Protestants Abroad

In Protestants Abroad David A. Hollinger argues that American missionaries and their children “changed America” between the 1920s and the 1970s (p. 1). They offered the American public a greater understanding of other cultures, advancing “domestic programs which would later be called ‘multicultural’ and foreign policies that prioritized alliances with non-white, colonized peoples,” resulting in a “missionary cosmopolitanism” centered on Asia (ibid.). Hollinger shows how, in the early twentieth century and even more after World War I, “mainline,” “ecumenical” missionaries (as opposed to “fundamentalist,” “evangelical” missionaries) increasingly critiqued the “parochialism” in the earlier missionary enterprise, emphasizing the positive qualities of foreign people and even finding some value in other religious traditions. This trend grew with the children of these “mainline” missionaries, many of whom became “post-Protestant” (pp. 10–12). While other scholars have explored how American missionaries were “converted” by the cultures in which they worked and have argued that American missionaries affected American perceptions of foreign cultures (e.g. Lian Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries [1997] and Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker, eds., The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home [2003]), Hollinger is the first to meticulously document missionary influence in such a wide range of fields. He demonstrates that the language skills of missionaries and their children made them indispensable in U.S. foreign policy and in the academic study of Asian cultures from the 1940s to the 1960s, when relatively few others in the United States had this kind of training. Particularly fascinating is the story of former American missionaries in Japan who worked in intelligence gathering during World War II, opposing the torture of Japanese prisoners of war and attempting to humanize Japanese soldiers, with one missionary's antitorture writings resurfacing during the Iraq War in 2003. Hollinger also argues for the centrality of missionary influence in bringing greater cultural sensitivity and opposition to racism to mainline Protestant denominations in the United States, in the development of an ideology of “human rights” and in the creation of the Peace Corps. Hollinger carefully documents all of his claims with an impressive breadth of sources. One exception, however, is that while he establishes the importance of missionary children in creating academic disciplines in area studies, especially in the case of Japanese studies, his evidence does not support the existence of the opposition to “Orientalism” suggested by the title of chapter 9, “Against Orientalism

Multiculturalism · Parochialism · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Sociology · Christian Theology and Mission · Gender Studies · History · Law · Religious studies · Religious Studies