The Case for the Heathen

I

THE peoples to whom missionaries are sent are the forgotten men of the current controversy over foreign missions. Since I am one of these forgotten men, it may be that my right to speak will be challenged. Someone may remind me that missions constitute a great, organized charity, and that even a heathen should know that good manners do not permit one to criticize the charity one receives. To this I can only reply: ‘Then keep your Christ at home. There is also such a thing as good manners in giving.’

It is because the success or failure of the missionary enterprise means vastly more to us to whom the missionaries are sent than to any other group, the missionaries themselves included, that I want to express my views.

I admit that it is extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, for any of us to think reflectively and objectively about those things that are very dear to us — our children, our country, our faith. When we see or imagine any of these threatened or hear them criticized, we are apt to warm up our hearts and reassert our loyalty and love. Seldom indeed, under these circumstances, can we cool our minds enough to weigh the real issues involved. To stand apart, to withdraw our apron string from the beloved object, is to expose it to danger. So we cling to it, shelter it, protect it. We love it too much to allow a word to be said against it.

This, I think, is the most pertinent remark that can be made about the singular lack of disinterestedness on the part of missionaries and the good folk who support them. For years the missionary enterprise has been the subject of controversy, and now it has been lifted into newspaper headlines by the famous Laymen’s Report; through it all, the missionaries have stood firm in their opposition to change and reform. No argument can move them.

The missionary has built up a thing, cherished it, prayed for it, often poured his lifeblood into it. It is natural that he should resent criticism, for his conscience is clear. Yes, it is clear to the point of arrogance. But his Chinese well-wishers have at no time questioned his conscience. What they do question is the infallibility of the attitudes he persistently maintains toward matters of religious interpretation, and the wisdom of the methods he employs to force his interpretation on the Chinese. In other words, the thinking Chinese have nothing but praise for the missionary’s heart, with none to spare for his head.

I am not generous enough to give the typical missionary much credit for anything but his faith, which, paradoxically enough, has proved to be a great impediment to his cause.

Faith unshakable and enduring is certainly a wonderful thing to have. It can move mountains, but it can also close one’s mind so that nothing else good can take root beside it. Such is the faith of the missionary. It fears not the executioner’s knife, but it abhors a broadened mind as a kind of deformity.

The missionary has never been able to understand that one civilized religion cannot be the enemy of another civilized religion. It has never occurred to him to think how enormously unfair God would have been if He had left millions and millions of His children, whom the world has chosen to call civilized, without any light on their pilgrimage to Him. To them also, we may be sure, He has sent His interpreters, in the persons of prophets and teachers who have spoken the language of the people. The missionary will not admit this; Jesus, he says, is the sole interpreter, and His accents as echoed by the missionary are unmistakably American.

This unquestioning faith has given the missionary the zeal of one bent on conquest. ‘Raise the banner of Christ on top of the Confucian temple! Set up the Virgin on the Altar of Heaven! Everything must give way before the onward march of the good soldiers of Christ! Victory! Hallelujah!’ This attitude explains why the missionary has failed, and lie will continue to fail as long as he uses the banner of his religion as a flag to mark conquered territory.

We Chinese, on the other hand, would be glad to see Christ’s banner raised upon our ancient altars as a symbol of the progress man has made toward the understanding of truth. The missionary could easily have won the hearts of the Chinese people if he had been content to gain for Christ the seat of honor among us, but he has willfully passed up the opportunity. There is a temple in China where Buddha sits between Confucius and Lao-Tse. When asked why Buddha has the place in the centre, the attendant replies: ‘He is our guest. We should give him the seat of honor.’ We have been asking the missionary ever since he came: ‘How about giving to our distinguished guest the seat of honor in this illustrious assembly of the teachers of mankind? It will be good for us to sit at their feet and listen to them.’ The missionary has always answered: ‘That is sacrilegious! You will have to clear out that gang before my Master will go in! Jesus will sit alone and supreme!’ The result is that the missionary has kept his Master waiting at the entrance; finally, tired of waiting, He has slipped in quietly by the back door and taken His seat in the hearts of many Chinese along with Confucius, Buddha, and the others.

