4

The Missionary Boomerang

Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians, you are not like him.

—DANA TAGORE, ABOUT 1910

ONE DAY in 1923, John R. Mott, the undisputed leader of American Protestant missionary efforts throughout the world, spent the morning with former president William Howard Taft, who was then chief justice of the US Supreme Court. Mott then went to the White House for lunch with President Calvin Coolidge. In the afternoon, Mott called on his old friend, the ailing former president, Woodrow Wilson.1 Three presidents in one day. Mott’s social calendar reveals the public standing of missionaries a hundred years ago.

In 1925 there were ten thousand American missionaries abroad, primarily in China, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and India, but also distributed elsewhere across the globe beyond the North Atlantic West. The cultural role of missionaries was much greater than their numbers would imply. To be a missionary was to have accepted a challenging and honored calling. The missionaries sent out by the major denominations were anything but marginal, socially. Often they were graduates of Princeton, Yale, Oberlin, Mount Holyoke, or Amherst. Missionaries were in the vanguard, taking risks to advance what were understood as the finest features of American society, spreading them out to the wider world. They were the bullfighters of Protestantism.

From the start of the American Protestant foreign missionary project in the 1830s, secular as well as religious magazines reported extensively on missionary activities. The size and social prominence of the missionary project grew rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s. By the early twentieth century, the organizations sponsoring the project were among the largest and most influential voluntary associations in the United States. Some missionary leaders held important positions in the federal government, especially during the Wilson administration. Quite a few were on relaxed social terms with the most powerful businessmen in the country, including Cleveland Dodge and John D. Rockefeller Jr. Some missionary leaders were guests at Rockefeller’s summer home on Mount Desert Island, Maine.

Missionaries were insiders to America and to Christianity. As such, they were different from Jewish immigrants. They differed also in the parts of the globe with which they were engaged. When Jewish immigrants and their descendants looked abroad, they focused on Europe. When missionaries and their children and their supporting organizations looked beyond the United States, they were inspired by Asia, and to some extent by Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific. Jewish cosmopolitanism and missionary cosmopolitanism ran parallel to one another, but they expanded American horizons in different directions and almost never took account of one another. Hence it is all the more important to understand each on its own terms.

What made the missionaries so critical of American provinciality? In what areas of public life was their influence registered? How did missionary cosmopolitanism affect the Protestant churches? How did missionary perspectives on religion relate to race and ethnicity?

Mark Twain’s sense that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” does not always apply.2 But it did for thousands of missionaries. The experience of living with peoples really different from themselves, much to their surprise, changed their understandings of themselves, of their country, and of humanity. Missionaries were expected to make the rest of the world “more like us,” more like American Protestants. But by the 1920s, a steady stream of missionary writings insisted that this old aspiration was a mistake.

The gospel ended up working like a boomerang, thrown across the sea but not staying there. It returned, carrying unexpected baggage.3 The rest of humanity was more than a needy expanse, awaiting the benevolence and supervision of American Protestants. Many returning missionaries became informal ambassadors from foreign peoples to Americans and vocal advocates of tolerance and inclusion. Some missionaries, to be sure, fit the popular stereotype of defenders of imperialism and empire, scornful of indigenous cultures. The missionaries most likely to become cosmopolitan critics of American narrowness were the most educated: those who had attended liberal arts colleges and leading seminaries.

The mission field was an important battleground between ecumenical and evangelical missionaries. This was true from the start and remained a prominent reality of the American missionary endeavor. One scholar found that even as late as the 1960s, “the most urgent issue facing Protestantism in the Congo” for evangelical missionaries was “the power of ecumenical Christianity, not traditional religion.”4

Evangelicals, like ecumenicals, had global reach, but the ecumenically minded missionaries were much quicker to change their inherited ideas. In the major denominations, the tone of missionary representation of foreign peoples moved steadily away from invidious language and toward the universalist vision of Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Ecumenical missionaries also differed from evangelical missionaries in their postmission role in American public life. The evangelicals, even when liberalized by their experience abroad, almost never became State Department officers, Ivy League professors, best-selling authors, or leaders of social reform movements. They did become prominent within evangelical institutions, and there sometimes argued against ethnocentrism.5

