Missions in fiction.

Scott, Jamie S.

Biblical portraits of the apostles are as much the products of fictional imagination as of historical fact, as are such early Christian texts as the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (ca. 203) and Athanasius's Life of Anthony (ca. 357). Later writers have reworked these ancient portrayals throughout the centuries, from hagiographies like Jacob de Voragine's Golden Legend (ca. 1260) to contemporary novels like Walter Wangerin Jr.'s historical drama Paul (2000) and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (2003), which depicts the apostle Peter as ambitious and misogynistic. More important, though, the lives of apostles, martyrs, and saints epitomize two interlacing themes: the inner turmoil of the soul resisting apostasy and the public struggles of believers committed to spreading the Christian Gospel among nonbelievers. Though classic Christian proselytizing narratives from St. Augustine's Confessions (398) to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (1321) play variations on such themes, the rise of the novel in eighteenth-century western Europe offered the most suitable vehicle for dramatizing missionary tales of discovery and self-discovery. Early Christian Europe or the Middle Ages sometimes provides the backdrop for missions in fiction; St. Augustine of Canterbury is the main character of Donna Fletcher Crow's Glastonbury: The Novel of Christian England (1992), for example. Generally, however, novelists and short story writers have looked for inspiration to two great flourishes of missionary activity: the Portuguese, Spanish, and French Roman Catholic missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which in many ways was revived in the nineteenth century; and the British and North American Protestant missions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both periods saw Christian missions established around the world as spiritual outposts of Western colonial and imperial expansion.

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Roman Catholic Missions in Fiction

Among the earliest depictions of Roman Catholic missions is Sydney Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), which is set in seventeenth-century Kashmir and dramatizes an unconsummated romance between the Portuguese Franciscan missionary Hilarion and the Hindu priestess Luxima. The Goan Inquisition sentences Hilarion to burn at the stake for apostasy, and Luxima prepares to commit sati on his pyre. A riot allows both to escape but also results in Luxima's death, leaving Hilarion a lonely recluse back in Kashmir, where he worships by the sacred rivers at sunrise and sunset as Luxima used to do. Largely orientalist in ethos, The Missionary issues salutary lessons on cultural encounters; as one scholar has suggested, Hilarion unmakes Hindus but makes no converts, and he himself ends up neither one nor the other.

In a sense, both historically and thematically James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933) picks up where Owenson's book leaves off. In May 1931 a plane crashes near the hidden lamasery of ShangriLa in Tibet's Kuen-Lun Mountains. The crash strands a group of Westerners, including Roberta Brinklow, an indefatigable Protestant missionary. The lamasery's high lama turns out to be the 200-year-old Father Perrault, a Belgian missionary who had traveled from Peking to Shangri-La in the early eighteenth century to found a Capuchin monastery. When Brinklow determines to start her own mission in Shangri-La, the high lama comments on her ambitions with a certain amount of indifference. He dies shortly afterward, his legacy a mysterious blend of Buddhism and Christianity.

Several other authors, some writing sympathetically, some from more ambivalent postcolonial perspectives, have portrayed Roman Catholic missionaries in the New World and elsewhere. Brian Moore's Black Robe (1985) explores the interplav between indigenous and European cultures in seventeenth-century New France. Tormented by self-doubt and tortured by the Iroquois, the young French missionary Father Laforgue begins in the novel zealously intent on restoring the Jesuit mission of Saint Marie. He ends a sadder and wiser man, whose compassion for the doomed Hurons displaces doctrinal dogmatism. Another story, Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), dramatizes nineteenth-century Roman Catholic efforts to revive the faith in the American Southwest after the United States annexed the New Mexico Territory at the end of the Mexican War (1846-48). The French Jesuit missionaries Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant journey west from Sandusky, Ohio, their conviction tested both by geographic adversity and by hedonistic frontier priests who gamble, drink, lie, and womanize, abusing Mexicans and Indians alike. A new cathedral in the desert almost apologetically symbolizes Latour's nearly forty years of selfless service. Explicitly sympathetic, Bernice Scott's fictionalized biography Junipero Serra, Pioneer of the Cross (1976) portrays the eighteenth-century founder of the California mission system in virtually hagiographic terms. By contrast, the huge cast in Almanac of the Dead (1991), by Native American Leslie Marmon Silko, includes missionaries in a radical critique of Christian complicity in the nonnative exploitation of North and South American indigenous peoples. The Native Canadian writer Tomson Highway concentrates upon a particularly harrowing instance of this exploitation in Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), in which Father Roland Lafleur, oblate of Mary Immaculate, sexually abuses Cree Indian boys in the church-run, government-financed Birch Lake boarding school.

