Protestant internationalist circuits and the future of Asia

The foundations of the vibrant Protestant internationalist exchange discussed in this article were established during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Crucial were the activities and expansion of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) that established its international headquarters in Geneva in 1878, as well as other related ecumenical and Christian student organizations such as the World Christian Student Federation (WSCF), founded in 1895.Footnote ¹³ These organizations were influenced by liberal Protestant theology and the Social Gospel, which became a dominant force especially in North American Protestantism and quickly found its internationalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹⁴ Closely related to the missionary movement and its mission boards and organizations, the Protestant internationalist movement was dominated by North American and British actors.

A significant milestone in the development of Protestant internationalism and the global ecumenical movement was the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. For the first time, particular attention was given to the ‘younger churches’ and the matter of indigenization, and the conference was indicative of the beginning of a slow transformation from mission to World Christianity in the following decades.Footnote ¹⁵ Protestant internationalism gathered momentum in the wake of the conclusion of the First World War during a Wilsonian and internationalist age.Footnote ¹⁶ The 1920s and the interwar period saw a broad spectrum of activities that extended state-sponsored and state-driven internationalism, which included alternative forms and non-government initiatives such as pacifist, feminist, socialist, anti-imperialist, and religious or ‘faith-based’ endeavours.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, in the early twentieth century, religious internationals had witnessed a transformation from ‘communities of faith’ to ‘communities of opinion’ which—contrary to long-standing narratives of secularization—increased their participation and influence in the secular-political sphere.Footnote ¹⁸

This post-First World War Protestant internationalist moment was manifested in the establishment of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in 1921, an international umbrella organization that stood at the interface between mission and ecumenical World Christianity; it would eventually merge with and be superseded by the World Council of Churches (WCC) in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ¹⁹ In terms of geography, Protestant internationalism witnessed a shift in focus from the ‘older churches’ in the West to the ‘newer churches’ in the former mission fields. During the 1920s and 1930s this mainly meant a stronger representation from Asian countries, especially from India, Japan, and China. This was evident in the world conference organized by the IMC in 1928 in Jerusalem. While the 1910 conference in Edinburgh had been a mostly European and North American affair, the Jerusalem conference featured a considerable number of non-Western delegates mostly from Asian countries. The largest delegations present in Jerusalem came—after the United States and Great Britain—from China, India, and Japan.Footnote ²⁰ The IMC’s subsequent world conference of 1938 consequently was scheduled to take place in China, but due to the Sino-Japanese War eventually moved to Tambaram, India, and featured an even larger proportion of non-Western delegates.

The increasing involvement of Asian Christians in these conferences was not only indicative of a transformation in Protestant internationalism and mission, but also reflected a broader trend in global politics. From the 1920s onwards, India, China, and Japan were increasingly perceived as potential future global players, and there was a growing interest in the area from Western audiences and in Western politics.Footnote ²¹ Intellectuals and politicians from these Asian nations, too, detected a shift in global dynamics. Pan-Asian sentiments grew stronger and found expression in inter-Asian exchanges and conferences such as the Conferences of the Asian Peoples which were held in Nagasaki and Shanghai in 1926 and 1927, respectively.Footnote ²² Concurrently, in British India and in semi-colonial parts of China, anti-colonial and nationalist sentiments intensified. Moreover, Asian, and particularly Japanese, aspirations for a geopolitical reordering were thwarted in the 1920s by anti-Asian policies in Western countries such as the Asiatic Exclusion Act of 1924 which barred immigration to the United States from Asian countries.

In terms of the subjects under discussion, the influence of social gospel theology in Protestant internationalism showed in an emphasis on ‘secular’ issues such as social work, agriculture, or education.Footnote ²³ From the 1910s onwards, a dominant topic was the relationship between the ‘older’ and the ‘newer’ churches and the future of Western missions. From a theological, missiological, and organizational perspective, this was discussed in regard to a devolution of missions and the potential and limitations of an indigenization of Christianity.Footnote ²⁴ In the political sphere, these trajectories translated into an engagement with and critique of imperialism, geopolitical and ‘interracial’ injustices, and the prospective relationship between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ countries. As a consequence of both the heightened involvement of Asian Christians in the movement and the growing interest in the region among European and American observers, the political future of Asia became a pivotal topic in this regard by the mid-1920s. In particular, East Asia and the Pacific area became a focal point of numerous activities. In June and July 1924, YMCAs from various countries bordering the (North) Pacific participated in a Pan-Pacific Conference in (rather ironically) Atlantic City. The Chinese delegation included T. Z. Koo. Koo had been working for the Chinese YMCA and the WSCF since the late 1910s. He had struggled for some time with his demanding role as a ‘travelling secretary’ for the WSCF, for health and family reasons as well as the racism he experienced regularly in Europe and North America. By the mid-1920s, however, his was convinced of the merits of his transcultural endeavours and fully engaged with his international work for the Federation.Footnote ²⁵

Koo also worked on setting up a Pacific Area Student Conference in China for the WSCF.Footnote ²⁶ At the Federation’s international meeting in Mysore, India, in December 1928, a proposal was made to organize a conference to deal with the ‘pressing problems in the Pacific Area’.Footnote ²⁷ In the early 1930s, the WSCF proposed the establishment of a separate office for the Pacific area, to be led by Koo.Footnote ²⁸ While the WSCF’s and Koo’s plans were only partially realized, it was the YMCA that assumed the lead in connecting the Christian internationalists of the region. After Atlantic City, it launched a series of follow-up meetings, commencing in 1925 with a Christian conference of the Pacific Area, this time held more appropriately in Honolulu. The objective of the conference was ‘to consider the contacts and conflicts of the pacific peoples and to develop understanding and cooperation’.Footnote ²⁹ Subsequent meetings followed in 1927 again in Honolulu and in 1929 in Kyoto.