The ecumenical missionary contingent included many who regarded the great Hindu leader Mohandas Gandhi—invariably called “Mahatma,” for “great soul”—as the most fully Christian person in the world. His peace-loving, generous behavior showed what it would mean to “walk humbly in the Lord.” Beyond Gandhi, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and followers of other non-Christian faiths were no longer to be scorned as heathens or patronized as less than complete human beings. Rather, they were “brothers and sisters.” God had made “all nations of one blood,” according to Acts 17:26, a verse that came into more common use in the United States in the context of foreign missions.

The link between religious ecumenism and ethnoracial inclusion was a constant refrain of this liberalizing missionary discourse. The missionary-influenced church leaders of the 1930s promoted Japanese preacher Toyohiko Kagawa and showcased him as an example of how persons of a foreign race could exemplify and evangelize for the Christian faith just as well as any white man. In 1936 alone, Kagawa spoke in a hundred fifty American cities before audiences of seventy-five thousand. He was regularly attacked by fundamentalists, making the ecumenical leaders all the more devoted to Kagawa as a carrier of their universalist gospel.6

Protestants missionaries from European nations also popularized ecumenical and antiracist ideas, but the European missionaries operated in the context of colonial empires. The British, Dutch, and German missionaries and their churchgoing supporters were more familiar with foreign peoples and less struck by the missionary encounter with them. For American missionaries and their followers back home, sustained contact with the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the South Seas was more novel than for their counterparts in Europe. The European missionary groups remained more comfortable with empire than the Americans, who proved highly responsive to decolonization when that world-changing process unfolded after World War II.

Business, military, and diplomatic connections abroad also promoted awareness of peoples beyond the North Atlantic West, as did National Geographic and the most popular works of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. But these secular reports on the wider world registered with a smaller segment of the public. Denominational periodicals delivered missionary testimony to American homes even in the most isolated locations. The missionary boomerang brought traces of radically different “others” directly into local churches and homes. Missionaries were intimate and trusted witnesses to world events. Missionaries on furlough were usually the featured speakers at national and regional denominational meetings and appeared regularly at Sunday night services in local churches. It was common for congregations to correspond for decades with specific missionary families to whose support they contributed financially. During the 1920s, some denominations allocated as much as 90 percent of their annual budget to foreign missions.7

Presbyterian missionary daughter Pearl Buck was perhaps the most acclaimed exemplar of missionary cosmopolitanism. Her 1931 novel The Good Earth portrayed Chinese men, women, and children in intimate terms that prompted American readers to empathize with them as if they were siblings. On her way to the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, Buck inspired countless reviewers to remark on how familiar she had made Chinese peasants seem. The Christian Century’s reviewer marveled that the central character of The Good Earth would have been no different “spiritually” had he “toiled on the Nebraska prairie rather than China.” Buck’s characters were multidimensional, striving individuals, each with a distinctive personality, profoundly different from the stereotypical candidates for conversion and benevolence long featured in even the most generous of what Americans were accustomed to reading about China. Later generations found elements of Orientalism in The Good Earth, but Buck challenged Orientalist stereotypes more effectively than any other popular writer of her generation. Will Rogers, the Oklahoma cracker-barrel philosopher who then enjoyed a national audience, described The Good Earth as “not only the greatest book about a people ever written, but the best book of our generation.” Historians of East-West cultural relations find that Buck altered Western perspectives on China more than anyone since Marco Polo.8