Roman Catholic missions to Africa have also received mixed reviews in fiction. In Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case (1961) the colonial leprosarium at a Roman Catholic medical mission in the Belgian Congo simultaneously symbolizes the fallen world and offers possibilities for spiritual renewal to the novel's central character, Querry, a celebrated French ecclesiastical architect who begins the story consumed by apathy and ends realizing, "I suffer, therefore I am." Indigenous African writers are often more openly censorious of missions. In Nigerian Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys (1962), Patrick Ikenga's mother tries to rear her son as a tribal leader, fearing the Roman Catholic church will make him "a eunuch." Ikenga rejects his birthright, becomes a priest, and allows the family line to die. Unlikable missionaries also appear in Nigerian John Munonye's The Only Son (1966) and Malawian Legson Kayira's Jingala (1969). In Munonye's novel, Roman Catholic priests are "lunatics" who scorn African birthright traditions and conspire to remove boys who are only sons from their families to the mission school. Likewise, in Kayira's novel a Roman Catholic mission school disrupts tribal ties by alienating Gregory, an only son, from his father, Jingala. More ambivalent, Kenjo Jumbam's The White Man of God (1980) portrays the destructive effects of the bullying dogmatism of "Big Father," who heads the Roman Catholic mission, upon Cameroon's traditional Nso village life. At the same time, though, Jumbam suggests a common humanity between Europeans and Africans with his portrayal of Father Cosmas, a compassionate young priest who fights tirelessly to prevent an epidemic among the local people, only to die from the disease himself. By contrast, the mission school in A Fighter for Freedom (1983), by Zimbabwean Edmund Chipamaunga, is controlled by the white supremacist missionary Father Truss, who belongs to Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front. Tinashe, a star pupil, becomes a leader in the liberation army, having realized that his father, who heads the school, is really only helping the white regime to oppress blacks. Also set in Zimbabwe, Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not (2006) explores life for girls at the Roman Catholic mission's Young Ladies' College of the Sacred Heart.

Evangelical Missions in Fiction

The evangelical revivals that have spawned successive waves of British and North American Protestant missionaries since the late eighteenth century have provided fruitful material for writers. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) a choice between "the wild field of mission warfare" and "the parlours and the peace" of English country life faces the born-again St. John Rivers, who opts for the former and tries to persuade Jane to join him as "helpmeet and fellow-labourer" in India. In a more ironic vein, in Bleak House (1853) Charles Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby lets her children starve while she raises money for missions to Africa. Another nineteenth-century British writer, Charlotte Yonge, draws upon the career of John Coleridge Patteson, a Church Missionary Society cleric in the Loyalty Islands, as a model for Norman May in The Daisy Chain; or, Aspirations (1856). Notable for lauding the proselytizing efforts of Samoan converts in the South Pacific, this novel also endorses women as missionaries; the "perfectly feckless" Norman and his wife, Meta, together make "a noble missionary," while his sister Ethel ministers among the rough and ready in the remote English village of Cocksmoor. In a sequel, The Trial (1864), the family's black sheep, younger brother Leonard, also sees the light and gives up "home, land, and friends, for the Gospel's sake." In a similarly enthusiastic vein, Sir William Wilson Hunter's The Old Missionary (1890) paints a sympathetic picture of early nineteenth-century mission life in Bengal. In contrast, Herman Melville's autobiographical novels Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo (1847) recognize that missionaries have improved morality, translated the Bible into the vernacular, and established churches and schools in the Marquesas, Sandwich, and Society Islands, but Melville laments their racial prejudice and insensitivity to local traditions, arguing that "they had exaggerated the evils of Paganism, in order to enhance the merit of their own disinterested labours."