Arguably the most tangible result of the Atlantic City conference was the foundation of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) in 1925. The IPR was an international think tank and research institute, funded largely by the American Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment. Although the Institute was American-dominated, from its inception it also saw a considerable degree of Japanese involvement. The Institute discussed and researched (trans-) Pacific as well as intra-Asiatic issues. It was soon confronted with the challenge of balancing scholarly research and political activism, as issues like anti-colonial and national movements, US-Japanese relations, or the growing antagonism between Japan and China arose as contentious topics.Footnote ³⁰

The themes of anti-imperialism and international and ‘interracial’ relations rang loud at the 1928 conference in Jerusalem, too. Its programme included sessions on ‘Missions and Race Conflict’, ‘International Missionary Relations’, and the relationship between ‘The Younger and the Older Churches’. Conferences, organizations, and networks like the Pacific Area and the Jerusalem conferences facilitated unprecedented opportunities for Christian travelling and international exchange. At the IMC conference in Jerusalem the concept of dedicated ‘diplomatic missions’ was drawn up. The Council’s final statement on the ‘Christian Message’ called for an exchange of missions and delegations between the churches of Europe and North American and the churches of Africa and Asia.Footnote ³¹

This appeal was put in action four years later when a ‘Mission of Fellowship’ comprising four Indian Christians—including Augustine Ralla Ram—undertook a four-month-long tour of Great Britain in 1932/1933. However, the visit was not without controversy. The following section focuses on this Mission, as well as the subsequent visit of a delegation of African American Christians to India, which was initiated by Ralla Ram three years later. An analysis of these exchanges will demonstrate how Christian internationalism and fellowship could serve as a conduit of anti-colonial and interracial solidarity. Concurrently, the examples highlight the challenges Protestant internationalist delegations faced in reconciling both spiritual and political ambitions and aspirations during their missions.

Anti-colonial and interracial solidarity in the 1930s

The visit of the Indian delegation was organized by the British Conference of Missionary Societies and the IMC through William Paton, former YMCA secretary in India and general secretary of the National Christian Council of India (NCCI) between 1922 and 1926, and by the late 1920s secretary of the IMC. The ecumenical delegation from India comprised the Presbyterian Ralla Ram; Ma Nyein, headmistress of the American Baptist Mission High School in Burma; A. M. Varki, principal of Union Christian College in Travancore and church leader of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church; and the Anglican J. S. C. Bannerji, assistant bishop in Lahore. The itinerary of the delegation’s tour through Great Britain included stops and speaking engagements in and around—in this order—Belfast, Dublin, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, North and South Wales, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Leicester, and finally London. The visit concluded in a service at St Paul’s Cathedral, a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a reception from the King and Queen.Footnote ³²

According to the British executive committee of the endeavour, the purpose of the delegation was spiritual and evangelistic, and the Indian Christians were supposed to show a British audience the reach of World Christianity, share with British believers the fresh breath of a young Indian Christianity, and encourage them ‘by the witness borne to Christ by people coming out of a totally different cultural tradition’.Footnote ³³ The timing of the mission, though, was no coincidence. The early 1930s were a period of heightened tensions in British India, characterized by growing hostilities between Indians and the British. The Indian National Congress (INC) had initiated the Civil Disobedience Movement, and the famous Salt March in March/April 1930 resulted in the arrest of Mohandas K. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi and other Congress leaders. Between 1930 and 1932 three so-called Round Table conferences were held in London where British and Indian politicians and representatives discussed constitutional reforms and the political future of British India. The third conference was convened in November 1932, at which point the Mission of Fellowship was touring the country.Footnote ³⁴ Accordingly, the executive committee of the Mission of Fellowship acknowledged that the possible ‘secondary effect’ of the visit may have lain in ‘the promotion of a kindlier and more friendly feeling between Indians and Britishers in general’.Footnote ³⁵ What the British organizers had not foreseen, however, were the activities that Augustine Ralla Ram would pursue during his stay in Great Britain.

Ralla Ram had previously served as pastor and professor at Ewing Christian College in Allahabad and was general secretary of the Student Christian Association (SCA) of India, Burma, and Ceylon from 1928. He participated in the WSCF world conference in Mysore in 1928 and was later vice president of the Federation. A second generation Christian with a Brahmin family background, Augustine Ralla Ram was part of a North Indian urban Christian middle class that by the 1910s and 1920s participated proactively in local church matters and had taken on more institutional responsibilities, as indigenization and devolution became the buzzwords of the day.Footnote ³⁶ In addition to his work in the Indian Student Christian Movement, Ralla Ram was an active figure in the United Church of Northern India, formed in 1924 to unite Presbyterian and Congregational churches in North India. His interest in the international dimension of Christian fellowship also showed in his work for the United Church, whose Foreign Missions Committee he headed for many years.Footnote ³⁷

While Ralla Ram was undoubtedly aligned with the evangelistic objectives of the Mission of Fellowship, he also perceived himself as an ‘Ambassador on behalf of India’,Footnote ³⁸ mediating between Britain and India. To him, Indian Christians were best prepared to act as ‘mediators between India and other nations, especially England and America’.Footnote ³⁹ For the ardent nationalist and supporter of the Indian National Congress and Gandhi, this meant, not least, making the political aspirations of the Indian national movement heard in the metropole. Augustine Ralla Ram was part of a generation of Indian Christians who saw no contradiction in reconciling their Christian identity with Indian nationalist and anti-imperialist convictions. While the attitude of many Indian Christians towards the national movement had been somewhat ambivalent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—which often brought accusations of their being too close to their colonialist, Western co-religionists—by the 1920s and 1930s, a newer, often second-generational wave of Indian Christians identified fully with the national cause and found integration into the broader national movement.Footnote ⁴⁰

During the delegation’s visit in Great Britain, Ralla Ram met privately with local pastors and churchmen, raised funds, and distributed a nationalist pamphlet titled ‘The Present Indian Political Situation and the Way Out’. Ralla Ram’s activities were perceived as a source of embarrassment by the British organizers of the tour, who responded promptly and attempted to calm the situation. Ralla Ram was pressured to publicly retract his actions and provide assurances that the tour had no political agenda (which he did only reluctantly and partially), thus effectively curtailing Ram’s political expression in favour of a harmonious Protestant internationalist narrative.Footnote ⁴¹ This narrative is evident in William Paton’s official reporting of the visit published in the IMC’s public organ, the International Review of Mission. In his report, Paton placed emphasis on the ‘clear and unambiguous purpose’Footnote ⁴² and the spiritual effects of the mission, touching upon the controversy created by Ralla Ram only indirectly by—in fact—denying it and attributing the mission’s success to its apolitical nature. Paton assured that:

In contrast, Paton emphasized in his article the international and ecumenical character of Protestant Christianity, referring for instance to a recent visit by T. Z. Koo to India, and expressing hopes for similar future exchanges, such as a visit from Kagawa Toyohiko.