Buck’s fiction of the 1940s and 1950s no longer won critical praise, yet many of her books were best sellers. Moreover, as one of the widely known and respected women in the country, Buck used her fame to become a public voice for a number of progressive causes. She advocated independence for India well before it was achieved, campaigned for the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and was a steadfast supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Walter White, the president of the NAACP, and other Black leaders could always count on Buck to support their programs while other white allies temporalized. As early as 1941, Buck demanded that women be given access to contraception and be paid salaries equal to those of men when performing the same labor. Buck articulated most of the ideas popularized two decades later by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book the then-aged Buck enthusiastically endorsed. Buck established and financed the first adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption. Buck was for “three decades,” biographer Hilary Spurling summarizes, a campaigner “for peace, tolerance, and liberal democracy, for the rights of children and minorities, for an end to discrimination on grounds of race and gender.”9

American writer and journalist John Hersey was also a “man for causes,” many of them shared with Buck. But this China-born missionary son made his greatest mark by enabling the American public to see themselves in the lives of ordinary Japanese people. This achievement was all the more remarkable for its timing: only a year after the end of the American war against Japan. Hersey’s detailed account of the experience of six survivors of the atomic bomb attack on the city of Hiroshima had much in common with Buck’s novel about the Chinese. Hersey’s poetic reportage enabled readers to experience a great range of emotions while recognizing the basic humanity of people who may well have been relatives of the Japanese soldiers whose depredations Americans had reason to condemn. Hiroshima is a materially dense, highly naturalistic, and minutely described story of pain and desolation, told without moral reflection. There is no argument that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was a mistake, nor that it was a military necessity. There is no plea for abolishing atomic weapons.10

“The power of his text is not just a matter of its raw material,” one literary scholar observed recently about Hiroshima. There is Hersey’s “startling intimacy with the people he writes about: with poor, maddened Mr. Fukai, determined to break free of his rescuers and run back into the flames to die; with Dr. Sasaki, wearing the spectacles he has borrowed from a nurse, applying first aid to surviving patients.”11 The editors of the New Yorker devoted the entire August 31, 1946, issue to what Hersey then published as a book. Readers reported that they stopped everything to finish the article in silence. Albert Einstein reportedly ordered a thousand copies to distribute to people he thought should read it.

Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, published in the same year as Hiroshima, also enabled Americans to recognize more humanity in the Japanese people than they had felt before. But Benedict wrote sweepingly about national traits, while Hersey, like Buck, wrote about specific individuals. Unlike Benedict’s anthropological classic, which sold only twenty-eight thousand copies in twenty-five years, Hiroshima was a runaway best seller and has never dropped from view. In 1999 a panel of distinguished journalists identified it as the finest piece of journalistic writing in the twentieth century. Some of Hersey’s other writings displayed the same capacity for empathic engagement with peoples far from the American heartland. The Wall, published in 1950, was the first novel to deal with the Holocaust and the first to use that word in print. The Yale and prep school graduate, a descendant of generations of Congregationalists, was praised in Commentary and other Jewish magazines for his sensitive depiction of the society and culture of Polish Jewry.

Henry Luce, also a missionary child, was different, but only up to a point. Compared with Buck and Hersey, Luce was more conservative and very much more an American nationalist. But he used his influence as the publisher of TimeLife, and Fortune to promote attention to contemporary Asia. He put Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek on the cover of Time a dozen times. Chiang and his wife, the equally famous, media-savvy Madame Chiang, were both Christian converts, rendering them less striking departures than Gandhi as heroes for Americans to admire. Luce’s magazines, especially Life, were consistently critical of racial discrimination well before other national periodicals had made that ideological turn.

Luce remained nominally Presbyterian, unlike Buck and Hersey, who both abandoned religion altogether. Nonetheless, Luce’s “American Century” of 1941 recast the old Protestant call to change the world as a national project, not a Christian one. Luce’s nationalism was less Christian than the internationalism of its most famous rebuttal, the leftist Henry Wallace’s The Century of the Common Man.12 Ironically, Luce’s treatise was more genuinely cosmopolitan than anything the god-talking Wallace ever wrote.13 The publisher’s sense of what it meant to be an American, for all its national chauvinism, was neither as ethnocentric nor as religiously sectarian as that of his major leftist critic.

