, under Ottoman law, included Alawis, Druze, and Shi’a minorities within Syria.
The ABCFM was joined by the North American Reformed Presbyterian Mission and the Danish Mission to the Orient, and the three combined to form the National Evangelical Synod of Syria. Overall, the Protestant missionaries met with little success despite resolute efforts among the Druze. Following the Druze-Maronite conflict in 1860, disillusioned American Protestant missionaries invested in secular education over proselytization. The Protestant Syrian College was founded in 1863 and was renamed the American University in Beirut in 1920. The American University in Beirut originally offered classes in Arabic, and provided an environment in which students explored their Arab identity, fostering an emergent pan-Arab nationalism.
All foreign missionaries were expelled following the 1963 Syrian coup d’état but they regained footholds in the following decades. Since 2000, the Syrian government, at the behest of Syrian Orthodox and Catholic leaders, has cracked down on unregistered Protestant churches and proselytization, largely performed by Christian relief organizations working among Iraqi and Sudanese refugees.
Sources
Necati Alkan, "Fighting for the Nuṣayrī Soul: State, Protestant Missionaries and the ʿAlawīs in the Late Ottoman Empire," Die Welt des Islam, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2012), pp. 23-50.
Caesar Farah, "Protestantism and British Diplomacy in Syria," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (July 1976), pp. 321-344.
Ussama Makdisi, "Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity," The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 3 (June 1997), pp. 680-713.
"Syria," World Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd. Ed., Vol. I, eds. David Barrett et. al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). pp. 719-722.
"Syria's Evangelical Christians: Don't try too Hard," The Economist, November 18, 2010, accessed June 6, 2013.
Image Credits:
"A Syrian Christian Mission School, 1936," courtesy of Mike Leavenworth.