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Pearl S. Buck and the Waning of the Missionary Impulse1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Grant Wacker
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Extract

Figuring out exactly when the American missionary impulse started to wane is not an easy task. Some would say that the first nail in the coffin was Hannah Adams's 1784 Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects, purportedly an “impartial and comprehensive survey” of world religions. Others, looking at the millions of dollars that evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics continued to pour into the missionary effort at the end of the twentieth century, might well ask, incredulously, “What coffin?”

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Articles
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Church History , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 852 - 874
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2003

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References

2. Cressy, Earl H., “Converting the Missionary,” Asia (06 1919).Google Scholar

3. For the weakening—or, perhaps, redefining—of the missionary impulse, see Xi, Lian, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), esp. 4–6Google Scholar; Varg, Paul A., Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), chapters 7–10Google Scholar; Hutchison, William R., Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chapters 5–6Google Scholar; and Wacker, Grant, “Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions, 1890–1940,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1940, ed. Carpenter, Joel and Shenk, Wilbert (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), 281–300.Google Scholar Epigraph quoted in Xi, Conversion of Missionaries, 207. For details about Adams, see Tweed, Thomas A., “An American Pioneer in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60 (1992): 437–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation by Tweed about Adams's purpose on 437.

4. The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions hosted the luncheon on Wednesday, November 2, 1932. For details, see “Better Missionaries Urged by Mrs. Buck,” The New York Times (3 November 1932): 19; “The Best or Nothing,'” The New York Times (6 November 1932): sec. 2, 1; “Mrs. Buck; Lauds Chinese; Faces Missionaries' Charges,” Newsweek (22 April 1933), 26. Different accounts give different specifics. I have followed The New York Times (3 November). Many years later Buck said that she had expected a small, private meeting with a delegation from the missions board. Her authorized biographer, Theodore Harris, added that the Women's Committee of the board had arranged the meeting. The Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin, a liberal theologian at New York's Union Theological Seminary, offered the invocation, which suggests that the luncheon may have been staged by liberal forces on the missions board. However the luncheon came about, Buck chose not to mention the event in her autobiography, and her sister quietly overlooked it in her hagiographic study of Buck. See Buck's remarks in Harris, Theodore F. (in consultation with Pearl S. Buck), Pearl S. Buck: A Biography (New York: John Day, 1969), 1:307–9Google Scholar, and Harris's own discussion of the event in volume 2, subtitled Her Philosophy as Expressed in Her Letters (New York: John Day, 1971) 2:279. (Though the first Harris volume was not designated volume 1 by the publisher, for the sake of clarity I have so designated it throughout.) See also My Several Worlds: A Personal Record (New York: John Day, 1954)Google Scholar; Spencer, Cornelia [Grace Sydenstricker Yaukey], The Exile's Daughter. A Biography of Pearl S. Buck (New York: Coward-McCann, 1944)Google Scholar; Stirling, Nora, Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict (Piscataway, N.J.: New Century, 1983), 125–27.Google ScholarPeter, Conn's definitive scholarly biography of Buck, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), briefly mentions the event on 148–49.Google Scholar

A word about Peter Conn's long, erudite, and often brilliant biography of Buck, published in 1996, is in order. Conn argues that Buck was a “secular, feminist missionary, who inherited a need for vocation from her father and a yearning for female emancipation from the example of her mother's sad defeats.” Though this hypothesis represents a good start, Conn underplays the special religious intensity of Buck's early commitments and later disillusion with the evangelical tradition. My essay aims in part to fill that gap. Conn, Buck, 381.

5. Is There a Case for Foreign Missions? (New York: John Day, 1932)Google Scholar; “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” Harper's (January 1933), 143–55 (I use the Harper's text for subsequent references); [Shanghai] Evening Post (14–15 April 1933), described in China Weekly Review, 282. See also Jones, E. Stanley: “Is There a Place for the Unusual Missionary?” Christian Century (04 16, 1933): 548.Google Scholar Needs of the time: “Mrs. Buck Resigns,” Christian Century (May 10, 1933): 611–12. Fine and sound: “Mrs. Buck Resigns Her Mission Post,” The New York Times (2 May 1933), 15. Hartford and Seattle papers noted in “Mrs. Buck Under Fire as a ‘Heretic,’” Literary Digest (May 6, 1933): 15, 18.