Luce was a leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party and in that role knew Minnesota Republican congressman Walter Judd. A Congregationalist missionary doctor in China before being elected to Congress in 1942, Judd proved to be one of the most vigorously antiracist members of the House of Representatives. He struggled for a decade to convince Congress to repeal of the “whites-only” provision of naturalization law that had been in place since 1790. Because the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship for emancipated African Americans and the 1848 treaty ending the Mexican War promised naturalization to Mexican immigrants, the law’s chief function was to deprive immigrants from Asia of the opportunity to become citizens. Judd tried to win support for the “Judd Bill,” which floated in and out of committees, session after session of Congress. Finally it became law in 1952, when its contents—repeal of the whites-only regulation—were incorporated into the McCarran-Walter Act. Judd was the single person most responsible for this landmark event in the diminution of white supremacy’s hold on American law.14

Missionary-connected Americans were also conspicuous in speaking out against the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II. The missionary lobby protested this policy more swiftly, more persistently, and more loudly than any other identifiable group of white Americans. Anthropologists, then another strongly antiprovincial presence in American life, almost never opposed the US government’s policies toward the Japanese Americans during the years when the missionary contingent’s opposition was on public display. Missionary-connected authors castigated the policy in the Christian Century, the most prominent national magazine to oppose the government’s action. Galen Fisher, a former missionary to Japan, led the largest of the organizations lobbying on behalf of the confined Japanese Americans. Pearl Buck pressed the issue directly with her personal friend, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Former missionaries supervised the process whereby the Japanese Americans eventually released from Manzanar, Tule Lake, Minidoka, and other camps were placed in homes and jobs, often in locations distant from the Pacific Coast, where they had lived before the war.

Across the Pacific, former missionaries made another, highly distinctive mark on the World War II era. They saved thousands of Japanese POWs from violent abuse and death. Placed in charge of the interrogation of captured soldiers because of their exceptional facility with the Japanese language, the missionaries who accepted commissions in the Marine Corps, Army, and Navy proved that decent treatment of POWs produced more and better intelligence while displaying the most admirable features of American culture. In so doing, these officers defied superiors with traditional, racist views of the Japanese people. Marine Lt. Col. Sherwood Moran, who was part of the first wave at Guadalcanal, had spent twenty-six years as a Congregationalist missionary in Japan. He wrote an interrogation manual instructing all interrogators to treat the Japanese soldiers as “brothers.”15 In all three services active in the Pacific War, the missionary impact was the same, yet without any interservice cooperation. Service rivalries kept each service’s programs for POW interrogation separate; only after the war was the independent power of the missionary witness on behalf of the Japanese soldiers recognized.

While what these military officers did during World War II was never widely known at the time, the Foreign Service was a setting in which the appreciation for foreign peoples was more visible. “China hands” John Paton Davies Jr. and John S. Service were purged in the McCarthy Era for their willingness during the war to engage the Chinese Communists. They warned the American government against too great a reliance on the patently corrupt Christian convert, Chiang Kai-shek. In policy debates about the Middle East, a substantial cohort of Beirut-born missionary sons fought against the anti-Arab prejudice that was widespread in the Department of State. One of these, William A. Eddy, was close enough to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia to detach him from his traditional British allies and to connect him to the United States, including through the Dhahran air base for which Eddy was largely responsible. Eddy was so trusted by both the Saudis and the American government that he served as translator for both King Saud and President Roosevelt in an epochal meeting between the two in 1945 devoted to the volatile issue of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Eddy and his missionary colleagues then sought to convince the administrations of Truman and Eisenhower to view Arab nationalism and the Islamic religion in more sympathetic lights.

