Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World But Changed America

by David A. Hollinger

They sought to transform the world, and ended up transforming twentieth-century America



Between the 1890s and the Vietnam era, many thousands of American Protestant missionaries were sent to live throughout the non-European world. They expected to change the people they encountered, but those foreign people ended up transforming the missionaries. Their experience abroad made many of these missionaries and their children critical of racism, imperialism, and religious orthodoxy. When they returned home, they brought new liberal values back to their own society. Protestants Abroad reveals the untold story of how these missionary-connected individuals left an enduring mark on American public life as writers, diplomats, academics, church officials, publishers, foundation executives, and social activists.

David A. Hollinger provides riveting portraits of such figures as Pearl Buck, John Hersey, and Life and Time publisher Henry Luce, former "mish kids" who strove through literature and journalism to convince white Americans of the humanity of other peoples. Hollinger describes how the U.S. government's need for citizens with language skills and direct experience in Asian societies catapulted dozens of missionary-connected individuals into prominent roles in intelligence and diplomacy. Meanwhile, Edwin Reischauer and other scholars with missionary backgrounds led the growth of Foreign Area Studies in universities during the Cold War. The missionary contingent advocated multiculturalism and anticolonialism, pushed their churches in ecumenical and social-activist directions, and joined with Jewish intellectuals to challenge traditional Protestant cultural hegemony and promote a pluralist vision of American life. Missionary cosmopolitans were the Anglo-Protestant counterparts of the New York Jewish intelligentsia of the same era.

Protestants Abroad reveals the crucial role that missionary-connected American Protestants played in the development of modern American liberalism, and how they helped other Americans reimagine their nation's place in the world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Church History

408 pages, Hardcover

Published October 24, 2017

About the author

Preston Hotchkis Professor of History (Emeritus)
University of California at Berkeley

One of the pre-eminent intellectual historians in and of the United States.

Past President of the Organization of American Historians (2010-2011); Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; former Guggenheim Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Harmsworth Professor of the University of Oxford.

Reviews

[Marilyn McEntyre · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a daughter of missionaries, I grew up with stories about orphans in India, and was carefully taught to recognize the disturbing distance between privilege and poverty, and also to ponder God's mysterious ways. What I hadn't realized, in years of reflection on my parents' missionary experience, was the way in which the protestant missionary enterprise influenced American diplomacy, foreign policy, and attitudes toward what came to be called third world countries. One stereotype is that of the missionary who uncritically promotes colonialism--and that certainly happened. But Hollinger points out a very different effect of huge early to mid-century missionary efforts: missionaries or their children often returned home with a more nuanced understanding of the people and needs in the countries they had lived in for years. Many entered government service. The ways in which they imported the Christian mandate to "go into all the world" and preach and serve varied widely. What is fascinating about this book is the way it brings into focus a layer of American history and public life few have mapped. For our generation, which is witnessing new, troubling entanglements and tensions among churches and between churches and secular institutions, Protestants Abroad offers a valuable perspective.

[Garret Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, David A. Hollinger argues that Protestant missionaries and their children returned from missions abroad and became important in American public life in the mid-twentieth century. Because these missionary-connected people were some of the few Americans who had extensive contact with these foreign societies, largely in Asia, they influence American military and government interactions with these various nations, inform the American public’s perceptions of other cultures, and even became involved in significant domestic political issues like Japanese Internment Camps and the Civil Rights Movement. Hollinger defends this thesis using specific examples of missionaries or the children of missionaries and how they became involved in American public life on behalf of these people and societies they had grown to cherish and admire. Because these missionary families had mutual respect for these foreign people and their cultures and ways of life, they provide potent examples that contradict the prevailing notions that American Protestant missionaries in the mid-twentieth centuries were merely another instrument of Western Cultural imperialism.
This book is a response to the previous notions that all Protestant missionaries had been agents of cultural imperialism seeking to spread American culture to other societies.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous account of the "boomerang" of influence that mainline Protestant missionaries and their children had on American public life, especially in the middle years of the twentieth century. It turns out these were often America's greatest "area experts" on regions outside of the North Atlantic, and were therefore crucial players in the rise of the post-war institutions designed to increase American knowledge of the world in the wake of WWII. More surprisingly, they turn out to have been a largely progressive and cosmopolitan force, arguing against the China Lobby that supported Chiang, publicly contesting the legitimacy of Japanese internment during WWII, and so on. Also beautifully written.

[B Hunter Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hollinger's carefully researched book on the impact of U.S. Protestant missionaries and their children on U.S. society after they returned home concludes that these transformed individuals served as a needed antidote to American exceptionalism and parochialism. These individuals' worldviews were significantly expanded because they embedded themselves in specific global contexts, learned the local language, and began to see the world through their neighbors' eyes.

I would give this book a 5 star rating and recommend it to friends because it is well-written and lfts up a phenomenon that has long caught my attention. But Hollinger's book helped me to see that *my* life's trajectory was profoundly affected by my decision-- at 23 years of age--to live and work as a Protestant missionary in DR Congo and Peru for 15 years. The experience of "falling into the arms of a people not our own" has bound our lives with the people who received us and changed the course of my life, along the lines of what Hollinger describes in "Protestants Abroad". I'm grateful for the author's research and insights and highly recommend the book.

[Lisa Hosack · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a person interested in missions, I really enjoyed reading this history as it covered a population (mainline Protestant) that I'm relatively unfamiliar with.