Boomerang Effect

Those are the first two sentences of Hollinger’s first chapter. By the end of that first page, he’s adduced the “boomerang” thesis put forward by Buell G. Gallagher in 1946: “The ‘gospel of inclusive brotherhood’ preached by the missionaries . . . flew back like a boomerang to the hands of those who had flung it outward, carrying on its return trip an awareness of the provincialism of its original construction.” The returning boomerang, thunking earnest American Christians in the back of the head, “was laden with an indictment of ‘cultural imperialism and arrogant paternalism’ and a plea for a more genuinely universal human community.” (Much further along, Hollinger notes that the book in which Gallagher formulated the “boomerang” thesis, Color and Conscience, was “one of the most penetrating critiques of racism written in the 1940s.”)

A good joke often includes a twist. Quoting Walter Russell Mead’s observation that “the multicultural and relativistic thinking so characteristic of the United States today owes much of its social power to the unexpected consequences of American missions abroad,” and further drawing on the testimony of W. E. B. Du Bois and Nadine Gordimer, Hollinger rebukes enlightened critics of “the missionary project” (critics who share his own passionately held “cosmopolitan” values) for their lack of nuance, their tendency to caricature.

In fact, Hollinger contends, firsthand experience with people in China, India, the Middle East, and other foreign lands changed the missionaries themselves more than the “heathen” they had gone to convert. “They brought their changed selves and their foreign-influenced children back to the United States,” spreading the gospel of cosmopolitanism in many different spheres of American public life. “Even as I finish Protestants Abroad,” he writes in his preface, “I remain surprised that such an important aspect of modern American history has not received more sustained scrutiny until now.”

The book consists of a series of thematic chapters that flesh out Hollinger’s thesis, including many biographical sketches. These are mostly of missionary children—in chapter 2, for instance, Henry Luce, Pearl Buck, and John Hersey. Some of the figures Hollinger treats (like these three) are familiar, though they haven’t typically been discussed in this context; others will be unknown to most readers. Among the subjects are “Anticolonialism vs. Zionism” (chapter 5), “Telling the Truth About the Two Chinas” (chapter 7), and “Of One Blood: Joining the Civil Rights Struggle at Home” (chapter 11), which also mentions unmarried women with missionary affiliations who quietly maintained same-sex relationships.

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Hollinger’s book will be read, cited, and argued with for years to come. Many of its most engaged readers will be people like myself, with missionary connections, who are deeply interested in the story he has to tell yet who find their shared experience only intermittently reflected in his narrative.

That sense of dislocation begins before the book has even been opened. There are hundreds of millions of Christians spread across Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania. Some of these were Christian long before the coming of the modern missionary movement. Many who have become Christian more recently have been converted by indigenous churches. But from the 19th century to the present, the impact of missionaries has been enormous, and many of those missionaries have been American Protestants. Clearly, both for better and for worse, they did change the world; Hollinger’s distinctive contribution is to show aspects of that influence at home. To acknowledge the one is not to deny the other. Why then the subtitle asserting the opposite? Just a bit of hype? No, because (as we’ve seen) Hollinger doubles down on this assertion in the first sentences of his first chapter.

Early on, Hollinger makes it clear that he is focusing on one of the two primary “families” of American Protestantism, “shaped by what came to be called the ‘mainline’ or ‘ecumenical’ denominations that controlled the spiritual capital of American Protestantism through the 1960s.” These are the Protestants Hollinger is talking about when he refers again and again to “the missionary project.” The other Protestant “family” comprised evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal groups. Hollinger acknowledges that a “study of foreign missions as such—rather than a study like this one, of their impact on American public life—would have much more to say about the evangelical family, which has maintained a robust missionary project all the way down to the present.”

