Page 4660 – Christianity Today (2025)

“For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren”: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism Among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942

By Brian Masaru Hayashi

Stanford University Press

217 pp.; $35

Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II

By Page Smith

Simon & Schuster

476 pp.; $27.50

Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona

By Richard Nishimoto

Edited by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

University of Arizona Press

262 pp.; $45, hardcover; $19.95, paper

Breaking the Silence: The Redress Movement in Seattle

By Yasuko I. Takezawa

Cornell University Press

248 pp.; $37.50, hardcover; $14.95, paper Whispered Silences

WHISPERED SILENCES

For another valuable perspective on the internment, see Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II, with text by Gary Y. Okihiro and photographs by Joan Myers (University of Washington Press, 249 pp.; $60, hardcover; $29.95, paper). Myers undertook a personal odyssey, visiting the desolate sites of all ten of the wra camps in which Japanese Americans were held during the war. Her haunting photos of the camps as they are today–and of objects left behind there–evoke the suffering of the internees with stark beauty. Okihiro (a leading scholar in the field of Asian American studies) contributes a superb essay that draws heavily on the memories of those who were in the camps while placing their experience in historical context.

On Sunday evening, December 7, 1941, the college group from Saint James Episcopal Church in Los Angeles (a Caucasian congregation) met as planned with the college group from Saint Mary’s Church (a Japanese congregation). Earlier that day, when news came of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, some members at Saint James wanted to cancel the meeting, but the majority thought otherwise, and the gathering took place: a Vespers service, dinner, and an address by the presiding bishop of the Los Angeles diocese. When the Japanese students from Saint Mary’s returned home, some of them learned that, while they were out, their fathers had been arrested by the FBI.

In the first five days after Pearl Harbor, 1,370 Japanese aliens on the West Coast were arrested, generally because they had ties with Japanese cultural and religious organizations. But they were only a few among the 16,000 suspected subversives who were arrested at the outset of the war, many of them Germans and Italians (and many subsequently released). Church leaders and government officials–including President Franklin Roosevelt–spoke of the need to respect the civil rights of all Americans, including those of Japanese ancestry, and for a short time that sentiment prevailed. By February of 1942, however, only two months after Pearl Harbor, plans were being laid for the removal and incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese from the West Coast, and on February 19, Roosevelt signed the executive order that set those plans in motion.

About the brute fact of these events–the bare outline of internment and, many years later, redress–there can be no disagreement; but everything else is up for grabs, subject to contesting interpretations, beginning at the basic level of terminology. Why did the internment take place? What was its impact on the Japanese American community? And if, in the internment and its aftermath, democracy was on trial, what was the verdict? From sharply different angles, four recently published books provide an opportunity to consider these questions.

Wrong country, wrong state, wrong time

In the 1990 Census, Japanese Americans, with a population of 847,562, ranked third among Asian/Pacific Islander groups in the United States. As the descendants of immigrants from Asia, they–along with other Asian Americans–challenge the notion that the American mosaic is derived exclusively from Europe and Africa. Japanese Americans are distinctive as the only Asian American group that is primarily American born. All the other major groups–Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Southeast Asians–are predominantly foreign born. While these other groups have experienced rapid growth through immigration as a result of the landmark Immigration Act of 1965, Japanese immigration has been at low levels. Thus Japanese Americans will soon be surpassed in numbers by groups that, in 1960–when the Japanese constituted by far the largest Asian American population–were tiny by comparison.

It requires a stretch of historical imagination to connect today’s Japanese American community–affluent and educated well above the national average–with the community cruelly displaced during World War II, and even more so with the first generation of Japanese immigrants, the “issei,” who began coming to the United States in the 1890s.

Harry Kitano, a scholar of the Japanese American experience, said of that first generation that they came to the wrong country and the wrong state at the wrong time. Overwhelmingly, the early Japanese immigrants came to California, with some moving north to Oregon and Washington. They came at a time when, after several decades of Chinese immigration, nativist passions were running high, and the negative stereotypes promoted by the anti-Chinese movement were easily transferred to the Japanese.

After a brief period of extensive immigration from Japan, Congress enacted a series of laws intended to curb further immigration, culminating in the highly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. At the same time, in California and elsewhere, farmers who felt threatened by competition from hard-working issei families, in concert with the ideologues of the anti-Japanese movement, won passage of alien land laws (intended to prevent aliens from owning the land they worked). Finally, in Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), a case that challenged the legality of denying Japanese immigrants the right to become naturalized citizens, the Supreme Court closed the door on the issei, ruling that Asians were “non-whites” and, lacking the exception granted to people of African descent, were thus ineligible for naturalization.

Thus, unlike immigrants from Poland or Italy, Germany or Ireland, Norway or Mexico, the issei were excluded by law from full participation in American civic life. Their American-born children, the nisei, however, were U.S. citizens. This difference in status accentuated the cultural difference that always exists between immigrants and their American-born children. It also encouraged the issei to maintain close ties with their homeland.

Japanese Immigrant Nationalism

Brian Masaru Hayashi, in “For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren,” explores the sensitive question of Japanese nationalism among Japanese Americans in the period before World War II. (The topic is sensitive because some commentators believe that to acknowledge any significant degree of pro-Japanese sentiment would be to concede that the internment was justified.) In a carefully documented study based on extensive research in Japanese-language sources, Hayashi looks at Japanese American Protestants in Los Angeles and finds that they exhibited nationalistic fervor and identified with Japan in the 1930s. Hayashi’s book thus challenges the received view, that Protestants constituted “the vanguard of cultural assimilation within the Japanese American community.”

Not the least of the virtues of Hayashi’s study is its pioneering look at the early Japanese American Christian community. In 1930 the Japanese population in the continental United States was 138,834, roughly 20,000 of whom were Protestants. Hayashi’s study focuses on three Los Angeles churches representative of that group: the Los Angeles Japanese Methodist Episcopal Church (now Centenary United Methodist Church), the Los Angeles Japanese Union Church (now the Union Church of Los Angeles), and the Los Angeles Holiness Church. All three churches, despite differences in emphasis, were strongly evangelical:

The members and pastors of the three churches held complete confidence in the Bible, were preoccupied with the gospel message, and sought to persuade other Japanese Americans to adopt the faith and thereby gain virtue in this earthly life and eternal life in the hereafter. All three churches conducted weekly Bible studies, and all three labored to spread the message of the gospel to others, especially to their fellow Japanese.

Moreover, Hayashi observes, the churches “emphasized certain aspects of evangelical Christianity, of an American sort that had a close relationship with American cultural values in general.”

At first glance, then, Hayashi’s findings regarding Japanese nationalism are surprising, for one might well expect that membership in Christian churches should have hastened acculturation and assimilation into American life. And, indeed, into the 1920s, that appeared to be the direction for many Japanese American Christians. But the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Court’s ruling in the Ozawa case reversed this course. Rebuffed by these actions, many of the issei began to take greater interest and pride in their homeland. At the same time, Japanese officials, led by Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, encouraged this development.

Matsuoka has not received the attention that he should from Asian American scholars. As one who had actually lived and studied (at the University of Oregon) in the United States in his youth, he did not look down upon Japanese Americans, as many of his peers did. Rather, he understood their experiences and struggles, and he cultivated closer ties and better relations with the issei and nisei generations of Japanese in America.

Furthermore, Hayashi points out that several aspects of Japanese Protestant Christianity facilitated political and cultural identification with Japan. First, the headquarters for the Methodist and Presbyterian denominations cut back on monetary support for the Japanese ethnic churches. As a result, Japanese Protestant churches found themselves more and more dependent upon the Japanese American community to sustain them financially. When they sought contributions, the churches also found it necessary to be linked with the concerns and sentiments of the immigrant community. And in the 1930s, this translated into pride and support for the military successes of Japan in China.

Second, the Japanese American version of evangelical Protestantism did not require believers to discard traditional Japanese values. The themes of mission, social work, and respect for government strengthened ties with the homeland. When disasters struck Japan, Japanese American Christians responded generously. They endorsed the slogan Doho no tame ni (“For the sake of our Japanese brethren”). Protestant evangelical morality and commitment also resonated well with seishin: the Japanese term comprising the values of such traits as loyalty, purity, filial piety, virtue, and honesty, in contrast to individualism, decadence, and materialism. Protestant beliefs and seishin fused together were compatible with allegiance to Japan. Thus Hayashi’s discovery of immigrant nationalism in the Japanese community complements other studies by Jerrold Takahashi, Yuji Ichioka, and John Stephan.

On reflection, this evidence of Japanese nationalism is not at all surprising. After all, other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, Armenians, Germans, Italians, Koreans, and Chinese, have shown strong identification with their ancestral homelands. Consistent with this theme, among the nisei there was a group known as the kibei, who were sent for a time by their parents to live and study in Japan. During the 1930s, Japanese Americans prepared and sent thousands of imonbukuro, or care packages, to Japanese soldiers fighting in Manchuria and later in China. They donated imonkin, or comfort money, for the families of Japanese soldiers who had been wounded or killed. Japanese vessels visiting ports such as Honolulu or Los Angeles were greeted warmly, and the fujinkai, or women’s associations, arranged hospitality programs for the Japanese naval personnel. Japanese American newspapers, like the Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi in Los Angeles, gave coverage that sided with Japan against China. In its annual poetry contest in 1938, the Rafu Shimpo even published senryu, or satirical poems, that were critical of the Chinese. In all this, the response of Japanese American Protestants might be likened to the fervent patriotism characteristic of American evangelicalism.1

The Decision For Internment

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, the loyalty of the Japanese American community understandably became a crucial issue. In the upper echelons of the federal government, there now occurred a struggle between the officials of the War Department and the Justice Department. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his staff felt that circumstances merited the removal of the Japanese on the West Coast. It did not help that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had been harping on the theme that subversion in Hawaii had been responsible for the success of the Japanese military. As he explained, “I think the most effective fifth column of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the possible exception of Norway.”

Opposing this position was Francis Biddle, the attorney general of the United States. Biddle was concerned about infringing on the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans and did not feel any evacuation was necessary. Moreover, his associate, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the fbi, did not feel that there was any evidence of subversive activity by the Japanese. But there were others sharing the sentiments of Stimson and Knox who proved to be more influential. These included the West Coast Commander General John L. DeWitt, who was worried about the security of the Pacific Coast and wanted to separate out the disloyal Japanese. They also included Provost Marshal General Allen Gullion and his aide Karl R. Bendetsen of the Aliens Division, who doubted the loyalty of the Japanese.

Actually, a number of federal agencies had already investigated the allegiance of the Japanese. For example, Lt. Cdr. Kenneth D. Ringle of Naval Intelligence, who was fluent in Japanese, had been studying the Japanese American community. He was convinced in 1941 that most of the Japanese were loyal to the United States. Curtis B. Munson, who prepared a report for the White House in November 1941, had also been examining the Japanese community. He believed that, on the whole, the Japanese were not a threat. Hoover and the FBI had chased down rumors about Japanese subversion but could find no evidence to substantiate those claims. And Gen. Mark Clark and Adm. Harold Stark, in surveying the situation, believed that there was no need to impose special measures against the Japanese.

But Stimson was determined to pursue the issue with the President. And when Franklin Roosevelt was confronted with the matter, he decided to defer to the War Department. On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which eventually opened the door for the Japanese American internment, saying only, “Be as reasonable as you can.”

In Democracy on Trial, the distinguished historian Page Smith (who died shortly after this book was published) suggests that the internment decision was one that nobody wanted to make. Somewhat by a process of trial and error, the United States fell into the situation of ordering the removal of the Japanese. Smith faults Biddle for being too rigid and doctrinaire in his support of civil rights for the Japanese. By refusing to allow mass searches of individual homes and neighborhoods, Biddle forced DeWitt to press for the more drastic measure of total removal to ensure security.

Smith takes this stance because he believes that military considerations dictated the need to evacuate the Japanese. He endorses the idea that, in wartime, “worst-case scenarios” must be taken into account: “It is certainly better policy to overestimate than to underestimate enemy capabilities,” he notes. “Pearl Harbor is a vivid reminder of the principle.”

Taking note of the expressions of nationalistic sentiment in the prewar Japanese community, Smith argues that the military had to be concerned about security for their army and navy installations. He declares that if no one could say that subversive activities would take place, “it was equally the case that no one could guarantee that they wouldn’t.” Smith tries to look at events in 1941 and 1942 “from the ground,” from the perspective of the actors at that time. He finds it difficult to quarrel with the logic of General DeWitt’s opinion that the Pacific Coast was the home to potential enemies.

Smith believes that DeWitt did not have the luxury to err regarding the security of California and the nation. The general’s decision was made according to military, not racial, considerations. He feels that public officials involved in the mass removal and incarceration made their decision after “wise and prudent” deliberations in a “responsible” and “reluctant” way. As Smith puts it, “the evacuation issue was a very small item in a global war that put the so-called free world at the risk of its life.” Smith thus accepts the argument that evacuation was based on military necessity–even if later events proved it was not necessary–and feels that the Japanese American internment was a small price to pay.

In holding to this interpretation, Smith goes against the flow of most who have written about the internment. Whereas most authors have found fault with DeWitt, Smith rehabilitates the general’s reputation. Yet, one wonders if Smith has not tried too hard to view events from the perspective of DeWitt and those who favored the internment. In so doing, he has deferred to history and legitimated what happened. One could argue that the internment was not really necessary. After all, Hawaii–the site of the Japanese attack and actually closer to the Pacific theater of war–did not witness the mass removal of its 160,000 Japanese residents. Moreover, Smith tends to see the Japanese Americans as tragic pawns. While he decries what happened to them, he nonetheless implies that the end justified the means. For Smith, history is filled with tragedy, and the fate of the Japanese Americans was another replaying of that theme. For Hayashi, however, the “mass internment was an injustice, however many Japanese Americans there were who sympathized with Japan.” Hayashi contrasts the treatment of Japanese Americans with that of German Americans and Italian Americans, who were not subjected to mass incarceration.

American Concentration Camps?

In the months following the signing of Executive Order 9066, the Japanese community from the West Coast, two-thirds of them American citizens, were removed from their homes to assembly centers, and then to ten war relocation centers situated in seven different states. The War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian agency, had the responsibility of administering the ten camps. The relocation centers were artificial communities hastily erected to house anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 internees. Barbed-wire fences and sentry towers were posted around the camps. Within these sites, the residents tried to eke out as normal a life as was possible under these circumstances. Children attended school, and adults were afforded opportunities for work. Inevitably, the artificial environment took its toll; in the midst of doubt and uncertainty, many inhabitants experienced stress, tension, and conflict.

