Shifting Balances: Missionaries or Marines?

The collapse of the sanguinely conceived and short-lived East-West condominium in Laos and the immediately consequent American military build-up in continguous Thailand enforces vividly the degree of the United States’ politico-military involvement in the affairs of remote countries with which few American communities have in the past had any direct connection. Such direct associations as they have had have in the past been almost exclusively through the few American missionaries in the area. This missionary monopoly of contact with exotic peoples is now being rapidly broken up and superceded by an intercultural confrontation along a very long line, mediated, on our side, by military and other governmental personnel, businessmen, and an increasing host of sightseers.

To be sure, American politico-military involvement in East and South-East Asia is nothing entirely new. Commodore Perry entered Tokio Bay ahead of modern missionaries. American troops acted in concert with those of several European nations and Japan in lifting the Boxers’ siege of the Legation Quarter in Peking, and for decades we had several hundred troops stationed there. I have myself, eight months before Pearl Harbor, crossed the Mekong and Salween rivers as a hitch-hiking missionary in the company of U. S. naval ratings in a latitude between Laos and that border territory which shows this extraordinary spectacle of four of the world’s mightiest rivers—rivers which after fanning out embrace the great and ancient peoples of China and Burma and everything between—the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, and the Yangtze, all flowing for some distance parallel to one another and all within hailing distance of one another. (The U. S. S. Villalobos was a voluntary exile in the upper reaches of the Yangtze after the Japanese conquered central China and was serviced overland by truck convoys, first from Hanoi and then, after the fall of Indo-China, from Lashio, in Burma.) But before the Second World War American military presence in Asia was restricted almost totally to the Philippines.

Today, however, we have a new and terrific establishment on Okinawa, atride the eastern approaches to the continent of Asia, and so formidable a U. S. naval aggregation as the Seventh Fleet is permanently stationed 2,000 miles nearer, as the crow flies, to Suez than to San Diego. In a number of areas that until a few years ago were as unfamiliar to the average American as the other side of the moon there are now a hundred or more nonmissionary Americans to every American missionary present. Only the recent deployment of American troops in Thailand has given perhaps 1,500 or 2,000 American communities an unwonted direct association with that country—all of it military. And where the experience of Americans away from home has been of monsoon rains and of seeing rice planters with Cambodian mud oozing up between their toes and of presenting flannelgraph Bible stories to illiterate village women, it is now on a far greater scale one of monsoon rains, more Cambodian mud, and of leaves spent in the cabarets of Bangkok.

Shrinkage Of Foreign Missions

This change is highly significant. It marks the comparative shrinkage of foreign missions to small potatoes, in our international relations. Actually the number of American foreign missionaries has increased since the last war, so that today it is about 30,000, and our annual foreign missions expenditures, including the very considerable part which is direct subvention to younger churches in foreign lands, now stand at about 200 million dollars. But in contrast to this is the fantastically mushrooming cost of our military establishment, which, though we have enjoyed a kind of a peace for the last 17 years, is now approximately 50 billion dollars a year. It is impossible to apportion this immense expenditure according to the cost of maintaining our power in specific areas of the world, for as great a force will be exerted in each arena as the maintenance of our power will require and as we can afford. Nevertheless the totality of our military establishment is in fact a kind of foreign mission, for no country in the world will fight a domestic battle if it can choose to fight on foreign soil. But while it is only reasonable to assign the totality of military costs to the totality of conflicts which we fear may take place, it is possible to ascertain certain particular costs of keeping particular areas on our side. The particular costs of keeping South Vietnam on our side the past seven years is reported to be 2½ billion dollars. And despite this enormous one-country subvention the pro-Communist forces in that land are said to have increased 500 per cent in the last two years by our own estimate.

Penalty For An Ungodly Choice

It would be utter improvidence not to inquire whether there is any relation between these two involvements, the missionary and the military. Maligners of Christian missions of course assert that the two belong simply under one head. While resolutely denying this we must not deny that both might be an assignment by God and might therefore both be carried out with his approval and blessing. They are thus not mutually exclusive in any absolute sense. On the other hand, war is one of God’s major ways of punishing mankind and is a substantial part of the cost of mammon-worship and other idolatry. This being so, the tendency must be that failure to evangelize the world implies a world at war, and to a considerable degree we are faced with the alternatives, missionaries and the military, with the penalty for an ungodly choice being a terrific drain on national resources, possibly even unto national extinction.

But this disjunction, missionaries or marines, must not be conceived of either crassly or subtly as an economic issue but as the question of the highest service of God. My present work for him is in East Africa. With his blessing the preaching of the Gospel has received a wonderful response from the Bantu peoples. But the response from the quarter million Indian immigrants has been almost entirely negative. In one or two recent baptisms or attempts at baptism that I know about personally, of two Indian girls, the opposition of the Asian community concerned was bitter and powerful almost beyond belief. We get on beautifully with the courteous and helpful Indian merchant as long as it is a matter of groceries and building material—even for the chapel!—but once it is a question of some members of his family being converted to Christ, affability yields to the intensest antagonism. Even so I think I might succeed in baptizing some Moolji Jivanjee if I could only guarantee, indubitably undertake, that his returns from his investment would thereby be increased, say by only one quarter of one per cent. Certainly I could if the baptism and the discipleship could be strictly secret! Now it is of course not in this spirit that the disjunction of missionaries and marines is to be weighed. Indeed, what God wants is not a little more for his program at the cost of what is not his program (mammon-worship is definitely not his program; the consequent military activity may well for some be a part of his positive program).

The principally lamentable thing about this relegation of foreign missions to a very inferior place in our international relations and about its displacement as a major concern by the military is the justice of the whole shift. Before the marines had ever arrived on the scene in great numbers Christian missions were no longer conducted as the major and passionate concern.

