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Christian Missionaries Against Colonialism

In their time overseas they developed an appreciation of other
religions and cultures.

By David A. Hollinger
Oct. 19, 2017 7:24 p.m. ET

Critics of Christian missionaries often write them off as pawns of
imperialism, destroying native cultures as they spread their religion
and their racist beliefs. There’s a grain of truth to this: Protestant missionaries throughout American history did promote colonialism and
prejudice. But then upon returning home many did the opposite. Men and
women sent abroad to make the world look more like the U.S. wound up, paradoxically, trying to make the U.S. look more like the world.

During the first half of the 20th century, American missionaries began developing relatively generous attitudes toward the people they had
been taught to regard as heathen and backward, if not inferior. Deep
and sustained immersion in foreign communities challenged inherited stereotypes. Missionaries and their children eventually became some of
the most conspicuous opponents of colonialism and racism.

As early as the 1920s missionaries were telling their sponsors back
home that they wanted to cut back on preaching and focus instead on
social service. This idea sharply divided the community of faith. Fundamentalists treated any weakening of the program of conversion as
heresy. Yet the better-educated liberals who later came to be known as “mainline Protestants” voiced increasing respect for Hinduism,
Buddhism, Islam and other faiths. These Congregationalists, Methodists
and ecumenical groups applied their cosmopolitanism to national and
world affairs. The women’s missionary boards were persistent critics
of Jim Crow at home and colonialism abroad.

Missionaries’ effect on public life was especially pronounced in the
1940s. World War II had created a new demand for fluency in
non-European languages. Missionaries and their children became
diplomats, intelligence officers, journalists and academics, bringing
to their work real knowledge of the history and cultures of “the
Orient.” When President Roosevelt wanted to meet with King Ibn Saud of
Saudi Arabia in 1945, it was a son of missionaries, Marine Col.
William Eddy, who arranged the meeting and served as translator. Eddy
had impressed the king with his ability to recite long passages from
the Quran in several Arab dialects.

The missionary contingent was uniquely influential in advancing human
rights during and after the war. Former missionaries were the earliest
and best-organized critics of the internment of Japanese-Americans.
Missionary son Edmund Soper’s “Racism: A World Issue” (1947) was one
of the most comprehensive and trenchant attacks on white supremacy
written by any white American before the 1960s.

Government officials with missionary experience were usually more
favorable than their colleagues toward anticolonial and nationalist
movements. Missionary sons John Paton Davies Jr. and John S. Service
were the most famous of the “China Hands” purged from the U.S. foreign service during the era of McCarthyism for trying to achieve a working relationship with Mao Zedong’s communists. Kenneth Landon, a former missionary, wrote the earliest document in what became the Pentagon
Papers. His dispatch was posted in 1946 after 10 days of private talks
with Ho Chi Minh.

In academia, missionary-connected Americans led a move to broaden the curriculum. Colleges and universities had been slow to incorporate the non-European world into their classes and research programs. The most
widely appreciated of them was missionary son Edwin Reischauer at
Harvard. But half the presidents of the Association for Asian Studies
during the two decades after World War II were either former
missionaries or the children of missionaries.

Missionary cosmopolitans tended to specialize in Asia, while the
Jewish intellectuals of the same period focused on Europe. Popular
culture and scholarship have rightly celebrated the role of Jews in
broadening American public life. But Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt
had Anglo-Protestant counterparts whose de-provincializing influence
has not been recognized.

One was China-born John Hersey, author of the 1946 classic
“Hiroshima.” Another was Lt. Col. Sherwood Moran, who persuaded the
Marine Corps to adopt humane techniques for interrogating Japanese
prisoners of war. Moran, who had been a missionary in Japan for a quarter-century before enlisting in the service, wrote a manual
instructing Marines to treat Japanese captives as “brothers.” Yet
another case was China-born Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and
Life. In supporting American global hegemony through his vision of an “American Century,” Luce was out of sync with most
missionary-connected Americans, yet he was a formidable voice for
greater public attention to Asia.

Americans with missionary experience did not all think alike, as
Luce’s example shows. But in one arena of public life after another,
they championed the interests of nonwhite peoples within the U.S. and throughout the world. Among 20th-century whites, missionary-connected
men and women were some of the most determined and influential critics
of white supremacy.

Mr. Hollinger, a professor emeritus of history at the University of
California, Berkeley, is the author of “Protestants Abroad: How
Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America,” out this
month from Princeton.

https://t.co/IUMRXRKh7t


--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com

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