Education with the soul of a church: The Yale Foreign Missionary Society and the democratic ideal

Founded in 1901 by a group of Yale alumni, administrators, and faculty, the Yale Foreign Missionary Society set out to Christianize China by training its elite in the ways of "Christian civilization." Within two decades, the mission sponsored a college, middle school, and medical school in Changsha, capital of the Hunan province. Developments in China eventually led the mission to support Huachung College in Wuchang and, following the communist victory on the mainland, the New Asia College in Hong Kong. Accompanying these changes overseas was another important shift at home. By 1964, the Yale mission, now known as the Yale-in-China Association, claimed to be a secular organization focused entirely on educational concerns.; Yale-in-China's secularization was nothing less than the fulfillment of its founders' desire to represent both religious and national ideals. Even those who did not believe in the supernatural, they thought, would freely admit nonsectarian Christianity's spiritual value in preserving a republican community. What they soon discovered was that neither their Yale nor Chinese constituencies shared this belief. Student uprisings in Changsha, the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and secularization at Yale made the Society increasingly aware that regardless of evangelicalism's tolerant, nondogmatic character, to assert that democratic ideals needed a Christian basis was in itself a sectarian claim. The mission's leaders responded by emphasizing liberal tolerance over communitarian virtue. Because sectarianism ran counter to the democratic Christian spirit, Yale-in-China could claim that removing religious faith from the Society's public identity was a Christian act.; The history of Yale-in-China illustrates how one group of Protestant elites adjusted to cultural pluralism. Idealism, pragmatism, and industrial capitalism all nurtured an array of assumptions highly conducive toward embracing tolerance as the central ideal of a democratic institution. The secularization of the Yale Foreign Missionary Society thus provides insight into a broader trend not only within educational missions, but the American Protestant establishment--by the 1960s, the champions of a distinctly Christian social ethic now favored, in the words of Richard John Neuhaus, a "naked public square."...