Paul Muni and Luise Rainer in The Good Earth (1937).
Pearl S. Buck asked the question in my title in a speech of the same name that she delivered in 1932, the year she published The Good Earth. Her answer was yes, but it was a very qualified. In her introduction, in the form of a litany of other questions, she lays out all the reasons why people have traditionally objected to supporting missions. It is a series derived from a decade or more of questioning the idea of missions herself. "'Don't you think it is really an insult to send out missionaries to foreign countries when we cannot live what we preach ourselves?' ... 'Don't you think we had better stay at home and attend to our own affairs and our own starving people before we give to other peoples?' ... 'I hear that missionaries are the ones who have stirred up all the trouble in the Orient.' ... 'Frankly I cannot give my money to a group of people to propagate religious and denominational ideas I no longer hold myself.' ... 'I am at sea in my own thinking about Christianity, and I prefer not to propagate what I am not sure about. Christianity has not worked very well in our own land.' ... 'I admire Jesus Christ, but I see nothing even of the idealism of Christianity any more in my own country, America. I cannot, therefore, believe in missions.'" [1]
Of course, most readers do not have missionaries much on their mind today, except perhaps to dismiss them. In Lucy Sante's "Models for Being," her review of Hua Hsu's recent memoir Stay True, she writes of Hsu’s first book, A Floating Chinaman (2016), which tells the story of H.T. Tsiang (d. 1971), a Chinese immigrant to America whose novels were continually rejected by publishers. Tsiang failed not because Americans weren't interested in the Chinese, Sante states, noting that Buck was at the time a best-selling author. The American readership of the period, Sante claims, could accept only Buck's view of the Chinese, which was "missionary." [2] Missionary? What does that one word mean to Sante and her readers? It's a reductive statement, to be sure. Like every one of us, Buck was a complicated human being, and so were the missionaries she had come to know in China, including, of course, her father. Unfortunately, the good ones far outnumbered the bad, Buck acknowledged in her speech. Why? One reason she cited was lack of support by sponsoring agencies or the wrong kind of support from them. Nonetheless, they expected to see high numbers of converts and were disappointed and disapproving when those numbers didn't materialize. As Buck saw it, the problem was that "neither the messenger nor the message [had] been suited to the needs of the people."
And what would suit those needs? "I should like to see every missionary sent to satisfy a special need of a community -- not the artificial need of a mission station for a clerical man or a woman evangelist or what not, nay a real need of the people. ... It seems to me this is the only basis for missions. It removes from us the insufferable stigma of moral arrogance, and it gives us besides a test of our own worth. Before we can share anything with benefit we must have tried it ourselves." In other words: "Above all, then, let the spirit of Christ be manifested by modes of life rather than by preaching... Let us cease our talk for a time... and let us try to express our religion in terms of life."
In her concluding remarks, Buck goes out on a great big limb, at least by today's standards of wokeness. Speaking neither as an American nor even as a Christian, but, by virtue of the years she had spent in China, she spoke as a Chinese person. And in that persona, she, who strongly objected to the non-Asians [3] cast in the leading roles of the movie version of her most famous novel, delivers her challenge: "Come to us no more in arrogance of spirit. Come to us as brothers and fellowmen. Let us see in you how your religion works. Preach to us no more, but share with us that better and more abundant life which your Christ lived."
_________
1. The speech was reprinted as an essay in Harper's, January 1933, 143-155.
2. New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022.
3. Paul Muni was born Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund in the Ukraine; Luise Rainer was born in Düsseldorf, of a German mother and German-American father.
Of course, most readers do not have missionaries much on their mind today, except perhaps to dismiss them. In Lucy Sante's "Models for Being," her review of Hua Hsu's recent memoir Stay True, she writes of Hsu’s first book, A Floating Chinaman (2016), which tells the story of H.T. Tsiang (d. 1971), a Chinese immigrant to America whose novels were continually rejected by publishers. Tsiang failed not because Americans weren't interested in the Chinese, Sante states, noting that Buck was at the time a best-selling author. The American readership of the period, Sante claims, could accept only Buck's view of the Chinese, which was "missionary." [2] Missionary? What does that one word mean to Sante and her readers? It's a reductive statement, to be sure. Like every one of us, Buck was a complicated human being, and so were the missionaries she had come to know in China, including, of course, her father. Unfortunately, the good ones far outnumbered the bad, Buck acknowledged in her speech. Why? One reason she cited was lack of support by sponsoring agencies or the wrong kind of support from them. Nonetheless, they expected to see high numbers of converts and were disappointed and disapproving when those numbers didn't materialize. As Buck saw it, the problem was that "neither the messenger nor the message [had] been suited to the needs of the people."
And what would suit those needs? "I should like to see every missionary sent to satisfy a special need of a community -- not the artificial need of a mission station for a clerical man or a woman evangelist or what not, nay a real need of the people. ... It seems to me this is the only basis for missions. It removes from us the insufferable stigma of moral arrogance, and it gives us besides a test of our own worth. Before we can share anything with benefit we must have tried it ourselves." In other words: "Above all, then, let the spirit of Christ be manifested by modes of life rather than by preaching... Let us cease our talk for a time... and let us try to express our religion in terms of life."
In her concluding remarks, Buck goes out on a great big limb, at least by today's standards of wokeness. Speaking neither as an American nor even as a Christian, but, by virtue of the years she had spent in China, she spoke as a Chinese person. And in that persona, she, who strongly objected to the non-Asians [3] cast in the leading roles of the movie version of her most famous novel, delivers her challenge: "Come to us no more in arrogance of spirit. Come to us as brothers and fellowmen. Let us see in you how your religion works. Preach to us no more, but share with us that better and more abundant life which your Christ lived."
_________
1. The speech was reprinted as an essay in Harper's, January 1933, 143-155.
2. New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022.
3. Paul Muni was born Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund in the Ukraine; Luise Rainer was born in Düsseldorf, of a German mother and German-American father.
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