Volume 32, Number 9 · May 30, 1985
Mission Impossible
By John K. Fairbank
The Call
by John Hersey
Knopf, 701 pp., $19.95
John Hersey's The Call is an epitaph for 120 years of Protestant missions in China. From 1830 to 1950 the China missions had a steadily growing place in American public sentiment. At the turn of the century John R. Mott of the Student Volunteer Movement for overseas missions called for 'the evangelization of the world in this generation,' with China as a special target. Unless we can understand the atavism today of Reaganesque piety and Falwellian evangelism we shall never comprehend how we could have felt so deeply the 'loss of China' in the 1950s or initially accepted so casually our crusade to save Vietnam from communism in the 1960s.
Review, 2814 words
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