Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Robert D. Linder / George Müller of Bristol (1805-1898) was widely celebrated in the nineteenth century as the founder of the Ashley Down Orphan Homes in Bristol, England. He was a German immigrant to Great Britain who was at the vanguard of evangelical philanthropic care of children. The object of his charitable work, orphans, influenced the establishment of Christian orphanages in Great Britain, North America, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. However, what brought Müller widespread public acclaim was his assertion that he supported his orphan homes solely by relying on faith and prayer. According to Müller, he prayed to God for the material needs of the orphans and he believed, in faith, that those needs were supplied by God, without resort to direct solicitation, through donations given to him. He employed his method as a means to strengthen the faith of his fellow Christians and published an ongoing chronicle of his answered prayers that served as evidence. Müller’s method of financial support brought him to the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century about the efficacy of prayer and the supernatural claims of Christianity. His use of prayer to provide for the orphans made his name a “household word the world round.” This dissertation is a study of Müller’s influence on evangelicals that analyzes Müller’s enduring legacy as a hero of the faith among evangelicals around the world. For evangelicals Müller was an exemplary Christian—a Protestant saint—who embodied a simple but pure form of biblical piety. To explore his influence from the nineteenth century through the twentieth century, this study, as a social biography, investigates how evangelicals remember individuals and how that memory, in this case Müller, influenced the practice of prayer in evangelical piety. The dissertation affirms a link between evangelicals and eighteenth-century German Pietism, while also showing that evangelicals used publications to celebrate and to informally canonize individuals esteemed for their piety. The dissertation, ultimately, is concerned with how evangelicals identified heroes of the faith and why these heroes were and are widely used as models for edification and for emulation in everyday life.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / To take at face value the current enthusiasm at the idea of marshaling science to end human social ills such as global poverty, one could easily overlook the fact that one hundred fifty years prior people were making strikingly similar claims as part of a broad movement often referred to as “scientific charity” or “scientific philanthropy”. The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to our knowledge of the scientific charity movement, through a retrieval of the morally weighted language used by reformers and social scientists to justify the changes they proposed for both public and private provision of poor relief, as found in the Proceedings of the Annual Assembly of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (NCCC). In essence I am claiming that our understanding of the scientific charity movement is incomplete, and can be improved by an approach that looks at scientific charity as a species of moral language that provided ways to energize the many disparate and seemingly disconnected or even contradictory movements found during the period under study. The changes enacted to late 19th century philanthropic and charitable structures did not occur due to advances in a morally neutral and thus superior science, but were born along by a broad scale use of the language of scientific charity: an equally moral yet competing and eventually more compelling vision of a philanthropic future which held the keys to unlock the mysteries of poverty and solve it once and for all. When viewing scientific charity as something broader than any particular instantiation of it, when pursing it as a set of languages used to promote social science’s role in solving human problems by discrediting prior nonscientific attempts, one can begin to see that the reformist energies of late 19th century social thinkers did not dissipate, but crystalized into the set of background assumptions still present today.