Epilogue
A New Generation
Among the US soldiers who died fighting the Great War was a young Chinese American man named Alexander Amador Eça da Silva Kin.1 Kin had been born in Honolulu in 1895 and was educated in California and New York before he enlisted. His mother had hoped that he would return with her to China as an adult. Before they could plan that trip, they tried to secure proof of his US citizenship—no easy task in the era of Chinese Exclusion. As his mother described her own history of extensive travels between the United States, China, and Japan to the US officials, one thing was clear: Dr. Yamei Kin spent much of her life building connections between the United States and Asia.
As a child, Kin’s travels were determined by the work of her adopted father: Divie Bethune McCartee, the Presbyterian missionary diplomat. As McCartee’s career took his family from China to Japan to the United States and back again, Kin followed. When she was a teenager, however, it was her career that brought the family to America. Following in her father’s footsteps, she became a medical missionary. She was one of the first Chinese women to earn a medical degree in the United States, and she put it to good use.
Like McCartee, Kin had a career that was eclectic and wide ranging. She is now best remembered for introducing Americans to the soybean through USDA-sponsored research in 1917, but she also carried on her parents’ medical missionary work in China and Japan and was a celebrated lecturer in the United States. In China, she worked as a hospital director and founded a nursing school in Tientsin, the site of the missionary troubles that had spread rumors about the predatory nature of Western medicine. Armed with a letter of introduction from President Theodore Roosevelt, she garnered local support from the viceroy for her new school in China.2 Like many missionary women, she toured the United States to lecture American women about the conditions of women in foreign lands.3
Unlike those missionary peers, however, she was not a citizen of the United States. She was born in China to Chinese parents, and her adoption by US missionaries had not changed her citizenship status. Kin’s son, however, was able to claim his citizenship on the basis of his birth in the United States. After his death, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in recognition of his service to his country. But his mother traveled under a Chinese passport. In 1904, President Roosevelt apologized in an official letter that he had no power to change this fact, including a handwritten note at the bottom of the typed page offering his services to assist the “dear Doctor” in any way that he could.4
It is unclear when Roosevelt had come to know Dr. Kin well enough to call her “dear,” but she counted him a friend, and she was well known in reform and society circles in the first decades of the century. The year after her US citizenship was denied, the New York Times described Dr. Kin as “the dainty little Chinese woman who has been charming American audiences with her addresses in defense of her people.” At that time, she was asked what the Chinese think of Christian missionaries. Her response may have surprised those who knew of her family’s background. The poor liked the missionaries: “They live in luxury, pay well, and are kind.” But others did not share that high opinion. The “thoughtful” and many officials had “grave mistrust” of the missionaries. After all, “sometimes they meddle with politics.”5 McCartee’s daughter knew this as well as anyone.
Dr. Kin’s lectures in the United States covered a wide range of topics. During her 1904 tour, she revealed the full range of “missionary intelligence” that a modern woman could provide. Some of the lectures, like one she delivered to society ladies gathered in the Washington home of the mother of a New Jersey senator, focused on the theme “The Chinese Woman.” Lectures like this covered domestic life and history, and amused the audience with stories of “henpecked husbands.”6 But she also discussed current political topics as a passionate and astute observer, as when she addressed the League for Political Education on the relations between China and Japan or when she was interviewed by the New-York Tribune. As she understood it, her task was to “interpret Orient to Occident.” Decades after Samuel Wells Williams had taken on this work in his writings, Kin found that it was still a challenge. “The races are so different,” she told one reporter. “I do not suppose it will ever be possible for Americans to understand the Chinese or for the Chinese to understand the Americans.” Like generations of missionaries before her, though, she had to try.7 By 1911, the Los Angeles Times described her as “one of the most extraordinary women in the world today,” partly because “she understands the politics of the Far East as few others, men or women, and this fact is recognized, not by her government alone, but by the representatives of other governments.”8
With the coming of the Great War, Kin’s addresses frequently turned to two subjects: peace and soybeans. Her discussions of soy emerged from a similar impulse that had guided her earlier work: teaching the United States about Asian culture and helping Americans to understand the various gifts that Asia had to share. Soy, a key part of the Chinese diet, had much to offer Americans. An efficient, high-protein food, it had tremendous potential to transform the American diet. The US government agreed and sponsored her research in China.
