Missionaries distracted: The rise of syncretism in American Protestant missions in China, 1907-1932

This dissertation examines the changes in the theology and cultural attitudes of American Protestant missionaries in China in the first three decades of this century. It looks at how the nineteenth-century metaphor (and mentality) of Christian "conquest" of the heathen land gradually dissolved during this period as the liberal American missionaries developed an appreciative understanding of the Chinese religions and culture, and as they increasingly sympathized with Chinese nationalism.; My study is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on the lives of three early twentieth-century American missionaries in China: Dr. Edward Hicks Hume, the physician who represented the Yale Mission (later Yale-in-China) in Hunan from 1905 to 1927; the Rev. Frank Joseph Rawlinson, who went to China in 1902 as a Southern Baptist evangelical missionary, and who later served (1914-1937) as editor-in-chief of The Chinese Recorder, the most influential missionary journal in China; and Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, officially a Presbyterian educational missionary from 1914 to 1933.; In the course of their missions, these three individuals gradually came to understand and embrace much in the Chinese culture. As a result, they also began to question traditional missionary ideology and attitudes. The rise of a new Chinese nationalist movement in the 1920s hastened the disintegration of their missionary cause, as they came to share Chinese perspectives on missionaries' implication in Western imperialism. In the end, both Hume and Buck chose to disengage themselves from missions, while Rawlinson doggedly tried to help shape a new, liberal direction of Christian work in China through The Chinese Recorder.; The cultural and historical forces which shaped the lives of Hume, Rawlinson, and Buck also helped reshape missionary thinking in general during the 1920s and 1930s by directing the evolving liberal theology toward a religious and cultural synthesis. Part II of this study explores the rise of an idealistic syncretism among American missionaries, which sought to incorporate the best in the Oriental religious tradition into Christian faith. As it was brought back to the home constituency of the missionary enterprise, syncretism contributed to the modernist search in America for a broadened interpretation of Christianity.