This is an important qualifier, which some reviewers of Protestants Abroad, alas, have failed to note. (John Kaag, reviewing the book for the Wall Street Journal, describes it as a “comprehensive history of American Protestant missionaries abroad.”) But it is also a bit misleading. In fact, even as you take in Hollinger’s explanation for focusing on the “missionary-connected men and women” who went to “Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, Princeton, Swarthmore, and Yale”—hence positioned to be influencers—rather than those who went to “Bob Jones, Calvin, Mercer, Westmont [from which I graduated, by the way], Wheaton,” etc., it may occur to you that by largely excluding evangelical missionaries and their children from his account, Hollinger is excluding evidence that would complicate his thesis. Protestants Abroad is not simply a study of the impact of mainline Protestant missions on American public life; it is the latest in a loosely linked series of books in which Hollinger has recounted and celebrated the rise of cosmopolitanism and the decline of “sectarian” convictions, especially Christian convictions.

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Let us stipulate, whatever our convictions, that the history of American Protestant missions, like the history of the world, like the history of any single human life, is a tangled affair. Shortly after the end of World War I, my grandmother, then in her mid-30s, traveled by ship to China to serve as a missionary in Shanghai. She was a staunch Baptist, but she wasn’t sponsored by a denominational ministry, nor was she with the China Inland Mission; rather, she was sent by a small independent agency.

When she graduated from high school in 1904, she wasn’t contemplating the mission field. She wanted to go on to college; her dream was to become an architect. Her father (a small-town banker in southern Illinois) ridiculed this ambition. She had three siblings: two brothers and a sister, with whom she was particularly close. Both brothers went to college; the eldest became a very successful business executive in New York and Texas, eventually president of a corporation, while the younger brother became a lawyer in California. Her beloved sister died in childbirth.

After living at home for a few years, my grandmother went to Moody Bible Institute, and following graduation she began working as a city missionary in Aurora, about 40 miles west of Chicago. Scholars would probably describe her as an evangelical (if not as a fundamentalist), but, contrary to what we are told about that period, she saw no conflict between “social work” and spreading the gospel. The two went hand in hand. Such were the convictions of A. T. Pierson, one of the prime movers of evangelical missions in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. (See Dana Robert’s splendid biography, Occupy Until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World.) Many of the people in Grandma’s patch were immigrants, and one of the hardest parts of her job, she told me and my younger brother when we were boys in the 1950s, was persuading men who worked long hours (often in miserable conditions) to go home to their families when they were done instead of heading for a saloon. (I wish I could go back in time for a minute to witness such an encounter.)

When she went as a missionary to China after that stint in Aurora, she certainly wasn’t motivated by a desire to make the Chinese “more American.” Yes, yes, of course, much took place in the global missions encounter that was independent of the motives of individual actors. But in Aurora as much as in Shanghai, she was convinced of the pervasive reality of sin and the healing presence of Christ.

Briefly recounting the life of the Methodist missionary and missions administrator Ruth Harris, who became “an exceptionally important antiracist organizer” in the United States, Hollinger describes

That is just how my grandmother described her first impressions of Shanghai when she arrived more than 25 years earlier.

In China, she met a fellow missionary, a widower with a young boy; his wife had died in the influenza epidemic. They married and had two children, the elder of whom was my mother, born in 1922. My mother lived in Shanghai until she was 11 years old. (I was not yet 11 myself when she said to me, for the first but not only time, “I hope the Lord doesn’t call you to be a missionary.”)

The notions intertwined with missions, especially of the evangelical variety, were (and still are) potent, and as such peculiarly vulnerable to manipulation. (See, for example. the excellent memoir by Amy Peterson, Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World.) Consider my grandfather telling my grandmother—the family having returned to America, then in the depths of the Great Depression—that God was now “calling” him to serve as an itinerant evangelist. And off he went to do the Lord’s work, leaving Grandma to maintain and support the household and care for the children.

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It was almost 20 years later when Grandma moved in with my mother and my brother and me in Southern California, and she lived with us for the rest of her life. (I was 5 years old; my parents had just divorced.) There were all sorts of Chinese artifacts in the house, and now and then she would open the battered steamer trunk she’d taken on voyages to China and back. Preserved among its contents were meticulous houseplans from decades earlier and delicately colored drawings of imagined interiors.

