Book Review: Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy
This book review first appeared in the most recent issue of the Baptist History & Heritage Journal (Volume LVIII, No. 2) honoring Dr. William Loyd Allen, retired Professor of Church History and Spiritual Formation at McAfee School of Theology.
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Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy. By Mikeal C. Parsons and Joáo B. Chaves. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023. 224 pp.
Although Southern Baptists sometimes idolize celebrity pastors and administrators, the perennial heroes of the Southern Baptist Convention have been its missionaries. By the same token, the task of mission, foreign mission in particular, has always been the locus around which leaders have sought to rally the Convention’s people. Remembering Antônia Teixeira, however, reveals that, in the words of one SBC missionary, “foreign missionaries have no wings.” (p.10) Parsons and Chaves show in this brief book that among the people that surrounded the young Antônia Teixeira, first in Brazil and later in Waco, Texas, wings were in short supply indeed.
Antônia’s story begins in Brazil, a mission field interesting to Southern Baptists partly because of interest in the nation as a location for Southern expatriates disappointed by the outcome of the Civil War. It is not surprising that Baptist missionary assessments of the population drew on deeply racialized assumptions. These assumptions necessarily affected the way that missionaries chose to remember and to write about Antônio Teixeira de Albuquerque, an ex-priest turned Baptist preacher who, despite his overwhelming erudition, came to be remembered by Southern Baptists as a “helper.” Not only that, the authors engage fully with the literature on this colorful figure, retelling his kidnapping of a seventeen-year-old girl while still in the Catholic priesthood, a story which Antônio never denied but that is almost completely missing from standard missionary accounts.
These missing details from the early story of Southern Baptist missionary work in Brazil serve here as a prologue to the center of the piece, an account of the sexual assault of Antônio’s daughter, Antônia, who came to Baylor University in 1892 to live under the care of the university’s president, Rufus Burleson, and his spouse after her father’s early death. Under a special arrangement, Antônia would provide domes- tic services to the Burlesons in return for her room, board, and tuition for study at Baylor.
Over time, Antônia’s days were filled with less study and more housework; then, in late 1894, Antônia was pulled out of the back door of the Burleson’s home and sexually assaulted on three separate occasions. The way that the Burlesons, and the wider community, handled the situation reveals the hideous underbelly of turn-of-the- century Baylor University and the culture in which it was situated. In the end, the entire miserable affair ended with Antônia changing her testimony, possibly in exchange for a train ticket to Memphis, where she was to meet a man that promised her marriage, perhaps only as a ruse to get her out of town.
Parsons and Chaves tell this miserable tale with remarkable equanimity, offering it to all of us not only as a plain account of the suffering of one young woman whose voice can finally be heard, but also as a window into the flawed cultural environment in which Southern Baptist faith once flourished. For as long as it has existed as a subfield of the discipline of church history, denominational history has always been tempted by hagiography and repetition.
Remembering Antônia Teixeira offers a model for a different sort of Baptist history, one in which hero worship is displaced by a frank admission of past failures, in which “mission history” is never severed from the wider narrative, and in which collaborative scholarship across national borders, language barriers, and disciplinary boundaries makes possible richer narratives than have sometimes been typical in the subfield. If this volume is any indication, the future of Baptist history may yet be very bright.
—Reviewed by Andrew C. Smith, Professor of History of Christianity, Carson-Newman University, Jefferson City, Tennessee