How should one refer to the WRA camps? That may seem like a trivial question, the sort of thing academics squabble over amid general indifference. But the issue is important, for the argument over how to name the camps reflects a larger argument about the meaning of the internment in American history. One could, of course, adopt the government’s own terminology: “relocation centers” or “relocation camps.” Others, however, feel that these terms are euphemisms that hide the tragedy of what really happened. Men, women, and children, two-thirds of them American citizens, without charges placed against them, and without the right of a trial by jury, were indiscriminately placed into sites of mass incarceration. Their only deficiency was their identity as Japanese persons in America.

Roger Daniels, who has written widely on Japanese Americans, claims that these WRA camps were “concentration camps.” He recognizes that they were different in character from the death camps of the Nazi Holocaust, but he staunchly defends the use of the label. He reasons in the following manner: First, the historical records show that President Roosevelt and other officials made use of the term “concentration camps” in referring to the WRA sites. Second, most dictionaries define “concentration camps” as places where political prisoners, prisoners of war, and others are held captive. Third, the term itself has its origins well before World War II. It dates back to Spanish Gen. Valeriano Weyler’s reconcentration policy in Cuba before the Spanish-American War of 1898. It is also linked with the British term for camps established for civilian prisoners during the Boer War in South Africa from 1899-1902.

Nevertheless, some writers still shy away from using the term “concentration camps” and instead employ the term “internment camps.” Daniels, however, argues that this label should be reserved for the detention camps that were devised for aliens. There were Japanese alien internment camps at sites such as Crystal City, Texas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, that were different in kind from the ten WRA camps. These alien internment camps were administered by the Justice Department rather than the WRA.

Page Smith also enters into this debate about appropriate terminology. He rejects the designation “concentration camps,” which summons up “the image of a fearsome Nazi-like death camp arrangement.” In Smith’s judgment, such associations are dramatically at odds with the actual experience of the Japanese American internees. The WRA camps, he argues, resembled communities such as villages, towns, or small cities. Indeed, he sees them as ” ‘forcing grounds’ of democratic principles,” where, for better or worse, the internees had “learned, willy-nilly, the tactics of democratic politics and in this sense none of them were as they had been before.”

In the scholarly community, the increasing trend is to use the term “concentration camps” for the WRA camps and the label “internment camps” for the alien detention sites. As an example, one could cite the volume Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present (1993), edited by Brian Niiya for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. With the exception of Smith, all of the authors reviewed here–Hayashi, Lane Hirabayashi, and Yasuko Takezawa–accept these terminological distinctions. At the same time, the tendency is to accept usage of the phrase “the Japanese American internment” to describe the mass removal and incarceration of the Japanese Americans.

By using, again and again, the term “concentration camps” to refer to the WRA camps, scholars contend that they are getting at the truth behind America’s self-congratulatory national mythology. But it is fair to ask if this term really respects the specific nature of the Japanese American experience during World War II. Is the implicit analogy with Hitler’s death camps helpful, leading to a deeper understanding of the internment, or is it, in fact, misleading?

Popular Resistance In The Camps

Consider the title of the third book under review here: Inside an American Concentration Camp, a collection of several reports by Richard Nishimoto, compiled and edited by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi. This provocative title was supplied by the editor, who has thus framed the pieces in a context not imagined by the author.2 Nishimoto (1904-56) was born in Japan and was a graduate of Stanford University. During the years from 1943 to 1948, he was employed as a researcher for the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS). Directed by Dorothy Swaine Thomas, JERS was an effort by the University of California to document the life of the Japanese Americans in the wra camps. One publication that resulted and that became a standard reference source was The Spoilage: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement (1946) with Thomas and Nishimoto as coauthors.

As a resident of Poston–the largest of the ten WRA camps–who was fluent in Japanese, Nishimoto was seen as a valuable field researcher for JERS. He wrote numerous reports detailing the camp life that he observed and documented the many reactions of the Japanese who were confined in the desert near Parker, Arizona. It was a place so hot during the summers that residents only half-jokingly referred to it as “Poston, Toastin’, and Roastin’.” Staying with the other inhabitants, Nishimoto noted the difficulties of camp administrators in getting cooperation from camp residents in work activities such as firebreaking. He also discussed the refusal on the part of Japanese residents to leave WRA camps near the end of the war.

For Lane Hirabayashi, these reports are documented descriptions of popular resistance on the part of camp residents. Many accounts of the Japanese American internment depict the camp residents as the victims of a wartime decision. Once they were within these communities, they had little recourse but to bide their time. But Hirabayashi believes that the camp residents were more than passive victims. Indeed, he argues, they resisted in many ways. Through the frequent airing of complaints, noncompliance with camp directives, labor slowdowns, strikes, protests, and even occasional riots, the Japanese internees indicated that they were dissatisfied with the conditions in their camp and with their confinement generally.

This resistance even extended to a refusal on the part of many to leave the camps. By 1944, the tide of the war had clearly turned against Japan. The WRA took the position that all of the camps, except for Tule Lake, should be closed down in 1945. But there was popular resistance. Nishimoto noted that representatives from some of the camps opposed this idea at an All-Center Conference held in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February of 1945. At this conference, camp representatives showed an unwillingness to leave unless certain demands were met. They wanted assistance, financial help, and various assurances. While this reluctance to leave might be viewed as bizarre and quixotic behavior, Hirabayashi says it is quite understandable. The internees’ refusal was really an attempt to take control of their lives. They wanted to indicate that they could not simply be dictated to by the WRA without any prior consultation.

Hirabayashi acknowledges that his interpretation of popular resistance is not necessarily a view that Nishimoto himself would have endorsed. Brian Hayashi would probably add that Hirabayashi does not give enough attention to Japanese nationalistic sentiment as a motive for this confrontational behavior. (For example, some residents saw themselves as subjects of Japan and refused to cooperate with camp authorities.) And Page Smith would argue that Hirabayashi has set up a false dichotomy, as if the internees were forced to choose between passive compliance and “popular resistance.” In fact, Smith would contend, the overwhelming majority of the internees chose neither of these alternatives. They were far from being passive, nor did they engage in resistance; rather, they got on with their lives: In time the centers became small cosmoses. They had all the agencies and instrumentalities, as we say, of any community. And some uniquely their own. They had religious services, social organizations, hospitals with doctors, nurses, operating rooms (the residents of one center, dissatisfied with their chief of medicine, petitioned the administration to have him fired), cooperative stores, small business ventures such as barber shops, tobacco stores, internal economies, and . . . largely unsuccessful attempts at modest war-related industries. They had schools, recreational facilities, social programs, transportation and communication systems, construction crews, paid workers, labor boards.

Nevertheless, Hirabayashi does present an interesting perspective. He has suggested a potentially useful method of looking at the camp experience from the level of residents rather than that of officials at the time.

Internment And Japanese American Identity

The imminent defeat of Japan had become obvious by early 1945, and there was no longer any need to maintain the camps. The WRA rejected the recommendations of the representatives made at the All-Center Conference. All ten of the WRA camps were closed by March of 1946. The internees were resettled in their former West Coast homes or in other communities. Although there was some hostility directed at Japanese Americans, its intensity and pervasiveness eventually diminished. Many issei never recovered from the ordeal of the internment and the often substantial material losses they had suffered–the human cost was incalculable–but others, especially among the nisei, were eventually able to join the ranks of the middle class and share in America’s postwar economic growth.

Over time, the consensus view of the Japanese American internment has altered radically. An event that was hardly even acknowledged in American history texts during the first postwar decades is now presented in books and films at many different levels, ranging from middle-school texts and stories for young readers to an enormous scholarly literature and a vast archive of primary sources. (“All in all,” Page Smith writes in a note on sources, “I think it safe to say that no event in history has been so thoroughly recorded.”) Many now see the mass removal and incarceration as a grave injustice to Japanese Americans. In this sense, they might well differ with Smith’s judgment that military necessity justified the evacuation.

With the Civil Rights Act of 1988, the U.S. government officially apologized for the internment of the Japanese and authorized payment of $20,000 to each survivor of the camps. Passed by a large margin in both houses of Congress and signed with great fanfare by President Ronald Reagan, the 1988 legislation provided dramatic evidence of the change in public sentiment.

How did this transformation come about? This is in part the subject of Yasuko I. Takezawa’s Breaking the Silence. In the immediate postwar years, Japanese Americans were preoccupied with rebuilding their lives. But by the early 1970s and 1980s, the community was embarked on a campaign for redress: to secure recognition from the U.S. government that the civil rights of citizens of Japanese ancestry had been violated during wartime. The redress campaign also served as an opportunity to educate the general public about the history and experience of Japanese Americans.

Takezawa, a Japanese scholar who has lived in the United States, locates the roots of the redress campaign in 1972, in Seattle. Conveniently, she was a graduate student at the University of Washington and was in an advantageous position to observe and to record some of the progress of this movement. From her perspective, the nisei were generally reluctant to discuss the internment episode. Perhaps it was the shame or the pain of the memory. In any event, in the years following the war, many nisei sought to blend in and to merge with the larger society. As a result, their children, the sansei, or third generation, seemed to be acculturating rapidly. They appeared to be indifferent to their cultural heritage and demonstrated no interest in the internment experience. Indeed, assimilation and a high rate of marriage outside their own ethnic group raised fears among Japanese Americans (comparable to those expressed by many American Jews) that the very survival of the Japanese American community might be in doubt.

But suddenly, in the 1970s, many sansei expressed a desire to learn more about the wartime internment. Why the abrupt change? Certainly the civil-rights movement and the increasing emphasis on ethnic identity helped to promote a heightened sense of ethnic and political consciousness among Asian Americans. In the quest to discover more about Japanese American identity and history, the sansei learned about the relocation experience of their parents and grandparents.

Japanese American activists in Seattle, many of them of the third generation, helped to mobilize support for redress. Many leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), such as Bill Hosokawa and Mike Masaoka, were initially reluctant to join the cause. They feared a backlash. Nevertheless, through the use of the media, videotapes, plays, and the reenactment of Day of Remembrance commemorations to focus attention on the internment, the Seattle activists were able to win a wider base of national support for redress.

A crucial stage was reached when the U.S. government agreed to establish a Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in 1981. Holding hearings across the nation, the commission gathered testimony that led to a final report in 1983. The commission concluded that the Japanese American internment was due to “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” It recommended a formal government apology, the establishment of an educational fund, and individual payments of $20,000. From these findings, both houses of Congress sponsored bills that finally passed and became the Civil Rights Act of 1988.

In this campaign for redress, sansei played a major role. But just as important, they were given an opportunity to enter into a dialogue with their nisei parents. There was reconciliation and mutual discovery across the two generations. The result of this communication was to instill among the sansei a sense of pride in their ethnic heritage and to strengthen intergenerational ties. The redress movement also enhanced their sense of community and made them more aware of minority concerns and a broader Asian American identity.

In short, Takezawa finds that the wartime internment experience helped to reconstruct and define Japanese American identity. She is aware that ethnicity can be expressed differently over time, and that ethnic identity is constantly being constructed or reconstructed; others might say ethnicity is a cultural invention. A consciousness of history–in this case, the redress movement growing out of knowledge about the internment–is helping to shape and to nurture a sense of ethnic identity among the sansei. The sansei are experiencing both assimilation and an enhanced sense of ethnic awareness; the two developments are not incompatible. At the same time, Takezawa notices that the reinterpretation of the Japanese American internment has become tantamount to a legend. It is a legend of setbacks and success, injustice and vindication, suffering and triumph. It is a very American story.

Franklin Ng is professor of anthropology at California State University, Fresno. He is the editor of the six-volume Asian American Encyclopedia (Marshall Cavendish).

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal

November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 30

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“You Have Stept Out of Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America

By Susan Hill Lindley

Westminster John Knox Press

599 pp.; $35

Susan Hill Lindley’s survey of American women and religion arrives on the scene at an auspicious moment, after two or three decades of vigorous scholarship in women’s history in general and in women’s religious history in particular. It reflects where scholars find themselves at this juncture–both in its strengths and its roads not yet taken.

The book is the most comprehensive attempt to date to synthesize the diverse literature of the recent decades, covering the various forms of Protestantism (mainline, evangelical, and African American), sectarian and utopian groups, Mormonism, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and even, in the final chapter, sections on women in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Goddess religions. Where religious traditions are unfamiliar to most readers (e.g., Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam), Lindley offers brief descriptions. She is also sensitive to variations according to region, acknowledging the ways in which women’s experience in the South or West differed from that in the Midwest or Northeast. Moreover, Lindley demonstrates an astonishing grasp of the literature and of the major historiographical controversies, both in women’s religious history and in American religious history more generally. For instance, she reminds us that, in the nineteenth century, women’s ambitions to preach were not precisely the same as their aspirations to ordination; women could preach without being ordained. Her footnotes are good guides for anyone wanting to explore a particular topic or issue further.

Most important of all, Lindley goes a long way toward organizing this vast body of heterogeneous material, tracing unifying themes such as that of “True Womanhood,” the nineteenth-century ideal that constructed women as primarily mothers and wives, more moral, private, virtuous, and spiritually minded than men, and confined mostly to home. This is a particularly valuable connective theme since almost all varieties of Christian groups–and some non-Christian as well–subscribed to that ideal in the nineteenth century. (In fact, not a few religious groups have continued to do so, to one degree or another, throughout the twentieth century.)

Inevitably “You Have Stept Out of Your Place” resorts to many of the conventional ways of ordering the material: by denominational or ethnic tradition (Roman Catholics, Native Americans, African Americans, for example), and in terms of losses and gains made by women in their movement toward lay leadership and clerical office in churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. Within this scheme, Lindley links denominations in sensible ways, rather than tracing each singly (this could be extremely tedious where denominational histories resembled each other in regard to women). For instance, in the twentieth century she groups those denominations that have granted formal equality to women (most of mainline Protestantism and Judaism except for the Orthodox); those that started by giving women greater leadership scope and then partially retracted it (the conservative evangelical Protestant denominations); and those that have more or less stayed the course (Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy). Where other themes have been developed in the recent literature–for instance, the great foreign missionary movement of the late nineteenth century; attempts to “masculinize” institutional religion; and women’s intimate involvement with social reform and benevolence–she has made fruitful use of them.

The volume might be faulted in certain respects, though probably the fault lies more with the state of the scholarship than with Lindley herself. First, her treatment of some groups is necessarily thin. Her sections on Native Americans reflect the youth of the field of Native American religion. And she must hurry over the complex stories of women in Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism (though, again, the footnotes will come to the rescue of those who want to know more).

