2019/03/22 by Emily Conroy‐Krutz · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics
paper · doi:10.1093/dh/dhz016
openalex publication_date 2019/03/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Recent years have witnessed an invigorating religious turn in diplomatic history. David Hollinger’s new book, Protestants Abroad, marks an important contribution to that growing field and its discussion of the influence of religion and the missionary movement in particular on Americans’ understanding of their role in the world. Protestants Abroad tells the story of the ways that missionary experiences abroad came back to have a profound effect on American life. This “boomerang effect,” Hollinger argues, mainly consisted of a missionary challenge to colonialism, cultural imperialism, and racism. That foreign missionaries are often associated with all three of those things is the point against which Hollinger is arguing throughout this book. Focusing on mission-connected ecumenical (liberal or main line) Protestants, Hollinger demonstrates the ways in which the mission movement fostered a cosmopolitanism that had important implications for American foreign policy. One of the great strengths of this book is the wide-ranging cast of mission-connected characters that Hollinger presents. If you didn’t think that missionaries and their children mattered much to American culture, it would be hard to maintain that stance after reading. Chapters include a steady stream of missionaries and “mish kids,” many of whom knew each other in the mission field and then again through careers in government work or the publishing world. With some individuals showing up in different contexts in multiple chapters, the overall effect is of an extensive network of missionaries and missionary-connected individuals at important centers of American life. Hollinger sets this tone in the opening chapter: a comparison of the careers of Henry Luce, Pearl Buck, and John Hersey, all children of China missionaries who went on to play important roles as writers who took on the question of how the United States ought to relate to the world in what Luce would call “the American century.” The three had different answers to that question, revealing the diversity of interpretation among missionaries more generally.