How to Write about the Religious Other: Halle Pietist Missionaries, Their Publication Strategies, and Protestant Plurality.

This article examines the publication strategies of the Danish-English-Halle Mission in South India during the eighteenth century to challenge the scholarly assumption that early modern Protestantism was inherently polycentric and pluralistic. Through analysis of the mission’s journal, the *Hallesche Berichte* and *Neue Hallesche Berichte*, and extensive correspondence among missionaries, editors, and European readers, it reveals that these actors constructed a spiritual geography centering Europe as the source of “true” Protestant Christianity, portraying the Tamil converts primarily as passive religious others within a divine plan of salvation. The missionary reports prioritized edification over ethnographic accuracy or exhaustive natural history, deliberately shaping narratives to inspire and unify a European Protestant readership rather than reflect the complex realities of mission encounters. This “community of interaction” around the journal effectively reinforced a monocentric vision of Protestantism centered in Europe, complicating modern historiographical models that emphasize Protestant plurality and polycentrism in the early modern period.