Three years after the Mission of Fellowship, Augustine Ralla Ram himself was the organizer of a similar Christian exchange. In his capacity as general secretary of the Indian SCA, he extended an invitation to a delegation of African American Christians to undertake a tour of British India and Ceylon in late 1935 and early 1936. A committee of the SCA’s American sister organization selected a four-member delegation comprising the couples Sue Bailey and Howard Thurman and Phenola and Edward Carroll. Howard Thurman, the head of the delegation, had previously held teaching positions at Morehouse College and Spelman College in Atlanta, and was dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University. First contacts between African American and Indian Christians had been established a few years earlier through the networks of Protestant internationalism and Christian student exchange. Thurman’s friends Frank T. Wilson and Juliette Derricotte had attended the WSCF conference in Mysore in 1928. A direct connection was established in 1931, when Behari Lal (B. L.) Rallia Ram—another Indian Christian internationalist, Gandhian, secretary of the Indian YMCA, and not to be confused with his colleague Augustine Ralla RamFootnote ⁴⁴—visited the United States and was invited by John Hope to give a lecture in Atlanta where he probably also met Thurman.Footnote ⁴⁵

The African American delegation, designated the ‘Pilgrimage of Friendship’, travelled through India, Ceylon, and Burma for six months, delivering lectures and talks in more than 50 cities along the route. As Ralla Ram explained in preparation of the delegation’s visit, he saw the mission as a chance to correct the prevalent misconception in India that Christianity was ‘identified with western imperialism’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The interaction with and Christian witness from African Americans, who had themselves endured oppression by white Christians in the United States, served to demonstrate the universal appeal of Christianity to (non-Christian) Indians.Footnote ⁴⁷ Howard Thurman perceived a similar rationale in the tour, assuming a common experience of oppression. In Thurman’s view, the ‘delegation [would] concern itself with interpreting the spiritual significance of life against the background and experience of an underprivileged minority in American life’.Footnote ⁴⁸

The experiences of the delegation in India were mixed. Generally, they were welcomed warmly and their lectures attracted large and interested audiences. Nevertheless, Thurman and the other members were frequently compelled to justify their allegiance to the ‘religion of their oppressor’, as Indians often highlighted the contradictions of American society, history, and Christianity. At an event at the outset of the tour in Colombo, Thurman was even called ‘a traitor to the highest good not only of the Negroes in America but also of the darker peoples of the earth’,Footnote ⁴⁹ as he recalled. Others were receptive to the anti-imperialist and emancipatory rationale they discerned behind the Pilgrimage of Friendship, and were convinced that the African American experience imbued the delegation with credibility and insights into the Indian situation.Footnote ⁵⁰ The delegation’s visit coincided with heated debates about mass conversion in India in 1935 and 1936, after B. R. Ambedkar, a prominent leader of the ‘depressed castes’, announced his intention to leave Hinduism. While the American missionary milieu especially had high hopes for a mass movement, Indian Christianity was divided on the issue. Augustine Ralla Ram himself, who came from an urban high-caste background, was rather reluctant to embrace the idea of mass conversions from lower, mainly rural, Hindu classes that were based primarily on social, economic, and political rather than spiritual grounds.Footnote ⁵¹ Another Indian Christian internationalist, P. O. Philip, secretary of the NCCI, saw the Thurman delegation and possible future visits by African-American Christians to India as a way of convincing underprivileged Indian non-Christians of the spiritual merits of Christianity outside the confines of the organized church.Footnote ⁵²

Howard Thurman was keen to emphasize that the objective of the delegation was not evangelization, a point he felt compelled to make repeatedly during his visit, as it was important to him to ensure that the delegation would not be perceived as a missionary endeavour from the West. Indeed, while he heavily lauded the Indian SCA for the organization and support, he was critical of the close connection between the association and the missionary movement.Footnote ⁵³ Notwithstanding these reservations and other setbacks—including occasional racism Thurman and his colleagues could not escape—the visit left a lasting impact on Thurman. As was the case with other African American intellectuals, Thurman had a particular interest in Mahatma Gandhi and his ideas. The delegation’s meeting with Gandhi on 14 March 1936, during which they talked about the treatment of African Americans in the United States as well as Gandhi’s views on non-violence, had a substantial influence on Thurman’s further engagement with civil rights.Footnote ⁵⁴ The meeting between the Pilgrimage of Friendship and Gandhi was part of a line of African American engagement with Gandhian ethics that eventually led to the 1960s’ civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr., on whom Howard Thurman was a major influence.Footnote ⁵⁵ Furthermore, it can be read as an example of a broader anti-imperialist internationalism or an ‘anticolonial transnational’ in the first half of the twentieth century, which saw solidarity, networks, and exchanges between very different groups and which could ‘transcend[…] racial, colonial, or cultural boundaries’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Although the Pilgrimage was imbued with an impetus of anti-colonial and anti-racist solidarity, in the run-up to the delegation’s visit Augustine Ralla Ram, now himself responsible for organizing the event, had urged restraint with regard to political activities. Ralla Ram cautioned the delegation that while they were at liberty to express their views on the relationship between India and Great Britain, they should keep respective statements and conversations private so that they would not have to fear repercussions from the British-Indian government.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, as Thurman later recalled, the delegation was subjected to constant surveillance by the British-Indian intelligence during their tour.Footnote ⁵⁸ The issue of politization was addressed by T. Z. Koo, Ralla Ram’s colleague at the WSCF, too. In early 1935, Koo offered a critique of Thurman’s emphasis on the status of Indians as an ‘underprivileged’ group, pointing to prevalent feelings of Indian superiority that Koo himself had often encountered.Footnote ⁵⁹ Koo argued that equating African Americans with Indians would result in an undue focus on the political aspect of the delegation. A few months before these statements, the Chinese WSCF secretary had met Thurman in New York City, when both talked about the upcoming African American delegation to India at a Federation luncheon. There, Koo had expressed a slightly different view, expressing hope that the delegation could inspire the Indians because the African American experience of suffering might speak to them. Additionally, he had hoped for the delegation to visit China.Footnote ⁶⁰ Koo’s rather inconsistent stance on the political and anti-colonial potential of the delegation is noteworthy, particularly given his own ardent Chinese nationalist beliefs. Conversely, his contradictory views illustrate the predicament Christian ‘diplomats’ in the interwar period experienced: the challenge of reconciling an ethos of Christian fellowship and testimony with the constraints imposed by the political realities. The following section will focus on the ‘Far Eastern Crisis’ of the 1930s and will probe further the relationship between Protestant internationalism and transnational diplomacy, which was put to the test in discussions concerning the political future of and Japanese imperialism in East Asia and saw differing interpretations of inter-Asian relations played out.

