Protestants Abroad by David Hollinger - a Book Review

David A. Holinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but
Changed America.
(Princeton University Press, 390 pp., 2017).

Review by Franklin J. Woo ... resident of Monte Vista Grove Homes, Pasadena ...

In 1997 Lian Xi (History, Hanover College) published The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907-1932. In interacting with thoughtful and ordinary Chinese, the Protestant missionaries became less dogmatic, more open, and more inclusive of cultures other than their own. They became better human beings: Frank Rawlinson discarded his Southern Baptist exclusivism tombecome editor of the Chinese Recorder which included Chinese input; Edward Hume became an engaged intellectual; and writer Pearl Buck became a post-Christian with social justice concerns such as anti-racism and adoption of children of mixed blood. She was the first “feminist” of her day leading to the Feminist movement (1970s) and the contemporary women’s marches of our time.

Using the Lian Xi model, David A. Hollinger (Historian Emeritus, UC Berkeley) did rigorous archival research and interviews with former missionaries and their progeny. Having no connection with the early missionaries, his book nevertheless is another first study of them by an academic historian. In his 80 pages of notes including Lian’s book, Hollinger is not limited only to China, but encompasses most missionaries in the rest of the world.

Hollinger names many former missionaries and their progeny all of which he categorizes as “Protestant Cosmopolitans.” These includes the three Johns (Davies, Service, Vincent) who sided with Mao and were accused by McCarthyism in the 1950s as having “lost” China; Edwin Reischauer (Japan); Ruth Harris (China); Pat Patterson (Japan); Margaret Flory (“Japan”); Richard Shaull (Brazil); and sons of Roberta and Dudley Woodberry (Afghanistan, Saudia Arabia, Pakistan) and many others.

Protestant Cosmopolitans were anti-racist and anti-western imperialism. During WWII some urged fair treatment of Japanese POWs as fellow humans and protested US incarceration of Japanese Americans. They were instrumental in establishing ecumenical councils in the U.S.A. and the world, not to mention the United Nations (1945) and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). They resonated with Re-Thinking Missions (1932) by William Ernest Hocking. As Lian so aptly puts it, “Even when they had lost their Call, they retained the momentum of mission,” which led to the of multiculturality in America, where “treasures long prepared--the wisdom, insight, gifts of grace of every culture, age and place--in Christ can now be seen and shared” (Brian Wren, 1971).

Protestant Cosmopolitans and Evangelical Conservatives are not monolithic; they overlapped in the porosity between them. “By the early 1970s, Hollinger claims, “the early evangelicals were emulating the liberals more visibly than ever before,” albeit without losing their basic Evangelical perspectives. Other than Hollinger and Lian, “value-free” academics tend to shy away from religion. Whenever they do write about missionaries, it’s invariably pejorative. Hollingerr urges Protestant Cosmopolitans to persist in showing the inclusivity of Christian faith, lest they lose by default to the religious right.

– Review by Franklin J. Woo