These missionary “Arabists” pursued a largely unsuccessful effort to get the US government to renounce the clients of the old European colonial empires still found in Egypt, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries. They understood the British government’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 as an imperialist gambit, and they advised against the recognition of Israel in 1948 even while acknowledging that the Jewish state was a response to prejudice of a different sort, and on a massive scale. American policy toward Israel was the only issue on which missionary cosmopolitanism divided from Jewish cosmopolitanism, although some missionary-connected individuals and groups supported Truman’s recognition of Israel, and some Jewish Americans opposed it. The missionary diplomats were aloof from the 1953 CIA coup replacing Mohammad Mosaddegh with the pro-Western Shah, and most of them opposed the landing of American troops in Lebanon in 1958. The American “missionary tradition,” observed historian Hugh Milford, lost out during the Cold War to “the British imperial legacy” embraced by Dulles and Eisenhower.16

The most historically important of the missionary diplomats during and immediately after World War II designed and put into place the post–World War II alliance between Thailand and United States. As the only Foreign Service officer with any knowledge of Southeast Asia, Kenneth Landon was able to defeat pro-British voices in Washington that wanted to defer to Britain’s eagerness to dominate postwar Thailand. Landon was also sympathetic to the Vietnamese nationalists in their war against the French. After a weeklong meeting with Ho Chi Minh early in 1946, Landon wrote what later became the document of earliest date in the Pentagon Papers.

Landon’s wife, fellow missionary Margaret Landon, portrayed the Thai people sympathetically in her book of 1944, presented as a true story but actually a work of fiction, Anna and the King of Siam.17 The novel was the basis for several Hollywood movies and the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage classic The King and I. Later critics correctly pointed to patronizing, Orientalist aspects of this romantic tale. But this former Presbyterian missionary created the most enduring popular image of an Asian national group, and one in which the local leader, the Thai king, invited respect by maintaining his country’s independence from colonial powers.

Throughout the Cold War missionary-connected lobbyists and government officials were, with some exceptions, more tolerant of the anti-American postures of postcolonial regimes than were the policy makers they tried to influence in the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Missionary cosmopolitans tried to persuade these officials that the interests of the United States were consistent with the self-declared interest of decolonizing peoples. They lost the argument concerning China, the Arab world, and, most significantly, Vietnam. But missionary service programs did greatly influence US-backed development programs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and eventually served as the explicit model for the Peace Corps.

In academia, missionary cosmopolitanism had its most dramatic and sweeping postwar impact. Long before Edward Said’s Orientalism, the highly effective polemic of 1978 that named and criticized Western habits of derogatory thought about the peoples and cultures of the East, missionary-connected American professors had been pushing against many of the same biases. They led the postwar expansion of scholarship and teaching about recent and contemporary non-Western societies and cultures. Half of the presidents of the Association for Asian Studies during the two decades after the war were former missionaries or missionary children. The most influential was Edwin Reischauer, a historian who, along with his colleague John K. Fairbank, developed an East Asian Studies program at Harvard University that produced dozens of doctoral alumni who then launched comparable programs in universities and colleges throughout the United States. Reischauer also served as the American ambassador to Japan, the country of his birth.

Missionaries and their children were uniquely qualified for academic jobs because of their mastery of Asian languages and their familiarity with Asian cultures. Missionary son W. Norman Brown played in South Asian Studies a role comparable to Reischauer’s in Japanese Studies. Political scientists Lucian Pye and A. Doak Barnett, literary scholar Harriet Mills, and historians C. Martin Wilbur, L. Carrington Goodrich, and Kenneth Scott Latourette increased the size and enhanced the reputation of Chinese Studies programs at Columbia, Yale, Michigan, and other universities. Although the Jewish Americans who joined faculties in large numbers at the same historical moment usually specialized in other, Eurocentric fields, campuses were major sites where missionary cosmopolitanism and Jewish cosmopolitanism operated simultaneously with a high level of intensity.

