Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy by Mikeal C. Parsons and João B. Chaves (review)

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• Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy by Mikeal C. Parsons and João B. Chaves
• Alison Collis Greene

Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy. By Mikeal C. Parsons and João B. Chaves. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023. Pp. xvi, 224. $26.99, ISBN 978-0-8028-8309-4.)

Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy describes how nineteenth-century Southern Baptists, their Foreign Mission Board, and Baylor University cultivated “narratives of institutional goodness” by reframing and erasing the stories of two generations of Brazilian Baptists: Antônio Teixeira, Brazil’s first native-born Baptist pastor, and his daughter Antônia Teixeira, who was raped while living in the university president’s household (p. 10).

Mikeal C. Parsons, a New Testament scholar at Baylor, and João B. Chaves, a historian of religion in the Americas, focus first on Antônio Teixeira and his encounters with Southern Baptist missionaries. Born to a wealthy white Brazilian Catholic family and educated in the best schools, Teixeira became a priest who courted political and personal controversy. At thirty-five, he either kidnapped or ran away with a seventeen-year-old girl, whom he married upon his conversion to Protestantism in 1878. In 1882, at age forty-two and having already become a Southern Baptist, Teixeira met two Baptist missionaries and joined their cause. Teixeira, not the bumbling Baptists, held the upper hand: “he was a highly educated, multilingual, well-connected, and nationally known leader who had learned to navigate his way around controversy” (p. 38). Though graduates of the best institutions that nineteenth-century Southern Baptists had to offer, the missionaries “were young, inexperienced, unsophisticated, monolingual, and undereducated” (p. 38). Teixeira was famous throughout his home country, first as a priest and then as an anti-Catholic firebrand. Yet when he died at forty-seven, the Baptist Church reframed his story to make him a local saint, a spiritual prodigy who took on the Catholics without upstaging the American Protestants who claimed his story.

The second half of the book tells the story of Teixeira’s oldest child, his daughter Antônia, who traveled to Waco, Texas, with a missionary’s family in [End Page 636] July 1892. Baylor president Rufus C. Burleson promised to house Antônia and send her to Baylor in exchange for domestic work in his household. Soon the domestic labor superseded her student status, further isolating her. In 1894, Teixeira reported a series of rapes by Stein Morris, a neighbor and relative of the Burleson family. Neither the family nor the courts took Teixeira’s charges seriously until a prominent local reporter made the story public. Parsons and Chaves describe the assaults in graphic detail, and they follow a trail of medical and court evidence—including the birth and death of the rapist’s baby—that supports Teixeira’s characterizations of the assaults. In the swirl of publicity, Burleson stepped down from his presidency at Baylor. His infamy was brief, however; and while Waco and Baylor wrote Teixeira out of the university’s story, both celebrated Burleson as an embodiment of Baylor’s distinct Christian witness.

Remembering Antônia Teixeira is an unusual book. Despite its emphasis on historical memory and institutional history, it does not engage substantially with memory studies or institutional-reckoning histories. Instead, the book unfolds detective novel–style, attempting to piece together what the authors can learn from the archive and then testing the range of recollections against one another. It bears the mark of the Bible scholar in its careful exegesis of primary texts, and of the scholar of American religions in its sharp grasp of the historical context and relevant literature.

Parsons and Chaves have accomplished something remarkable: they have presented in familiar Baptist idiom a scholarly and persuasive case that should be intelligible and credible both to the historian and to the person in the pew. They have shown how Baylor’s narrative of institutional innocence—and that of Southern Baptists more generally—has allowed predators free rein. In so doing, they have offered a model of how...