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Protestant denominational publishing houses were saturating the market with popular tales of British and North American missionary heroes carrying the white man's gospel to benighted heathens. A brief selection of titles from North America alone would include William H. Withrow's Neville Trueman, the Pioneer Preacher (1880), Egerton Ryerson Young's Oowikapun; or, How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians (1894), Ralph Connor's Black Rock: A Tale of the Selkirks (1898) and The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills (1899), Norman Duncan's Dr. Luke of the Labrador (1904), Basil King's Duncan Polite (1905), Hiram A. Cody's The Frontiersman: A Tale of the Yukon (1910), and Ernest Thompson Seton's The Preacher of Cedar Mountain: A Tale of the Open Country (1917). All portray the missionary as a man mighty in flesh and spirit in the standard colonial and imperial romance model of fearless crusader, lone adventurer, and chaste lover. These novels proceed from action scene to action scene, exciting the sensibilities of a cloistered urban audience with descriptions of natural calamities and wild animal attacks, robberies and frontier bar brawls, tragic heroines and Roman Catholic perfidy. Similar lists of titles might be tallied for fiction set in various parts of Africa and, to a lesser extent, in India, Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, with authors ringing changes on the romance formula by taking into account local differences in the kinds of natural challenges and spiritual trials that beset the muscular Christian missionary's evangelical resolve. Occasionally, a writer of this era expresses ambivalence about Christian complicity with Western expansionism. In Siri Ram, Revolutionist (1912) and Abdication (1922), for example, Edmund Candler identifies the missionary presence in India with imperial power exercised in hypocritical self-interest.

Between World Wars I and II this skepticism increases, and critical portrayals of Protestant missions and missionaries begin to outnumber sympathetic depictions. Three short stories set in very different parts of the world epitomize this trend. Edith Wharton's "The Seed of the Faith" (1919) tells of the American Evangelical Mission in the small Arab town of Eloued, Morocco. Driven to despair by his wife's death and twenty-five years of failed ministry, Mr. Blandhorn, a Baptist missionary, invokes the martyrs of old and contrives his own persecution by entering a mosque, desecrating the Qur'an, and declaring "Christ crucified!" He dies at the hands of the furious crowd, his wife's name the last word on his lips. Equally controversial, W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain" (1921) finds the missionary Alfred Davidson quarantined in American Samoa with the prostitute Sadie Thompson. Arguing that punishment will atone for her past sins, Davidson convinces Thompson to return to San Francisco to face a murder inquiry, even though he believes her innocent. Having then slept with Thompson himself, the missionary commits suicide, while she moves on to Australia, a woman changed for the better not because of Davidson's moralizing but because she has found love with a serviceman. The third short story, E. M. Forster's "The Life to Come" (1922), explores interracial homosexual relations. Vithobai, a tribal chieftain in central India, identifies the love of Christ with Paul Pinmay, the young English missionary who offers it. Renaming him Barnabus, Pinmay manipulates Vithobai's devotion, colluding with colonial officials and land speculators to dispossess the chieftain of his heritage and royal authority. A decade later Pinmay visits the dying Vithobai, hoping to alleviate his guilt with one last gesture of reconciliation. Vithobai stabs the missionary through the heart and hurls himself from the roof where he has been languishing, naked and alone.

Numerous novels of the interwar years elaborate on the ambivalence toward missions and missionaries characterizing these short stories. In Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927) Timothy Fortune leaves the Hornsey branch of Lloyd's Bank and joins the Church of England to serve as a missionary on the volcanic island of Fanua in the South Pacific. Equipped with a used harmonium and a sewing machine, Fortune makes one convert in three years, the boy Lueli, whose purity inspires a deep love in the missionary. When the volcano erupts, killing Lueli, Fortune loses his faith and leaves the island, reflecting on the contrasts between South Pacific innocence and the civilization that produced World War I. C. S. Forester's The African Queen (1935), by contrast, celebrates missionaries and the war, though somewhat ironically. In 1914 Reverend Samuel Sayer and his spinster sister Rose are running a mission in German Central Africa. Samuel invokes God's wrath upon the Germans, "as another Samuel had once prayed for victory over the Amalekites," but local military activities force the mission to close, and the shock kills Sayer. Unwillingly liberated from her brother's ecclesiastical paternalism, Rose finds love with the Canadian river rat Charlie Allnutt, as the pair avenge Samuel's death by sinking the German steamer Konigin Luise, which dominates Lake Wittelsbach.