6. Free attachments: “A Protestant among the Presbyterians,” America (April 29, 1933): 77. Etherealized animalism: the McIntire, Reverend J., The New York Times (22 06 1936), 8Google Scholar, quoted in Silver, Charles, “Pearl Buck, Evangelism and Works of Love: Images of the Missionary in Fiction,” Journal of Presbyterian History 51 (1973): 220.Google Scholar Cynicism: Wisconsin Presbyterian pastor Marvin M. Walters to Robert E. Speer, 26 November 1931, quoted in Xi, Conversion of Missionaries, 121. Hurricane of the times: “Mrs. Buck Resigns; Board Accepts ‘With Deep Regret,’” Christianity Today (May 1933): 35. Charles Erdman to Robert E. Speer, 15 March 1933, quoted in Alan Patterson, James, “Robert E. Speer and the Crisis of the American Protestant Missionary Movement, 1920–1937” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1980), 153Google Scholar; China Weekly Review (April 22, 1933): 282–83.

7. Robert E. Speer to William Miller, 1 April 1933, quoted in Patterson, , “Robert E. Speer,” 153Google Scholar; “Pearl Buck, Heretic,” ******The Nation (May 17, 1933): 546. Buck officially resigned on May 1, 1933. Conn, Buck, 154. The controversy won extensive coverage in The New York Times (12, 13, 14 April 1933) and a full-page story in Newsweek, as noted above. The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions accepted Buck's resignation “with regret”— prompting another round of controversy about the meaning of the words “with regret.” Did they mean that the missions board was sorry she had fallen into doctrinal error? Or sorry she quit? Additional controversy stemmed from confusion about Buck's relation-ship with the board. What, exactly, had she resigned from? By April 1933 she was no longer receiving a salary from the board, but her husband did, and she worked under board appointment. “Mrs. Buck Resigns Her Mission Post,” 15; “Mrs. Buck Resigns,” 35.

8. Streets of Nanking: My Several Worlds, 191. For Buck's influence, see below.

9. Hunt, Michael H., “Pearl Buck—Popular Expert on China, 1931–1949,” Modern China 3 (1977): 33–34, 45–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Subject of China: Thomson, James C., “Pearl S. Buck and the American Quest for China,” in The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, ed. Lipscomb, Elizabeth J. and others. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994), 14.Google Scholar For the quotation, see Conn, Buck, xiv.

10. Horrible sin: Buck to Mother and Father and Clifford, 2 February 1918, Pearl S. Buck Collections, Lipscomb Library, Randolph-Macon Woman's College (RMWC). All references are to Pearl S. Buck unless otherwise indicated.

11. Beauty-loving people: Buck to Home-people, 17 September 1917. Servant class: Buck to Home-people, probably 14 October 1917. Official class: Buck to Home-people, 17 September 1917. Opium and drunkenness: Buck to Mrs. Coffin, 12 December 1918. Slave in the family: Buck to Mother [in-law], 11 April 1919. Foot-binding: Buck to Home-people, 17 September 1917. Infanticide: Buck to Mrs. Coffin, 11 December 1918. All of the foregoing at RMWC. Given to the devil: quoted without citation in Stirling, Buck, 52. Superstition: Buck to Grace and Vincent Buck, 15 March 1919, RMWC, quoted in Conn, Buck, 65. Stirling's well-researched but unfootnoted work is filled with details drawn from interviews, Buck family papers, and archival materials. Stirling's working papers are deposited at RMWC. My own spot-checks of Stirling's quotations against the original sources persuade me of her reliability.

12. Others to Christ: Buck to MrsCoffin, , 12 1918Google Scholar, RMWC. Weighs terribly: Buck to Emma Edmunds White (dated by White 29 August 1918), RMWC. Buck's sister, Grace Yaukey, who also served as a Presbyterian missionary in China, said virtually nothing about religion in her biography of Buck. Yaukey did acknowledge, however, that after Pearl married, she avidly involved herself in her husband's missionary work, setting up Sunday schools, running a day school, and talking with Chinese women. Spencer, Daughter, 137–38.

13. Buck to [B]rother, 8 April 1918, RMWC.

14. “China the Eternal,” International Review of Missions (October 1924): 581. For a survey of the tenets of liberal Protestant missionary thought, see Hutchison, William R., “Modernism and Missions: The Liberal Search for an Exportable Christianity, 1875–1935,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. Fairbank, John K. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

15. Personal unworthiness: “China and the Foreign Chinese,” Yale Review 21 (1932): 541–47.

16. Marked the times: “What Religion Means to Me,” Forum and Century (October 1933): 195–200. Oppression in Asia: “God Becomes a Convenience,” Forum (September 1936): 99, 104–5.

17. Supernaturalism: “Easter 1933,” Cosmopolitan (May 1933), 169; “What Religion Means to Me,” 195; My Several Worlds, 66. Miracles: “Case for Foreign Missions,” 143–44. Superstitious missionaries: “Case for Foreign Missions,” 145; “God Becomes a Convenience,” 103.