Although there have been examples in the West of men who were religious without having any definite religion in the narrow sense of the word, the Western mind seems quite incapable of understanding how a good and religious man can be a Confucian, a Buddhist, a Taoist, a Christian, all at the same time. The Christians of Europe and America say that it is not right, that it cannot be done, but thousands of Chinese Christians are doing it. The Occidental cannot understand it because he was born with the Bible in his mouth and the cross on his chest: he was a Christian before his parents were born. It is not so with us. We are born acrobats. We learn to walk on the rope of life by steadying our steps, now with this religion, now with that philosophy, until we are able to attain balance on the quivering, vibrant line.

To put it another way, the fountain of our religious life comes from many sources, while that of the West comes mainly from one. And you Westerners, arguing that its water should flow this way and not that, have shed rivers of precious blood over it until — to its discredit in our eyes — it runs almost red, while with us the stream has been allowed to flow naturally from its many sources. In the Orient a man has only to be alive to receive its mixed but not impure water, and he cannot escape its permeation. Show me a Chinese Christian of whom you are proud, and I will prove to you that he is not a Christian by your definition. He is made of different things, moulded by different influences. Christianity merely gives him the finishing touch, puts on him its label, and sends him off into the market for service. He is no more a Christian in the Western sense than a Chinese student returned from America is an American.

Again, show me a Chinese Christian who is a pure missionary product, and I will demonstrate to you that he is a poor fellow. He has no blood of his own, but only that which the foreign missionary has injected into him, and it is weak and thin at best. There are thousands of such Christians, — if Christians, indeed, they are, — maladjusted, rootless men and women who have ceased to be Chinese in everything but their skins. Culturally, they are people who have been robbed of their civilization. The missionary has tried to make them over after his own image, and he has failed miserably. How could it be otherwise when the thing he attempted was impossible?

II

The missionary heard the ‘call,’ armed and girded himself with faith in his God, and went forth to the field with little or no knowledge, often with gross misunderstanding, of the people to whom he was going. Arriving in a strange land, he set to work with the same aching enthusiasm that distinguished his pioneer forefathers when they cut down trees and made America a great nation. He had no more respect for the natives than his fathers had for the Indians. His Anglo-Saxon instinct for domination, which he called efficiency, was manifest in everything he attempted. Knowing nothing of the Chinese mind, he had but one idea — to make the Chinese think as he did.

In whatever the missionary undertook, he proceeded on one assumption, which he regarded as a self-evident truth: ‘What is good for me must be good for you.’ Not only did he apply it in religious matters, but in other fields as well. Take education, for example. Almost without exception, the missionaries deliberately copied American models so that Chinese schools became nothing but preparatory academies for American colleges. The charm of many Chinese girls has been destroyed by The Faerie Queene and The Lady of the Lake; many Chinese boys have been driven crazy by Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with America. They have been taught American history, American geography. And, because Americans abuse wine, it was plain logic that teetotalism, temperance societies, and prohibition must be introduced in China. What if drunkenness is practically unknown among the Chinese? No matter! The Lord made us different from the missionaries for no other purpose than to have the missionaries make us like them. It is only by a miracle that the Republican and Democratic parties have not been introduced among us.

Because there are interdenominational wars in America, the Chinese must have them too. To the amusement of our heathen eyes and the bewilderment of our heads, the missionaries have reënacted the drama of dirt-throwing and throat-clawing that has been going on for centuries upon the religious stage of the West. Nay, they are still fighting where the most conservative churchmen have long since ceased to fight. This fratricidal strife within the Church is more meaningless to the Chinese than are the Chinese civil wars to Westerners.

The missionaries cannot understand that denominations have no significance to us. If we choose to become Christians, we are Christians — not Methodist Christians, Presbyterian Christians, Baptist Christians. Somehow the fine distinction escapes us. If there is any difference between the sects, we dismiss it as unimportant. It seems to us that Christians should have better things to do than to wave baskets of dung before each other’s noses. We weep to see that the body of Jesus carries more bullets than that of a slain Chicago gangster — bullets inflicted by denominationalists.