Other writers of the interwar period depict missionaries at work in Africa, as well as in South Asia and Australia. Joyce Cary's Aissa Saved (1932) features the Shibi Mission, run by Mr. Carr and his wife, Hilda, on the banks of the River Niger in southern Nigeria. Transfixed by the strains of his favorite hymn, "None of Self and All of Thee," the missionary fails to stop African converts from interrupting a rain-making festival at the pagan village of Kohi across the river Bloodshed ensues, and the lapsed convert Aissa is captured and sentenced to death as a Christian witch. She escapes and reconverts, vowing to give herself over more fully to Christ. Chanting "All de tings I lak de mos / I sacrifice dem to His blood," she decapitates her infant son Abba in a rain-making ritual that conflates Carr's teachings about Christ's self-sacrifice with African juju traditions of sacrificial appeasement. In The African Witch (1936) Cary ironically turns these events on their head, so to speak. Modeled loosely on Albert Schweitzer, the medical missionary Dr. Schlemm ministers in northern Nigeria not as an evangelical enthusiast but as a humane figure of quiet dignity and moral reasonableness. For his troubles, though, Schlemm is murdered by a fanatical convert who parades his head as a triumphal trophy of indigenized African sacrificial Christianity. Less violent, Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus (1939) nonetheless expresses ambivalence about British ambitions to Christianize India. The novel explores the difficulties confronting Sister Clodagh, the youngest mother superior in the history of the Anglican Saint Faith Order, as she tries to establish a convent, a mission school, and an infirmary in premises that used to serve as a pleasure palace for the local potentate in Mopu in the Himalayas. Turning to Australia, we find Xavier Herbert writing rather sardonically in Capricornia (1938) of the way in which the Gospel Mission makes a good profit off coconut plantations worked for free by the Reverend Theodore Hollower's Aborigine converts, who receive free Christian indoctrination in return. Over thirty years later in Poor Fellow My Country (1975), which is set in 1937, Herbert satirizes denominational rivalries in the persons of the humorless teetotaler Reverend James Tasker, head of the Protestant Mission Society, and Father Glascock, who greets visitors to the Leopold Islands Mission with a beer.

In the postwar era we see still further elaborations of missions in fiction, some sympathetic, some antagonistic. Several North American writers have located their work in China. Cornelia Spencer's The Missionary (1947) explores tensions among American clerics whose mission serves as troop barracks and shelter for the wounded in China's brutal civil conflict, while John Bechtel's The Year of the Tiger (1946) depicts missionaries as beacons of faith and hope when World War II threatens to overwhelm the Tsui clan. John Hersey's historical novel The Call: An American Missionary in China (1985) embodies over one hundred years of the Protestant missionary presence in China in the person of David Treadup. Interned by the Japanese, this American evangelical realizes that his long career as educator and agricultural reformer has expressed more of an impulse to serve fellow human beings than a divine call to save souls. Other North American novelists depict missions and missionaries in other locations. Charles E. Mercer's Rachel Cade (1956) portrays an American nurse at Dibela in the Belgian Congo. The mission doctor dies, and, left alone, she finds herself cursed by local shamans for climbing the sacred Mountains of the Moon. Also involving Africa, Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) reverses the Middle Passage, representing Nettie's letters about Reverend Samuel's missionary work among the tribal Olinka as the vehicle by which Celie, her horribly abused sister, recovers her psychological health and spiritual identity. In First and Vital Candle (1963) Canadian Mennonite writer Rudy Wiebe suggests that both Roman Catholic and Protestant colonial missions were interested only in imposing ecclesiastical disciplines upon Arctic Inuit peoples, whereas later nonconformist Protestant missionaries, like the novel's "Good News Man," the Reverend Joshua Bishop, convert by example. In Australia we find Randolph Stow's To the Islands (1958), which portrays a disillusioned Anglican missionary who, mistakenly believing he has killed an Aborigine, flees into the desert, not to avoid justice but to explore the frontiers of his tormented soul.