Missionaries from hither and yon often spoke at church, typically at the Sunday night service, often attired in the garb of the country where they were based. And a steady flow of missionary friends came to visit—some retired, some on furlough. Almost none of them had been in China, but they were part of an informal network of evangelical missionaries worldwide, from Ecuador to Korea, from the Congo to the Philippines. At every church we attended in those years, there was a map of the world with colored pins or other markers showing the places where missionaries supported at least in part by our congregation were serving.

These visitors to our house, like the missionaries and their children brought to life in Hollinger’s biographical sketches, had all been immersed in cultures very different from those they were familiar with in America. They were quite a varied bunch, resistant to stereotypes. Some of them were very critical of American society, broadly construed, others not. Some of them said they felt the people they were working with were closer than Americans are to the world of the Bible. Many related instances of miracles, demonic powers at work, and the like; others not at all.

I thought about these long-ago encounters, in which I listened closely to the “grownups” talking, as I read Protestants Abroad. Hollinger begins his preface by remarking, “No, I am not part of a missionary family. It is usually the first question people ask when they learn what I am working on.” But at the end of the preface, he writes, “I did grow up in a Protestant social setting in which missionaries were important characters,” and he recalls, as I have, a series of houseguests. “I did not then fully understand what special cultural beings missionaries were,” he concludes. “But every word and gesture of the missionaries, over the dinner table and at church events, alerted me that there was a wider world beyond the small-town America of my experience.”

That’s a lovely note from a scholar whose outlook is very different from that of the Christian community in which he was raised. For my own part, I don’t think of missionaries as “special cultural beings,” perhaps because they have never not been active presences in my life, but I do share Hollinger’s sense that missions and missionaries have helped to open my eyes to “a wider world.”

And they continue to do so. A couple of years ago, as a magazine editor, I assigned for review a book about African Pentecostals in Italy. The reviewer was Philip Jenkins, whose own book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity alerted general readers to the explosive growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and other regions outside Europe (where churchgoing and the wider cultural influence of the faith have declined precipitously) and North America (where the decline, although not so steep, has nevertheless been significant). In Colorado or Massachusetts you may bump into missionaries from South Korea.

Hollinger, of course, is not unaware of these developments, which he treats only in passing in Protestants Abroad (in what is the single least persuasive passage in the entire book): “Were the constructions of Christianity developed in the Global South, with all their variations drawn on local traditions, really part of a single community of faith with the Protestants of the North American West? This was a dangerous question for church leaders.” Really? Wouldn’t the reality outlined by Philip Jenkins, by the great missiologist Andrew Walls (quoted by Hollinger with patronizing asides), and many other observers be much trickier for Hollinger himself?

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The denomination that my wife and I belong to, the Evangelical Covenant church, has its roots in Sweden and the Pietist movement in Europe. During the relatively brief period of sustained immigration from Sweden to the United States in the late-19th century, an American offshoot of the Swedish denomination was founded. The first foreign missionary venture of this fledgling denomination, in 1890, was to China.

In the century and more since then, the home church in Sweden has dwindled greatly. The ECC in the United States is a small denomination by American standards but reasonably healthy. A few years ago, our local congregation heard a visiting speaker on the ferment among Christians in China—including ambitious plans (despite many barriers) to send Chinese missionaries to other parts of the world. Along the way, she related stories of miracles that reminded me of the visiting missionaries when I was a boy.

I listened with mixed feelings. It takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff, and God works in mysterious ways. Maybe in 50 years, Chinese missionaries will come to Chicago, as my grandmother once went to Shanghai. Maybe the boomerang effect Hollinger describes with such zest is not the end of the story. That would be a different sort of comedy.

John Wilson edited Books & Culture from its founding in 1995 until its closure in 2016.