In the decades after World War II, Protestant missionaries abroad
were a topic of vigorous public debate. From religious periodicals
and Sunday sermons to novels and anthropological monographs, public
conversations about missionaries followed a powerful yet
paradoxical line of reasoning, namely that people abroad needed
greater autonomy from U.S. power and that Americans could best tell
others how to use their freedom. In
The Gospel of Freedom and
Power, Sarah E. Ruble traces and analyzes these public
discussions about what it meant for Americans abroad to be good
world citizens, placing them firmly in the context of the United
States' postwar global dominance.
Bringing together a wide range of sources, Ruble seeks to
understand how discussions about a relatively small group of
Americans working abroad became part of a much larger cultural
conversation. She concludes that whether viewed as champions of
nationalist revolutions or propagators of the gospel of capitalism,
missionaries--along with their supporters, interpreters, and
critics--ultimately both challenged and reinforced a rhetoric of
exceptionalism that made Americans the judges of what was good for
the rest of the world.