18. Existence of Jesus: “Easter 1933,” 169–70; “Case for Foreign Missions,” 150–51. Existence of God: “What Religion Means to Me,” 197, 199; “God Becomes a Convenience,” 103. Figure of Jesus: “Case for Foreign Missions,” 151. Universal: “Easter 1933,” 16.

19. Come to hate: “And Yet—Jesus Christ,” Far Horizons (January 1932): 10. Missionary pot: “God Becomes a Convenience,” 102.

20. Only work they could find: “Case for Foreign Missions,” 146. See also “Laymen's Mission Report,” Christian Century (November 23, 1932): 1,435. Buck said that people in the United Stares did not want to waste their best on foreign lands, hence faulting the senders as well. Two years for four thousand: “Laymen's Mission Report,” 1,435; see also “Case for Foreign Missions,” 146; The Spirit and the Flesh (1936; reprint, New York: John Day, 1957), 44, 94.Google Scholar

21. Chinese thought: “Give China the Whole Christ,” Chinese Recorder (July 1932): 451; see also “Case for Foreign Missions,” 144; “Advice to Unborn Novelists,” Saturday Review of Literature (March 2, 1935): 513; “God Becomes a Convenience,” 103–4. Eye to eye: “Give China the Whole Christ,” 451.

22. “God Becomes a Convenience,” 103; see also “And Yet—Jesus Christ,” 8; “Case for Foreign Missions,” 144.

23. Chinese ears: “Case for Foreign Missions,” 145. Lung, Wang: The Good Earth (1931; reprint, New York: Washington Square/Simon and Schuster, 1973), 88–89.Google Scholar Words not understood: “Laymen's Mission Report,” 1,436; first-rate minds: Xi, Conversion of Missionaries, 113, n. 51.

24. “Laymen's Mission Report,” 1,436. See also “Give China the Whole Christ,” 452; Spirit and the Flesh, 113; My Several Worlds, 199. Whether Buck's indictment of missionaries was fair is, of course, an entirely different matter. For a vigorous rejoinder, see Porter, Andrew, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997): 367–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Bind the wounded: “And Yet—Jesus Christ,” 10; “Laymen's Mission Report,” 1,437. Dwelt among them: “Laymen's Mission Report,” 1,437. See a difference: “Laymen's Mission Report,” 1,435. Human race: “Case for Foreign Missions,” 152. Buck sometimes said that missionaries should address spiritual needs, but she remained vague about what that might entail. See, for example, “Give China the Whole Christ,” 452.

26. Missionary personalities sometimes turned up in Buck's later works, but I am not aware that she devoted sustained attention to the question of this essay, the morality of the missionary impulse. See Silver, “Pearl Buck,” esp. 217. Family values: My Several Worlds, 326; The Child Who Never Grew (New York: John Day, 1950), 10, 34. Buck hoped to accompany President Nixon on his visit to the PRC in 1972, but the PRC denied her a visa, claiming that her novels had vilified the Chinese people. Stirling, Buck, 317. East Wind, West Wind: Pearl Buck: The Woman Who Embraced the World, prod. Craig Davidson and Donn Rogositi, 85 min., Refocus Films, 1993, videocassette, suggests that the PRC refused a visa for a less grandiose reason: Mao's wife disliked her.

27. Religious organizations: Buck to Florence Lurty, 10 August 1938, Pearl S. Buck Family Trust archives, quoted in Conn, Buck, 202. Organization's sake: “Can the Church Be Religious?” Christian Century (December 22, 1943): 1,499. This essay intimates a measure of lingering attachment to Christianity, if not the church, but other evidence suggests that this attachment was rapidly evaporating. Atheism denied: Letter 31 July 1955, to “Father—,” in Harris, Buck, 2:254. Faith in human beings: “This I Believe,” New York Herald Tribune (18 February 1952), quoted in Harris, Buck, 2:255; see also the letter on the same page. Immortality: A Bridge far Passing (New York: John Day, 1961, 1962), 255–56Google Scholar; see also 182–83. Cope with it: Buck to Marjorie Ashbrook Temple, 2 May 1967, Pearl S. Buck Foundation archives, quoted in Conn, Buck, 375. Buck was buried according to her instructions, without ceremony or officiating minister. “Pearl Buck Buried on Her Farm Home,” The New York Times (10 March 1973), 34. Stirling argued that Buck remained purely agnostic, refusing to embrace the principled atheism of her husband, Richard J. Walsh. Stirling, Buck. 260–62.

