Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend (Southern Biography Series)
Legendary Southern Baptist missionary Charlotte ”Lottie” Moon played a pivotal role in revolutionizing southern civil society. Her involvement in the establishment of the Women’s Missionary Union provided white Baptist women with an alternate means of gaining and asserting power within the denomination’s organizational structure and changed it forever. In Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend Regina Sullivan provides the first comprehensive portrait of ”Lottie,” who not only empowered women but also inspired the formation of one of the most influential religious organizations in the United States.
Despite being the daughter of slaveholders in antebellum Virginia, Moon never lived the life of a typical southern belle. Highly educated and influenced by models of independent womanhood, including an older sister who was a woman’s rights advocate, an open opponent of slavery, and the first Virginian female to earn a medical degree, Moon followed her sister’s lead and utilized her extensive education to successfully combine the language of woman’s rights with the egalitarian impulse of evangelical Protestantism.
In 1873 Moon found her true calling, however, in missionary work beginning in China. During her tenure there she recommended that the week before Christmas be designated as a time of giving to foreign missions. In response to her vision, thousands of Southern Baptist women organized local missionary societies to collect funds, and in 1888, the Woman’s Missionary Union was founded as the Southern Baptist Convention’s female auxiliary for missionary work.
Sullivan credits Moon’s role in the establishment of the Woman’s Missionary Union as having a significant impact on the erosion of patriarchal power and women’s new engagement with the public sphere. Since her initial plea in 1888, the Missionary Union’s annual ”Lottie Moon Christmas Offering” has raised over a billion dollars to support missionary work.
Lottie Moon captures the influence and culminating effect of one woman’s personal, spiritual, and civic calling.
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The Real Lottie Moon Story,
While many individuals are held in high esteem in our denomination, Southern Baptists have only one saint and her name is Lottie Moon. Of course, we don’t refer to her as “St. Lottie,” but the legend that has arisen around her life story qualifies Lottie Moon for the highest regard in Baptist life.
After all, who but Lottie Moon set off to serve alone as a single woman to China in 1873? Who but Lottie Moon worked with Chinese women and children, leaving the preaching and mission politics to men? Who but Lottie Moon starved herself to death because she gave all her food and money to feed the Chinese around her?
Those questions comprise the legend of Lottie Moon as generations of Southern Baptists have come to know her. Unfortunately, none of the above statements is completely true according to Regina D. Sullivan’s new book, Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China In History and Legend.
The author of this new groundbreaking book grew up Southern Baptist, and is now a professor at Berkeley College in New York. Sullivan contends that many of the hagiographic details of the “Lottie Moon story” were embellished by others in a misguided effort to bolster missions funding, and to camouflage Moon’s advocacy of women’s rights in SBC life.
Contrary to both the policies of the former SBC Foreign Mission Board which appointed Moon in 1873, and the current SBC International Mission Board, Sullivan also contends that Moon believed in and lobbied for an equal voice for women on the mission field. The historical record shows that Moon worked not only with Chinese women and children, but also preached to and taught Chinese men and boys when the situation demanded it. And here in the United States, at Moon’s urging, Southern Baptist women organized themselves into the Women’s Missionary Union, despite the opposition of many SBC pastors in the late 1800s. In short, Moon was an egalitarian when it came to women’s service in Baptist life.
Regina Sullivan has done Southern Baptists a great favor by pulling back the curtain of misinformation that has surrounded Lottie Moon’s story since her death. Working from primary sources which have never been surveyed comprehensively, Sullivan researched SBC archives at current SBC institutions, but also expanded her inquiries to other institutions such as the University of Virginia, Drexel University, Yale Divinity School, and many other non-Baptist sources.
Sullivan’s Lottie Moon is not the typical Baptist biography of Moon, like Her Own Way or The New Lottie Moon Story. Rather, Sullivan has positioned Lottie Moon in the ranks of significant Southern women. Impeccably footnoted and referenced, the endnotes, bibliography, and index comprise a quarter of the book’s volume. The publication of this book by Louisiana State University Press in its “Southern Biography Series” speaks to the quality of her research, and the integrity of Sullivan’s work as an academic.
The significance of this book for Southern Baptists is that the real Lottie Moon story is better than the myth. After the Civil War, at a time when women in American society were advocating women’s political rights, Moon was a pioneer in her advocacy for women’s rights within the religious culture of the Southern Baptist Convention. Sullivan skillfully weaves the details of Lottie Moon’s life, the struggles of SBC Foreign Mission Board, the emergence of the Woman’s Missionary Union, and the politics of the Southern Baptist Convention into a single compelling story. At the center of it all was Lottie Moon, a force to be reckoned with in the late 1800s, and after her death a legend to be exploited for fundraising.
Moon’s defiance of the SBC Foreign Mission Board when she moved alone from the established mission compound in Tengchow to pioneer work as a single woman in Pingtu is an historical fact that cannot be ignored or rehabilitated to fit Victorian or contemporary notions of a woman’s “proper place.” Had the Foreign Mission Board been prescient enough to anticipate Moon’s entrepreneurial approach to mission work, the FMB would never have appointed her.
Lottie Moon has been a role model for Baptist mission work and sacrifice for almost 140 years. And, largely because of her story, Southern Baptists have given over $1-billion dollars to international mission work through the SBC Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. But that story was often stretched beyond the point of truth with the tales of Lottie starving herself to death because she gave all her food and money to feed her starving Chinese neighbors. It is that legend that Southern Baptists have embraced until now.
But Moon’s real story is even more wonderful because she was a true pioneer. Lottie Moon was a woman who grew up in a family that educated its girls, expected them to excel, and gave them room to grow into…
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