Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (review)

Since J. K. Fairbanks' The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (1974) a body of intercultural literature has emerged which uses missionary sources to illuminate Chinese culture and Western attitudes toward it. Eric Reinders' Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies, owing much to the historical Sino-Christian studies of Dan Bays, Ryan Dunch, Norman Girardot, Jessie Lutz, Jacques Gernet, and Kathleen Lodwick, provides a fresh multidisciplinary addition to this important body of material. Here is an informed study of the sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic, imaginative construal by (primarily) Protestant Victorian missionaries of Chinese religion, language, culture, dress, diet, smell—and, most illuminatingly for Reinders, bowing (the kowtow), that most ambiguous and contested act of social and spiritual obeisance. Reinders' work will intrigue the generalist and inform the specialist. References to missionaries like Morrison, Gützlaff, Hudson Taylor, and Wells Williams, rub shoulders with insights from Robert Fortune and Evariste Huc, Herbert Spencer and Roland Barthes, Frank Dikötter and Mark Harrison, Pearl Buck, and even Charlie Chan. Indeed, analyses ancient and modern pour from every page with an almost baroque effusiveness.

Reinders is in the Religion Department at Emory University and reflects a broad intercultural and ethnographic awareness of the dynamics of religion and theology as instruments of self-understanding and self-differentiation. He quotes Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations on the first page, "Meaning is a physiognomy": this shapes both the character and content of his treatment of the "bodyful" terms of the missionary encounter with Chinese culture, in which the (initial) unintelligibility of Chinese language, inscrutability of millions of undifferentiated Chinese faces, and uncivilized habits of a Chinese lifestyle, both appalled and attracted those who felt called by God to bring the Protestant Christian gospel to China. Hence, Chinese religious habits (habitus) become, in Reinders' review of missionary literature (especially private memoirs, letters, travelogues, and missionary periodicals such as the Church Missionary Gleaner and Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China [1877 and 1890]), mirrors on Western prejudice and preference, as much as per se meaningless, heterodox rituals akin to that most disturbing phenomenon, Catholicism. For culture and conflict both came with the missionaries. As Reinders observes: "Protestant writers repeatedly asserted the resemblance of Chinese religious practice to 'the holy mummeries of the Romish Church'" (p. 105).

But missionary—let alone English—culture, language, spirituality, and motivation, are as inscrutable and fascinating as the China Reinders reports. This English reader wonders if American missionaries generally (let alone their German, Dutch, and Swiss counterparts) experienced the "bodifulness" of China differently or, crucially, less critically. My sense is, no. Crucially, too, English missionary discourse was widely read and well understood in Britain as enculturated colonial writing, as alien today as fiery Calvinist sermons or the Catholic Inquisition and to be read, therefore, as carefully: Reinders' reading risks imitating its authors' textual literalism and cultural elitism. Where, too, is more generous recognition that many missionaries loved and served China and the Chinese, understood China as well, if not better than, most (what of Morrison or Legge's remarkable work, for example?), and embraced China as lifelong residents (not short-term aliens) and faithful ambassadors? Seen in this light, initial reactions to the bodily forms of Chinese culture (which are essential to Reinders' study) are just that, initial reactions, which, we may surely assume, many subsequently regretted.