28. My Several Worlds, 96–97, 371, 49.

29. Social reform efforts: Doyle, Paul A., Pearl S. Buck (New York: Twayne, 1965), chapter 7Google Scholar; Stirling, Buck, chapters 15–21. Noninfluence in Washington, D.C.: Hunt, “Pearl Buck,” 43, 55–58. Conn's biography offers rich documentation for the breadth of her social concerns and the impressiveness of her charitable accomplishments, especially regard- ing the treatment of women at home and abroad. Conn rightly calls her a “secular missionary.” See Conn, Buck, 4, and chapters 6–7. One could argue that Buck transferred the idealism she once had vested in the church to the American nation itself. See, for example, My Several Worlds, 406–7. I owe this point to Sean Burt, “‘What America Means to Me’: Pearl S. Buck's Religious Evaluation of America,” MTS seminar paper, Duke Divinity School, 2000.

30. Eliot, T S., “The Hollow Men,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (1930; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 58.Google Scholar

31. Ernest Hocking, William and others, Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry After One Hundred Years (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932)Google Scholar, esp. chapters 1–3, and its ancillary reports, provoked a storm of controversy. The skirmish is contextualized in Hutchison, Errand to the World, chapter 6, and in Fitzmier, John R. and Balmer, Randall, “A Poultice for the Bite of the Cobra: The Hocking Report and Presbyterian Missions in the Middle Decades of the Twentieth Century,” in The Presbyterian Presence: The Twentieth-Century Experience, ed. Coalter, Milton J., and others (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1991).Google Scholar

32. To be sure, in the late nineteenth century, independent faith missionaries scornful of theological relativism and all but the most superficial forms of cultural accommodation were clambering off the ships in growing numbers every year. But Buck seemed oblivious to their existence.

33. Thomson, “American Quest,” 10; Xi, Conversion of Missionaries, 10–21, 29,143, 158, and throughout; Varg, Paul A., “Motives in Protestant Missions, 1890–1917,” Church History 23 (1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Modem American Protestantism and Its World, ed. Marty, Martin E. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993), 13:6–15, quotation on 12Google Scholar; Forman, Charles W., “Evangelization and Civilization: Protestant Missionary Motivation in the Imperialist Era II: The Americans,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research (04 1982)Google Scholar, reprinted in Marty, Modern American Protestantism, 13:41–44; Hyatt, Irwin T., “Protestant Missions in China, 1877–1890,” in American Missionaries in China: Papers from Harvard Seminars, ed. Kwang-Ching, Liu (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 93–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bates, M. Searle, “The Theology of American Missionaries in China, 1900–1950,” in Fairbank, Missionary Enterprise.Google Scholar

34. See, for example, Lofland, John and Stark, Rodney, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” American Sociological Review 30 (1965): 862–75CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Lofland, John, “‘Becoming a World-Saver’ Revisited,” American Behavioral Scientist 20 (1977): 805–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for classic discussions of the stages religious converts typically traverse. Sociologists of religion who have studied deconversion—the process of self-consciously moving from a positive religious tradition to none at all—note that such movement often involves both pain and disparagement of the tradition abandoned. William Sims, Bainbridge, “The Sociology of Conversion” in Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. Malony, H. Newton and Southard, Samuel (Birmingham, Ala.: Religious Education Press, 1992), 187Google Scholar; and Rambo, Lewis R., Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 27, 39–40, 53–54.Google Scholar

35. Several Worlds, 51. Home here: Interview notes with Ross Terrill, 26–27 December 1971, quoted in Conn, Buck, 372. See the summaries of clinical research on missionary children in Jeanne, Stevenson-Moessner, “Cultural Dissolution: ‘I Lost Africa’” Missiology: An International Review 14 (1986): 314–24Google Scholar; and “Missionary Motivation,” Sociological Analysis 53 (1992): 189–201. For autobiographical and fictional ruminations on these tensions, see Espey, John, Minor Heresies, Major Departures: A China Mission Boyhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. 78Google Scholar; and Hersey, John, The Call: An American Missionary in China (New York: Knopf, 1985).Google Scholar

36. Financial resentments: Spirit and the Flesh, 98; see also Stirling, Buck, 20; Crichton, Kyle, “Preacher's Daughter,” Collier's (02 7, 1942), 37.Google Scholar Photographs of the rambling, multi-floored missionary compound in Nanking (see Stirling, Buck, 118 ff.), and the family's extensive travels through Russia, Europe, and North America, suggest that Buck suffered more in her imagination as an adult than she ever did as a child (My Several Worlds, 139, 291). Conn argued that sexual incompatibility created some of the distance between Pearl and Lossing Buck. Conn, Buck, 59, 62–63, 88, 158, 171. More broadly, for Buck's thinking about conventional norms, see Buck to Emma Edmunds White, 29 May 1931, RMWC; Stirling, Buck, 86–58, 143–46; Conn, Buck, 103, 117, 128. Stirling, Buck, 143. Womanhood, : The Exile (1936), 283Google Scholar, quoted in Conn, Buck, 20. Conn argued that Buck's anger about Christian misogyny constituted the deepest root of her alienation from Christianity.

