Institution Building for the Soul Highlights

Thomas Gallaudet and the Church FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH John Van Cleve , 1997. JOHN VAN CLEVE: Thomas Gallaudet was an Evangelical Christian, and he believed that it was his duty to try to save the souls of as many people as he possibly could. He thought that the way to bring about heaven on earth was, in fact, to convert people to the true Christian light, as he saw it. In the early nineteenth century, you really had a couple of choices if you believed that. One is that you could go out and convert the heathen, even overseas, or the heathen in the American West, the Indians. Gallaudet discovered the heathen in our midst, and they were deaf people, who were, because of their inability to read and their inability to understand the spoken word as well, denied knowledge of God. And it's clear that Thomas Gallaudet thought that he was saving their souls, and believed that this was the most important part of what he did. And I think he believed that right until the day he died, that he was in fact preparing America for the millennium, by converting the souls of deaf people, as well as saving individual deaf people themselves so that they would be, after death, saved. That's really what drives Gallaudet. That great desire to play out his role as he believed God assigned it to him. He was a person who was quite ill as a young man, who was looking around for a niche, a place where he felt that he could live out his God-given role as a savior, and when he happened to find a deaf child, he said, "I took one look at this child and said, 'Here is an ignorant, innocent person who can be converted, but the first thing I have to do is find out how to communicate with her, and I have to find out how I can teach her, so that she can then understand the word of God and can be saved.'" And that becomes the basis of all of Gallaudet's professional life. He first tries to save deaf people, deaf children particularly. Later on, when he is no longer as active and involved with the American School for the Deaf, he becomes involved in writing children's books. Again, it's to try to save the people who have not yet seen the light of God. That's where he's coming from.