All of these examples of missionary cosmopolitanism involve Asia and the Middle East, not Africa and Latin America. Why that imbalance? The long-term diplomatic and commercial engagement of the United States with Latin America rendered public and private authorities less dependent on missionary expertise. In addition, Spanish was a familiar language, widely taught in American schools. And because ecumenical Protestants were often reluctant to “poach” on the strong Catholic presence in Latin America, the missionary presence there was dominated by evangelicals much less deferential to Catholics and even less likely to have important careers in secular institutions. Finally, Latin America was not a major theater in World War II, with the result that the US government did not have a great need to draw on Latin American expertise. Africa, too, was marginal to the war. African peoples spoke many different languages, none of which had the broad currency of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and several other Asian languages. Also, many societies in Asia and the Middle East were connected to ancient, classical cultures whose value was more quickly recognized in the North Atlantic West than the indigenous cultures of Africa and Latin America. Although there were missionaries to the Pacific islands, they were relatively few in number and learned languages of limited strategic value.

Within the churches, the missionary witness to the scope of humankind and the integrity of its many cultures threatened the old habit of speaking of non-Christians as “heathens.” Some missionaries did persist in describing Muslims, Hindus, and adherents of other faiths in this manner, thereby reinforcing the traditions of white supremacy. But by the 1920s this outlook was on the defensive in church publications and in denominational assemblies.

Two missionaries with extensive experience in the field led the assault on the white supremacy of traditional missionary theory and practice. Daniel J. Fleming argued that “God has not been working exclusively through Christianity.” From his post at Union Theological Seminary, where he taught for three decades after returning from service in India, Fleming ridiculed missionary arrogance and American complacency. He invited readers of the Christian Century to ask themselves how they would feel if a group of Buddhists came to their home town in Connecticut or Indiana and demanded that they give up Christianity and become Buddhists.18 E. Stanley Jones declared Gandhi to be “one of the most Christlike men in history.”19 This Hindu had done more than thousands of missionary preachers like himself, Jones insisted, to show the world what true Christianity actually was. Jones was moved when Dana Tagore, the brother of the great poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, told him that the Americans he had met bore little resemblance to the Jesus that the Tagore brothers had read about in the Bible. Time magazine followed Jones’s activities and in 1929 reported that his book of 1925, The Christ of the Indian Road, had been translated into fourteen languages. Fleming and Jones hoped India would eventually turn to the Christian faith, but the chastening message to churchgoers in America was clear. If even an entirely foreign religion like Hinduism could be a stage on the way to heaven, surely the Christian faith must be understood as commodious. Its many versions should be tolerated rather than fraught by sectarian disputes. Ecumenical attitudes were essential to the survival of the faith in a diverse world filled with cultures that were not going to disappear.

Fleming pled with his fellow Christians to attend conscientiously to “comparative studies in religion,” an enterprise being carried out with increasing determination in American seminaries and universities. Scholars who had been missionaries themselves or who relied heavily on missionary testimony had developed this field of study by the time of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, where the World’s Parliament of Religions called popular attention to it. Later generations were rightly sensitive to the ways in which these scholars classified as “religions” on a Judeo-Christian model a number of exceedingly diverse cultural projects. But the impact at the time was to vastly expand the capacity of American and European Christians to achieve a measure of empathic identification with an imposing range of cultures.

Faiths long scorned for “bowing down to wood and stone,” as in the popular hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” turned out to be highly complex, deeply grounded, sensitive responses to the experience of human beings in a variety of historical contexts, and to share important features with Christianity itself. The popular dissemination of “The World’s Great Religions” throughout much of the twentieth century was largely the work of former missionaries. Japan-born Edmund D. Soper’s textbook, The Religions of Mankind, was first published in 1921 and went through several editions.20

The tide of empathic identification with non-Christian peoples was so strong by the early 1930s that it generated a comprehensive review of the entire missionary endeavor. The ecumenical reformers succeeded in persuading John D. Rockefeller Jr. to fund a nine-month inquiry in which fifteen church leaders toured the mission fields of India, Burma, China, and Japan. The group was to prepare a comprehensive assessment of the missionary enterprise and chart a viable future for it. Rockefeller bought the idea and capitalized the entire undertaking. The result was Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years, a 1932 volume timed for the centennial of the beginning of American Protestant foreign missions.21