The Far Eastern Crisis and the limits of Christian diplomacy

When the Pilgrimage of Friendship coordinated by Augustine Ralla Ram came to an end in early 1936, the constantly travelling T. Z. Koo was touring the United States, speaking at several Christian student and ecumenical conferences. There, he crossed paths with the third main protagonist of our story: Kagawa Toyohiko. Kagawa had come to prominence in Protestant internationalism in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a result of his social work in the slums in Kobe as well as his Kingdom of God campaigns, which had caught the attention of Western, and particularly American, Christian audiences. The social reformer, labour activist, and pacifist was quickly designated the ‘Japanese Gandhi’ by his Western supporters and became one of the international faces of non-Western Christianity.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1936, Kagawa undertook an extensive and widely publicized tour of the United States. While the tour demonstrated Kagawa’s huge popularity among American liberal Protestant audiences, they remained somewhat arrested by the tensions between Japan and the United States that had increased in the past years.Footnote ⁶²

In the aftermath of the First World War, Japan had taken steps to participate in a system of international law and arbitration, signing, for instance, in 1928 the Briand-Kellogg Pact that renounced war as a tool for international conflict resolution. By the mid- to late 1920s, Japanese politicians were envisaging a leading role for the country in Asian internationalism. Concurrently, however, many voices in Japan were critical of the Anglo-American dominated post-Versailles international order, and Japan’s own imperial ambitions in East Asia and the growing militarism in the country undermined its aspiration for geopolitical integration.Footnote ⁶³ Tensions between Japan and the United States in particular had already become evident at Versailles and continued to intensify throughout the 1920s. In particular, the Asiatic Exclusion Act in the United States, introduced in 1924, contributed to a significant degree to Japanese alienation.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and subsequent Japanese advances in northern China in the following years gave rise to considerable international protest and contributed to the deepening of the rift between the two countries.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nevertheless, while Japanese expansion was viewed with scepticism in the United States, which sought to advance its own interests in the Pacific area, the interwar period saw manifold initiatives from both sides to maintain diplomatic ties. Kagawa’s visit in 1936, which occurred just months before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, can thus be viewed as part of a broader campaign of cultural diplomacy between the United States and Japan during the 1920s and 1930s, in which travelling Christian internationalists joined ranks in the form of friendship dolls and delegations of baseball players.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Sino-Japanese conflict reverberated heavily in the Protestant internationalist scene in Asia. In 1933, the YMCA convened a Far Eastern and Indian Area Conference in Baguio on the Philippine Islands, with delegates from Japan, Korea, China, Siam, India, Hawaii, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippine Islands in attendance. The political tensions manifested themselves repeatedly at the conference. However, as Sidney Phelps, honorary secretary of the YMCA in Japan, reported, it was not the Chinese and Korean delegates that caused an ‘embarrassment’ to the Japanese. Rather, it was the Indian delegation comprising Augustine Ralla Ram, B. L. Rallia Ram, and Surendra Kumar Datta that ‘seemed to feel a special mission to help the Chinese and Koreans to secure a Christian settlement of all misunderstandings with the Japanese’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, the Indians linked the issue to the political situation in their own country where Mahatma Gandhi had recently been arrested once more. However, although Datta,Footnote ⁶⁸ who presided over the conference, tried to initiate a discussion, most of the other delegates were not willing to tackle the delicate topic.Footnote ⁶⁹ To Phelps, this showed that ‘there [could] be no engineered peace between these distraught brethren of the Far East’,Footnote ⁷⁰ and the American missionary in Japan urged that the situation be left to develop without interference from outside.

In his deflection Phelps did not represent an unusual position. American missionaries in Japan, particularly those who had resided in the country for an extended period, often stood out as apologists of Japanese imperialism in East Asia. While many American missionaries sympathized with anti-colonial sentiments, for instance in British India, missionaries in Japan were often inclined to adopt a lenient, if not understanding, stance towards Japan’s hegemonic claims in the region. This was not necessarily at odds with the prevailing liberal missionary discourse as articulated in Jerusalem, which criticized ‘imperialistic missions’ and advocated for an ‘indigenization’ of Christianity. The activities of Japanese Christian missionaries in colonial Korea, for instance, were interpreted by American observers as an indication of a growing autonomy and maturity of Japanese Christianity.Footnote ⁷¹ Narratives of the legitimacy and necessity of further Japanese expansion in East Asia often remained similarly uncontested and/or were excused by reference to the United States’ own imperialist agenda in the region.Footnote ⁷² Japanese Christians, too, employed the rhetoric of the modern missionary movement to justify Japanese imperialism and the missionary efforts of Japanese Christians in Korea and Manchuria. Ebizawa Akira, general secretary of the Japanese National Christian Council (NCC), for instance, acknowledged that Japanese Christians were in a ‘extremely difficult position’ in reconciling Christian brotherhood and patriotism. At the same time, he denounced the earlier Western missionaries who used to attack local traditions such as ancestor worship which, by contrast, were acknowledged by Japanese Christians. Ebizawa argued that there was a ‘spiritual and cultural unity’Footnote ⁷³ between Japan, Korea, and Manchuria. Japanese missions—that superseded earlier Western missionary efforts in colonized Korea and Manchuria—should thus be regarded not as imperialism but rather as a step towards the indigenization of Asian Christianity. In this narrative, Ebizawa combined the then topical Protestant internationalist issue of indigenizing Christianity with the pan-Asian sentiments that guided Japanese expansionism in East Asia, positioning ‘Asia’ vis-à-vis the ‘West’, and seeing the puppet state of Manchukuo as a model for the Japanese pan-Asian ideology of the ‘harmony of five races’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Ebizawa was part of a group of Japanese Christians, predominantly from the YMCA and the NCC, the latter an umbrella association for Japanese Protestant Christianity established in 1923 following the formation of the IMC, who moved actively in the circles of Protestant internationalism. In the spring of 1937, shortly before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, a delegation of five Western missionaries and five Japanese Christians, including Ebizawa, was dispatched to China on behalf of the NCC of Japan. The delegation met with Chinese Christian leaders and educators at Christian universities in China as well as with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kuomintang government. The delegation, however, eschewed public events and lectures in order to avoid provoking protests from Chinese critics. As a member of the delegation reported, the Chinese were highly suspicious of the Japanese delegation’s motives, suspecting that it had been sent by the Japanese government.Footnote ⁷⁵