Consider the question of a Christian’s fitness to keep the Lord’s Supper. I do not know what the current practice is in America, but in China the flesh and blood of Christ are never passed to us until the missionary has seasoned them with some denominational sour milk. It is a source of perpetual bewilderment to us that a Christian minister can announce with emphatic and damnable sincerity: ‘Those who believe as we do will please remain. All others are requested to leave.’ This never fails to keep educated men away from the church, and it gives converts reason to doubt the missionaries’ loudly preached doctrine of love and the brotherhood of man.

Consider, also, the meaningless difficulties put in the way of one’s joining a church. When my mother wanted to become a Christian, I advised her, because of her old age, to be sprinkled instead of immersed, and left the matter at that. Then holy gentlemen came and went, each telling her that his was the only church for a Christian. Finally one of them won her to his fold by declaring that God would be angry and that the salvation of her soul would be imperiled if she only got her forehead wet instead of her whole body. And, he added, ‘God will be more pleased if you are not afraid of the cold water.’ The ceremony took place in the middle of a severe winter, and, as a result, my poor mother got a few mouthfuls of the sin-infested water and her nose became soft.

Do not think this an exceptional case. I could cite similar instances almost without number. The only thing exceptional about it is that I ever let such silly things be said in my house. It is certainly no compliment to the teachings of Jesus that the missionaries continue to fight over the hairsplitting differences between one Christian creed and another. No wonder that the Chinese are becoming thoroughly sick of it.

III

The missionary knows only that he has his religion to preach; he does not know that he is preaching it to the Chinese. He is a salesman who does not consider his customers. He does not understand that the real problem before him and us is not whether the Chinese can be made to become Christians, but whether Christianity can be made to become Chinese. If it can become Chinese, if it can be made to meet the needs of the people and to fit their genius, if it can be interpreted in terms of their life and their psychology, China will become a Christian nation. But the missionaries say that ‘Christianity transcends nationality.’ Very well, that is my point. We Chinese are not bound to take the missionary’s interpretations as the only correct ones; they cannot be correct for us, since his interpretations are colored by centuries of Western political, social, and religious views. We shall first, then, have to make Christ a Chinaman, even though the missionary does not have much respect for one.

The Native Church Movement and the Chinese Student Christian Movement are reactions against a too Westernized Christ. Their purpose is to make Christianity as Chinese as possible, for enlightened native Christians know that if Christianity is to become an effective force in the land it must undergo a process of naturalization so that the people can assimilate it and understand it. They are determined, therefore, to remove from it the label put on by the missionaries, ‘Imported from the U. S. A.,’ at the same time retaining its essence, which is universal.

Nor is this all. The Church should be a social as well as a religious institution, but the Church in China has been too mild to enlist the sympathies of youth. Youth demands action, and the times also demand it. The cries of the people for rice, for justice, for mercy, drown out the ready-made prayers and strange church music. While the missionaries and their good sheep pray their bloodless prayers and sing foreign songs, youth shouts to the people, ‘Come, let us fight our battle through!’ Therefore the workers and the peasants follow him to certain victory, for whoever wins the peasants will win the nation. The Communists know this, as does also the government. Indeed, the war between the Chinese Communists and the government may be called an armed courtship to woo the heart of the peasantry.

Youth knows this; the missionaries do not. They do not understand why the suffering and fate-flogged people cannot accept the magic formula of Faith and Salvation. Preach as they will, they no longer make converts, for their words do not touch the present needs of the people. Meanwhile the young Chinese whom the Church needs to give it new life and strength, to reinterpret the message of Christianity to the people, are turned away from the door; they are not wanted. The greatest failure of the missionaries has always lain in their inability to hold and make adequate use of Chinese of real calibre. They associate with and recruit only inferior men.

