In 1932, the American Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry published a multi-volume report entitled Re-Thinking Missions, which called into question the purpose, quality, and methods of a century of predominantly Protestant Christian evangelization to the eastern and southern hemispheres of the world. James L. Barton, one of the leaders of that global evangelical effort, had already retired from his thirty-five years of service with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) three years earlier. What did this former Foreign Secretary think of the controversial report that criticized the work of denominational missions to which he had dedicated the better part of his life? The answer to that questions illuminates several common themes already raised in the proposed MESA 2009 panel, “Wars, Apostates, and Schools: Protestant Missions in the Ottoman Empire”: the relationship of international foreign policy and foreign missions, the relationship between the United States and the Near East in particular, and the secularization of American foreign missions over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper argues that Barton’s career epitomizes the gradual secularization of American foreign missions advocated by Re-Thinking Missions as Protestantism increasingly fulfilled the mandates of reigning Social Gospel ideology through deeper cooperation with national and international agendas. Barton entered the foreign field at the age of thirty in the eastern Anatolian plains of the Ottoman Empire in 1885 as a conservative-leaning Quaker convert to Congregationalism. As a young recruit, he authored editorials against progressive theological doctrines and emphasized gospel priorities over civilizing projects. Nine years later he began his tenure as ABCFM Foreign Secretary, a position that provided him both access to successive American presidential administrations and the opportunity to influence their diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire (later, the Turkish Republic). As a result, Barton provided counsel on the United States’ neutrality toward the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, on the negotiations of the Versailles and Lausanne peace conferences, and on America’s eventual alliance with Turkey in the late 1920s. By the end of his career, and in a seeming about-face, Barton was writing books criticizing conservative denominational politics abroad and dedicating himself to economic development in war-ravaged Near East. In other words, the personal evolution in missionary philosophy and implementation that Barton experienced – an evolution that predated and even predicted the Hocking report – resulted from his witnessing the transformation of Ottoman imperial politics into Republican statecraft.