The pressure on Japanese Christians within Japanese society increased over the course of the 1930s. Many Japanese Christians undoubtedly were sympathetic towards Japanese imperialism and developed their own interpretations of a Japanese empire. At the same time, it became increasingly difficult to express dissenting opinions, as the Japanese government became more coercive and tightened the regulation of the various religious communities in the country.Footnote ⁷⁶ When the Sino-Japanese conflict escalated and the Japanese invasion of China started in July 1937, the NCC of Japan released a statement in English declaring its full support of Japanese Christianity for ‘the spiritual awakening of the nation’ and the ‘constant desire to secure the stability and prosperity of the Far East’,Footnote ⁷⁷ following official Japanese declarations that proclaimed a Japanese-dominated pan-Asian ‘New Order’ in (East) Asia.Footnote ⁷⁸ In an ‘Open Letter to Christian Brethren throughout the World’, which was signed by 45 prominent Japanese Christians, the signatories reiterated the official position of the Japanese government, which asserted that the Japanese attack on China was an act of self-defence.Footnote ⁷⁹

Outside of Japan, in the arena of Protestant internationalist exchange, the Japanese Christians’ position was contested. At the YMCA world conference in Mysore, India, in May 1937, the Sino-Japanese conflict pervaded the atmosphere of the meeting. Following the argument that Indian internationalists tended to emphasize throughout the 1930s, most of the participants agreed that Japanese imperialism in East Asia was no different from British rule in South Asia.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Indian support of and solidarity with China among Protestant internationalists reflected shifting trends in inter-Asian relations and pan-Asian visions in the 1920s and 1930s. While Japan had previously been regarded as a role model and beacon of Asian modernism in the early twentieth century—particularly following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905—in British India, public and intellectual opinion about Japan gradually changed as Japanese imperialism in East Asia became more aggressive.Footnote ⁸¹ Alternatively, pan-Asian visions were reinterpreted and focused more on the relationship and solidarity between India and China.Footnote ⁸²

The Sino-Japanese conflict had a profound impact on T. Z. Koo. The fighting between Japanese and Chinese forces during the January 28 Incident in early 1932 had left Koo’s childhood home in Shanghai in ruins and contributed to a partial disillusionment about the efficacy of Christianity in achieving peace.Footnote ⁸³ Nevertheless, his confidence in the capacity of international Christian fellowship was not completely broken. Koo was a strong advocate of the indigenization of Christianity in Asia. In China, he pushed for hybrid conceptions of Christianity that were receptive to Confucian and Buddhist traditions. While working closely with Western missionaries and Christian internationalists, he was also committed to the idea of devolution and the slow withdrawal of Western missionaries from China and Asia.Footnote ⁸⁴ Building on his work for the WSCF on Asian and Pacific conferences, he continued to work for inter-Asian and Sino-Japanese exchange. In 1934, he discussed with Saito Soichi, general secretary of the Japanese YMCA, the possibility of convening a series of Sino-Japanese conferences of Christian leaders in North, East, and South China. While the official topics were supposed to focus on contemporary life in Japan and China and the place, function, and message of Christianity in both countries, on an informal level the programme was to ‘center round the topic of Sino-Japanese difficulties’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Protestant internationalist diplomacy, however, was significantly incapacitated by the conflict. This was evidenced in December 1938, when the IMC convened its next world missionary conference in the Indian city of Tambaram. The conference featured a who’s who of Protestant internationalism with an even stronger representation from non-Western and especially Asian countries than at the meeting in Jerusalem ten years earlier.Footnote ⁸⁶ The conference was attended by over 470 delegates from 70 countries, including T. Z. Koo, Augustine Ralla Ram, and Kagawa Toyohiko, as well as numerous other influential Asian Christian leaders and internationalists such as P. C. Hsu, T. C. Chao, B. L. Rallia Ram, Rajah B. Manikam, Ebizawa Akira, and Saito Soichi. The ongoing war in China weighed heavily on the shoulders of the delegates.Footnote ⁸⁷ A British participant remarked that the Chinese delegates in Tambaram seemed rather ‘reserved’, whereas the Japanese were described as ‘isolated’.Footnote ⁸⁸ For an Indian observer, P. D. Devanandan, the Japanese ‘were restrained and at times, embarrassingly quiet’,Footnote ⁸⁹ whereas he felt that the Chinese contributed most to the conference. As M. S. Bates, an American missionary and professor at the University of Nanjing, noted, the Japanese participants were under considerable pressure not to anger the Japanese government with their performance in Madras. Interestingly, it was the Chinese delegation that suggested refraining from political debates between Japanese and Chinese delegates at the conference.Footnote ⁹⁰ Augustine Ralla Ram, too, was impressed by the ‘Christian dignity and forbearance with which the Chinese delegation conducted itself inspite [sic] of the terrible aggression which Japan [was] carrying on against it’.Footnote ⁹¹