The decades on either side of the new millennium have also produced a flurry of novels depicting missions and missionaries, many of them set in Africa. "Pagan Coast," the first part of Crossing the River (1993), by black British writer Caryl Phillips, describes how Nash Williams, an emancipated slave sent as a missionary to Liberia by the American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century, feels alienated in both the United States and Africa, suffers an identity crisis, disappears, and dies. Other missionaries to Africa face further challenges. English lay missionaries Ralph and Anna Eldred, confronted with the violence of South African apartheid and with the sale of an infant son for body parts to a spirit healer in Bechuanaland, discover that radical evil transcends race in Hilary Mantel's A Change of Climate (1994). Less despairing, Swimming in the Congo (1995), a collection of short stories by Margaret Meyers, explores the interplay between Protestant and tribal African beliefs from the perspective of a seven-year-old. Growing up at the Boanda Mission Agricultural Institute in the Belgian Congo of the 1960s, little Grace Berggren negotiates her way among the ndoki spirits of enchanted forests and the narrow dogmatism of her parents, for whom even ballet lessons are sinful. Late colonial Belgian Congo also provides the setting for Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible (1998), which portrays the American Baptist missionary Nathan Price, whose crazed zealousness eventually so infuriates the villagers of Kilanga that they burn him, still preaching, from his perch atop a colonial coffee plantation tour de maitre, to be dragged to his death by animals. We find a more salubrious picture in Joshua's Bible (2003), by the African-American writer Shelly Leanne. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, this novel revolves around Joshua Clay, a Philadelphia preacher sent to South Africa by a white mission because he is black. Abandoning the mission board's instructions to preach in English from an English Bible, Clay turns to a Xhosa translation and takes a leading role in the struggle against racism. Ranging from the early twentieth century to its close, Owen Sheers's The Dust Diaries (2004) reimagines the career of Arthur Cripps, an eccentric missionary in Southern Rhodesia and an obscure relative of Sheers.

Other recent novels are set in parts as various as the Indian Ocean, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the Sudan. In Julia Blackburn's The Book of Colour (1995) a nineteenth-century English missionary's obsessive efforts to "civilize" the natives on an island in the Indian Ocean engender a cursed legacy of madness for his descendants. Tapu (1997) and Slow Water (2003), by New Zealanders Judy Corbalis and Annamarie Jagose respectively, both draw widely upon historical events. Beginning in 1814, Tapu follows the story of missionaries Thomas and Jane Kendall, who violate the tapu world of the Maoris they hope to convert. Slow Water fictionalizes the scandal surrounding William Yate, who in 1836 is returning by ship from London via Sydney to the Anglican mission in Waimate, New Zealand, when he falls foul of fellow missionary Richard Taylor. Disgraced by Taylor's allegation that he indulged in a homosexual affair with a crew member, Yate ends up back in Dover, England, where he serves as chaplain of St. John's Mariner Church, ministering to seamen till his death in 1846.

Contemporary American authors take us to other mission fields. In Nora Okja-Keller's Comfort Woman (1998) and Fox Girl (2002), for example, American missionaries in Korea patronize the victims of Japanese violence in World War II and preach the superiority of the United States to the "throwaway children" of American servicemen from the Korean War. John Dalton's Heaven Lake (2004) follows Vincent Saunders from Red Bud, Illinois, to Toulio, Taiwan, where he loses a job teaching English in a Presbyterian Bible school after having an affair with a student. Mainland China then serves as the backdrop for a series of lessons in self-discovery for the compromised missionary. More uncompromising, Philip Caputo's Acts of Faith (2005) follows the career of Quinette Hardin, an American missionary from Iowa who works with a human rights group buying back slaves from Arab raiders in Sudan's civil war in the 1990s. Hardin immerses herself in local ways in order to save souls, then marries a commander of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, rationalizing their armed resistance to the Muslim government in Khartoum as a front in the global war between good and evil.

Indigenous Writers and Christian Missions

Echoing themes from novels depicting Roman Catholic missions, several of the late twentieth-century novels mentioned above dramatize postcolonial issues arising from encounters, conflicts, and occasional accommodations between Western and non-Western cultures. Not surprisingly, these themes dominate the work of indigenous writers attempting to come to grips with the European and North American colonial and imperial presence and its aftermath. The British legacy in Africa, for example, has by itself inspired a small library. In Akiki K. Nyabongo's early novel Africa Answers Back (1936) Mujungu finds in biblical stories far more meanings than his missionary instructors intend, including scriptural backing for polygamy. More subtle, Things Fall Apart (1958), by the celebrated Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, portrays the missionaries Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith as the two faces of colonial Christianity, one benevolent, the other autocratic. For Achebe, African converts also play a crucial role. In Arrow of God (1964), for instance, John Goodcountry, a native Christian missionary, and Ezeulu, the titular head of the priesthood of the traditional god Ulu, embody the clash between tribal Igbo and European Christian mores. Ezeulu miscalculates the strength of his control over the tribe, which turns from the cult of Ulu to Christianity. The symbol of the python captures this tension: the snake functions at one moment as a sacred native totem, at another as a Christian figure of original sin. Another giant of the contemporary African literary scene, Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o, also embodies the ambiguities of the missionary presence in Africa in his novels. In Weep Not, Child (1962) Ngugi writes warmly of the missionaries, who "never talked down to Africans" and whose school seemed "a paradise where children from all walks of life and of different religious faiths could work together without any [race] consciousness." But in The River Between (1965) the efforts of missionary Livingston to ban female circumcision create conflict between the traditionalist Kameno and the Christian Makuyu. Dividing to conquer, the missionary misconceives the nature of Christian charity. Neither the Christian convert Joshua nor the traditionalist Kabonyi, who both attend the mission school, shows compassion for Muthoni, who dies from a badly performed circumcision, as the river between the two communities carries the girl's body "into a darkness that no one could fathom."

