“As They Really Are”: The World Outlook of Protestant-Sponsored Mission Films, 1930–1950

Perhaps the most striking feature of the history of America’s missionary enterprise in the twentieth century is the movement’s virtual loss of visibility as a cultural phenomenon.

– Patricia R. Hill¹

Kenji Comes Home is no longer a recognizable title, but in 1950 the motion picture was nominated for an Academy Award under the category of documentary feature.² Produced by the Protestant Film Commission, this educational film about post-war Protestant missions in Japan served as a nondenominational resource for churches engaged in a systematized foreign mission studies movement. Beyond its Oscar nomination, the docudrama is notable for marking the apex of the ecumenical mission studies movement. Since the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of mainline and evangelical Protestants had annually read books and periodicals, hung maps on their walls, and consumed images based on an annual foreign mission theme, such as in 1949 when the theme was Japan. Beginning in the 1930s, motion pictures were added to the array of interdenominational resources. Educational leaders promoted moving images as the “ideal vehicle” for the study of foreign missions due to their ability to bring “far people near” and to portray “them as they really are.”³ At the height of their popularity in the late 1940s, films about foreign missions received critical acclaim and widespread distribution (Fig. 1). Today they are mostly forgotten by laypeople and scholars.

This essay explores the role of ecumenical films about Protestant foreign missions in the public understanding of religion from 1930 to 1950. Despite their contemporary lapse into obscurity, foreign mission films, as part of a larger mission study movement within the Protestant churches, played a significant role in the shaping of North American attitudes about Protestantism and its relationship to non-Western cultures and non-Christian religions. “The effect of this world-wide missionary effort,” wrote mission scholar Kenneth Scott Latourette in 1949, “is seldom appreciated. Even those most active in it are infrequently aware of how deeply it has molded the American outlook on the world.”⁴ Addressing missionary education, Latourette claimed that it had familiarized “thousands of Americans with country after country and people after people with whom they would otherwise have little or no direct contact.”⁵

In the following, I examine the ways in which these motion pictures were exhibited and received by audiences. Church sponsorship, along with an educational agenda, endowed these films with religious authority. Moreover, the mixture of documentary and fiction film techniques and conventions lent an aura of authenticity to these films. The prevalent theme of these foreign mission films was one of Protestant-American superiority in relation to other dogmas and faith traditions. Simply put, Protestant missions held the solutions to global problems. This message was reinforced by an educational curriculum of mission study designed for the Protestant churches.

Missionary education

During the peak of the Protestant foreign mission enterprise, from about 1880 to 1930, North American missionaries “were the chief interpreters of remote cultures for the people at home,” contends historian William Hutchison, “and as such played a central role in the shaping of American public attitudes.”⁶. It was during this period of evangelical enthusiasm that the ecumenical study of foreign missions, or missionary education, came to play a significant role within the mission enterprise. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, youth groups, such as the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), and women’s mission societies began to organize mission study programs. The goal was to stimulate interest in the world’s peoples as a way to cultivate domestic support of the foreign missionary enterprise. Pragmatically, this meant securing financial contributions and volunteers for missionary service.⁷

Figure 1.

“Movie hour, school of missions, Westwood, NJ”. Source: Board of Missions and Church Extension, Methodist Church, 1949,Composite Report of the Secretaries, Division of Education and Cultivation, New York: Board of Missions and Church Extension, Methodist Church, p. 17, United Methodist Archives and History Center, Madison, NJ.

Beginning in 1903 the Central Committee on the United Study...