"What if it should be God's plan to people the world with better and finer material?"
About this Quote
Beneath the soft, speculative phrasing, Josiah Strong is running a hard argument: empire as providence, hierarchy as holy design. “What if” pretends to humility, but it’s a rhetorical crowbar. It invites the listener to step into a moral thought experiment whose conclusion is already baked in: that some populations are “better and finer material” and that history’s violent churn can be rebranded as God’s quality control.
Strong’s era matters. He’s writing and preaching in the high tide of Anglo-Protestant confidence, when U.S. expansion, mass immigration, and the global scramble for colonies created anxiety and opportunity in equal measure. The language of “people the world” smuggles in a demographic fantasy: the planet as a canvas to be filled, arranged, improved. It turns migration, conquest, and displacement into a neutral act of settlement, like stocking a pantry. The phrase “material” is doing especially cold work. Humans become raw inputs, sortable and gradable. Faith supplies the halo; social Darwinism supplies the ranking.
The specific intent isn’t merely to reassure believers that change has meaning. It’s to authorize a program: missionary work fused with nationalism, assimilation, and the civilizing mission. Strong offers his audience an absolution in advance. If domination is framed as God’s plan, then the costs - coerced conversion, cultural erasure, racialized exclusion - can be filed as unfortunate but righteous side effects of a higher standard. The genius, and the danger, is how the sentence flatters the reader into complicity: if God is “peopling” the world with better stock, who, conveniently, counts as the better stock?
Strong’s era matters. He’s writing and preaching in the high tide of Anglo-Protestant confidence, when U.S. expansion, mass immigration, and the global scramble for colonies created anxiety and opportunity in equal measure. The language of “people the world” smuggles in a demographic fantasy: the planet as a canvas to be filled, arranged, improved. It turns migration, conquest, and displacement into a neutral act of settlement, like stocking a pantry. The phrase “material” is doing especially cold work. Humans become raw inputs, sortable and gradable. Faith supplies the halo; social Darwinism supplies the ranking.
The specific intent isn’t merely to reassure believers that change has meaning. It’s to authorize a program: missionary work fused with nationalism, assimilation, and the civilizing mission. Strong offers his audience an absolution in advance. If domination is framed as God’s plan, then the costs - coerced conversion, cultural erasure, racialized exclusion - can be filed as unfortunate but righteous side effects of a higher standard. The genius, and the danger, is how the sentence flatters the reader into complicity: if God is “peopling” the world with better stock, who, conveniently, counts as the better stock?
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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