Missionary Positions: Evangelicalism and Empire in American Fiction

8. Contemporary Developments: Hersey’s The Call, Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, Grisham’s The Testament, and LaHaye’s “Left Behind” Novels

8 Contemporary Developments Hersey’s The Call, Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, Grisham’s The Testament, and LaHaye’s “Left Behind” Novels In the preceding chapters I have sought to establish The God-Seeker and Hawaii as retrospective fictions that employ nineteenth-century missionary settings to assess, each in ideologically divergent ways, the spirit of America as an evangelizing nation. Taken together, they embody two major orientations toward their subject, The God-Seeker seeing America’s mission as one of reform from within so as to realize a vision of inclusiveness , and Hawaii embracing American empire in the name of the same inclusiveness.Theretrospectivenatureofthesenovelsoughtnot,however, to be taken as a sign of the diminished vitality of the missionary novel as a genre. Over the last quarter century novelists of significant stature, most notably John Hersey and Barbara Kingsolver, have continued to work within the genre’s parameters. At the same time, however, the missionary novel has begun to show dramatic signs of transformation as a host of evangelical writers have adapted the form to propagate an apocalyptic doctrine of America’s role in the “end-times.” Since both of these developments deserve attention, I propose to show in a summary way how the missionary novel continues to develop in its traditional high cultural forms, and then to characterize in a somewhat more detailed fashion the “Left Behind” novels of Tim LaHaye and his writer Jerry Jenkins, along with others of their kind. Pursuing a related development, I will conclude by examining John Grisham’s best-selling thriller The Testament, as a “crossover” missionary novel that capitalizes upon the evangelical mode made popular by the Left Behind series, even as it appeals to a broader general audience. The virtual absence in these latter novels of a dialogic,contestatorymodeisatroublingsignthatspeaksof The Call, Poisonwood Bible, The Testament, and LaHaye’s “Left Behind” Novels • 177 a diminution in the quality of our national discourse about empire, a feature that has found its counterpart in the politics of the American nation. John Hersey’s The Call, published in 1985, shows the persistence of the mainline missionary novelistic tradition. Its journalistic form and assiduous efforts to allow the main character, David Treadup, to reveal himself without undue authorial intrusion is a mark of Hersey’s own journalistic credo as well as his respect for his protagonist. Additionally, Hersey’s emphasis on Treadup’s missionary vocation, from which the title is taken, along with the biographical format of this seven-hundred-page novel, clearly demonstrate that The Call belongs to the mode of missionary novel that began with Cooper’s depiction of Parson Amen and later evolved into the closely observed, fictional biographies of Willa Cather’s Father Jean Marie Latour, a nineteenth-century missionary in the American Southwest , in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927); A. J. Cronin’s humanistic life of Francis Chisholm, a Catholic missionary to China, in The Keys of the Kingdom (1941); and in the brace of novels we have examined, Hobart’s Peter Fraser in Yang and Yin and Lewis’s Aaron Gadd in The God-Seeker. The Callmay, inbrief,bedescribedasapsychologicallypenetratingrepresentationofthetortuous ,uncertainlifeofatwentieth-centuryAmerican missionary to China who is also an engineer and YMCA secretary. Unlike Cronin’s novel, withitsconcentratedfocusonFrancisChisholm’smission, The Call merits special notice for its scope and deep self-reflection on the historical significance of the American missionary effort to China. Inspired in part by Hersey’s father, Roscoe, who spent his professional life in China as a missionary, and in part by the demonstration-lecturer on modern technology Professor C. H. Robertson, The Call portrays Treadup as obsessively devoted to preparing the Chinese to become technologically skilled and self-sufficient.1 In keeping with his “social gospel” principles, Treadup, like Hobart’s Fraser, dedicates himself to a life of service rather than to the promulgation of Protestant doctrine. Despite its introspection, the novel is not much given to an examination of American missions as a form of cultural imperialism. Nonetheless, its broad historical arc highlights in a journalistic way the brute facts of history leading up to and following the Chinese revolution, especially during the soul-wrenching Japanese occupation of World War II. Hersey is particularly concerned to trace Treadup’s psychological and spiritual responses to China’s passage from becoming, potentially, a Christian nation under the nationalist 178 • Part III. Mid-Twentieth Century to the Present: America’s Missionary Identity leadership of Sun Yat-sen to its...