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

By David A Hollinger

Princeton University Press, 2017

ISBN: 978-0691158433

408 pages

USD $35.00

Reviewed by Richard Cook, Associate Professor of Church History and Missions at Logos Evangelical Seminary in El Monte, California. He served as a missionary in Taiwan for over ten years and has a PhD in Modern Chinese History from the University of Iowa.

David Hollinger, emeritus professor from Berkeley, began, in the 1990s, to appreciate the impact missions had on the United States. Hollinger lays out a simple thesis “The Protestant foreign missionary project expected to make the world look more like the United States. Instead, it made the United States look more like the world” (1). He argues that missionaries, after being exposed to numerous cultures around the world, returned home making America become less narrow-minded and more pluralistic. Based on a massive amount of research, Hollinger tells the stories of missionaries and missionary children.

Chapter 1 presents the idea of a “Protestant Boomerang.” Protestant missionaries left the United States with the intent to change the world, were changed themselves, and returned to the United States with insights and skills that made them successful at changing the United States. Chapter 2 discusses three of the key individuals that profoundly shaped popular culture in the twentieth century: Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine; Pearl Buck, author of the award-winning novel The Good Earth; and John Hersey, author of The Call.

In Chapter 7, “Telling the Truth about the Two Chinas” Hollinger provides fascinating profiles of several political actors on both the left and the right in the volatile 1950s who were missionary kids. Hollinger notes that his argument is not that missions led to a particular worldview, but rather missions-related people were involved.

Chapter 9, “Against Orientalism: Universities and Modern Asia,” examines the growth of area studies in the American universities. In Chapters 10 and 11, Hollinger concludes by suggesting that the missionary impulse of the early and middle twentieth century transformed into the Peace Corps and the civil rights movement.

Protestants Abroad is a dazzling book, presenting valuable material and a persuasive case for the role of missions in making the US more liberal and pluralistic. Nonetheless, Evangelical scholars of missions may find the book sometimes frustrating. Missions scholars might object to Hollinger’s assertion that missions “expected to make the world look more like the United States.” Hollinger focuses on liberal missions, apparently simply assuming that the liberal missionaries were more multi-cultural than the conservatives. A more nuanced study, however, might show that conservative missionaries were more pluralistic and less influenced by the growing racism and social Darwinism popular in the universities starting in the late nineteenth century.

When I first saw the book, I hoped it would be groundbreaking. Unfortunately, the book is more like a brilliant “Who’s who” compendium of important people who had missionary connections. I suspect a similar book might be written about, for instance, Yale University alumni. Rather than introducing fresh insights, the contribution of the book among academic historians may be little more than persuading a handful of them that many famous people had missionary connections and that not all the missionaries were as bad as they thought.