The effects of missionary teachings on traditional ways also preoccupy other indigenous African writers. In Francis Selormy's The Narrow Path (1967), for instance, the upbringing of a Ghanaian boy in a strict mission household leads to conflict with his father and the fracturing of the patrilineal line. In another story, missionary deception makes a martyr of Ndatshan, the main character in Stanlake John Thompson Samkange's The Mourned One (1975). A native teacher at the mission school, Ndatshan is falsely accused of rape and sentenced to death. The missionary testifies against him, "his brother in Christ, but not his brother in law", a white man first and a Christian second." In Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger (1978), the ethical authority of the Anglican missionary church is compromised by its conniving with Ian Smith's racist Rhodesian regime. Also set in Zimbabwe, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) dramatizes the ambiguous effects of a British mission school upon the traditional roles of Shona women. Religion and politics also intertwine in Andre Brink's Praying Mantis (2005), which reimagines the Bethelsdorp ministry of the London Missionary Society's J. T. van der Kemp and James Read, who served on the eastern frontier of the Cape colony at the turn of the nineteenth century. Abandoning the Khoi convert Kupido Kakkerlak, who loses his desert congregation but not his personal faith, the mission epitomizes the mixed messages between imported Christianity and the indigenous faith it spawns. Indeed, from early in the twentieth century to the present, similar issues preoccupy not only indigenous African novelists but also writers from various formerly British domains. A pair of examples will have to suffice. Set in India, Mulk Raj Anand's The Un touchable (1935) satirizes the Christian missionary Colonel Hutchinson, whose inability to persuade Bakha, a lavatory cleaner, of the benefits of conversion leaves Hutchinson convinced that technology in the form of the flush toilet is a more likely cure for the ills of untouchability. By contrast, Sweet Water--Stolen Land (1993), by the Aboriginal Australian Philip McLaren, fudges historical and geographic facts to create a murder mystery. The German Lutheran missionary Karl Maresch sets up the Neuberg Mission near Coonabarabran, New South Wales, but fails to attract converts. This failure turns him into an insane serial killer of settlers, who in panic blame Aborigines for the murders and herd them off the land and into the mission, thus justifying the murders in the evangelist's crazed mind.

Missions in Modern Popular Fiction

We find a wide array of Christian missionary stories in modern popular fiction, especially in the United States. Sympathetic treatments of missionary endeavors include Catherine Marshall's Christy (1967) and Margaret Craven's I Heard the Owl Call My Name (1967), both of which tell of missions in remote communities in North America. Marshall's Christy Huddleston, guided by the Quaker missionary Alice Henderson, grows in faith as a teacher at the mission in poverty-stricken Cutter Gap, in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains. Craven's Mark Brian heads an Anglican mission in the Kwakiutl native village of Kingcome, on British Columbia's northwest Pacific coast, where he works to prevent alcoholism, modern housing, and residential schools from overwhelming the traditions of salmon fishing, totems, and the potlatch.