The tense situation in Madras can be seen in the performances of both Kagawa Toyohiko and T. Z. Koo. Kagawa, then probably at the peak of his prominence in the Protestant internationalist scene, delivered a speech on the ‘Message of the Cross’.Footnote ⁹² The speech refrained from touching on any current political issues but emphasized Christ’s suffering. As with other Japanese Christians, Kagawa found himself in a delicate position. His stance on Japanese imperialism and militarism has been deemed ambivalent in newer research.Footnote ⁹³ For throughout the 1930s, Kagawa maintained a pacifist stance that drew much suspicion from the Japanese government. At the same time, while he usually refrained from the more jingoistic language used by more vocal Japanese Christian nationalists such as Ebizawa, he often showed at least a formal endorsement of Japanese expansion that cannot be explained by government pressure alone. During the mid- and late 1930s, Kagawa actively supported and collaborated in the agricultural colonization efforts of Japanese Christians in occupied Manchuria, guided by a combination of patriotic sentiments of imperial state-building and romantic and spiritual visions of Christian settlement in a ‘promised’ and ‘uninhabited’ land.Footnote ⁹⁴ While Kagawa Toyohiko’s speech refrained from touching on any sensitive points, his presence at the world missionary conference in Tambaram still left an impact. His image as the ‘Japanese Gandhi’, however, was somewhat tarnished in the aftermath of the conference. Kagawa did not return to Japan immediately but instead used the opportunity to visit the actual (Mohandas K.) Gandhi.Footnote ⁹⁵ During their conversation, Gandhi brought up the Sino-Japanese War. While Kagawa responded cryptically that his views made him ‘rather a heretic in Japan’, he refrained from further elaborating his position but instead turned the question on Gandhi, inquiring what the Mahatma would do in his place. Gandhi insisted on Kagawa taking a public stance against the war, despite the Japanese activist being advised by other Japanese to keep quiet.Footnote ⁹⁶

In contrast to Kagawa, T. Z. Koo addressed the Sino-Japanese conflict head on in Tambaram, talking about ‘The Church and the International Order’. In his speech, Koo, identified a conflict between ‘two concepts of political development […], namely, nationalism and internationalism’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Directly addressing the atrocities perpetrated by Japanese forces during the ongoing war, and specifically the Massacre of Nanjing in December 1937, Koo reflected on how difficult it was for him to maintain a feeling of Christian fellowship, noting that ‘a sense of strain bears down heavily upon my Christianity when I face a Japanese’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Nevertheless, Koo’s speech concluded on a conciliatory note, leaving open a window for redemption and forgiveness. As was the case with other Chinese Christians of the time, Koo was caught in a ‘conflict between his Christian convictions and sympathy for anti-Japanese patriotism’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Chinese intellectuals operating within the Protestant internationalist milieu had cultivated a strong sense of Christian pacifism that drew from both Christian and Confucian ideas. However, their hopes for a Christianity-driven international code of conduct were severely challenged as Japanese imperial aspirations accelerated and escalated in the 1930s. Most internationalists like T. Z. Koo eventually compromised their principled pacifism to support armed resistance to at least some degree.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

By the late 1930s, Protestant internationalist diplomacy in Asia was facing a critical juncture. It had lost much of its potential for anti-imperialist solidarity. While some found ways to downplay and/or justify Japanese (and other) imperialist advances, to others in the Protestant internationalist milieu the conflict had reached a boiling point. In September 1939, Ebizawa Akira published an article that employed a strong anti-colonialist, anti-Western, and occidentalistFootnote ¹⁰¹ rhetoric to bemoan the ‘pitiful semi-colonial existence’ that the ‘materialistic West’ had imposed on the nations of East Asia—with the exception of Japan. In the article, Ebizawa placed Christianity at the service of Japanese expansion in the region: the Japanese people had ‘been thrust spontaneously into the leadership of East Asia’ as ‘a trust from the Creator God’.Footnote ¹⁰² For the IMC’s William Paton the remarks from Ebizawa were ‘appalling stuff’ and Japan’s behaviour towards China unacceptable, and he noted that Japanese Christians apparently had not learnt any lessons from the Tambaram conference.Footnote ¹⁰³ Nevertheless, Christian diplomacy demonstrated a remarkable resilience and persisted, even as the outbreak of the Second World War further escalated the conflict lines and brought the Far Eastern Crisis into an even more global framework. A final Protestant internationalist attempt to salvage Japanese-American relations was made in 1941, just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The following section will focus on two significant Protestant internationalist delegations—one from Japan (including Kagawa) to the United States shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and one from the United States to Japan that took place shortly after the Japanese surrender in 1945. These examples show how Christian internationalists reacted to the effects of global and local war and highlight both the resilience and the reach of Protestant internationalist diplomacy. As the war situation brought tighter governmental supervision and more restrictions for international exchange, the entanglements and influence of Protestant internationalists beyond the purely religious milieu became more visible, extending well into official diplomacy and national governments.

The Second World War: Resilience and reconciliation

In early 1941, the Japanese NCC approached the American Federal Council of Churches with a proposal for a delegation of Japanese Christians to undertake a tour of the United States. The NCC gave assurances that recent developments in Japan had not altered the desire of Japanese Christians to keep an ‘intimate fellowship with the Church in the United States and throughout the world’ and that the NCC was ‘unanimous in feeling that the Christians of both nations should leave no stone unturned in an effort to relieve the present tension and discover some solution for the problems which [were] alienating the two nations’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The proposal was accepted and in early April the Japanese delegation set out for a three-month tour. The original main purpose of the delegation—‘to strive for a betterment of Japanese-American relations’—expanded during the preparations to encompass questions pertaining to the future of the Japanese church and the role of Western missions in Japan.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The amendments were a response to concerns and uncertainties in the United States that emerged after the Japanese government introduced the Religious Organizations Law in 1940. The legislation granted the state more control over religious organizations. It restricted the inflow of foreign funding, prompted the withdrawal of Western missionaries, and brought the forced reorganization of the various Christian denominational bodies in the establishment of a United Church of Japan (Nippon Kirisuto Kyodan), which eventually also replaced the NCC.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The liberal Protestant establishment in the United States had high hopes for the Japanese visit, although some were more sceptical. The IMC’s A. L. Warnshuis remarked that the Japanese plans were ‘based upon the persistent, naïve idea that if Americans only “understood” Japan’s real purpose and plans there would be no opposition’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless, Warnshuis eagerly anticipated the visit and assisted in overcoming the bureaucratic hurdles the delegation faced. He provided an affidavit to the American authorities to facilitate the issuance of a visa for Kagawa Toyohiko, assuring the State Department that Kagawa and the delegation ‘would not discuss political or military matters in public, nor [engage in] any attempts at propaganda for Japan’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To the organizers it was clear that the Japanese delegation would be incomplete without Kagawa and his participation was made a priority.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In Japan, too, the authorities had to be convinced by Japanese sympathizers of Kagawa in the state bureaucracy to approve his participation in the delegation. Kagawa, whose internationalist activities and connections made him suspicious in the eyes of the Japanese government, had been arrested in August 1940—ironically, not primarily due to his own cautious pacifist statements, but rather to their dissemination abroadFootnote ¹¹⁰—and was since his release under constant surveillance by the authorities. Eventually, he was permitted to travel—on the condition that he refrain from engaging in any political activities.Footnote ¹¹¹