Second and more important, Lindley seems less comfortable with the twentieth century than with the nineteenth (one symptom of this is that eight or nine chapters deal almost entirely with the nineteenth century, two with the turn of the century, and only four or five devote themselves wholly to the twentieth century). Her account of the nineteenth century is thematically richer. This, I would argue, is no accident, for the interpretive lines are yet to be set for the twentieth century. For the time being, for the twentieth-century narrative Lindley must rely primarily on the standard story of the progress (or lack of progress, as the case may be) of women’s formal leadership in American religious institutions. There is no doubt that issues of ordination, the acquisition of lay rights, and access to theological education have been crucial parts of the twentieth-century story, but thus far other significant parts of the story have been eclipsed by the efforts to tell the “leadership” narrative.

How might Lindley’s volume best be used? It is more for dipping in and out of, I think, than for reading from cover to cover. There is simply too much to absorb. It would serve as a wonderful companion volume in a course on women and American religion, perhaps supplementing the documentary texts collected in Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller’s Women and Religion in America. (It would add some coherence to the stories those disparate documents tell.) Or it might help tie together a reading list featuring the books that are emerging as classics in the field, such as Margaret Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender and Evelyn Higginbotham’s work on National Baptist women. In comprehensiveness, Lindley’s survey surpasses the two volumes edited by Catherine Wessinger on women in mainline and “marginal” religious institutions, focusing as they do mainly on issues of leadership.

No doubt the next survey volume, maybe a decade down the line, will benefit from further interpretive work on the history of women and religion and therefore will cover ground somewhat different from Lindley’s. In particular, I hope it will reflect coming advances in our understanding of twentieth-century women’s religious history. (At the risk of sounding self-serving, let me mention the Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism project, funded by Pew and operating out of Andover Newton Theological School, which is intended to widen our grasp of this period.)

I trust a future survey will go beyond the question of women’s “leadership” to a richer consideration of what is now being referred to as “lived religion,” that is, to the varied forms of female devotion and piety. Women’s prayers, fiction, meditations, arts and crafts, autobiographies, and hymnody all need more attention than they have received thus far. So do a multitude of other topics that are thoroughly entangled with religion, such as women’s role as nurturer and educator in the family, and women’s physical existence–their sexuality, their experience of giving birth, and their health concerns.

Further, a future survey might tackle some still unanswered questions: Given the increasing options for women outside the home in the twentieth century, what is it that has impelled women to persist in working through religious institutions and/or through a religious understanding of what they are about? Indeed, what is it that lies at the core of women’s religious experience in the twentieth century? There is probably a variety of answers depending on which women we are looking at: Are liturgy and ritual central? Rules for living? A morality expressed particularly in a concern for social justice and equality of persons? More theology than we commonly recognize?

Finally, with any luck, a prospective survey would be in a better position to tackle the question of the relation between “secular” and “sacred” women’s history. For instance, the recent excellent scholarship on the female origins of the welfare state (e.g., Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare ) has pretty much omitted the religious dimension in favor of concentrating on women who embraced the discourse and outlook of the social sciences. I suspect there is a religious dimension to the story of the rise of the welfare state, but it has not yet been explored or articulated. To cite another example, feminism in most of the twentieth century has been assumed to be largely secular in its outlook, sometimes even anti-religious. Is it possible that by a closer examination of the styles and discourses of the women’s movement we might discover more of a religious legacy than hitherto suspected?

The scholars who explore these questions and, eventually, the historians who attempt the next surveys will surely build on Lindley’s work and pronounce themselves grateful that she has laid out so much material with such sophistication, care, and clarity.

Virginia Lieson Brereton is codirector of the Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism project at Andover Newton Theological School.

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal

November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 33

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Postethinic America: Beyond Multiculturalism

By David Hollinger

BasicBooks

210 pp.; $22

How, some half-dozen years after it burst on the scene, multiculturalism has clearly passed its zenith and begun its descent toward domesticated acceptance and stodgy curricular institutionalization. Naturally, any such statement must immediately be qualified, for, as John Higham pointed out when it was still on its ascending arc, multiculturalism is not only a “buzzword” and a “crusade,” but also “a gigantic mystification.” The first and third of those labels still apply, but the crusading aura has definitely faded.

Its buzzword quality helped to make it mystifying, for if multiculturalism was vague to start with, overuse made it hopelessly multivalent. There are, indeed, almost as many interpretations of multiculturalism as there are people who employ the term. The strongest versions, often heavily overlaid with some species of postmodernism, deny to the United States a collective national identity, claiming that “America” is nothing but the barren if not depraved political container within which the race–and gender–defined groups that are the authentic agents of culture have historically been oppressed. Weak multiculturalism, by contrast, is indistinguishable from the “tolerance for diversity” traditionally associated with cultural pluralism and the more relaxed versions of melting-pot assimilationism.

Strong multiculturalism, which is far too extreme to win general acceptance, broke through to general visibility with the controversy that greeted New York’s “Curriculum of Inclusion” in 1989. Its excesses prompted intense criticism from persons like Arthur Schlesinger and C. Vann Woodward, who could not credibly be dismissed as reactionaries. As a conspicuous element in “political correctness,” multiculturalism was thrown further on the defensive by the tidal wave of ridicule that rolled over p.c. in 1990-91. But the protean nature of the phenomenon helped it weather those storms, for virtually no one objects to the idea in its weaker tolerance-for-diversity forms, which, like the more robust versions, draw on antiracist and antisexist sentiments that are deeply rooted in the culture. Indeed, the determination of most critics to make clear that they are not against tolerance for diversity has no doubt reinforced acceptance of generic multiculturalism, which can always be given an acceptably benign interpretation.

David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism belongs to a second wave of commentary that began to appear in the midnineties. It reflects the determination just mentioned–to preempt charges of prejudice and cultural insensitivity–for one of Hollinger’s objections to multiculturalism is that it does not adequately comprehend the full richness of American diversity.

His book outlines a position intended to preserve the positive elements of multiculturalism while moving beyond its “increasingly apparent” limitations. This “postethnic perspective” is not put forward as “an all-purpose formula for solving policy problems,” but simply as “a distinctive frame within which issues in education and politics can be debated.” It constitutes, however, a searching critique of multiculturalism, which takes on special significance because of Hollinger’s sympathy for the goals of this “prodigious movement,” and because of his stature as one of the nation’s leading intellectual historians.

Hollinger strongly supports cultural diversity and therefore endorses multiculturalism to the extent that it genuinely enhances respect for, and nurturing of, that quality in American life. More particularly, he approves the way the movement has established the legitimacy of descent-based communities (i.e., racial and ethnic groups) as bearers of cultural diversity sufficiently important to be accorded recognition in public policy. The latter point is related to his belief that the displacement of “species” by “ethnos”–that is, melting-pot assimilationism by multiculturalist diversity–is to be understood within the context of a larger epistemological shift that he finds congenial. The larger shift involves a movement away from thinking in universalistic terms to a more lively awareness of historicity, the “recognition that many of the ideas and values once taken to be universal are specific to certain cultures.”

Hollinger’s principal reservations about multiculturalism have to do with what we can call its “essentializing” of race. He does not use that term, but it comes to mind in connection with his criticism of the five descent-based communities around which multiculturalism has structured itself: African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Euro Americans.

Although he approves of affirmative action, the political policy that gave rise to this “ethno-racial pentagon,” Hollinger finds the pentagon itself increasingly unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. By making race the trump category and reducing ethnicity to comparative insignificance, it has fueled a pervasive racialization of thought and policy, the most deplorable distortion of which is the now almost conventional identification of race with culture. Insofar as multiculturalism encourages this tendency, it actually constricts real cultural diversity and threatens to become an avatar of old-fashioned biological racism, which–though discredited for more than half a century–is clearly the theoretical source of the assumptions associated with the ethno-racial pentagon.

Hollinger also lays considerable weight on the fact that the regnant schema cannot accommodate an increasing population of “mixed race” persons, who are unlikely to tolerate for long being classified by some variant of the odious “one-drop rule.” Finally, he is troubled by the unwillingness of many multiculturalists to credit the reality of American nationality and the importance of the social and political values built into it.

The author’s prescription for moving beyond multiculturalism is not set forth in programmatic fashion; rather, it is embedded in his broader analysis and critique. He is, however, quite insistent on the need to distinguish sharply between race and culture, and he cautions against increasingly generalized resort to racial terminology. In this connection, he urges calling the groups that make up the pentagon “ethno-racial blocs” (a cumbersome mouthful) rather than “races,” because the former expression implies a more “contingent and instrumental” way of classifying people, which is the direction antiracists should “want to be heading.”

Hollinger would like to see a greater emphasis on “cosmopolitanism,” by which he means a capacity to savor cultural diversity without undue attachment to any one of the elements comprising the diversity. Such an emphasis, he believes, would enlarge the range of cultural choice for individuals and thereby promote a “diversification of diversity.” Cosmopolitanism is, indeed, the key element in Hollinger’s postethnic vision, which, as he describes it, “prefers voluntary to prescribed affiliations, appreciates multiple identities, pushes for communities of wide scope, recognizes the constructed character of ethno-racial groups, and accepts the formation of new groups as part of the normal life of a democractic society.”

Despite his commitment to historicist particularism, Hollinger rejects the view that human-rights talk is no longer tenable. (Even Richard Rorty, he notes, “has come around to insisting that full recognition of the historically particular character of our discourses should not be taken as a license for abandoning a traditional human rights commitment.”) Moreover, he affirms the existence of an American national community and espouses a “civic” nationalism based not on descent, but on a shared commitment to democratic ideals and practices. He is even brave enough to reply to multiculturalist parody of this kind of Americanism with a parody of his own that is daringly incorrect politically. And in a brief but arresting passage, he suggests that the tradition of church-state separation might be applicable to state action in respect to ethno-racial blocs:

In this . . . view, ethno-racial cultures ought to look after themselves much the way religious cultures have been expected to do. Both are sustained by voluntary affiliations. The products of both are to be welcomed as contributions to the richness of the nation’s cultural life and thus as part of the environment for its politics. But both partake more of the private than the public sphere, and neither is to be the beneficiary of outright public subsidies. In the meantime, programs for affirmative action can continue to occupy the political space that was theirs alone before culture began to take over the ethno-racial pentagon.

Also of special interest to readers of this journal is Hollinger’s citing of religion as a model for the relatively free entry and exit–individual affiliation and disaffiliation from the group–that postethnicity envisions across the board.

No summary could do justice to the subtlety of Hollinger’s formulations, but even these remarks may suggest the scope and boldness of his postethnic vision. His book is, to my mind, quite persuasive in its critique; and postethnicity is an appealing next step beyond multiculturalism. There are, however, three points I would like to see addressed if Hollinger decides to develop more systematically the position he has outlined for us here.

First, the role of women’s studies and gender theory in multiculturalism and the postethnic future needs fuller consideration. Second, it seems to me that Hollinger’s enthusiasm for cosmopolitanism has skewed his tracing of that concept’s historical interaction with cultural pluralism and assimilationism. Moreover, one may ask whether cosmopolitanism can fulfill Hollinger’s hopes for it as a key element in postethnicity, since it is doubtful that an outlook hitherto confined to a sophisticated few can serve as the basis for a large national society’s cultural policy.

Finally, there is the question of affirmative action. Hollinger endorses it as a way of overcoming “racism,” which he regards as real, although “race” is not. But that would seem to ground the policy in a paradox; and affirmative action is the root cause of the pervasive racialization of thought that Hollinger deplores, while attributing it to the ethno-racial pentagon, which is but an artifact of affirmative action.

Here, it might be said, Hollinger’s book is provocative by implication only. But that is not its overall character. This brief volume contains the most probing exploration of multiculturalism that has appeared to date, and it succeeds brilliantly in sketching new directions for the future.

Philip Gleason is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of many books, including most recently Contending with Moderity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press).

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal

November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 34

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Facts On File

2 vols. 800 pp.; $99

Reference books in American religion have become big business in recent years–big, that is, by the monetarily modest standards of academic publishing. During the past decade alone a veritable spate of them has appeared, virtually flooding our shelves with names, dates, and other forgettable religious data. Since the publication of Scribner’s massive Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience (3 vols. 1988), several other major works have been released. To name only the most well known requires the mention of at least half a dozen, including the Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (1988), the third and fourth editions of the Encyclopedia of American Religions (1989, 1993), the Dictionary of Christianity in America (1990), a second edition of the Dictionary of American Religious Biography (1993), the Dictionary of Baptists in America (1994), and, last but not least, the award-winning Concise Dictionary of Christianity in America (1995).

Religion, it seems, has resurfe. And often, as newsmakers, poll takers, and a growing number of opinion shapers reawaken to its utter relevance to their work, they rub their otherwise well-trained eyes in a dreamlike state of disbelief at the enormous complexity of the religious scene they have too long ignored. Gone are the days when the well-informed could count themselves au courant with a basic knowledge of Murray, Weigel, and the brothers Niebuhr. Today one needs a scorecard to keep track of the myriad players whose public performances make the headlines every week.

While one might question, then, the need for yet another reference work in a market that seems to be so clearly overcrowded, The Encyclopedia of American Religious History has actually filled an important niche by providing the most panoramic survey of the field to date. Its three primary authors and a small cadre of other experts have contributed terse, reliable summaries of subjects from Lyman Abbot to Louis Farrakhan to Zionism. And while few of these writers have yet become seasoned veterans in their field, they cover a wider range of religious topics than any of their predecessors. Indeed, as even a cursory look at this work’s synoptic index will attest, theirs is not primarily a sourcebook on mainstream Protestantism. For example, while the “Methodists” and “Presbyterians/ Reformed” receive a total of 25 separate entries, “Eastern Religions” alone receive a full 24. “African-American Religion” receives a healthy sum of 35. “Judaism” gets 29. “Harmonial Religion,” 19.

In all honesty, it would be more accurate to call this work an encyclopedia of U.S. religious history, for those outside the United States are generally neglected. Specialists might also quibble over some of the interpretations in these articles for, alas, not even encyclopedists can be purely objective (this specialist, for example, was disappointed with the entry on Yale’s Nathaniel William Taylor, whose evangelical Calvinism is all-too-often mislabeled Arminian). To their credit, the primary authors rightfully disclaim responsibility for covering all the latest interpretive disputes. The general reader will approach these volumes hoping to be “caught up” on topics of interest, not to be bogged down or confused by the incessant wrangling of academics. While in many cases, however, a dose of conventional or accepted wisdom serves us better than the recitation of recent revisionary points of view, caveat emptor: the very practice of historical revision suggests that encyclopedias, while very useful, are no more than time-bound efforts in synthetic interpretation.

Despite the inevitable (though often overlooked) limitations of all such reference works, The Encyclopedia of American Religious History should be widely used. Its more than 700 entries and 150 black-and-white illustrations-along with two indexes and a system of hundreds of helpful cross-references-offers “American” spectators an attractive guide to the various sights and sounds they are sure to encounter at the religious ballpark. In short, while one can find better reference works on various parts of American religion, one can do no better than this if seeking a handy program to the entire whole.