With the late twentieth-century rise of the evangelical right in the United States, Christian publishing became big business, and its vast catalog of pulp fiction often features missionaries. A few examples will suffice. Typifying evangelical adaptations of the Western romance, Alan Morris's Bright Sword of Justice (1997) presents Hunter Stone, who trails outlaws to a Blackfoot Indian village where he falls in love with the beautiful missionary Reena O'Donnell. One of the outlaws turns out to be Reena's brother, and Stone must choose between love and justice. In other evangelical romances women take the lead roles. The Calling of Emily Evans (1990), by the Canadian writer Janette Oke, features an inspirational young woman called to start a church in a nineteenth-century pioneer prairie settlement. Stephanie Grace Whitson's Valley of the Shadow (2000), by contrast, describes the triumphs and hardships of Genevieve LaCroix, an eighteen-year-old Sioux who is sent for an education to the Renville Mission at the time of the Dakota Sioux uprising of 1862. Her loyalties divided between the missionary and his wife and her family and friends, Genevieve puts her faith in God to show her the way forward. Evangelical heroes and heroines are also portrayed in overseas missions. In Jeffrey W. Bennett's Under the Lontar Palm (2001), for instance, a dispute between Indonesian tribesmen leaves the missionary Raymond Springer dead. His wife, Marta, continues their call with the help of a Vietnam veteran, John Braddham, who flies missionaries over Irian Jaya for Prayer on a Wing in order to gain experience for a career as an airline pilot.

Other authors, less willing to take the American evangelical agenda at face value, dramatize its ambiguities. For instance, the loosely autobiographical No Graven Image (1966), by Elisabeth Elliot, explores the mysteries of the divine will. The twenty-five-year-old Margaret Sparhawk ministers to the Quechua in Ecuador's Andes Mountains. The shocking death of a much-loved convert causes Sparhawk, like Job, to question the foundations of her own faith: "'And does He now,' I asked myself there at the graveside, 'ask me to worship Him?'" Still other writers simply satirize evangelical certainties. Frank Schaeffer's Calvin Becker trilogy, for example, features Ralph and Elsa Becker, Reformed Presbyterian missionaries from Kansas, and their son, Calvin. In Portofino (1992) Calvin wryly observes his parents' efforts to convert Roman Catholics; in Saving Grandma (1997) he celebrates his grandmother's heathen ways while they fret over her soul; and in Zermatt (2003) a hotel waitress initiates him into the pleasures of the flesh while his parents forbid dancing and Mad magazine.

Mission Fiction in Other Languages

Finally, we consider fictional depictions of missions and missionaries in languages other than English. The widely celebrated novel Silence (1966), by the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, tells the story of Sebastian Rodrigues, a young Portuguese priest who travels from Macao in the 1630s to work among Japan's persecuted Christians as atonement for the apostasy of his mentor, Christovao Ferreira. As God remains silent, Rodrigues profanes a bronze image of Christ in order to save tortured peasants. He later takes a Japanese name and wife and presides over an underground church.

More frequently, though, missions and missionaries appear in the growing national literatures of Europe's former colonial and imperial domains, notably in Latin America and Africa. In the early Brazilian novel Sired (1857), by Lourenco da Silva Araujo Amazonas, for instance, Carmelite missionaries help natives displaced by Portuguese colonizers to transform the jungle into an agricultural settlement. In Herculano Inglez de Souza's O missionario (The Missionary) (1891), by contrast, Father Antonio de Morais abandons noble intentions to convert the native Mundurucus, takes a mistress, and pursues personal ambitions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Other Brazilian novelists have dramatized the Guaranitica War (1752-56) and its aftermath, which destroyed dozens of mission settlements, saw the powerful Jesuits expelled from Portuguese and Spanish possessions, and helped determine the modern borders of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Erico Verissimo's O continente (The Continent) (1943), Manelito de Ornellas's Tiaraju (1945), Alcy Cheuiche's Sepe Tiaraju (1978), and Rui Nedel's Esta terra teve dono (This Land Has an Owner) (1983) ring the changes on the relationship between the Jesuits and the legendary Sepe Tiaraju, who served as prefect of the Mission of San Miguel before becoming a native guerrilla defender of the mission settlements against Portuguese and Spanish colonial forces. Religion and politics intermingle in other Brazilian fiction too. Against the backdrop of the military coup of 1964, time among the Xingu natives inspires the young priest Nando in Antonio Callado's Quarup (1978) to become a political activist, while Darcy Ribeiro's Maira (1976) portrays Italian Jesuits competing to transform the lives of Mairum natives with apocalyptic American evangelicals whose mission station is shaped like a flying saucer. Similar themes permeate other Latin American fiction as well. Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador (The Storyteller) (1987), for example, laments the way in which Roman Catholic missionary efforts to convert the Machiguengas along the Urumba River in Peru's Amazon rain forest have contributed to the loss of tribal culture.

