Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America
Columbia’s Center for American Studies, a JMC partner program, will host a discussion with David Hollinger, Susan Pedersen, Wayne Proudfoot, and Casey Blake (a JMC faculty partner). The discussion topic is Hollinger’s recent book, Protestants Abroad (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Tuesday, March 27, 2018 • 6:15PM
The Heyman Center, 2nd Floor Common Room • Columbia University
The event is free and open to the public.
Learn more about the event here >>
About Protestants Abroad
Between the 1890s and the Vietnam era, many thousands of American Protestant missionaries were sent to live throughout the non-European world. They expected to change the people they encountered, but those foreign people ended up transforming the missionaries. Their experience abroad made many of these missionaries and their children critical of racism, imperialism, and religious orthodoxy. When they returned home, they brought new liberal values back to their own society. Protestants Abroad reveals the untold story of how these missionary-connected individuals left an enduring mark on American public life as writers, diplomats, academics, church officials, publishers, foundation executives, and social activists.
David A. 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 citizens with language skills and direct experience in Asian societies catapulted dozens of missionary-connected individuals into prominent roles in intelligence and diplomacy. Meanwhile, Edwin Reischauer and other scholars with missionary backgrounds led the growth of Foreign Area Studies in universities during the Cold War. The missionary contingent advocated multiculturalism and anticolonialism, pushed their churches in ecumenical and social-activist directions, and joined with 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 reveals the crucial role that missionary-connected American Protestants played in the development of modern American liberalism, and how they helped other Americans reimagine their nation’s place in the world.
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). Professor Hollinger received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California Berkeley and his B.A. from La Verne College.
Learn more about Professor Hollinger >>
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