-Douglas Sweeney

Religion and American Culture: A Reader

Edited by David G. Hackett

Routledge

518 pp.; $65, hardcover; $24.95, paper

David Hackett, who teaches at the University of Florida, is a leading scholar among a distinguished cohort of younger students of American religion. The designation is important, for what Hackett studies is precisely religion as a shared universal phenomenon, rather than the particular beliefs, practices, or truth claims of any particular religion, like Christianity. Thus, this noteworthy collection of articles that were individually published between 1978 and 1996 contains careful studies of how Pueblo religion functioned; why symbols for the American nation divided the citizens of Albany, New York, when those symbols were put to use in a religious way; whether Mormonism should be considered a variant of previously existing forms of Christian faith or its own new religion; how myths of early California society exerted a long-term influence on standards of religious practice west of the Rockies; why Southern civil religion after the Civil War combined military, evangelical, and cultural values the way it did; how disputes over seating men and women in American synagogues led to differences within Judaism that resembled denominational divisions among Christians; and twenty other similar subjects.

Students of history who, like myself, are much more interested in the particularities of a particular religion (e.g., Christianity) face a decision in how to use work such as Hackett assembles. A temptation is to dismiss it as irrelevant for specifically Christian purposes because of its preference for anthropologists over the apostles, and for structures of religious practice over questions of religious truth. To follow that temptation would be a mistake. Particularly where studies of “religion” are presented with the care, honesty, and objectivity that Hackett and his colleagues display in these essays, they can function as a valuable assist for the light they shed, sometimes even inadvertently, on the particularities and distinctives of individual religious traditions. To employ terms made famous by Augustine more than 1,500 years ago, it would be a foolish “Israelite” who scorned the rich spoils offered so abundantly by the sort of “Egyptians” whose work David Hackett has enlisted for this outstanding anthology.

-Mark Noll

Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996

By Ronald Radosh

Free Press

298 pp; $25

With rumors of Clinton’s political death sinking in the wake of a double-digit poll lead over Republican Bob Dole, Ronald Radosh presents a counterintuitive assessment of the Democratic Party: It is no longer the majority party, and–here’s the kicker–this owes nothing to the Republican sweep in 1994. The culprit? A “New Politics” movement once relegated to the margins of a “New Deal liberal-labor coalition” but now firmly in control of the party’s apparatus and agenda in favor of “demographic representation,” that is, identity politics.

Radosh, a bête noire of the American Left, is best known as coauthor of The Rosenberg File, which established that there really was Communist infiltration of the federal government during the McCarthy era. Here, through amply documented original and secondary sources, he chronicles the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party from 1964 to 1996. Reviewing pivotal events such as the anti-Vietnam War movement, the 1968 Chicago convention, and the rules and delegate-selection reforms of the 1972 Democratic convention (which culminated in the nomination of George McGovern over segregationist George Wallace and New Dealer Henry “Scoop” Jackson), he offers a primer on key figures and organizations that set the Democrats on their course to irrelevancy.

Given Radosh’s thesis that the party succumbed to “a dangerous overreaction and takeover by guilty white liberals and race-conscious black militants,” one suspects overstatement. While Radosh offers a compelling revisionist history of the 1960s civil-rights movement, especially its communist leanings, can anyone really believe that Stokely Carmichael or the radicalized Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ever held sway, even in part, over the Democratic Party?

More important, is there no connection between the divisive interest-group politics Radosh deplores and the progressive philosophy of FDR’s New Deal he praises? As redefined by Roosevelt, government–instead of limiting itself to protecting the natural rights that citizens possess in common–exists precisely to supply the needs and wants of supplicant constituencies.

Divided They Fell, while recounting in riveting detail the inner tensions and fragmentation of a party that has sought to be all things to all interests during the last 32 years, fails to trace these woes to their source, 32 years earlier, at the birth of the New Deal.

-Lucas Morel

The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945-1995

By Robert J. Samuelson

Times Books/Random House

293 pp.; $25

As a columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek, Robert Samuelson has written about national affairs–chiefly through the window of economics–with lucid intelligence and uncommon sense. In The Good Life and Its Discontents, his first book, Samuelson brings those virtues to an ambitious account of postwar American life. “The paradox of our time,” he writes, “is that Americans are feeling bad about doing well.” Yes, he concedes, there are problems in our society, some of them seemingly intractable, but nonetheless, “Americans have achieved unprecedented levels of material prosperity and personal freedom.” Why then our “almost permanent state of public grumpiness”?

In a word, entitlement. “Increasingly, we have come to believe that certain things are (or ought to be) guaranteed to us. We feel entitled.” As a society, we have expectations that are impossible to fulfill. No matter what we achieve, it is bound to be unsatisfactory when measured against utopia. In the postwar boom, Samuelson shows, the entitlement mentality took root and flourished; now the dream is coming up hard against reality.

The Good Life and Its Discontents is one of the best books you are likely to read this year. Written with exceptional clarity, it is full of epigrammatic wisdom. To an unusual degree, Samuelson combines an up-to-the-minute grasp of current scholarship with a refreshing realism about the limits of our knowledge. Why, for instance, has income inequality increased? Samuelson’s answer–a frequent one in these pages–is that no one really knows.

In one important respect, however, Samuelson’s book is a failure, for it ignores a crucial dimension of the story it sets out to tell: what we might call the inscape of postwar American life. The problem begins with the bold sleight-of-hand at the outset, when Samuelson asserts that any sense of malaise in our fin-de-siècle is attributable to unrealistic expectations, and it runs right through to the concluding pitch for “responsibility” (which has all the sensible impotence of the bestsellers marketing virtue without God).

By all means, then, read Samuelson–but follow it up with something like Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch for a reminder of all that is missing from this curiously bloodless history of our time.

-JW

Lucas Morel is assistant professor of political science and history at John Brown University.

Douglas Sweeney is assistant editor on The Works of Jonathan Edwards project at Yale Divinity School.

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal

November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 38

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The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of FaithBy Andrew F. Walls Orbis Books 262pp.; $20

When, in the late 1950s, Andrew Walls left his native Scotland to teach church history in Sierra Leone, he knew, because of his own theological education, what a solid curriculum in church history looked like:

"The first year was for the early Church; the second, the Reformation; the third, Scotland–after all, what else is there?" Not too long into this assignment, however, Walls experienced an illumination: "I still remember the force with which one day the realization struck me that I, while happily pontificating on that patchwork quilt of diverse fragments that constitutes second century Christian literature, was actually living in a second century church." Then came a resolve that changed his life: "Why did I not stop pontificating and observe what was going on?"

Now, a lifetime later, Walls has gathered the results of those observations in The Missionary Movement in Christian History. It is a collection of essays rooted in his early African experience but also nourished by the years in which he has guided the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, first at the University of Aberdeen and more recently at New College, University of Edinburgh. If a more important book on the general meaning of Christian history is published this year–or even this decade–it will be a surprise.

The elements that make this book so important were latent in Walls's epiphany during his early days at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. Most important was the realization that, in traveling the relatively short distance from Great Britain to West Africa, he was making an extraordinary, and extraordinarily complex, conceptual journey. First, he was leaping back in time over Christendom. He was going back to such a situation as had existed before the long epoch stretching from the fourth century to the nineteenth, where the lands, customs, values, and landmarks of Europe were all in some sense Christian. For most Africans, there were no Christian monuments pointing back toward a Christian past.

To be sure, concern for evangelism and church renewal linked Walls and his students. But Walls's instinct as an evangelical Protestant was to revive a faith that, however lukewarm, nominal, or commonplace it had become, was ineluctably part of the European background. By contrast, most of his students could never, by definition, be revivalists since their cultural histories were defined by primal, non-Christian religions. Africa was thus in a situation much more like the Roman world of the second century where the notion that Christianity could exert a broad social or political influence was, if not unthinkable, certainly unthought.

Yet at the same time that Walls's journey to Sierra Leone took him back in Christian time, it also took him forward into the Christian future. Figures provided by the missiologist David Barrett outline the reality that Walls was experiencing firsthand.1 Since 1900, while the world's population has multiplied 3.6 times, the number of identifiable Christians in Europe has increased by a factor of only 1.4 and in North America by a factor of 3.4. By contrast, over those same 90-plus years, the number of Christians in the Pacific islands has multiplied by 4.9, the number in Asia by 14.5, and the number in Africa an astounding 34.3 times. Where there were approximately 9 million identifiable Christians in Africa in 1900, there are now over 300 million. On the basis of what has happened so far this century, Barrett projects that within 30 years, the number of Christians in Africa and Asia each will outstrip the number in Europe, while the number of Christians in Africa alone will approach three times the number in North America.

By coming to Africa from Europe, in other words, Walls had left a scene of Christian retrenchment to enter an arena of spectacular Christian growth. Not only had he gone back before Christendom, he had also leaped into a future where the South was overtaking the North as the heartland of Christianity.

Andrew Walls is hardly the first observer from Europe or North America to note the global changes that are now redefining Christian culture, Christian expansion, and Christian adherence. Yet how Walls has written about this situation makes him nearly unique. Along with only a few others–for example, the retired English bishop from India, Lesslie Newbigin, or the Muslim-born Gambian, Lamin Sanneh, who now teaches at Yale Divinity School–Walls has enriched Christian history by incorporating into it the dramatic developments of this century. Even more, he has illuminated the very nature of Christian faith by profound reflection on the trajectory of its history.

1. The Missionary Movement in Christian History is divided into three sections: a series of chapters on "the transmission of the Christian faith," several more on "Africa's place in Christian history," and a third set on the British and American missionary activity that began with William Carey in the 1790s and has now reached, in the terms of one chapter, its "old age." The book's 19 essays were published between 1971 and 1994; most are relatively compact, usually under 15 pages.

The book does contain a certain amount of repetition since many of Walls's key observations reappear for different purposes in the different essays. There are also lacunae. He has, for example, much more to say on the cross-cultural transmission of Christianity to Africa and India than to Latin America, and much more on Protestant missionary efforts than on Roman Catholic. It can also be asked if the parallels in Christian history that seem so striking to Walls–like those between twentieth-century Africa and the second-century Mediterranean world–do not blind him to other fruitful comparisons, perhaps between fourteenth-century Europe blasted by the Black Death and twentieth-century Europe blighted by secularism, mammon, and war.

Yet focusing on what Walls could have written instead of on the treasures that are here would be a mistake, for the book, stocked by a lifetime's wide reading, careful observation, and spiritual wit, spills over like a cornucopia.

Thus, when Walls writes about the anomalies, excesses, weaknesses, and phantasms that Western observers see in Africa's new churches, he provides a telling detail to remind readers that the conversion process had also been pretty bizarre during the Christianization of Europe: "The author of the Orkneyinga Saga tells us of the first conversion of the Orkney Islands in a way which makes clear why a second conversion was needed: 'I want you all and your subjects to be baptised,' said [Olaf of Norway to Earl Sigurd of Orkney]. 'If you refuse I'll have you killed on the spot, and I swear that I'll ravage every island with fire and steel.' "

Again, when Walls describes the contributions of early missionaries to scholarship in the British Isles, he provides nearly unbelievable information: "When Robert Morrison was appointed a missionary to China in 1807, the entire Chinese resources of British academic libraries consisted of one manuscript in the British Museum and one in the Royal Society, and not a person in Britain read or spoke Chinese."

Such individual data are gems sprinkled on the surface. But Walls's enduring contributions are veins of pure gold that force us to reconceptualize the Christian past and renew a vision of Christian faith itself. Among the most important of these conceptual achievements are Walls's answers to these questions:

• How can the early history of the church show why the rapid spread of Christianity in Africa during the twentieth century may well be critical for the entire church?
• How does the perspective of mission history illuminate well-worn themes, like the Christian history of America?
• How does that same perspective breathe fresh life into an understanding of the Christian faith itself?

Walls's experience as an instructor of church history in Sierra Leone, and then later as an organizer of the religion department at a Nigerian university, lies behind his long-standing fascination with the encounter between primal religions and Christian faith. By "primal religious traditions" he means the assumptions, beliefs, and rituals that "the various peoples of Africa, the Indian sub-continent, South East Asia, Inner Asia, North and South America, Australia, and the Pacific" practiced before they embraced the great world religions like Islam, Hinduism, or Christianity. As Walls looked further into the bewildering complexity of African primal religions, as he observed the diverse pattern of conversions to Christianity in contemporary Africa, and as he pondered religious and secular explanations for these conversions, he found his mind drawn, not to preemptory judgment, but to historical comparison.

Scenes Walls was observing in contemporary Africa, for example, seemed more and more to resemble stories he had read in the Venerable Bede's account of how Christianity came to England in the seventh century. Did whole groups of Nigerians convert rapidly after the British exerted their power in quashing local rebellions, and did some of these converts associate Christian faith with merchandise provided by the white man and to power from the books he brought (especially the one Book)? So, Walls noticed, it had been as well when Edwin, king of Northumbria, after taking counsel with his advisers, concluded that the new God of the Christians offered more prosperity and more military security than the Northumbrians had enjoyed under their old gods.

In these pages Walls speaks repeatedly of his expectation that the rapid spread of Christianity in twentieth-century Africa may be a watershed for theology. His reasons once again are historical.

Apparent eccentricities in the theological interests of contemporary Africa look much more important, Walls argues, if they are compared with theological interests during other moments of cultural transformation. In Africa, intense theological concern often exists for questions prompted by former adherence to primal faiths. In particular, what does the Bible have to say about the way family and tribal relationships, which were often key matters in the primal faiths, affect who may worship and when? Another burning question concerns the relationship of Christian converts to the past generations of their non-Christian ancestors.

Both of these issues look a lot less eccentric when they are set against the backdrop of Christendom's earliest history. Again, Walls relies on Bede, from the early eighth century, to guide us into the future:

The questions, Bede informs us, that burst from the first English Christian converts and inquirers were on topics such as the possibility of two brothers marrying two sisters, or attendance at worship during pregnancy or menstruation or after intercourse. No doubt their pre-Chris-tian rituals were hedged by regulations concerning such things. If the gods who underwrote the sanctions on such prohibitions were being abandoned, it was necessary to know what the new God demanded in such matters. To be without an answer was to leave people confused and in fear of breaking a dangerous taboo. It is worth noting that many African independent churches have explicit regulations on these very matters. Like Pope Gregory, to whom Augustine referred his questions, they have noticed that some of them are dealt with in the Holiness Code in Leviticus. Because of this they are able from the sacred book to build up the way of life of a neo-Levitical community. Are they not a kingdom of priests?