Thus it happens that the real influence of Christianity in China is today exerted, not by the missionarycontrolled Church, but by the young men who, touched by the great humanity of Christ, have left the stuffy atmosphere of the compounds and gone forth into the open, where the people are waiting. These young Chinese are the genuine missionaries, even though they do not speak with the accredited voice of Western Christianity. Theirs is the true spirit of Christ finding concrete expression. They open native schools. For the workers and farmers they build model villages — little Utopias which the vision of Christ has enabled them to dream of. Often the government has granted vast tracts of land and given money to further these enterprises.

So it is that religion is becoming the handmaiden of economic and social reforms. The fountain of Christ, once far removed from the people, has been brought near at hand by native youth, and, the channels once dug in the right places, the waters of Christianity will henceforth flow to the people as naturally as a river flows. To continue this work the Chinese Christian looks for help even to the missionaries and their supporters in America. What will the Home Boards say? Will they foster this movement, or will they prefer to go on spending money to build more of those expensive, gigantic shells which are made to seem sacred when we call them churches?

IV

Whatever the answer, of one thing we can be sure: the twilight of foreign missions is at hand. But there are two twilights — one before the dawn, and the other before dark. Which is this to be?

I am not interested in what this twilight may mean for the missionaries; I am only interested in what it may mean for the Chinese. And I am convinced that the future of Christianity in China will depend on the success or failure of the native Christian movements. The question is: Will the missionaries continue to oppose them, as they have done in the past, or will they have a change of heart and lend them their aid and their blessing? If they are willing to walk hand in hand with the Chinese, they can help to usher in the morning of a new day for Christianity in China; if they refuse, it may be that the twilight of foreign missions heralds the coming of darkness.

All the present evidence indicates that the missionaries are bent on remaining what they have always been. They are still busy flogging the dead horse of a mythological religion. No intelligent Chinese can be made to believe that the intricate system of Heaven and Hell, the Virgin Birth, the story of Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the twelve baskets of leftover fish and bread, are vital to true religion. They are beautiful myths, and are to be taken as such. They have their place, but to insist upon them as essential truths is as foolish as would be the building of gigantic pillars to support a many-colored feather which the wind has blown away.

The doctrine of original sin is repulsive to a Chinese. It is neither poetic nor moralistic. It is a disease of the Western mind, a residue of primitive thinking, an irreligious conception of man. The fundamental Chinese conception of man — no matter whether it is philosophical, political, social, ethical, or religious — is that he is by nature good; he has no original sin. To think of him in the terms of this doctrine is to malign him. No one — the ethical-minded Chinese least of all — will deny the existence of the sense of guilt, but that is hardly original sin: it is the voice of a healthy mind reminding man of his unfulfilled obligations. Give a missionary ten years in which to do nothing but explain original sin to a Chinese, and in the end all he will have accomplished will be the fostering of a belief that, once upon a time, a greedy woman ate a bad apple, and that her man was indiscreet enough to take a bite.

I have no wish to disillusion anybody, the missionaries least of all, for disillusion is cruel. Nor have I a passion to change the faith of others, for that is futile and does not concern me. Neither have I a desire to argue theology. Suffice it to say that theology is not religion — at least, not with us. My sole wish is that those who come to us with good things to offer may hereafter know their wares and their customers better than they have in the past. The battle that religion is fighting has shifted to new and more spacious grounds. I am continually astonished that Christians should cling so desperately to the ruined fields.

We Chinese have been good customers for ideas, even when they have been preached from behind barbedwire entrenchments. But the day when China could be made the dumping ground for the discarded thought of the West is gone forever. We are now plundering the houses of the rulers of men, and taking our loot out into the broad daylight to examine it. You Westerners will have to excuse us, then, if we put your religion upon the evaluating scale and search it under the microscope of the modern Chinese temper. Amid many other far-reaching revolutions, we are going through a religious reformation, and we can no

longer see any point in flogging the dead horses which the missionaries brought over to us. Instead, we shall henceforth devote ourselves to the raising of good horses so that we can ride out of this engulfing stress and storm.

Meanwhile, it will do us all good to think in terms of a better civilization, and to learn as much as we can from one another. To do so may make even a missionary a Christian, and a Christian a cultured man.