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

About the Book

They sought to transform the world, and ended up transforming twentieth-century America Between the 1890s and the Vietnam era, tens of thousands of American Protestant missionaries were stationed throughout the non-European world. They expected to change the peoples they encountered abroad, but those foreign peoples ended up changing the missionaries. Missionary experience made many of these Americans critical of racism, imperialism, and religious orthodoxy. When they returned home, the missionaries and their children liberalized their own society. Protestants Abroad reveals the untold story of how these missionary-connected individuals left their enduring mark on American public life as writers, diplomats, academics, church officials, publishers, foundation executives, and social activists. David Hollinger provides riveting portraits of such figures as Pearl Buck, John Hersey, and Life and Time publisher Henry Luce, former "mish kids" who strove through literature and journalism to convince white Americans of the humanity of other peoples. Hollinger describes how the U.S. government's need for people with language skills and direct experience in Asian societies catapulted dozens of missionary-connected individuals into prominent roles in intelligence and diplomacy.He also shows how Edwin Reischauer and other scholars with missionary backgrounds led the growth of Foreign Area Studies in universities during the Cold War. Hollinger shows how the missionary contingent advocated multiculturalism at home and anticolonialism abroad, pushed their churches in ecumenical and social-activist directions, and joined with cosmopolitan Jewish intellectuals to challenge traditional Protestant cultural hegemony and promote a pluralist vision of American life. Missionary cosmopolitans were the Anglo-Protestant counterparts of the New York Jewish intelligentsia of the same era. Protestants Abroad sheds new light on how missionary-connected American Protestants played a crucial role in the development of modern American liberalism, and helped Americans reimagine their nation as a global citizen.

About the Author :

David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History and Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (both Princeton).

Review :
"Co-Winner of the Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Book Prize, Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA)" "Elegant and original. . . . Hollinger's book is a comprehensive history of American Protestant missionaries abroad, but it is also the more important story of how a religious and cultural movement overcame its own provincialism."---John Kaag, Wall Street Journal "Hollinger’s latest book, Protestants Abroad, traces the lives and activities of thousands of mainline American Protestant missionaries and, importantly, their children, from the early twentieth century into the 1960s. In its deft interweaving of personal stories and historical argument, it is the most accomplished piece of prose yet written by an exceptionally accomplished scholar."---John T. McGreevy, Commonweal "Thoroughly researched and well crafted, this is a reminder of the influence that liberal, cosmopolitan Protestant intellectuals have had on American life." "Too often collected essays lack coherence--not so here. As a reader, each essay opened up new horizons of thought, but Hollinger's own intellectual drive to narrate the twists and turns between the vernacular and the ecumenical traditions of Protestantism give the volume a propinquity that is powerful. This is a superb work of scholarship, a passionate intellectual argument without spite, and an invitation to think, which is the highest compliment one can pay to a scholar."---James K. Wellman, Sociology of Religion "Hollinger tells a fascinating and illuminating history, and I commend it highly."---Ryan Hoselton, The Gospel Coalition "A major contribution in the overlapping historiographies of American religious history, transnational history, cultural history, and intellectual history."---Albert Wu, H-Diplo Roundtable Review "The product of prodigious research over many years. . . . This rich work casts light on such diverse subjects as the feminism of Pearl Buck . . . the interrogation of Japanese Prisoners of War in World War II, the relationship of The King and I to its purported source, and the rise of Area Studies."---John A. Thompson, H-Diplo Roundtable Review "One of the most important books about religion in twentieth-century America to appear in the last decade. . . . A book that will reshape the way we think about the historical arc of American Protestantism in this period."---Joe Creech, The Cresset "No one has done more than Hollinger to put mainline American Protestantism on the map of 20th-century American cultural and intellectual history, and this book adds an important chapter to that impressive legacy."---Robert Westbrook, Christian Century "A major contribution to a wide range of subfields of American history."---Andrew Preston, American Historical Review "This book maps its own territory, with carefully drawn detail and a steady hand."---Intellectual History Book Review, Elesha Coffman "Protestants Abroad is a monumental achievement. The most conspicuous feature is the breadth of the research. Hollinger seems to have read every relevant primary and secondary text he could find. The book is monumental is a second way. It sets a benchmark for the clarity of its prose . . . . The book is monumental in a third way, and that is the forcefulness and persuasiveness of its argument. Hollinger contends that modern US history—especially the decades stretching from the 1930s through the 1960s—is helpfully examined by viewing it through the lens of missionary history."---Grant Wacker, Church History