This volume became the foundational document for missionary cosmopolitanism’s campaign to revolutionize American Protestant missions. Re-Thinking Missions was edited and largely written by Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking, best known for his Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912).22 Hocking was also known for a critique of American cultural arrogance that matched that of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and other cultural anthropologists of the era. By what right, Hocking asked, “do we apply our standards of civilization to cultures other than our own?”23

Re-Thinking Missions, otherwise known as the Hocking Report, declared that what really mattered about missions was not preaching but “educational and other philanthropic” activities. Trying to persuade people to give up their own religion to become Christians was no longer a good idea. “We must be willing” to provide services to Indigenous people in need, the report insisted, “without any preaching.” We must “cooperate with non-Christian agencies for social improvement,” a crucial portion of the text continued, and we must respond to “the initiative of the Orient in defining the ways in which we shall be invited to help.” The missionary should be “a learner and a co-worker,” not a preacher. The task of evangelism, in this view, was to be done by exemplifying “the Christian way of life and its spirit” and “by quiet personal contact and by contagion.” Any evangelizing done at all was to be done “not by word but by deed” and, as the report emphasized in its own italics, “by living and by human service.” There was no dodging the responsibility to engage the social evils found in many societies. “Missions should recognize and teach that a well ordered community cannot exist when there are too great inequalities,” the report proclaimed. In a characteristic equivocation when it came to actual politics, Hocking and his colleagues explained that they were not advocating “meddling in politics,” especially those of foreign countries, yet Christians “can wisely attempt to modify any social order which unduly accentuates economic inequality and privilege.” Pushing the social reform envelope as far as its authors thought they could, Re-Thinking Missions allowed that “if one man by the honest study of Christ’s teaching becomes a communist, another a labor union leader, another a socialist and another a capitalist, none should find himself excluded from the fellowship or prevented from trying to win other Christians to his point of view.”24

Communism potentially compatible with Christianity? Shocking enough, but that was far from the end of it. The top Methodist missionary in India, Bishop Frederick Bohn Fisher, told readers of the Christian Century that the Hocking Report, which went through ten printings in six months, was “a book of human rights with a bomb in every chapter.”25 No bomb was bigger than the report’s perspective on the religions practiced in the East. These faiths were not such terrible things, according to Hocking and his colleagues. While Christianity could be expected to emerge eventually as the faith of all humankind, for the time being Christians should respect and in some cases even support other religions. It may well be that Christ’s ultimate triumph will be advanced by “the immediate strengthening of several of the present religions of Asia.” The big problem in the world in 1932 was not the power of other religions, as had so often been assumed, but secularism: missions need to be mobilized in an alliance of all religions against “the same menace, the spread of the secular spirit.” In a characteristically generous gesture toward Hinduism, the report described child marriage as an abuse that had “invaded” that religion. When missionaries criticized such abuses, they should see themselves as “joining Hindus” in clarifying and purifying their own faith. “Desiring to be considered a co-worker rather than an enemy,” the ideal Christian will “refrain from misrepresentation abroad of the evils he desires to cure” and will make a point of calling attention to “the efforts being made by nationals to correct” those evils.26

Stop preaching the gospel to the Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists? Acknowledge the spark of divinity within those religions? The evangelical wing of Protestantism would have nothing to do with such ideas. Evangelicals held firm to the notion that the unconverted were forever lost and that converts were expected to follow American models for what it meant to be a good Christian. Conservatives continued to treat the Bible as the unchanging, inerrant word of God, no matter what the historical context in which this or that bit of scripture had been created. In missionary theory, Protestantism’s two-party system was fully in operation.

At the time of its publication, Re-Thinking Missions was too radical even for a great many on the ecumenical side of the ecumenical-evangelical divide. Yet from the mid-1930s through the 1960s the major denominations gradually reformed their missionary activities in accord with the once-controversial document’s prescriptions. The Hocking Report was rarely cited to justify these changes—it was a “red flag”—but the ideas it brought together and popularized were increasingly accepted by missionary boards and by newly recruited missionary personnel associated with the so-called mainline American Protestant denominations. “Foreign” missions became “the world mission,” and converts in several mission fields were given more and more authority over operations.