The Japanese delegation, comprising Kagawa, Abe Yoshimune Abe, Kozaki Michio, Matsuyama Tsunejiro, Saito Soichi, and the only female delegate, Kawai Michi,Footnote ¹¹² and accompanied by the American missionary in Japan William Axling, held a number of conferences, including major ones in Riverside, Chicago, and Atlantic City.Footnote ¹¹³ The conferences were small and confidential in nature and attended by church and missionary leaders. It was decided to not keep and release official minutes of the meetings and the delegates were regularly reminded that ‘at all times there shall be no public speaking or questioning on political or diplomatic subjects, nor shall these subjects be discussed with press representatives’.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The visit can be considered a partial success for the Japanese delegation, particularly in terms of public relations. While it—unsurprisingly—could not prevent the eventual escalation in the Pacific, the visit proved effective in portraying the recent religious policy of the Japanese government, and in particular the forced church union, as an expression of the liberal Protestant internationalist agenda of indigenization, self-support, and financial autonomy of non-Western churches, rather than as hyper-nationalist and authoritarian measures.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As one observer noted, ‘U.S. churchmen left Riverside with a real feeling that the Nippon Kirisuto Kyodan, being as indigenous as Fujiyama, might make Japan more Christian than foreign missions ever succeeded in doing’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Politically, the delegation’s visit did not achieve much. Prior to his return to Japan, Kagawa Toyohiko sent a letter and a gift to the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nothing came of it. Upon his return to Japan, Kagawa attempted to utilize his Christian internationalist networks to reach out to American officials and other political and church leaders back in the United States, primarily through his friend, the prominent missionary E. Stanley Jones, who was a close adviser to Roosevelt.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Jones was able to secure an audience with the president in early December 1941; however, just a few days later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, marking the beginning of the war in the Pacific. The Second World War and its consequences in the Pacific theatre significantly impeded Protestant internationalist exchange, but could not halt it completely. Kagawa undertook individual trips to India in 1942 and (occupied) China in 1944.

In late 1944 and early 1945, Augustine Ralla Ram was part of an Indian Mission of Fellowship invited by the Presbyterian Church to visit the United States. Ralla Ram had intensified his ties to the United States during the ongoing war, when many American airmen were stationed in Ralla Ram’s hometown of Allahabad and Ralla Ram was part of an ‘East-West Association’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In the run-up to the Mission of Fellowship, the British-Indian authorities had reservations about issuing Ralla a visa for the United States. Ralla Ram was known to the authorities for his ‘anti-imperialist views and his pro-[Indian-National-]Congress sympathies’,Footnote ¹¹⁹ not least since his subversive activities during the Fellowship of Friendship to Great Britain 12 years earlier. As Ralla Ram told John R. Mott in 1941, he had a vision of a ‘[post-war] world order in which nations together will establish a brotherhood in which there will be no suggestions of a governing nation and a subject nation’.Footnote ¹²⁰ However, John B. Weir, secretary of the India Council of the American Presbyterian Church, assured the British-Indian authorities that Ralla Ram had been advised to refrain from political activities while in the United States and that he had ‘under pressure from [the India Council] accepted this special appointment as entirely a religious mission’ and would ‘observe scrupulously the terms of [the] understanding’.Footnote ¹²¹ Like a decade earlier in Great Britain, however, Ralla Ram hardly felt bound to these instructions once he was in the United States. The political future of India was a recurring topic in his talks, and Ralla Ram’s American audiences were indeed ‘impressed with his capacity to interpret the significance of Christian impact upon the problem of Indian independence’.Footnote ¹²² Unlike in Great Britain, there was not much initiative from the delegation’s organizers to contain Ralla Ram’s nationalist expressions. The Indian struggle for political freedom—often compared with the United States’ own road to independence—had many sympathizers in the United States, among both the general audience and the missionary and internationalist milieu.Footnote ¹²³

Similarly to Kagawa, Ralla Ram sought to make his case heard through official diplomatic channels, too. He planned to meet Edward Wood, the first Earl of Halifax, former viceroy of India (1926–1931) and now British ambassador in the United States, during his stay in the country. Ralla Ram had previously met Wood in 1932, when he was part of the Mission of Fellowship. He hoped to host a public event that would have Wood as well as the prominent Indian diplomat Girija Shankar Bajpai in attendance. Eventually, Ralla Ram’s plans resulted in ‘only’ having an interview with the ambassador. In his talk with Wood, the Indian Christian assured him that India did not seek ‘rabid nationalism and isolationism but brotherhood and fellowship of nations’ and was hoping for ‘a special British and Indian alliance in a Brotherhood of Nationals with all empire ideologies eliminated’.Footnote ¹²⁴ As reported by Ralla Ram, Wood expressed sympathy with the Indian nationalist’s concerns but could not commit himself more concretely.Footnote ¹²⁵