When Walls turns to the status of ancestors, he is once again able to demonstrate the gravity of this contemporary African preoccupation by referring to a similar situation at the dawn of the Christian centuries. The conversion of the Roman Empire was, in fact, attended by similar wrestling with the question of how to regard the worthy Greeks and Romans from whom the new Christians descended but who had never known the one true God. In the early church, theology of a high order came from struggle with this question. On one side the brilliant, if acerbic, Tertullian, a lawyer from Carthage in North Africa, wanted to reject the non-Christian past entirely because it lacked explicit faith in Christ. But proponents of the opposite view eventually won out, including Justin Martyr in the second century and Clement and Origen, theologians from Alexandria, in the third. Their conclusion was that Greek philosophy and Roman standards of law were indeed imperfect; both needed Christianity to find their proper fulfillment. But, they reasoned, these earlier patterns contained glimmers of truth that the church could build upon and for which it could thank the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, too, in modern Africa a great debate is under way. On the one side are those who want a complete break with the non-Christian past. On the other are those who find in widespread African notions of a Great High God adumbrations of the true faith for which Christians, specifically as Christians, may give thanks.

Simply to observe this debate may be enough to convince Western observers that it deserves their respect. Walls, because of his historical sense, wants us to take the African debate far more seriously than that. One of the book's persistent themes is his contention that theological reflection arising out of the missionary entrance of Christianity into new cultures has permanently and universally advanced the self-understanding of Christian faith at the most profound level. In trying to take the measure of Christian Africa's ferment in the present century, Walls wants us to remember that a similarly productive confusion attended Hellenistic Christianity in the second and third centuries. In particular, he notes that the questions that Tertullian and Clement debated opened up a whole series of related issues that led straight to reflection on the Trinity and the nature of the person of Christ, for these were debates that concerned precisely the incarnation of the Bible's Semitic narratives into the thought forms of the Hellenistic world. More-over, discussions that began over whether and how to honor Socrates and Plato led eventually to the great creeds from Nicea and Chalcedon, which may be said to have put to use for Christ the work of Greek philosophers in defining categories, such as person, essence, or nature, that were treated only indirectly in the Bible.

Walls wants us to understand how important Nicea and Chalcedon were as the theological anchor for more than a millennium of Western Christian history, but also for the missionary movement that eventually came to Africa. In other words, Walls is contending that questions raised by Africans (and by Asians, Latin Americans, and residents of the Pacific Islands) be taken seriously as legitimate questions of theological inquiry, but also potentially as leading to the kind of globally significant self-understanding that happened at least once before when the gospel was carried from its Jewish cradle into the pagan world of Greece and Rome.

To follow Walls in his reasoning is to realize that African questions like whether pregnant women may come to church–questions that arise out of translating the gospel into a new cultural idiom–deserve the same concentrated attention that similar questions have long received on the translation of the gospel into a cultural idiom foreign to the Jewish believers of the Book of Acts.

2. It might only be expected that the recent history of Christianity in Africa, with missionary efforts so prominent, would stimulate fresh insights relating the cross-cultural transmission of Christianity. It is more of a surprise to find that the missiological perspective yields nearly as rich rewards when applied to America.

Walls begins his essay on "The American Dimension of the Missionary Movement" with a telling quotation from Kanzo Uchimura, a Japanese Christian who in 1926 was writing about the potential of Americans to teach Japanese about religion:

Americans are great people; there is no doubt about that. They are great in building cities and railroads. . . . Americans have a wonderful genius for improving breeds of horses, cattle, sheep and swine. . . . Americans too are great inventors. . . . Needless to say, they are great in money. . . . Americans are great in all these things and much else; but not in Religion. . . . Americans must count religion in order to see or show its value. . . . To them big churches are successful churches. . . . To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavour. Statistics is their way of showing success or failure in their religion as in their commerce and politics. Numbers, numbers, oh, how they value numbers!

Uchimura may stand accused of hyperbole, but not Andrew Walls in his careful effort to define "a specifically American Christianity, an expression of Christian faith formed within and by American culture." For Walls, mission insights are crucial both for understanding the shape that Christianity has assumed in America and for evaluating that faith with critical sympathy.

For a historian of missions, moreover, the question of America is not a trivial question. It was the shape that Christianity took in winning America that dictated its appearance when American missionaries carried the gospel overseas. Because America succeeded Britain as the greatest source of missionary volunteers at the time of World War I, and because since the end of World War II the United States has become the overwhelmingly dominant force in world missionary effort, Walls suggests that the question of how missions shaped American Christianity is packed with world-historical significance.

To be sure, Christianity in America grew from the stock of Christian Europe. But the special circumstances of American settlement–which mingled immigrants from many religious as well as ethnic regions and which was accompanied by a growing attachment to democratic liberalism–meant that Christianity in early America would also differ significantly from its shape in Europe. Thus, American dispositions were not theoretical but activist, not traditional but self-starting, not dependent on the state but voluntary, not institutional but individual. In Walls's terms, Christians in America came to be characterized by

vigorous expansionism; readiness of invention; a willingness to make the fullest use of contemporary technology; finance, organization, and business methods; a mental separation of the spiritual and the political realms combined with a conviction of the superlative excellence, if not the universal relevance, of the historic constitution and values of the nation; and an approach to theology, evangelism, and church life in terms of addressing problems and finding solutions.

With his willingness to see local culture as shaping much that American believers regard as unquestioned essentials of Christian faith, Walls is prepared to find fault. He thinks, for example, that Americans, and especially American missionaries, have been politically naïve. The naïveté lies in thinking that the American practice of separating church and state somehow represents the cessation of politics. By way of objection, Walls points out that most Americans embraced a separation of church and state from practical rather than theoretical reasons. There were simply too many different representatives of competing European churches to re-establish any one of them as the established religion. But when Americans treat their practical solution as a theological principle, "the effects," according to Walls,

have been paradoxical. American missions have tended to think of themselves as nonpolitical: how can it be otherwise if [as an assumption of American life] church and state live in different spheres? Non-Americans have seen continual political implications in their activities: how can it be otherwise if [as an assumption of life in most of the rest of the world] church and state inhabit the same sphere, or at least overlapping spheres?

Similarly, Walls thinks that the habit of perpetually writing new statements of faith for an ever-growing number of freshly minted institutions is as much a product of distinctly American circumstances as is American instincts on church and state. To Walls, as a non-American, it is evident that this practice of continual theological self-definition reflects "the characteristically American problem-solving approach at work," in which the common procedure is to "identify the problem [in this case doctrine], apply the right tools, and a solution will appear. Then move on to the next problem."

Equally characteristic of American habits of mind is the tendency to use such statements of faith as "tests for fellowship and a basis of separation." Walls is not surprised to see fragmentation by formula flourish in America, for "the principle of separation is the converse of the principle of free association." Nor is he shocked that the result of this process is "the atomization of the church." Indeed, that result is only what one might expect, once the distinctives of Christianity in America have been compared with what has usually not occurred in other Christian venues.

But Walls is not like other critics who simply bemoan the dismaying self-delusions of the American churches. It is a central plank of his whole platform that all vigorous forms of Christianity will be incarnated in their own cultures. Hence, the question for America (as for all other regions) is not if a cultural form of the faith develops, but whatkind of cultural Christianity emerges. Walls, despite his criticisms, is a critic with genuine sympathy. As he labors to explain at length in the rest of the book, the whole history of Christianity is a series of successive adaptations of the faith to local situations. If this adaptation has occurred in America, of course it yields skewings, distortions, and disfigurements of the faith, but it also yields a genuine incarnation.

"None of these marks," Walls reminds us, "and none of their effects, is nearly as important as the universal Christianity, the gospel of the risen Christ, to which historic American Christianity witnesses." In missiological terms, the only serious problem with American Christianity is forgetfulness. "There is nothing wrong with having local forms of Christianity–provided that we remember that they are local."

Walls's final judgment on American Christianity is much more admiring than critical. But admiration comes quite specifically from his perspective as a historian of Christian mission. In particular, he is much taken by the fact that, important as Americans have been for missionary work in the twentieth century, the really noteworthy fact about America in mission history is the conversion of Americans in the nineteenth century.

Walls does not provide extensive historical background for his assertion that "in no part of the world did that century see such a striking outcome [resulting from missionary activity] as in North America." But he is nonetheless on solid ground. At the time of the formation of the United States, and the continuation of Canada in loyalty to Great Britain, the state of Christianity in both countries resembled more the recent European picture of recession than the recent African picture of expansion. Not only were churches and denominations disrupted by the Revolutionary War, impoverished by economic dislocations, and suffering under the strains of uprooting (Canadian Loyalists), starting over again (United States patriots), or both (settlers moving west across the mountains in both Canada and the United States). Believers also were living in societies where non- or at best quasi-Christian values were increasing in cultural power. To be sure, memories from a Christian past were still strong. But the culture, guided by leaders wed to non-Christian versions of the Enlightenment, and imperiled by the barbarism of the frontier, was heading rapidly in a non-Christian direction.

In those bleak settings, marvels occurred. In both the United States and Canada, earnest evangelists (led by Methodists and Baptists) labored tirelessly to win the lost. Equally earnest champions of Christian civilization (led by Presbyterians and Congregationalists) developed elaborate rationales to demonstrate the compatibility of traditional Christianity with North America's newfound democracy. After only a few decades, equally earnest labors in evangelism and Christianization would firm up the faith of a burgeoning Roman Catholic population. The result in the period of roughly 1780 to 1860 was a rapid spread of Christian profession and Christian institution-building unlike anything that had been seen since the monastic revivals of the Middle Ages and unlike anything the modern world has seen, with the exception of Christian expansion in Korea and certain parts of Africa.

As a historian of the church's world mission, Andrew Walls is impressed. In particular, he is especially taken with American success in exploiting the voluntary society (or parachurch agency) as a means of promoting mission at home and abroad. Protestant voluntary societies resembled Catholic precedents in the history of monasticism more than either Protestants or Catholics recognized at the time. They began with German Lutherans in the late seventeenth century and High Church Anglicans in the early eighteenth century. They were used with telling effect by John Wesley and other British awakeners. But they came into their own in America.

Walls devotes most of two other essays to the importance of the mission-generated voluntary societies that flourished in Britain and, even more, America. He calls them "one of God's theological jokes," since they developed with almost no forethought, they received almost no attention from church leaders and weighty theologians, and they worked their leaven for change in the church almost before they were recognized. Yet, from the voluntary societies organized for missionary service, Walls can trace matters of immense Christian significance: for example, the relativizing of denominational barriers by people who were actively cooperating to spread the gospel, a door for service and leadership opened wide to the laity (especially women), and the development of new worlds of knowledge and spiritual concern through the distribution of missionary periodicals.

Walls has much more to say about the critical role that voluntary societies played in the Christian history of the last centuries, most of which activity he thinks has benefited the church. But here it is enough to recognize that Walls's missiological analysis of Christianity in America undergirds his very positive assessment of American faith. In a word, without an American form of Christianity, warts and all, the world would never have known the blessings brought by voluntary mission societies.

I have given here only an introduction to the cascade of insight that Walls's mission-trained eye brings to the subject of America's Christian history. Even so, work on America in The Missionary Movement in Christian History is only a cameo. But crafted with eyes trained by the early Christian fathers and the Venerable Bede, hands apprenticed to the task in Sierra Leone, and a heart loyal to the Incarnation, the cameo that results is a thing of rare beauty.

3.What makes The Missionary Movement in Christian History more than just fascinating history is the way Walls moves from subjects like the spread of Christianity in modern Africa, or America as a missionary trophy, to insights about the nature of Christian faith itself. Here, however, it is necessary to be even more allusive than in summarizing Walls's writing on Africa and America, for the results of his missiological research are more profound than any quick summary can measure.

For a sample of how Walls weaves his magic, go with him in the thought experiment that opens the book. Imagine an alien savant, unbound by the puny human life span, who wants to study Christianity as a lived reality and who is able to visit planet Earth at widely spaced intervals. His first visit occurs in A.D. 37 at a gathering of believers in Jerusalem where the ways in which this church differs from a Jewish sect are hard to discern. The Christians are honoring the seventh day, they meet in the temple, their religious reading is from the Hebrew Scriptures, and they circumcise their sons. Only by unusual interpretations of parts of those Hebrew Scriptures, specifically by relating Jewish accounts of the Messiah, the Suffering Servant, and the Son of Man to Jesus of Nazareth, do these Jews show that they are, in fact, Christians.

Next the extraterrestial returns in the year 325 to the little town of Nicea in modern Turkey where a great gathering of Christian leaders is taking place. Jews and the marks of Judaism are nowhere to be seen. Rather, the believers come from throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. And they are preoccupied with minute, but also obviously momentous, discussion about how to understand the life of Jesus in the thought forms of Hellenistic culture.

The visitor is back in about three centuries, this time to the coast of Ireland. Here he encounters a crowd of monks. They are undergoing several kinds of privations, some self-inflicted, some arising from efforts to spread the message of Jesus to unappreciative listeners. Some of the monks have forsaken all fellowship with other humans and sit quietly in caves by the sea. The religious issue that consumes them is how to determine the exact date on which to celebrate Easter.

Now leap forward more than a millennium to 1840 and a great meeting of prosperous Londoners in Exeter Hall. They are convened to discuss how best to advance Christianity, along with commerce and civilization, in the continent of Africa. Their prosperity could not be in starker contrast to the poverty of the Irish monks, their lack of concern for anything Jewish as clear as at Nicea, their cen-trality in their society's power structure (which is at the pinnacle of all such powers in the world) as evident as was the marginality of the Christians of A.D. 37 in relationship to the might of Rome.

Finally, come with our alien to Lagos, Nigeria, in 1980. As Walls describes what the visitor sees,

a white-robed group is dancing and chanting through the streets on their way to their church. They are informing the world at large that they are Cherubim and Seraphim; they are inviting people to come and experience the power of God in their services. They claim that God has messages for particular individuals and that his power can be demonstrated in healing.

What such an extraterrestial visitor would note immediately is that Christianity does not possess a single, sharply defined cultural essence. Rather, it appears in different forms (sometimes, very different forms) in different centuries in different places. If the visitor had come to Nicea in 1840, there would have been virtually nothing Christian to see at all. If he had returned to London in 1980, there would have been much Christian architecture, but rituals of Christian practice far less expansive than on view in Nigeria.

Yet after a little more reflection, the visitor would have been able to say that, despite immense cultural disjunctions, certain continuities did, in fact, exist. The various Christian groups all spoke of "the final significance of Jesus." All of them possessed "a certain consciousness about history"; they looked backward in time to Jesus for the anchor of their existence and forward in time to what Jesus would yet accomplish. All continued to use the Scriptures, with those after the earliest meeting in Jerusalem studying writings directly about Jesus as well as the Hebrew Bible. Finally, all practiced rituals featuring the ceremonial eating of bread and wine and ceremonial washing with water.

