Global encounters through missionary engagement took a vital part in creating what came to be the foundation of American and European relations to the Middle East. Recent research still frames the impact of missionaries during that time as that of a simple transmission of Western identity concepts. It states that when religious conversion failed, the missionaries turned to an agenda of civilizing mission, forcibly and effectively applying a Western distinction of the religious and the secular onto the local societies. I want to challenge these views, arguing that the image and boundaries of a stable Western identity must be questioned. Local and foreign perspectives both changed in the process of communication and all sides contributed to generating the very meaning of religious and secular in a global discourse. At the time, global entanglement was nowhere more apparent than in the Western Anatolian port cities of Constantinople and Smyrna with their cosmopolitanism and illustrious international public from all social strata. There, missionary presence and identity proves to be even in the most basic aspect of the legitimation for their work eminently divergent, conflicting and precarious. I will draw on diverse missionary accounts as well as comparative Ottoman and Armenian sources to argue that missionary and local identities were in a complex process of change, shifting around often times conflicting ideas of a civilizational agenda vs. the search for primordial cultures, emerging (scientific) materialism vs. inwardness and the undecided question which kind of modernity is to be embraced. The paper reexamines these fundamental issues of missionary history in the given politically and ethnically specific, markedly non-colonial context. It evaluates how moral questions shaped the communication about religious and secular identities. Over time, these conflicting issues were drawn into the field of Western identity negotiation as well. The critique of civilization was aimed at the educational work of French or the political affiliations of German missionaries. Thus missionary rivalries also took part in an all sides negotiation of religious identity. This religious dimension of an entangled history defies the monodirectional paradigm. Its consideration can help to shed a new light on the topics of current identity formation, of the evaluation of public policy towards religious or secular interest or of the organization of pluralistic coexistence.