Even in circles where theology remains truly biblical the expected consequences in the matter of evangelization are so denatured by the prevailing mood of universalistic optimism and listlessness that when one, for instance, sings the great missionary hymns of the Church (“From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” “The Morning Light Is Breaking,” “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun,” and so on), even while admiring their esprit and vigor one wonders where the writer derived his compulsive sense of mission. It is hardly to be found in the home churches these days. Nor is it characteristic of us missionaries ourselves. The great pioneers would find our company for a week an unaccountably strange experience. To take only South-East Asian examples, Adoniram Judson would find few companions in present day missionary circles who would really share the pain of his soul as he looked upon Gautama-devoted Burma, and I am afraid few of us would hold out in the Rangoon of his day, awaiting the accessibility of royal Ava. Few of us if we sat by Morrison’s side as he translated the Scriptures into Chinese in the East India Company’s precincts in Canton would really have the expectation from that Word that he had as he thought in love upon the Chinese of a century and a half ago. Few if they worked the lower basin of the Salween from a palanquin as did the diseased and saintly Boardman would burn with compassion for the Karens as he did. Few as they consider China totally closed again in our day, perhaps more relentlessly than a century before the end of the Ming dynasty, now bother to rise in the night as Xavier then did to ask, “Rock, when wilt thou open to my Lord?”

We still have the Bible, many of us still believe all of it to be verily the Word of God, but few of us give its words unbounded credence; few of us take sin and grace and salvation and damnation and the holy war against the world for the facts that they are, sufficiently to do what is really appropriate and consequential. Therefore we deserve to be crowded to the wall by the marines. Any race is to the strong.

It’s the hour to recoup and to advance. Missions must again become the passion of the Church. The world to be evangelized is today ten times the size of that to which the original apostles were commissioned. The ratio of one professional missionary to two or three thousand church members at home is disobediently small. Great grace of wisdom must attend the direction of missions in our time. Mission board executives and the missionaries themselves must steer judiciously in the new seas. On the one hand the Scylla of failure to cooperate as fully as possible with the younger churches of foreign lands must be studiously avoided, and on the other the Charybdis of deputizing these churches to do the work with only subventions of money from the West. With the Christians in the largest of the pagan nations constituting at the most a few per cent of the population, the Western Churches cannot resort to a Hessianizing of foreign missions by reserving their own sons and daughters while paying for the services of others. The evangelization of the world requires the offering of every treasure by every individual Christian. If great national doors have been politically closed to external missionaries, then such a missionary with a call from God to enter but still without the relevant visa is as truly bound as Peter while chained between two guards—and as properly the object of the Church’s importunate prayer as he. Peter at least had reached his field and was blessed with good sleep. The same angel is mighty today to the opening up of great gates and should be proven as to the reality of this strength.

The Task Before Us

In addition to the reconsecration and vast enlargement of the professional missionary forces as well as their preparation and equipment (with at least the degree of thoroughness and provision exercised in the astronaut program), particularly in matters biblical, there is the task of making the whole of America’s secular contact with the heathen world an informal Christian mission. All of the American troops now deployed in Thailand should be true Christians witnessing as earnestly for Christ in their capacity as any of the missionaries stationed in that country. Then there is the rapidly growing number of expatriate Americans in business. Our foreign investment now stands at about 40 billion dollars. Trust the investors of so great a sum to care enough about its security and productiveness to be making exhaustive studies of the lands and the peoples concerned and to have established a web of personal contacts and of public relations reaching from coolies to cabinet ministers. This whole apparatus in so far as it is legitimate is earmarked by God for consecration to himself as bearer of his saving Gospel.

Finally, there is the whole of our national life. We should be to the last American a godly people, proclaiming by word and life the praises of Him that through Christ blesses us in our earthly citizenship and has reserved for us a state in heaven in regard which the whole of our Americanism is to be ancillary. The text of 1 Peter 2:11 f. (R.S.V.) enjoins us: “Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul. Maintain good conduct among the Gentiles, so that in case they speak against you as wrongdoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.” The evangelization of the world requires the explicit preaching of the Gospel. But it requires just as much the commendation of that Gospel by the regenerate lives of those who profess it. Our so-called Christian country has a long way to go to qualify as an unambiguous commender of the Gospel. The other day we had a letter from a fellowmissionary working with one of the most primitive tribes of East Africa. She told of her husband’s complaining to an African Christian leader about the marital unfaithfulness of local Christians. The leader answered, “But we don’t have the divorces that you have.” It would surely be grossly untrue to say that the Gospel has not yet exerted a great and effective power in American life. It has. Only in a country deeply affected by the Gospel can a top official be forced to resign from office for having accepted the gift of a vicuna coat. In non-Christian society bribetaking and influence-peddling are universal and it is in conceivable that honest functionaries could ever be found. On the other hand our Christian witness before the pagan world is rapidly deteriorating. What American missionaries of 100 years ago—or even 30 years ago—would on opening their home papers and magazines have read that the president of one of the nation’s most exclusive women’s colleges had in a convocation of the whole college enjoined the students not to have premarital sex relations, or that in a poll of the student body she had been supported by a bare majority of just two per cent. The pagan world knows enough about profligacy. It is holiness in the social order that we so often fail to reflect to the world; holiness that incites others to wonder and moves them to inquire about the message that has the power to bring it about.

While missionaries or marines may thus perhaps epitomize the issue before us, resolution to make it missionaries rather than marines must mean incalculably more than a mere underscoring of one recruiting agency rather than another, or the appropriation of millions and billions of dollars to one budget rather than another. The change required is much greater than this. Uncle Sam himself requires a change, a personal change, a change of conversion to God and the godly life.

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