After still more reflection, this time informed by historical consciousness, the visitor would have been led to a startling conclusion. Each of the new forms of the faith that he witnessed had resulted from a similar process. The first Christians were, in biblical language, adapting the old wineskin of Judaism to the new wine of Christianity. At Nicea, Jewish-Christian concepts were being translated into a Hellenistic idiom. In Ireland, a Hellenized faith was being rendered fit for a barbarian people who would soon carry the faith throughout all of northern Europe. In London, Victorian businessmen were outfitting a late manifestation of Northern European religion for export. And in Lagos, the Cherubim and Seraphim had begun to make something of the Englishmen's gift for themselves.

As a historian, what Walls wants us to see taking place in each instance is translation. One way of living out, or of speaking, the gospel, with all the cultural particularities that attend the use of specific languages, is being brought over into another way of living, another way of speaking, into all the cultural particulars that attend the use of the receptor language.

Armed with this insight, readers of the Bible find ordinary passages transmogrified into revelation of extraordinary power. Walls's favorite is Acts 11:19-20:

Now those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews. Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.

It is not Jesus the Christ (or Messiah) whom these unnamed Jewish Christians proclaim to the Greeks in Antioch, for that would be to ask non-Jews to take on the full load of Hebrew religion before they could understand the work of God. Rather, to Greeks who did not know the Hebrew Scriptures, the proclamation is of Jesus as Lord, the one from God who will rule over all nations and all other rulers. And so, in germ, lies hidden a sequential history that in mere centuries will take in Ireland and the rest of the barbaric North, and, a millennium or so later, will enfold to itself peoples of the Southern Hemisphere who knew neither Judaism nor Hellenism, and who could never be more than outsiders to Europe whether barbaric or industrial.

As a historian, Walls also wants us to see that this process of translation has been not only an interesting feature in the history of Christianity, but almost certainly its crucial feature. Had Christianity remained Jewish, it may well have perished in the destruction of Jerusalem wrought by Titus in A.D. 70. Had Christianity remained Hellenistic, it may well have perished when the Islamic followers of Allah swept out of the Middle East in the seventh century. If it had remained the preserve of barbarian monks, it perhaps could not have adjusted to the European renaissance or the great prosperity that some of Europe came to enjoy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If it had been solely a creature of expanding European civilization, it might have been conclusively put to rest by one of the towering intellects of the nineteenth century, Hegel or Marx or Nietzsche or Wagner or Freud–or perhaps bled to death at Ypres or the Somme. But in each instance–"just in time," Walls says–translation saved the day.

At this point, Andrew Walls the historian gives way to Andrew Walls the theologian. Might the reason translation is such an important fact in Christian history be that translation reflects something more than just human history? Walls provides his answer at several places. His main point is that translating the gospel message from one culture to another turns out to define the character of Christian faith itself, because that is how Christianity began. Hear one of the passages in which these connections are joined:

In the Incarnation, the Word becomes flesh, but not simply flesh; Christian faith is not about a theophany or an avatar, the appearance of divinity on the human scene. The Word was made human. To continue the linguistic analogy, Christ was not simply a loanword adopted into the vocabulary of humanity; he was fully translated, taken into the functional system of the language, into the fullest reaches of personality, experience, and social relationship. The proper human response to the divine act of translation is conversion: the opening up of the functioning system of personality, intellect, emotions, relationship to the new meaning, to the expression of Christ. Following on the original act of translation in Jesus of Nazareth are countless re-translations into the thought forms and cultures of the different societies into which Christ is brought as conversion takes place.

Going on now as historian and theologian together, Walls suggests that the peculiar problems and possibilities of translation explain also one additional reality of Christian faith as it is lived by every believer, but also as a grand movement through the centuries. That reality is the paradoxical combination of, in his terms, "indigenization" and "pilgrimage." The gospel comes to each person and to all peoples exactly where they are. You do not have to stop being an American, a Japanese, a German, or a Terra del Fuegian in order to become a Christian. In fact, you will find resources in Christianity for you and your specific cultural situation that those from far away never dreamed possible.

Yet, at the same time that the gospel dignifies individual cultures by entering into all of them so particularly, it also calls all believers together to a pilgrim journey. The gospel that legitimates the particular upholds the universal. The gospel that communicates dignity to each believer from whatever culture calls each Christian to join all others in praising the universal rule of God in Christ. Believers will (in fact, must) worship in different ways. But believers together worship the one God revealed in the Son who fills all things.

Andrew Walls's essays, though they display the fruits of a lifetime's diligent labor, reading, and reflection, remain provocative more than definitive. To make this concession, however, is only to say that they touch on fundamental reality à la Chekov rather than Tolstoy, like "Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring" instead of the Saint Matthew Passion, like a sip of your favorite expensive beverage rather than a tub of pop at a picnic. The extraordinary learning behind this book is worn lightly. The author is modest, self-effacing, and reserved. Yet a last citation, this one from the chapter "Culture and Conversion in Christian History," not only features many of Andrew Walls's central themes, but also suggests something of the supernal light reflected in these marvelous essays:

The homing and the pilgrim principles are in tension. They are not in opposition, nor are they to be held in some kind of balance. We need not fear getting too much of one or the other, only too little. To understand their relationship we have only to recall that both are the direct result of that incarnational and translational process whereby God redeems us through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. It is his life which enters the life of each new community where he is received by faith, and which is to be realized through all the courses of that community's thoughts and traditions. . . . The Christians of all communities, with all their distinctive discipleships, are brought together "in Christ." If his likeness is to be formed in each community of Christians, some sort of family resemblance should be developing across them. All these cultures which they represent, all the nationalities belong alike to the fullness of Humanity described so graphically in the Epistle to the Ephesians. It is a delightful paradox that the more Christ is translated into the various thought forms and life systems which form our various national identities, the richer all of us will be in our common Christian identity. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us-and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. His inaugural Kuyper Lecture, given at Calvin College in the fall of 1995 and cosponsored by the Center for Public Justice, has just been published as Adding Cross to Crown: The Political Significance of Christ's Passion (Baker Book House).

Part II

To be sure, Christianity in America grew from the stock of Christian Europe. But the special circumstances of American settlement–which mingled immigrants from many religious as well as ethnic regions and which was accompanied by a growing attachment to democratic liberalism–meant that Christianity in early America would also differ significantly from its shape in Europe. Thus, American dispositions were not theoretical but activist, not traditional but self-starting, not dependent on the state but voluntary, not institutional but individual. In Walls’s terms, Christians in America came to be characterized by

vigorous expansionism; readiness of invention; a willingness to make the fullest use of contemporary technology; finance, organization, and business methods; a mental separation of the spiritual and the political realms combined with a conviction of the superlative excellence, if not the universal relevance, of the historic constitution and values of the nation; and an approach to theology, evangelism, and church life in terms of addressing problems and finding solutions.

With his willingness to see local culture as shaping much that American believers regard as unquestioned essentials of Christian faith, Walls is prepared to find fault. He thinks, for example, that Americans, and especially American missionaries, have been politically naïve. The naïveté lies in thinking that the American practice of separating church and state somehow represents the cessation of politics. By way of objection, Walls points out that most Americans embraced a separation of church and state from practical rather than theoretical reasons. There were simply too many different representatives of competing European churches to re-establish any one of them as the established religion. But when Americans treat their practical solution as a theological principle, “the effects,” according to Walls,

have been paradoxical. American missions have tended to think of themselves as nonpolitical: how can it be otherwise if [as an assumption of American life] church and state live in different spheres? Non-Americans have seen continual political implications in their activities: how can it be otherwise if [as an assumption of life in most of the rest of the world] church and state inhabit the same sphere, or at least overlapping spheres?

Similarly, Walls thinks that the habit of perpetually writing new statements of faith for an ever-growing number of freshly minted institutions is as much a product of distinctly American circumstances as is American instincts on church and state. To Walls, as a non-American, it is evident that this practice of continual theological self-definition reflects “the characteristically American problem-solving approach at work,” in which the common procedure is to “identify the problem [in this case doctrine], apply the right tools, and a solution will appear. Then move on to the next problem.”

Equally characteristic of American habits of mind is the tendency to use such statements of faith as “tests for fellowship and a basis of separation.” Walls is not surprised to see fragmentation by formula flourish in America, for “the principle of separation is the converse of the principle of free association.” Nor is he shocked that the result of this process is “the atomization of the church.” Indeed, that result is only what one might expect, once the distinctives of Christianity in America have been compared with what has usually not occurred in other Christian venues.

But Walls is not like other critics who simply bemoan the dismaying self-delusions of the American churches. It is a central plank of his whole platform that all vigorous forms of Christianity will be incarnated in their own cultures. Hence, the question for America (as for all other regions) is not if a cultural form of the faith develops, but whatkind of cultural Christianity emerges. Walls, despite his criticisms, is a critic with genuine sympathy. As he labors to explain at length in the rest of the book, the whole history of Christianity is a series of successive adaptations of the faith to local situations. If this adaptation has occurred in America, of course it yields skewings, distortions, and disfigurements of the faith, but it also yields a genuine incarnation.

“None of these marks,” Walls reminds us, “and none of their effects, is nearly as important as the universal Christianity, the gospel of the risen Christ, to which historic American Christianity witnesses.” In missiological terms, the only serious problem with American Christianity is forgetfulness. “There is nothing wrong with having local forms of Christianity–provided that we remember that they are local.”

Walls’s final judgment on American Christianity is much more admiring than critical. But admiration comes quite specifically from his perspective as a historian of Christian mission. In particular, he is much taken by the fact that, important as Americans have been for missionary work in the twentieth century, the really noteworthy fact about America in mission history is the conversion of Americans in the nineteenth century.

Walls does not provide extensive historical background for his assertion that “in no part of the world did that century see such a striking outcome [resulting from missionary activity] as in North America.” But he is nonetheless on solid ground. At the time of the formation of the United States, and the continuation of Canada in loyalty to Great Britain, the state of Christianity in both countries resembled more the recent European picture of recession than the recent African picture of expansion. Not only were churches and denominations disrupted by the Revolutionary War, impoverished by economic dislocations, and suffering under the strains of uprooting (Canadian Loyalists), starting over again (United States patriots), or both (settlers moving west across the mountains in both Canada and the United States). Believers also were living in societies where non- or at best quasi-Christian values were increasing in cultural power. To be sure, memories from a Christian past were still strong. But the culture, guided by leaders wed to non-Christian versions of the Enlightenment, and imperiled by the barbarism of the frontier, was heading rapidly in a non-Christian direction.

In those bleak settings, marvels occurred. In both the United States and Canada, earnest evangelists (led by Methodists and Baptists) labored tirelessly to win the lost. Equally earnest champions of Christian civilization (led by Presbyterians and Congregationalists) developed elaborate rationales to demonstrate the compatibility of traditional Christianity with North America’s newfound democracy. After only a few decades, equally earnest labors in evangelism and Christianization would firm up the faith of a burgeoning Roman Catholic population. The result in the period of roughly 1780 to 1860 was a rapid spread of Christian profession and Christian institution-building unlike anything that had been seen since the monastic revivals of the Middle Ages and unlike anything the modern world has seen, with the exception of Christian expansion in Korea and certain parts of Africa.

As a historian of the church’s world mission, Andrew Walls is impressed. In particular, he is especially taken with American success in exploiting the voluntary society (or parachurch agency) as a means of promoting mission at home and abroad. Protestant voluntary societies resembled Catholic precedents in the history of monasticism more than either Protestants or Catholics recognized at the time. They began with German Lutherans in the late seventeenth century and High Church Anglicans in the early eighteenth century. They were used with telling effect by John Wesley and other British awakeners. But they came into their own in America.

Walls devotes most of two other essays to the importance of the mission-generated voluntary societies that flourished in Britain and, even more, America. He calls them “one of God’s theological jokes,” since they developed with almost no forethought, they received almost no attention from church leaders and weighty theologians, and they worked their leaven for change in the church almost before they were recognized. Yet, from the voluntary societies organized for missionary service, Walls can trace matters of immense Christian significance: for example, the relativizing of denominational barriers by people who were actively cooperating to spread the gospel, a door for service and leadership opened wide to the laity (especially women), and the development of new worlds of knowledge and spiritual concern through the distribution of missionary periodicals.

Walls has much more to say about the critical role that voluntary societies played in the Christian history of the last centuries, most of which activity he thinks has benefited the church. But here it is enough to recognize that Walls’s missiological analysis of Christianity in America undergirds his very positive assessment of American faith. In a word, without an American form of Christianity, warts and all, the world would never have known the blessings brought by voluntary mission societies.

I have given here only an introduction to the cascade of insight that Walls’s mission-trained eye brings to the subject of America’s Christian history. Even so, work on America in The Missionary Movement in Christian History is only a cameo. But crafted with eyes trained by the early Christian fathers and the Venerable Bede, hands apprenticed to the task in Sierra Leone, and a heart loyal to the Incarnation, the cameo that results is a thing of rare beauty.

3.What makes The Missionary Movement in Christian History more than just fascinating history is the way Walls moves from subjects like the spread of Christianity in modern Africa, or America as a missionary trophy, to insights about the nature of Christian faith itself. Here, however, it is necessary to be even more allusive than in summarizing Walls’s writing on Africa and America, for the results of his missiological research are more profound than any quick summary can measure.

For a sample of how Walls weaves his magic, go with him in the thought experiment that opens the book. Imagine an alien savant, unbound by the puny human life span, who wants to study Christianity as a lived reality and who is able to visit planet Earth at widely spaced intervals. His first visit occurs in A.D. 37 at a gathering of believers in Jerusalem where the ways in which this church differs from a Jewish sect are hard to discern. The Christians are honoring the seventh day, they meet in the temple, their religious reading is from the Hebrew Scriptures, and they circumcise their sons. Only by unusual interpretations of parts of those Hebrew Scriptures, specifically by relating Jewish accounts of the Messiah, the Suffering Servant, and the Son of Man to Jesus of Nazareth, do these Jews show that they are, in fact, Christians.

Next the extraterrestial returns in the year 325 to the little town of Nicea in modern Turkey where a great gathering of Christian leaders is taking place. Jews and the marks of Judaism are nowhere to be seen. Rather, the believers come from throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. And they are preoccupied with minute, but also obviously momentous, discussion about how to understand the life of Jesus in the thought forms of Hellenistic culture.

The visitor is back in about three centuries, this time to the coast of Ireland. Here he encounters a crowd of monks. They are undergoing several kinds of privations, some self-inflicted, some arising from efforts to spread the message of Jesus to unappreciative listeners. Some of the monks have forsaken all fellowship with other humans and sit quietly in caves by the sea. The religious issue that consumes them is how to determine the exact date on which to celebrate Easter.

