May 1985

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.