The Gospel of Freedom and Power: Protestant Missionaries in American Culture after World War II

Chapter two. Evangelicals

55 chapter two EVANGELICALS 1 1 1 In September 1945 the Free Methodist Missionary Tidings featured a poem, “The Converted Heathen Speaks.” The author adopted the voice of a convert: Out of the Stygian darkness Of heathendom, brutish and base, Out of the black superstition That curses and crushes our race . . . We have been lifted and pardoned In answer to somebody’s prayer. Petition, according to the convert, empowered those “bringing the ‘Light into the Darkness’ / To souls who were sunk in despair.”1 Reports in that and subsequent issues reiterated the theme in prose. Missionaries stood in stark white contrast to woeful black superstition. In 1989 a congregation of Free Methodists heard that they should no longer divide the world between Stygian darkness and American light. That year, longtime missionary to the Philippines Bob Cranston preached a Sunday sermon at Seattle’s First Free Methodist Church. His sermon recounted the transfer of church leadership from missionaries to nationals. He assured the congregation that the transfer was no cause for concern. “Missionaries will come and go, and they will build houses and they will build churches and the missionaries will disappear,” he said. “But it is wonderful to know that through the power of the Holy Spirit, the church will continue to march forward. His truth will be marching on as we give trust and confidence to the church around the world today.” To those who worried that Christians abroad would stray from the gospel, Cranston responded “You don’t have to worry 56 Evangelicals about your doctrines and your standards and your traditions overseas. It will carry on through the power of the Holy Spirit.” Indeed , if anyone should evoke doubt, it was not the church abroad. “I am not so worried about the church overseas as I am about the church in America,” he remarked. Christians in the United States needed to shift their critical gaze from national leaders abroad to their own souls at home. “The question this morning, really, is not whether we can trust the Holy Spirit to work through [Filipino leaders]. Will we trust the Holy Spirit to work through our lives, my life?”2 The shift from “The Converted Heathen” to Bob Cranston reveals significant changes, as well as subtle continuities, in Free Methodist portrayals of the relationship between missionaries and people abroad. By the time Cranston took the pulpit at First Church, the image of missionaries as assured leaders and people abroad as needy recipients had changed. Missionaries, in Cranston’s telling, needed to acknowledge capable national leadership. The same Spirit that empowered American evangelists also spoke to national pastors. The once firm lines between leaders and the led had dissolved. Yet beneath this picture lay a continuing affirmation of American Christianity’s normativity. Fidelity to your doctrines, standards, and traditions, Cranston assured his audience, measured the health of Christianity abroad. People elsewhere deserved autonomy and support because they had demonstrated their faithfulness to what American Free Methodists understood as the true gospel. Free Methodists were not alone in propagating this message. Christianity Today, the magazine of the postwar evangelical establishment , also responded to a changing world by increasingly emphasizing other believers’ autonomy and capability while subtly reaffirming that American evangelicals were the arbiters of what counted as truly Christian. Multiple factors led to the change from Stygian darkness to trusted Christian.The rise of nationalism and the growth of indigenous churches were significant factors. Like people in the Protestant mainline, American evangelicals had conversations about missions and about their message that were Evangelicals 57 affected by “the revolutionary world” and the critiques emerging from Christians abroad. Thus, evangelical reflections on missionaries were part of a larger postwar story. They occurred in the context of rising nationalism , Cold War fears, and a growing global church. Moreover , evangelical assessments of missionaries added a wrinkle in the commonly told narrative about American evangelicals and the Cold War. Evangelicals are often depicted as Cold Warriors of the first order—and for good reason. Particularly in the 1950s and the 1960s, they embraced the United States’ struggle against godless communism. White evangelicals remained supportive of the Vietnam War longer than the nation as a whole. The rise of the religious Right in the 1970s and its alliance with conservative and militantly anticommunist politicians such as Ronald Reagan further demonstrated the evangelical acceptance of Cold War ideology and American exceptionalism.3 Yet, without denying theological...