Now leap forward more than a millennium to 1840 and a great meeting of prosperous Londoners in Exeter Hall. They are convened to discuss how best to advance Christianity, along with commerce and civilization, in the continent of Africa. Their prosperity could not be in starker contrast to the poverty of the Irish monks, their lack of concern for anything Jewish as clear as at Nicea, their cen-trality in their society’s power structure (which is at the pinnacle of all such powers in the world) as evident as was the marginality of the Christians of A.D. 37 in relationship to the might of Rome.

Finally, come with our alien to Lagos, Nigeria, in 1980. As Walls describes what the visitor sees,

a white-robed group is dancing and chanting through the streets on their way to their church. They are informing the world at large that they are Cherubim and Seraphim; they are inviting people to come and experience the power of God in their services. They claim that God has messages for particular individuals and that his power can be demonstrated in healing.

What such an extraterrestial visitor would note immediately is that Christianity does not possess a single, sharply defined cultural essence. Rather, it appears in different forms (sometimes, very different forms) in different centuries in different places. If the visitor had come to Nicea in 1840, there would have been virtually nothing Christian to see at all. If he had returned to London in 1980, there would have been much Christian architecture, but rituals of Christian practice far less expansive than on view in Nigeria.

Yet after a little more reflection, the visitor would have been able to say that, despite immense cultural disjunctions, certain continuities did, in fact, exist. The various Christian groups all spoke of “the final significance of Jesus.” All of them possessed “a certain consciousness about history”; they looked backward in time to Jesus for the anchor of their existence and forward in time to what Jesus would yet accomplish. All continued to use the Scriptures, with those after the earliest meeting in Jerusalem studying writings directly about Jesus as well as the Hebrew Bible. Finally, all practiced rituals featuring the ceremonial eating of bread and wine and ceremonial washing with water.

After still more reflection, this time informed by historical consciousness, the visitor would have been led to a startling conclusion. Each of the new forms of the faith that he witnessed had resulted from a similar process. The first Christians were, in biblical language, adapting the old wineskin of Judaism to the new wine of Christianity. At Nicea, Jewish-Christian concepts were being translated into a Hellenistic idiom. In Ireland, a Hellenized faith was being rendered fit for a barbarian people who would soon carry the faith throughout all of northern Europe. In London, Victorian businessmen were outfitting a late manifestation of Northern European religion for export. And in Lagos, the Cherubim and Seraphim had begun to make something of the Englishmen’s gift for themselves.

As a historian, what Walls wants us to see taking place in each instance is translation. One way of living out, or of speaking, the gospel, with all the cultural particularities that attend the use of specific languages, is being brought over into another way of living, another way of speaking, into all the cultural particulars that attend the use of the receptor language.

Armed with this insight, readers of the Bible find ordinary passages transmogrified into revelation of extraordinary power. Walls’s favorite is Acts 11:19-20:

Now those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews. Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.

It is not Jesus the Christ (or Messiah) whom these unnamed Jewish Christians proclaim to the Greeks in Antioch, for that would be to ask non-Jews to take on the full load of Hebrew religion before they could understand the work of God. Rather, to Greeks who did not know the Hebrew Scriptures, the proclamation is of Jesus as Lord, the one from God who will rule over all nations and all other rulers. And so, in germ, lies hidden a sequential history that in mere centuries will take in Ireland and the rest of the barbaric North, and, a millennium or so later, will enfold to itself peoples of the Southern Hemisphere who knew neither Judaism nor Hellenism, and who could never be more than outsiders to Europe whether barbaric or industrial.

As a historian, Walls also wants us to see that this process of translation has been not only an interesting feature in the history of Christianity, but almost certainly its crucial feature. Had Christianity remained Jewish, it may well have perished in the destruction of Jerusalem wrought by Titus in A.D. 70. Had Christianity remained Hellenistic, it may well have perished when the Islamic followers of Allah swept out of the Middle East in the seventh century. If it had remained the preserve of barbarian monks, it perhaps could not have adjusted to the European renaissance or the great prosperity that some of Europe came to enjoy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If it had been solely a creature of expanding European civilization, it might have been conclusively put to rest by one of the towering intellects of the nineteenth century, Hegel or Marx or Nietzsche or Wagner or Freud–or perhaps bled to death at Ypres or the Somme. But in each instance–“just in time,” Walls says–translation saved the day.

At this point, Andrew Walls the historian gives way to Andrew Walls the theologian. Might the reason translation is such an important fact in Christian history be that translation reflects something more than just human history? Walls provides his answer at several places. His main point is that translating the gospel message from one culture to another turns out to define the character of Christian faith itself, because that is how Christianity began. Hear one of the passages in which these connections are joined:

In the Incarnation, the Word becomes flesh, but not simply flesh; Christian faith is not about a theophany or an avatar, the appearance of divinity on the human scene. The Word was made human. To continue the linguistic analogy, Christ was not simply a loanword adopted into the vocabulary of humanity; he was fully translated, taken into the functional system of the language, into the fullest reaches of personality, experience, and social relationship. The proper human response to the divine act of translation is conversion: the opening up of the functioning system of personality, intellect, emotions, relationship to the new meaning, to the expression of Christ. Following on the original act of translation in Jesus of Nazareth are countless re-translations into the thought forms and cultures of the different societies into which Christ is brought as conversion takes place.

Going on now as historian and theologian together, Walls suggests that the peculiar problems and possibilities of translation explain also one additional reality of Christian faith as it is lived by every believer, but also as a grand movement through the centuries. That reality is the paradoxical combination of, in his terms, “indigenization” and “pilgrimage.” The gospel comes to each person and to all peoples exactly where they are. You do not have to stop being an American, a Japanese, a German, or a Terra del Fuegian in order to become a Christian. In fact, you will find resources in Christianity for you and your specific cultural situation that those from far away never dreamed possible.

Yet, at the same time that the gospel dignifies individual cultures by entering into all of them so particularly, it also calls all believers together to a pilgrim journey. The gospel that legitimates the particular upholds the universal. The gospel that communicates dignity to each believer from whatever culture calls each Christian to join all others in praising the universal rule of God in Christ. Believers will (in fact, must) worship in different ways. But believers together worship the one God revealed in the Son who fills all things.

Andrew Walls’s essays, though they display the fruits of a lifetime’s diligent labor, reading, and reflection, remain provocative more than definitive. To make this concession, however, is only to say that they touch on fundamental reality à la Chekov rather than Tolstoy, like “Jesus, Joy of Man’s Desiring” instead of the Saint Matthew Passion, like a sip of your favorite expensive beverage rather than a tub of pop at a picnic. The extraordinary learning behind this book is worn lightly. The author is modest, self-effacing, and reserved. Yet a last citation, this one from the chapter “Culture and Conversion in Christian History,” not only features many of Andrew Walls’s central themes, but also suggests something of the supernal light reflected in these marvelous essays:

The homing and the pilgrim principles are in tension. They are not in opposition, nor are they to be held in some kind of balance. We need not fear getting too much of one or the other, only too little. To understand their relationship we have only to recall that both are the direct result of that incarnational and translational process whereby God redeems us through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. It is his life which enters the life of each new community where he is received by faith, and which is to be realized through all the courses of that community’s thoughts and traditions. . . . The Christians of all communities, with all their distinctive discipleships, are brought together “in Christ.” If his likeness is to be formed in each community of Christians, some sort of family resemblance should be developing across them. All these cultures which they represent, all the nationalities belong alike to the fullness of Humanity described so graphically in the Epistle to the Ephesians. It is a delightful paradox that the more Christ is translated into the various thought forms and life systems which form our various national identities, the richer all of us will be in our common Christian identity. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us-and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. His inaugural Kuyper Lecture, given at Calvin College in the fall of 1995 and cosponsored by the Center for Public Justice, has just been published as Adding Cross to Crown: The Political Significance of Christ’s Passion (Baker Book House).

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 6

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—Catholic Archbishop Joachim Ruhuna was murdered in an ambush on his car September 9 near the town of Gitega in Burundi. His bullet-ridden body was discovered two miles away in an unmarked grave on September 18. Ruhuna, a 62-year-old Tutsi, had condemned the ethnic killings between Hutu rebels and the Tutsi minority in the predominantly Catholic country. More than 150,000 people have died in ethnic fighting in Burundi since 1993.

—Ronald J. R. Mathies, 56, of Elmire, Ontario, Canada, is the new executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the international relief-and-development agency of the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches. Mathies succeeds John A. Lapp, who retired after holding the post for 11 years. The MCC, founded in 1920 to assist Russian famine victims, has 900 workers in 50 nations.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last Updated: October 10, 1996

—Celebrated author and Catholic theologian Henri J. M. Nouwen,64, died September 21 of a heart attack in Hilversum, Netherlands. After teaching at Yale, Harvard, and Notre Dame, Nouwen left the academic world in 1985 to work with the developmentally disabled at L’Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto. His books included The Wounded Healer and Our Greatest Gift.

—Nashville-based CCM Communications, which publishes CCM Magazine, Worship Leader, and Youth Worker Journal, has purchased the recently downsized women’s bimonthly magazine Aspirefrom Thomas Nelson, Inc. Jeanette Thomason, former editor of Virtue, is the new editor in chief.

—The board of directors of World Relief Canada has hired Doug Stiller as president and voted to continue operations. In May, then-president Robert Henry and eight staffers were dismissed in a budget-balancing move. Stiller, a former business executive and pastor, says World Relief Canada hopes to expand internationally from its current involvement in 22 countries.

—The Worldwide Church of God has launched the media-related Plain Truth Ministries Worldwide (PTM). Plain Truth magazine, at one point a primary force in spreading the doctrines of founder Herbert W. Armstrong, will be the flagship of PTM. PTM also will be publishing pamphlets, producing videos, and, in 1997, launching a radio program. Plain Truth has gone from free distribution to paid subscriptions, with a projected circulation of 100,000.

—After a barrage of complaints about being excluded last year, religiously affiliated schools have been included in this fall’s Money magazine annual ranking of “best values” colleges. Christian schools making the top 100 list include Hanover (Ind.) College (11); Grove City (Pa.) College (12); Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas (16); Trinity University in San Antonio (20); Samford University in Birmingham (26); McPherson (Kans.) College (30); Centre College in Danville, Kentucky (33); and Wheaton (Ill.) College (34).

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last Updated: October 10, 1996

Thanks for the memories

Your fortieth anniversary issue [Sept. 16] elicited memories, emotion, and elation: Henry’s writings, Kantzer in the classroom, my frequent tears re: the Auca “tragedy,” and ct-I have all but two issues, an early one I never obtained, the other loaned and never returned. Thanks for the memories and inspiration.

-Prof. Albert E. CramerCrown CollegeSt. Bonifacius, Minn.

After reading your issue on evangelicalism, I wonder if history will reveal the movement more as a flowering of Reformed evangelical intellectualism and academia than anything else. An intellectual understanding of the world’s issues and an appreciation for the relevancy of the Christian faith in addressing them is just one side of the coin. Will the multitudes of today’s more enlightened evangelicals be any more effective in living the Christian faith and life in the power of the Holy Spirit than their less sophisticated predecessors?

-Ron WetmoreClackamas, Oreg.

* Happy birthday! As a senior recycled missionary, I enjoyed reading ct from the very beginnings. May the Lord continue to bless and guide you until his return.

-Bruno R. FrigoliGrandville, Mich.

I have been a subscriber to and reader of every issue of ct since its inception 40 years ago. Thus, your anniversary reflective issue was a tremendous blessing and challenge to me. Most of the individuals highlighted in this anniversary issue are friends of mine, and it was wonderful to recognize God’s sovereign working in the lives of these giants.

That God himself might raise up another cadre of such quality Christian leaders for this new generation as we move into the next century and millennium is my earnest prayer.

-Ted W. Engstrom, President EmeritusWorld VisionMonrovia, Calif.

* I was delighted to see an entire issue dedicated to evangelicalism in the last 40 years. Though I found much of interest (focusing on the contributions of Stott, Packer, Henry, Kantzer, Mears, Skinner could not disappoint), I wonder what you mean by evangelicalism. When I think of evangelicalism in the last 40 years (and I am 42, so I have a biographical dimension to my perspective), I think of so much more. Let me suggest that you focused far too much on theological leaders, to the neglect of many who “make us what we really are-at the grassroots level.”

-Prof. Scot McKnightNorth Park CollegeChicago, Ill.

A single issue of ct could never do justice to all the people whose contributions to the evangelical cause over the past 40 years have equally had an impact on the movement. While we profiled some theologians, we also chose an evangelist, five missionaries, a pastor, and a Sunday-school pioneer-not to mention two editors (which shows our bias). Surely the list could be greatly expanded. We’re grateful for the way God used so many to make evangelicalism blossom during these years. -Eds.

* I enjoyed your anniversary edition, but I’m troubled by the patronizing attitude toward Roman Catholics displayed by Kenneth Kantzer and Carl Henry. One of ct’s loyal readers, Fr. Benedict Groeschel, said recently: “Why do some evangelicals spend so much energy attacking Roman Catholics, a people who only want to pray? These people are living in Babylon, and yet they attack the very church that gave them the gospel.”

-David L. BlattChicago, Ill.

Healing hurting Christians

* “Hurting Helpers,” by Steve Rabey [Sept. 16], was a very informative article; but isn’t it sad that so many people misunderstand Christian therapy, and that so many abuse it? No wonder there is confusion! As a Christian social worker, I see people for the full fee, and also for a reduced fee if they cannot afford my fee. I believe in moral responsibility for my clients.One of my goals as a Christian is to see God’s people healed and returned to him. Another is to see any person in need or pain have the safety and opportunity to work this through. So, whether in a non-Christian agency or in a Christian therapy, I feel if a person can be assisted toward healing, it is good. I believe hurting Christians are still useful and should be helped and encouraged to serve in their churches, even if it does take a little more effort to encourage them along.

-Jayne ZochDes Plaines, Ill.

I was greatly disappointed in the article and wish Steve Rabey had accepted my invitation to talk with me. The article has many inaccuracies and implications that I am asking you to clarify and correct. The way the quote about greed in the industry is positioned and used makes it seem as though he is referring to us. He presented my organization as one focused solely on profit, which we are not, and failed to mention even one thing (all of which he knew) that exemplifies our ministry spirit, such as: (1) We provide free treatment by tithing all the beds we solely operate; (2) we tithe any profit; (3) we developed, at our expense, a drug treatment program for Prison Fellowship to use with prisoners; (4) we give a Life Recovery Bible free to any prisoner who requests one; (5) we train missionaries and lay counselors all over the world at no cost to them; (6) we provide free counseling and sliding-scale counseling to pastors and missionaries; (7) our radio program, which costs a great deal to produce, actually prevents many from having to have counseling (if we were focused on profit, we would have eliminated this expense long ago); (8) we have donated thousands of dollars to many ministries; (9) of the 30,000 calls we get each month from people who need help, only 500 receive care from us—the rest are referred to counseling services in their area, many to churches, support groups, and other forms of free care.

