81Book Reviews
Review of For God and Globe. Michael G. Thompson, For God andGlobe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between theGreat War and the Cold War. xi, 250pp. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2015.
TAO Bo*Keywords: Christian internationalism, Protestant, missionary, Sherwood Eddy,
Kirby Page

“The evangelization of the world in thisgeneration.” Inspired by the ambitious slogan,known at the time as the missionary watchword, thousands of eager American students
ventured abroad as Christian missionaries
beginning in the late nineteenth century. The
Protestant foreign missionary movement—ledby figures such as John R. Mott (1865-1955;
漢名: 穆德), chairman of the Young Men’s
Christian Association (YMCA) and World
Student Christian Federation (WSCF)—
established a vast organizational network thatencompassed the entire world. Through thebuilding of numerous schools, churches, andhospitals in East Asia and beyond, the movement gradually constructed an institutional
infrastructure that underpinned America’s overseas “moral empire.”
By the 1920s, however, the same missionaries began to question theiridealistic championing of America as a model for the world to emulate.
Deeply disturbed by rising racial prejudices at home, and influenced by theirdirect exposure to global currents of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, andracial unrest abroad, missionary reformers developed an increasing sympathy
toward the plight of non-Western peoples. Michael G. Thompson’s For God	  * TAO Bo is Ph. D. Candidate, Department of History, Yale University

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and Globe elucidates this crucial turning point in America’s foreign
missionary enterprise with the innovative framing device of “Christian internationalism,” which allows him to bring fresh theoretical insights to thehistory of interwar missions and its wider implications on international relations.
The expert analysis of Thompson—who currently teaches at Australia
Catholic University—offers a robust and compelling theoretical frameworkwith which to explain the emerging system of early twentieth-century U.S.East Asia relations. Unlike conventional histories that take for granted theidea that Protestant foreign missions was simply an extension of U.S. state
power which provided an ideological cover for expansionism, Thompson
argues that Christian internationalism of the 1920s functioned as a checkagainst the racist and imperialist tendencies of America—against what
Sherwood Eddy (1871-1963; 漢名：埃迪), another influential YMCA leader
who worked alongside Mott, pointedly called the “white peril.” Defined as amovement of thought originating from the missionary experience, Christianinternationalism took shape through the proliferation of new enterprises
dedicated to facilitating Christian reflection on the ethics of international
relations: e.g. world conferences, travel seminars, new forms of print andperiodical culture, and ecumenical study commissions.
Such unique origins gave it an intellectual character that was distinct fromother emerging internationalisms of the interwar period. Unlike the Wilsonian
liberal internationalism that predominates the scholarship on this period,missionary-rooted Christian internationalism was distinguished by its lack offocus on international law and international institutions. It stressed instead theimportance of non-state, person-to-person interactions, positing the centralityof cultural, and especially racial, issues in international relations. Moreover,in contrast to the Euro-centric emphasis of legalist and institutionalist internationalism, Christian internationalism derived its insights from its lived
experience in the Asia Pacific region, which, along with the Middle East andAfrica, was the main target of missionary efforts in the early twentiethcentury. Given this background, it becomes easier to understand why theYMCA network, cultivated by the likes of Mott and the famous Japanmissionary Sidney Gulick (1860-1945), was instrumental in the formation of
the world’s first international non-governmental organization (INGO) dedicated to cultural diplomacy and race relations in the Pacific: the Institute ofPacific Relations.
In addition to helping to explain the rise of pioneering Asia Pacific-focused
INGOs, Christian internationalism itself constituted a formidable, if often
neglected, influence on the international stage. To illustrate this, For God andGlobe divides its chapters into two parts: the first part consisting of three

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chapters discussing the intellectual impact of The World Tomorrow, a New
York-based journal financed and ran by missionary internationalist leaders
Sherwood Eddy and his associate, Kirby Page (1890-1957), from 1926 to1934. Through charting the rise and fall of the journal—which represented adiverse coalition including Christian socialists, Christian pacifists, blackinterracial activists, Quakers, YMCA and YWCA leaders, and Socialist Party
leaders—Thompson argues that its editors, and Page in particular, formed theleading edge of a current of missionary-connected criticism of U.S. imperial
power that has been largely forgotten in the historiography. According toThompson, The World Tomorrow played the role of a “foreign policy counterpublic” (a term borrowed from communications theory signifying a discursive
position that sets itself up against the mainstream public opinion), that useddidactic, middlebrow forms of writing as well as mass survey techniques toformulate a critique of U.S. nationalism and hegemony. The radicalness of its
political stance and methodology is crystallized in a notable 1931 letter to theeditor from General Douglas MacArthur, who voiced his severe disapprovalof the journal’s constant questioning of the (to him, self-evident) assumptionof America as a “Christian” nation.
The second part of the book comprises four chapters centering on
ecumenical world conferences as a site of collective deliberation that gave
rise to a new, distinct strand of internationalism. The section opens with a
discussion of Peking 1922, the first ecumenical world conference thatspecifically set aside a portion of the program schedule to the considerationof international topics, resulting in the adoption of a declaration for racialequality known as the “Peking Resolutions.” Such efforts, complemented bya parallel movement for world ecumenism as manifested at a conference inStockholm in 1925, ultimately culminated in Oxford 1937. The Oxford
ecumenical meeting, Thompson argues, gave expression to a postliberalconsensus based on a blending of the theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr andKarl Barth which advocated for the supranational and transracial solidarity
among Christians worldwide. In the final two body chapters, Thompson
demonstrates how this consensus, formed at a Christian conference inEngland, crossed the Atlantic to influence American wartime internationalist
politics. In doing so, he argues that the message of Oxford 1937 impacted thedevelopment of a framework in which realists and pacifists were able tocooperatively articulate a shared Christian internationalism—notably leadingto the establishment of John Foster Dulles’s Commission on a Just andDurable Peace—while also being altered by the vision of Dulles that laid thefoundations for his later, highly influential reading of the Cold War as a battle
between rival faiths.
Overall, Thompson’s work does an excellent job of identifying Christian

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internationalism as an important social and political movement with a
missionary-based heritage, and showing its development alongside—andmutual influence with—the more traditional, state-based American internationalism. His nuanced treatment of the intellectual distinctions between
complex, often overlapping, strands of internationalist thought opens up roomfor future scholars to engage in more sophisticated analyses on the international politics of this period of transition. It is slightly disappointing that mostof his substantive content focuses on Euro-American examples, despite hisstated argument that much of the impetus for this movement came not fromthe Atlantic, but from the Asia-Pacific context. This, however, only serves tounderscore the great potential of his theoretical framework in enabling us toreorient our thinking about the relationship between the United States andEast Asia during the interwar period.