In this project, I document the United Mission in Mesopotamia’s (later Iraq) approach to race and politics in region between the mission’s founding in 1921 and it’s deportation by the Baathists in 1969. I rely on the mission’s archives housed at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I first situate its history against the broader history of American missions in the Middle East. Its story is rather conventional in this regard with respect to other scholars who have worked on American missions in the broader Middle East. I then turn toward the discourse of “civilization” and how the mission’s approached was raced, even if “race” did not explicitly figure in the way they present themselves. We glean such a discourse from their letters, annual publications, and other written documents preserved in their archive. And I lastly conclude with the politics of the mission: how race intersects with their approach to nationalism and domestic political issues, beneath the discourse of “civilization.” The United Mission in Iraq, an all-white American organization, synthesized British colonial tropes with American optimism about modernity, styling themselves bearers of modernity under the guise of evangelizing Christianity.