But even as food science occupied much of Kin’s attention, the war pulled at her heart. Her son enlisted. As she told one reporter, he was “doing his bit,” and she wanted to do hers, too. After his death, she spent the rest of her life in China in relative seclusion. Her days of touring the United States were over. The McCartee tradition of missionary diplomacy—of combining service to God with service to America’s global mission—was left to be continued by a new generation and new families.
After the war, changes in both US governance and the mission movement transformed missionary diplomacy. Twentieth-century pluralism, ecumenism, and cosmopolitanism all challenged the legacy of nineteenth-century confidence that missionaries and diplomats were ultimately in service of similar goals. After several decades of missionary troubles, nationalist and imperialist conflicts, and a world war, American observers and missionaries alike understood the relationship between missions and the US government differently than they had at the beginning of the foreign mission movement.
But Protestant missions, they understood, still had the potential to advance US interests. Missionary leadership in education and medicine, like the work of Dr. Kin and her many American peers, could advance humanitarian interests while also encouraging positive associations with the United States. Missionary colleges like Robert College and the American University Beirut remain to this day as lasting testaments of this earlier era of missionary diplomacy. Well into the twentieth century, missionaries could still serve as key figures in the exchange of intelligence between the United States and their mission fields. In these roles, missions enjoyed at least some support from the US government.
On January 28, 1925, President Calvin Coolidge took to the stage of the Washington Auditorium in Washington, DC, to address an audience of five thousand. It was the opening day of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, and Coolidge had been invited to speak to the men and women from eighty-five missionary organizations in the United States and Canada who had gathered together for “information and inspiration.” No major decisions were to be made over the six days of the conference. It was, rather, a purely educational event. The goal was to “enlarge the interest and deepen the conviction of the Christian people at the home base as to their foreign mission responsibilities and obligations.”9
The convention’s location in Washington made it easy to highlight the long connections between the mission movement and the US government. In a New York Times article advertising the event, the journalist made sure to note that the opening prayer would be delivered by former president Warren Harding’s pastor.10 Coolidge was not the first president who had addressed this sort of gathering. Twenty-five years earlier, Benjamin Harrison had served as honorary chairman of the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York, which Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley also addressed.11 The political presence was symbolic. Presidents and former presidents attended to indicate their approval of the mission movement and a generalized understanding of shared goals between the missions and the government.
Coolidge’s address drew the audience’s attention to the moment in which they were living: one in which there was “need for a revival of faith” and a “renewal of the spirit of brotherhood.” In the aftermath of world war, there were new duties imposed on what Coolidge called “the Christian nations” of the world. In both “an intensely practical as well as a highly spiritual sense,” those countries had been “charged with a great trust for civilization.” Coolidge echoed what missionary diplomats and government officials had long argued: that the spread of Christianity around the world advanced important secular goals, including charity and benevolence, education, science, and industry. Christianity was, he insisted “a highly practical, as well as a profoundly spiritual mode of life.”12
But Coolidge was not only celebratory. His address also noted, if vaguely, the negative impacts that missions could have. The important thing, he told his audience, was to embrace “true Christianity” and to approach the world with a spirit of “liberalism,” “toleration,” and “brotherhood.” Missionaries should go out “into the twilight places of the world” and be open to learning new things that might transform and improve life in the United States. Missionary work, in other words, was not just about remaking the world in the image of American Protestantism. It could also transform the United States. There was, or there ought to be, some aspect of give-and-take.13
Coolidge was not the only one to come to this realization. Many missionaries agreed. Bishop Herbert Welch, a missionary in Japan, agreed that President Coolidge had spoken with “absolute accuracy” when he acknowledged negative consequences of Western influence. Welch told the conference that Americans needed to remember the weapons, the “vulgar films,” and the drugs that had “been almost forced upon the Far East,” as well as “the rum that went with our Bibles.” Missionaries needed to come to terms with this darker side of their impact on the world. The West was not inherently superior to the East; US Christians had much that they could learn from the peoples and cultures they had set out to convert.14
By the mid-1920s, this cosmopolitan outlook was becoming a theme in some Protestant missionary circles. While James Barton was planning the Washington conference, Arthur Judson Brown of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions had been hard at work planning the International Peace through Religion Conference that would meet in Geneva in 1928. Their goal was not comparison, but collaboration. Much like Golden Rule Sunday, the organizers and participants emphasized the points that various faith traditions had in common in the hopes of promoting peace and unity.15
The 1920s did not mark the end of mission diplomacy, but they certainly witnessed its transformation. The debates over the value of missions had left their mark, as had the disruptions of the first world war. But equally important, the US government profoundly transformed the machinery of US diplomacy during these years. The consular reforms that had begun to shift missionaries’ relationship to the state at the end of the nineteenth century did not stop there.16 In 1924, the Rogers Act combined the consular and diplomatic branches into a single US Foreign Service and marked the culmination of these decades of professionalization.17 A new era had dawned.
