Mission work historically has been key to evangelical self-understanding and their view of the United States as a Christian nation favored by God, historian and author Holly Berkley Fletcher said.
“Christian nationalism is based on this grandiose idea of what American Christianity is, and missions are central to that narrative and central to this idea of American exceptionalism and American greatness and ‘we’re the chosen people.’ Missions have been central to that from the beginning.”
Fletcher’s new book, The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism, examines the relationships between evangelical missions and missionaries, their children and the religious culture and churches that send them into the world.
Despite her oftentimes harsh critique, the book also delves into the positive influences of the international missionary movement.
“This not the hatchet job some people fear it is.”
“This not the hatchet job some people fear it is,” she said. “We all know lovely missionaries, and it is not my intention to unequivocally denigrate or criticize missionary work, but to elucidate how the missionary enterprise has created a monster in terms of American Christian egos and self-understanding. It is a narrative more complicated than many of people would allow.”
Missionaries in foreign cultures have helped end or reduce female mutilation practices, domestic slavery and caste systems and have educated populations and their leaders, she writes.
“I also do not wish to feed a counter-myth of evil, colonially minded missionaries who run around the globe wrecking everyone’s cultures,” Fletcher writes. The popular narrative of missions as colonialism — in which missionaries were always and everywhere agents of governments — is an exaggeration.”
Fletcher was raised in Kenya by Southern Baptist church-planting missionaries and went on to teach college-level history and to serve as an Africa analyst for the Central Intelligence agency.
Her research included more than 300 surveys and 80 interviews with people raised as missionary kids, or MKs. She continues to hear and share stories through her podcast and Substack, “A Zebra without Stripes.”
Due for release Aug. 19, The Missionary Kids presents a complicated picture of family and social life in the international missionary movement, complete with the feelings of invisibility, loneliness and isolation many MKs endured overseas.
“A lot of the people I spoke with, and who remain true believers, told me the feelings they had of being secondary to their parents’ callings and of being deprioritized in their parents’ lives and ministries,” said Fletcher, who attends a United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C.
In the chapter “A Breeding Ground for Abuse,” Fletcher relays numerous accounts of physical and sexual abuse some MKs suffered from other youth, missionaries or from staff members at the foreign boarding schools they attended.
There are numerous accounts of children “who were mercilessly, physically bullied by other students with few consequences from the adults in charge,” Fletcher writes. “‘Creepy’ teachers who looked down girls’ shirts. An emotionally disturbed dorm parent who badly needed mental health treatment instead of being put in charge of twenty-odd children. Children, with parents distant in more ways than one, yearning to be special to someone. And supposedly sainted adults, called by God to care for them, who could sniff out the most vulnerable, dangle the attention they craved in front of them, then go in for the kill.”
Abused or not, most MKs grew up feeling overlooked in the shadow of parents considered saints by many and whose presence and words were revered and celebrated, Fletcher writes.
“In the minds of many, missionaries were — and remain — on a whole other level. I’ve heard my parents literally introduced as ‘Super Christians’ and regularly saw people in two hemispheres fawn over them as if they were Bono.”
Fletcher separately recalls the times when her family visited the United States to visit relatives and to tour Southern Baptist congregations that contributed to missions work. “Looking back, there was this frustration with the American church as having a shallow, consumeristic interest in missionaries. They were interested in cool stories but not really interested in learning anything. I heard this from other missionary kids, as well.”
The missionaries-as-saints construct also functions in part to whitewash an overseas endeavor that often promoted American Christian nationalism abroad and attempted to assuage white evangelical guilt in the process, she says. “The MK experience is a distilled version of what many people have experienced in evangelical Christianity. And the myths surrounding missions derive from the wider white evangelical story and manifest in other ways within American borders.”
Fletcher said her research also shows how the “missionary industrial complex” functions not only to globalize American evangelicalism but also to help shape a religious self-image free from the sex scandals and membership declines of the U.S. church.
“The prevalence of narcissism in white evangelical spaces obscures their deep-seated shame with grandiose narratives about missions,” she said. “Of course there is some truth to the narratives, but it’s more complex than the glorified ways evangelicals conceive of missions and themselves.”