37. Told a friend: Buck to Emma Edmunds White, 4 January 1929, RMWC. Flesh from flesh: Buck to Clarence H. Mrs Hamilton., 9 January 1930, Boston University archives, quoted in Conn, Buck, 111. Giving up Caro, : Child Who Never Grew, 21, 29, 31.Google Scholar No one listening: Stirling, Buck, 76. Church music: Child Who Never Grew, 26. Christians' insensitivity: “God Becomes a Convenience,” 104. Marian G. Craighill, a missionary and Buck's close friend in China in the 1920s, also felt that Carol's situation undermined Buck's faith. Craighill to Nora Stirling, 14 February 1976, RMWC.

38. At least one member of the Nobel Prize Committee voted to give the award to Buck primarily because of Fighting Angel. Doyle, Buck, 67; see also 71–76. In his detailed biography of Buck, Conn acknowledged Absalom's influence on Pearl but presented it principally as a foil against which Pearl defined her own adult life. For example, Conn wrote: “When she was a child, Pearl tended to see her father in heroic terms. As she grew older, she decided that he was a simple fanatic, touched with an apocalyptic fever.” My argument is that Absalom was less a foil than an ambiguous ideal that Pearl could neither wholly embrace nor wholly abandon. Conn, , Buck, 3, 135Google Scholar. See also 4, 39, 101, 134, 150–51, 188, 197, 204, 225, 238, 375.

39. Spirit and the Flesh, 21, 36–37.

40. Love for Absalom: My Several Worlds, 6, 257; “Advice to Unborn Novelists,” 513; Harris, , Buck, 1:81Google Scholar; Conn, Buck, 151 (though Conn, remarkably, claims that Buck did not mean what she said). Buck eviscerated one clerical reviewer of Fighting Angel who had the temerity to call her father “bigoted” and “dogmatic.” Buck to BillingsMr., 13 January 1947, in Harris, Buck, 1:252. Foreign domination: this and the preceding three sentences drawn from Jost O. Zetzsche, “Absalom Sydenstricker [repeated in Chinese characters] (1852–1931): A Ruling Minority of One” (paper presented to the North Atlantic Missions Project conference, Fuller Theological Seminary, March 1998). Zetzsche's work, based on Sydenstricker's own writing in the Chinese Recorder and elsewhere, leaves an image of a man intellectually rigorous and personally admirable.

41. Relations with Chinese and whites: Spirit and the Flesh, 81,85,93,152–53. Other religions: My Several Worlds, 66–68.

42. Buck, to “Father—,” 31 July 1955Google Scholar, in Harris, , Buck, 2:254.Google Scholar Buck's sister confirmed that she shielded her father from unsettling religious discussions. Spencer, Exile's Daughter, 171. Complete in anyone: Buck, to Emma Edmunds, White, 13 November 1931, RMWC.Google Scholar

43. Spirit and the Flesh, 49, 102, 50.

44. On my work: Buck to Emma Edmunds White, 15 January 1938, RMWC. What people say: Buck to Emma Edmunds White, 15 February 1937, RMWC.

45. Enveloped, assimilated: “China the Eternal,” 575, 583. Chinese stock: My Several Worlds, 255, quotation on 248. Historians James C. Thomson, Michael Hunt, Charles W. Hayford, and Lian Xi have made similar observations, but to somewhat different ends. Thomson, “American Quest,” 15; Hunt, , “Pearl Buck,” 52, 56Google Scholar; Hayford, “From ‘Farmer’ to ‘Peasant’: Orientalism, Rhetoric, and Representation in Modern China” (paper presented at the Rhetoric of Social History Scholars Workshop, University of Iowa, summer 1992), 22–23; Xi, Conversion of Missionaries, 111.

46. Fencing and evasion: Child Who Never Grew, 14. The quotation referred to the physician who forthrightly apprised Buck of Carol's malady, but it applied to Buck's outlook in general. Quotations from “Tribute to Dr. Machen,” The New Republic (January 20, 1937): 355.

47. Utmost cruelty; Buck quoted in Block, Irvin, The Lives of Pearl Buck: A Tale of China and America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), 159–60.Google Scholar