As concerns about “cultural imperialism” intensified, the number of American missionaries sent abroad by the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Northern Baptists, Dutch Reformed, and other ecumenically dominated denominations decreased. The Hocking Report assumed the missionary project would flourish, but on revised terms. It did so only temporarily. The service-centered approach urged by the Hocking Report was eventually separated from the very concept of missions. The “Global Christianity” that replaced “missions” in the “mainline” denominations placed great emphasis on the agency of indigenous peoples. By the late 1960s, the majority of Americans abroad who called themselves “missionaries” were sponsored by the Southern Baptists, the Christian Missionary Alliance, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Assemblies of God, and other evangelical denominations and agencies.

Prior to this shift of missionary energy from the ecumenical to the evangelical camp, the ecumenicals began to sharply question the importance of denominational distinctions. Meaningful as the distinction between a Northern and Southern Presbyterian might be to the faithful in Maryland or Kentucky, it made no sense abroad. To join the Dutch Reformed or the Disciples of Christ, what did it matter? Seeing the home churches through the eyes of converts in Korea or Lebanon or Nigeria revealed the parochialism of American Protestant denominations. Perhaps it was time that Western Christians joined forces institutionally? The Christian project, for all its versions, was understood to be a single, if commodious, enterprise. Denominations were mere historical instantiations. Was it time to get beyond them?

While the ecumenical intelligentsia was pondering this question, its members read a commanding piece of historical sociology that appeared in 1929, The Social Sources of Denominationalism. This book, by Yale University’s H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold Niebuhr’s brother) explained the historical conditions that had fragmented the gospel. Denominationalism was an evil to be overcome. Niebuhr’s critique of denominationalism was inspired by German scholarship and betrayed very little missionary influence. But Niebuhr offered irrefutable evidence that Christians had repeatedly fashioned the gospel in highly particular ways, as responses to local conditions. His theologically sensitive analysis spoke exactly to the concerns of the missionary cosmopolitans. “A church is needed which has transcended the divisions of the world and has adjusted itself not to the local interests and needs of classes, races, or nations, but to the common interests of mankind and to the constitution of the unrealized kingdom of God. No denominational Christianity, no matter how broad its scope, suffices for this task. The church which proclaim this gospel must be one in which no national allegiance will be suffered to infringe on the unity of an international fellowship.”27 Why not establish a single, national Protestant church? Well before Niebuhr’s ambitious treatise, YMCA leader Sherwood Eddy asked readers of the Christian Century in 1920 to consider the possibility that the churches in the mission field might instruct those at home.28

The momentum for mergers gathered in the United States year by year. Union Theological Seminary president Henry P. Van Dusen declared in 1947 that the example of a single, national Christian church in India could serve as a model for Christians in the United States. Perhaps, mused Van Dusen, denominational distinctions within the North Atlantic West, including America, would be overcome at last? Perhaps the “receiving” churches created by foreign missions could become a model for the “sending” churches?29

Ecumenical leaders deliberated about this while they tried to act more comprehensively on their growing historical sophistication, their increasingly resolute globalism, and their accelerating recognition of the diversity of American society. They tried to develop a version of Christianity suitable for their own time and place, yet consistent with a single, universally applicable gospel.

What might that gospel be? How might Christianity look if it were true to its deepest values yet functional in a demographically diverse, sexually and racially egalitarian, globally engaged, and scientifically literate society welcoming to Jews and to other non-Christians? And a society that was, moreover, experiencing rapid urbanization, the expansion of education at all levels, and greater immersion in world affairs?

Church officials, seminary professors, and preachers recognized only gradually the severity of this challenge and the many domains in which it demanded attention. How they tried to meet this cascading challenge, and how their more conservative Protestant contemporaries reacted to their initiatives, is the central dynamic in Christianity’s relation to the public affairs of the United States during the past one hundred years.

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