At Minirth Meier New Life, profit has never taken precedence over ministering to the hurting.

-Paul MeierMinirth Meier New Life ClinicsRichardson, Tex.

The chart, “The Roots and Shoots of Christian Psychology,” in Steve Rabey’s “Hurting Helpers” is a classic example of simplistic thinking that can serve to bitterly divide the body of Christ. The tree and its branches portrayed a fair representation of Christians who have made outstanding contributions to the mental health field in the last 40 years. But the picture tarnishes all the names listed by labeling the roots of their work as the “secular and humanistic pioneers,” including Rogers, Jung, Freud, Maslow, Skinner, and Satir.

Because I personally know, have read, or listened to most of the fruitful individuals on this “tree,” I can confidently say that the primary sources of their ideas and their dedicated service have not been twentieth-century popular psychology. In fact, they have exerted much effort in exposing the emptiness of secular humanist thought.

-James M. SiwyAtlanta, Ga.

* I was disturbed to see my name and picture in the chart. I can’t imagine where the information came from that would place me as a primary representative of specialists in this area. I in no way consider myself even to be part of the Christian psychology movement. I am not trained in psychology, much less with a specialty in dissociative disorders. I have never written so much as an article on the subject.

I have been a professor of missions and am now retired from full-time teaching. I continue to have a teaching ministry on an international basis with Freedom in Christ, but dissociative disorders is not a part of the material covered in that teaching, and it has been several years since I have had a personal ministry relationship to a person known to be dealing with disassociation.

-Timothy WarnerFort Wayne, Ind.

It is unfortunate that Steve Rabey identified Neil Anderson’s ministry under “dissociative disorders.” It is inaccurate to list Freedom in Christ’s ministry in this manner.

Our ministry addresses pastoral ministry and classic discipleship issues related to every believer’s identity and freedom in Christ. Dr. Anderson conducts seminars in churches for pastors, elders, teachers, and laymen and -women of all ages who seek training on living free and ministering in Christ. Only one lesson out of 24 in our conferences covers dissociative disorders.

-Roger McNichols, Jr., Vice PresidentFreedom in Christ MinistriesLa Habra, Calif.

The article casts a slant of greed in the industry over ministries like Minirth Meier New Life Clinics and their leaders Steve Arterburn and Paul Meier. Having known and worked with Arterburn for several years, I know this does not represent his attitude, behavior, and ministry.

-Lars B. Dunberg, PresidentInternational Bible SocietyColorado Springs, Colo.

I was disappointed in your article. I have been employed as a director of Minirth-Meier Clinic and then Minirth Meier New Life since October of 1976, when it began in Dallas. It has been a joy to see that the work we have done has impacted hundreds of thousands of lives across America. We have served in the Wheaton, Illinois, area for 10 years and have helped over 30,000 people find new hope and new health spiritually, physically, and emotionally.

-Nancy Brown, Clinic DirectorMinirth Meier New Life Clinic of WheatonWheaton, Ill.

I was disappointed that the article made no mention of Jay Adams. He has had a major impact in the Christian counseling movement, and to ignore him in such an article verges on revisionist history.

-James T. Corbitt, DirectorGeneral Synod, Board of Church ExtensionAssociate Reformed Presbyterian ChurchGreenville, S.C.

The article about psychological “healers” did not present a clear picture of what has been happening with the Minirth Meier-sponsored women’s conferences called “Joyful Journey.” So far this year we have ministered to more than 40,000 women; the plans for 1997 will include 100,000 women. We see women, by the score, come for encouragement and hope. Nothing in your article mentioned that this groundswell of activity is happening. In the future conferences of Joyful Journey, Campus Crusade will be providing their staff counselors for our follow-up.

-Barbara Johnson, DirectorSpatula MinistriesLa Habra, Calif.

“Underdog” not always right

“Members Snooze to Avoid Eviction” [North American Scene, Sept. 16] missed not only our name (Church Development Fund) and church affiliation (Christian Churches-Independent), but more important, it missed the principles of neutral law which convinced six judges in four courts over 13 years that the church building in Inglewood, California, belongs to Church Development Fund.

The issues are complex, but the concept is quite simple: In 1983 a dying Christian Church (Lockhaven Christian Church) asked for a loan and for our help in maintaining their assets if they should die or be taken over by another group. A trust was established, the property was deeded to CDF, and when Lockhaven All-People’s Christian Lighthouse Church tried to take over the building for their use, we stood firm.

To be consistent, any thinking Christian who disagrees with our action should be prepared to hand over the deed and the keys to their own church building to the next group that walks in the door, without regard to doctrinal differences. Unfortunately, a growing number of churches are changing hands through “hostile takeover” as weakened, congregationally autonomous churches are outnumbered and outvoted by a sudden influx of new people eyeing their valuable property. That is exactly the course things would have taken at Lockhaven had it not been for our ability to mount a legal defense in excess of $250,000.

Contrary to Steven McFarland’s uninformed opinion, the heart of this issue is not “dollars and cents.” Because of the Christian principles involved we told the California Attorney General’s Office in 1991 that any property (real or personal) which we received from this eviction would only be used to provide for ministry in the Inglewood area.

Our American tendency toward “rooting for the underdog” doesn’t always serve us well. Sometimes the underdog just doesn’t deserve such unthinking and unqualified support.

-Larry Winger, C.E.O.Church Development FundFullerton, Calif.

* I am outraged by your correspondent’s reference to a “Church of Christ (Campbellite).” Such offensive labels are seldom seen in the usually civil reporting of ct. Why would you see the need to attach a parenthesis? If you consider them unfamiliar to readers, at least use a term they themselves might use, such as Church of Christ (noninstrumental). Whether in reference to a Church of Christ, Christian Church or Disciples Church, all of which stand in the heritage of Alexander Campbell among many others, I’ve never seen the term “Campbellite” used in a way where offense was not intended.

-Larry JacksonWharton, Tex.

Pro-life and pro-missions

* A small comment on the editorial regarding “Our Selective Rage” [Aug. 12]. Emphatically agreed-being pro-life means more than being anti-abortion. One major element is missing from your discussion of “consistently pro-life”: world evangelism. Evangelicals who are genuinely concerned with the issues of life must give at least as much attention to the eternal condition of those already born, but who have never heard of Christ, as we do to those yet unborn. A pro-life church must be a pro-missions church.

-Johnny V. Miller, PresidentColumbia International UniversityColumbia, S.C.

I want to thank Ron Sider for his insightful editorial. He successfully articulated something that has been nagging at me for many years: How can I speak up on some important issue without being lumped in with others who, while they may share my views on that point, are nevertheless quite divergent on some other issue about which I am equally concerned? I hope his idea of seeing “a new coalition” of evangelicals and others that “could contribute substantially to the renewal of our society” comes to fruition. In the meantime, how do I vote this fall?

-David F. OltroggeDallas, Tex.

At first glance, I was heartened to see the editorial, certain that Ron Sider would make some mention of the second leading cause of death among children over the age of ten: guns. But like all evangelical publications and leaders, ct is strangely silent about the illicit love of Christians for guns. Since 1979, more American children have died from gunfire than members of the U.S. military in the Vietnam war, plus every American hostile action since then. Where are the pickets against pistols? The silence of evangelicals on this most perverted of political bedfellows, Christians and guns, is appalling.

-Paula V. DoctorMuskegon, Mich.

In the mid-1970s, as a student at Messiah College, I was deeply inspired by Ron Sider and his emphasis on faith-based social justice. Ironically, my personal journey led me to the understanding that reproductive freedom is also an issue of social justice. I believe Sider demonstrates selective rage when he talks about “empowering the poor” and supporting the “dignity and equality of women” while at the same time advocating for a pro-life ethic which denies women full access to safe and legal reproductive services, including abortion. What is empowering or dignifying about denying a woman the use of her own judgment to exercise control over her reproductive choices, and subjecting her to laws which require carrying a pregnancy to term in spite of the fact that it may kill her? This is not empowerment; this is not justice; this is not pro-life.

-Paula PileckiLos Angeles, Calif.

The ethnic church

* I am very thankful for Helen Lee’s article, “Silent Exodus” [Aug. 12], about the flight of Asian Americans from their ethnic churches. I am assistant to the senior minister of a Vietnamese church in Waco and have been working with Vietnamese for a little over two years. In this short time, I have run into the same problem: the ever-growing division between first- and second-generation Asian Christians. The problem comes from the lack of theological thought that rises from the fear of disunity and estrangement.

If Christianity responds to cultural changes by being relevant, then the need to create ethnic unity within the church would be placed under the more important goal of missions. For example, there is no need for ethnic churches to teach their language in the church if those within the church are not involved in bringing in nonethnic-speaking individuals. Christianity is about unity through diversity; culture is about diversity seeking unity. Keeping culture through the church institution undermines the work of these churches to begin with. Having Korean-, Chinese-, Japanese-, or Vietnamese-speaking services only for the sake of the languages reaches no one. The “exodus” to atheism or English-speaking churches is inevitable, because when culture and not theology is addressed, the ultimate result is dispersion. Theology speaks to Asian cultures that are rapidly being undermined by the internal need for assimilation or alien forces of assimilation. The question is “Are churches willing to listen?”

-Phuc Luu, Assistant MinisterFirst Baptist ChurchWaco, Tex.

To blame the exodus of second-generation Asians from the church on cultural differences with the first generation is a one-sided judgment in disposition and goes against fundamental biblical principles. It further fails to represent the opposing views of first- and second-generation Asian Americans.

Submerged in our own arrogance and self-ambition, the disrespect, disobedience, and indolence of today’s typical second-generation Asian pastor is in stark contrast to the commitment, sacrifice, spiritual fervor, and humility of the parent generation. We have become a generation spoiled by the blessing painstakingly reaped by the first generation.

Moreover, to make the first generation solely culpable for our own inadequacies and mistakes is a further reflection of our own self-centeredness. How can one talk about multi-ethnic ministry when one can’t even embrace his own culture? Scripture is quite clear when it comes to principles of (1) the unity in the church, and (2) submission to authority. There is still much to learn from the parent church.

-Leo RheeBethel Korean Presbyterian ChurchEllicott City, Md.

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Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last Updated: October 9, 1996

In the dog days of August, President Clinton joined forces with the Food and Drug Administration to declare nicotine a drug and cigarettes a drug delivery system. Reframing the tobacco issue in this way paved the way for the FDA to regulate for the first time what 32 years ago the surgeon general declared to be a public health menace. It’s about time.

The FDA has also redefined smoking as a “pediatric disease.” Two kinds of evidence indicate this bad habit can no longer be considered a matter of “adult choice”:

—First, the evidence reveals that youthful experimentation with smoking leads to most cases of nicotine addiction. Centers for Disease Control data show there is a 90 percent chance that a person will not take up smoking if he or she makes it to age 19 without having started.

—Second, new evidence demonstrates that tobacco marketers intend to snare vulnerable youth. “The fragile, developing self-image of the young person needs all of the support and enhancement it can get,” says one leaked cigarette company report. “Smoking may appear to enhance that self-image. … This self-image enhancement effect has traditionally been a strong promotional theme for cigarette brands.” Combine the appeal of Joe Camel-style advertising with manipulation of nicotine levels to cinch physiological addiction and you have a nasty form of corporate child abuse.

The portable abortion clinicTobacco not only abuses teenagers, it duplicates the abortionist’s art-but without the consent of the mother. According to an April 1995 article in the Journal of Family Practice, tobacco causes approximately 115,000 “spontaneous abortions” every year. And a woman who smokes during her pregnancy increases her chance of miscarriage by 24 percent.

If tobacco doesn’t get the fetus in the womb, it may get the baby in the crib: maternal smoking alone is responsible for an estimated 1,200 to 2,200 deaths each year from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. After congenital abnormalities, SIDS is the most common cause of infant death in the U.S.

Democratic capitalism is largely about expanding consumer choice through competition. In the post- Cold War era, it is spreading like McDonald’s and is being tested in societies unused to either political or economic choice. But along with the good it brings, capitalism’s shadow side is seen in the way tobacco companies focus on opening new markets, snagging children and youth in an addiction that leaves them little choice.

Responding to the tobacco companies’ friendly persuasion and political contributions, several recent administrations have made tobacco their opening wedge in Asian countries. “For years,” writes Roy Branson, cochair of the Interreligious Coalition on Smoking OR Health, “the United States Trade Representative, working out of the White House, threatened trade sanctions against Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand if they did not allow U.S. tobacco companies access to their respective markets.” This heavy-handed promotion of tobacco has created new markets: The state-owned tobacco monopolies in these countries had typically sold to middle-aged men, but the American tobacco companies targeted (and captured) women and children.

That U.S. tobacco interests appeal to young consumers here is well known. That they resist restrictions on youth access to tobacco is shocking. According to an Associated Press report, Philip Morris paid former House doorkeeper James T. Molloy $20,000 to lobby against proposed youth smoking regulations.

Not just a private viceThe FDA’s reclassification of nicotine as a drug and declaration that tobacco addiction is a “pediatric disease” remind us that smoking is not just a bad habit with nasty side effects; it is a public-policy problem. Any industry that threatens the health of future generations cannot be fought with simple appeals to personal decision. Public policy must be shaped.

The FDA’s current proposals are strong: prohibit cigarette sales to anyone under 18, restrict tobacco ads in youth-oriented magazines to black-and-white text with no photos, ban tobacco advertising within 1,000 feet of schools, scratch brand-name tobacco sponsorship from sporting events, end vending-machine sales. In Sweden and Norway, Branson reports, smoking among teenage boys fell markedly in just a few years after stringent tobacco advertising restrictions were implemented.

What is wanted further is stiffer taxation-what Branson calls “the single most effective public policy combating tobacco smoking-by far.” By raising the price of tobacco products beyond the reach of most young users, Canada reduced tobacco consumption a dramatic 28.5 percent in six years. In California, a 35-cent per pack tax increase reduced tobacco usage by 25 percent among public-school children aged nine to seventeen.

It is a Christian obligation to protect the vulnerable: the unborn, infants, and teens. The FDA has taken important steps in this direction; but if it is to survive threats of legislative and executive interference spurred by the dollar-rich tobacco lobbies, it will need our strong grassroots support.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last Updated: October 9, 1996