In African vernacular fiction, numerous short pieces celebrate the triumph of Christianity over native superstition, among them Malawian S. A. Paliani's Nyanja narrative In 1930 Came a Witchdoctor (1930), Zairean Stephen A. Mpashi's historical fiction The Catholic Priests Arrive Among the Bemba (1956), and Zimbabwean works like David Ndoda's Ndebele tale In Days Gone By (1958) and Patrick Chakaipa's Shona story Love Is Blind (1966). A. C. Mzolisa Jordan's Xhosa novel The Wrath of the Ancestors (1940), by contrast, associates Anglican missionizing with the awakening of African pride, only to suggest that such pride is really a masked revival of precolonial tribal identity. Francophone and Lusophone African writings also unflatteringly portray Roman Catholic missions. Written in the form of an altar boy's journal, Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (The Poor Christ of Bomba) (1956), by Cameroon's Mongo Beti, satirizes Father Drumont's efforts to frustrate premarital sex. Native girls are confined for months in the sixa (a settlement for women escaping polygamy), where catechists rape them, sowing seeds of syphilis among future generations of Africans. As heartless as the colonial rulers, the church exacts huge tithes even from the poor, the old, and the infirm. In other works, missionary hypocrisy assumes the explicit form of sexual immorality. In Une vie de boy (Life of a Houseboy) (1956), by another Cameroonian, Ferdinand Leopold Oyono, Father Gilbert uses conversion to bring French civilization to Africa, but gonorrheal catechists reflect European Christianity's true decadence. Zairean Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu also frames missionary corruption in sexual terms. Ranging from mid-nineteenth century to contemporary Kinshasa, La re-production (1986) attacks Roman Catholic missions for being partners in the colonial exploitation of Africa. Ngandu Nkashama perpetuates these negative impressions. Written in the form of a prison journal, this Zairean novelist's La mort faite homme (Death Made Human) (1986) identifies the mission school's father director as an abusive hypocrite. Similarly, Josh Luandino's Lusophone Angolan collection Vidas novas (New Lives) (1976) includes the short story "Dina," which implicates missionaries in colonial cruelties. The title character, a prostitute, recalls how Portuguese troops killed her parents even as they sought sanction in the Mission of Sao Paulo. Once again, the missionary here fares ill in the hands of the secular skeptic.

Images in fiction portraying missions have ranged from the heroic to the hypocritical, from the comic to the catastrophic. As the interplay of cultures continues apace worldwide, the panorama of missions and missionaries portrayed in vernacular and in English-language and other national literatures will doubtless grow still more varied and more colorful. Mindful of the frequently mixed motives of their former mentors, for example, indigenous churches now send missionaries to preach the Gospel in former colonial and imperial centers in Europe and North America, and we may expect to see these figures featuring in future short stories and novels. At the same time, ironically, lecturers in Western seminaries and theological colleges, equally aware of the checkered record of colonial and imperial missionizing, today include mission fiction in their syllabuses in an effort to add a degree of human ambiguity to the idealistic image of the missionary enterprise so often portrayed in less self-reflective mission histories and missiological treatises. Lastly, globalized literary studies promise multiplied opportunities for comparative readings in missions, missionaries, and fiction. In some cases we have translations of literary classics, such as Anthony C. Yu's glorious rendition of Wu Cheng'en's Chinese epic, Journey to the West (1977-83 [orig. ca. 1595]), which describes the adventures of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled to India to obtain scriptures for the propagation of Buddhism in China. In other cases, a plethora of best-selling contemporary novels invites mission studies analysis, from Salman Rushdie's magic realist classic The Satanic Verses (1988), which works on one level as an ironic critique of extremist tendencies in certain kinds of Muslim proselytizing, to Myla Goldenberg's more conventionally imagined Bee Season (2000), in which Aaron Naumann finds Hindu rituals transplanted to New York more satisfying than the Jewish traditions of his father, a cantor and scholar of Kabbalah. Aaron abandons plans to become a rabbi and converts to the Hare Krishna movement.

Jamie S. Scott, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Research Institute for the Advanced Study of Humanity, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia, teaches courses in religion and culture. He is the editor of Religions of Canadians (Oxford, forthcoming).