In November of that year, Robert Speer of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions wrote to Secretary of State Charles Hughes in the hopes that the US government might make a statement about religious freedom in Persia after a vice consul had been killed in that country. But Speer would be disappointed. While Hughes acknowledged the humanitarian concerns that motivated Speer, he would not push the government to take action. After all, as he reminded Speer, “The civil and religious rights of foreigners in their own countries are subjects concerning which the governments of those countries are not disposed to receive suggestions from other governments.” This was not a matter for US intervention.18
Such a response from the State Department would have been much less likely several decades earlier. Hughes had to balance many concerns—protection of the American missionaries in the region among them. Pushing the Persian government to make a firm statement of support of religious toleration at a moment when they were already working together to bring the vice consul’s killers to justice seemed unnecessary and unproductive.
Speer and his colleagues in the mission movement would continue to push their government in this way in the decades to come. After a century of cooperation, the mission movement had good reason to expect that they would find a friendly reception in the State Department. Though they did not always receive the responses that they wished for, they could expect respectful treatment and an attentive ear. The government continued to see missionaries as potential partners in their work around the world, particularly when regions that had long histories of missionary action became the subject of new diplomatic importance, as occurred during the Second World War.19 Over the twentieth century, as humanitarianism and development work came to define more of US foreign policy, missionaries would continue to be a valuable resource to the American state.
The question of how far the US government could—or should—go to protect Protestant missionaries when they face troubles overseas remains unresolved. The missionary insistence that religious freedom ought to be a defining priority of US foreign relations was eventually enshrined in the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, even if American Christians, the US government, and foreign governments can still disagree about how “religious freedom” ought to be defined.20
Modern-day American missionaries look very different from the missionary diplomats of the nineteenth century. Since 2000, approximately a million Americans annually take part in short-term service trips overseas—numbers that would have awed the leaders of nineteenth-century missionary organizations.21 Programs like the Peace Corps have created government-sponsored secular options for Americans wanting to transform the world through development. Some evangelical Protestants follow in the footsteps of their nineteenth-century forebears by continuing to push against the boundaries of where they might be welcome—seeking out communities that have not yet been exposed to Western evangelical Christians. And sometimes, when they do, they get into trouble, as John Allen Chau did when he was killed in North Sentinel Island, India, in 2018. Although the US media largely concluded that Chau was a troublemaker who had ignored good sense and caused his own demise when he knowingly approached a community that did not welcome Christian evangelism, missionary Andrew Brunson received very different treatment from the press and politicians.
Brunson was not breaking the rules in the same way that Chau did when he was arrested after two decades in Turkey on vague charges of connections to a military coup. His imprisonment set off a diplomatic crisis, with the State Department only able to secure his release after two years of negotiations. The photo of Brunson kneeling in the Oval Office and praying with President Donald Trump accompanied news reports of the reception at the White House celebrating the missionary’s safe return home. At the event, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina described Brunson’s work—“to spread the word of Jesus Christ”—as “a foundational thing about this country, the United States.” Such a message should remind us that the many legacies of missionary diplomacy run deep.22