In April 1945, while touring the United States, Ralla Ram received a letter from his WSCF colleague Helen Morton who had been surprised by the sudden appearance of T. Z. Koo in the United States. Morton jokingly speculated that Koo might have asked Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek himself for speedy transportation to the United States.Footnote ¹²⁶ In fact, this was not too far from the truth. In late 1941, Koo had intended to travel to the United States, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he was stranded first in Hong Kong and later in Shanghai. He was prevented from travelling between 1942 and 1944, but eventually managed to reach the (unoccupied) interior of China and Chongqing, where the Republic of China had its provisional capital during the war.Footnote ¹²⁷ In 1945, Koo was selected as an adviser to the Chinese delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization, which convened between April and June in San Francisco. Already by the 1930s, Koo had received (and declined) offers to work with the Kuomintang authorities, for example as a secretary for Kai-Shek or on the staff of the social-reformist New Life Movement.Footnote ¹²⁸

Koo and Augustine received much positive attention in the United States. Koo, who in his capacity as a WSCF official visited various conferences and college campuses after the United Nations Conference, was lauded as ‘a world citizen’ who would ‘interpret […] the Christian message with the practical directness of the West, the wealth of Oriental insight, [and] the outlook of world statesmanship’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Ralla Ram was conferred with an honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity from the College of Wooster in Ohio.Footnote ¹³⁰ The positive reception must have left an impression on him. In April, he approached his colleagues in the United States, informing them that he had felt a ‘divine call’ to leave the Indian Student Christian Movement and pursue a new assignment ‘which [would] keep him shuttling between the Orient and Occident […] as an ambassador of the Christian enterprise’,Footnote ¹³¹ dividing his time between the United States and India.Footnote ¹³²

Only a couple of months later, still in the United States, Ralla Ram had another ‘vision’. On 15 August 1945, the Japanese emperor Hirohito had announced Japan’s surrender, thereby bringing the war in the Pacific to a conclusion. During the war, Ralla Ram had continued to criticize the Japanese advances in East Asia, frequently invoking Japanese imperialism as a rhetorical means to critique British colonial rule in India. He had urged ‘treat[ing] all empire ideologies as a menace to the peace of the world’, seeing not much difference between allegedly ‘benign’ empires such as the British and the Axis powers.Footnote ¹³³ Now that the war had abruptly ended, Ralla Ram, as he told his friends in the United States, was overcome by an urgency to travel to Japan and take a first step towards reconciliation with his ‘Japanese brothers’. The idea was met with approval by his American WSCF and missionary contacts, who considered it ‘a God-given opportunity to take first steps toward Christian reconciliation’.Footnote ¹³⁴ In the end, however, due in part to Ralla Ram’s own travel schedule, it did not materialize and it was not Ralla Ram, who travelled to post-war Japan in an ‘official’ capacity as a Christian diplomat, but an American delegation.

Shortly after the Japanese declaration of surrender, the American secretaries of the IMC again took up the matter of sending a Christian delegation to Japan.Footnote ¹³⁵ American church and missionary leaders were encouraged by a speech delivered by Toda Tsunetaro, the head of the Cultural Department of the All Japan Religious Association. In a radio broadcast, Toda had welcomed an American Christian deputation to Japan.Footnote ¹³⁶ The proposal was further discussed by the so-called Riverside Fellowship which had formed in the aftermath of the 1941 Japanese delegation to the United States. Its members approached George Atcheson, who was serving as a political adviser to General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers during the American occupation of Japan, as well as Russell Durgin, a former YMCA secretary in Japan and now part of Atcheson’s staff.Footnote ¹³⁷ The Riverside Fellowship was even able to obtain a letter of endorsement from President Harry S. Truman in support of the plan.Footnote ¹³⁸ Eventually, General MacArthur granted his approval, and the delegation became the first American civilian, non-military delegation to visit post-war Japan. Indeed, MacArthur was fully supportive of the plans as he was ‘convinced—and urgently convinced—that a glorious opportunity at the moment present[ed] itself for the Christian missionary enterprise in Japan’.Footnote ¹³⁹ MacArthur’s support for the delegation was only one of numerous initiatives meant to encourage the Christianization of Japan that the general supported and himself initiated during the American occupation of the country.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ For IMC chairman James C. Baker, MacArthur was ‘a gift of God to Japan and the world’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

A arrangements committee selected the delegation, which consisted of four American high-profile church and missionary leaders, representing the IMC, the WCC, the (American) Federal Council of Churches, as well as the Foreign Missions Conference of North America. Earlier plans to include British and Chinese members were abandoned in order to facilitate a timely visit. The delegation departed in October and travelled through Japan on a tight itinerary, culminating in an audience with the Japanese emperor.Footnote ¹⁴² Some members of the delegation additionally undertook a visit to Korea. Initially, the committee had decided against a Korea visit, as it considered it politically too sensitive. However, it was General MacArthur and John R. Hodge, commanding general of the United States Army Forces in Korea, who urged the delegation to include Korea in their itinerary.Footnote ¹⁴³

The delegation and its reception back in the United States provided an opportunity to re-evaluate the stance and role of Kagawa Toyohiko during the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Despite his ostensible support of Japanese imperialism and its war campaigns, Kagawa himself had endured much hardship during the war. As the delegates reported, Kagawa was in a state of poor health when they met him.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ While most parts of the Protestant internationalist milieu still supported Kagawa, the war had left a stain on his reputation. After 1945, there were rumours in the United States that his 1941 visit had been orchestrated by the Japanese government and that Kagawa had travelled to the United States as a spy.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Others countered that while Kagawa undoubtedly had supported the war effort, so had almost all other Japanese Christians. Kagawa’s support, however, had been comparatively cautious and since the end of the war, he was ‘on the side of the angels’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Kagawa eventually returned to the United States in 1950, where he still had many friends and supporters and was warmly welcomed.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Kagawa’s swift rehabilitation was part of a broader reintegration of defeated Japan into the post-war order which was facilitated by significant transformations in Asia, by ‘anti-colonial, nationalist and pan-Asian movements, the demise of European empires, the Chinese Communist Revolution and the onset of the Cold War’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Epilogue: Protestant internationalism and the early Cold War

With the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the framework defining Christian internationalist fault lines changed. Communism and one’s positioning in the Cold War slowly became the pivotal ideological factors that structured many post-Second World War debates in Protestant internationalism.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Illustrative of this are the circumstances surrounding the East Asia Christian Conference held by the WCC in December 1949. The conference made international headlines because it was heavily attacked by the American Christian fundamentalist and evangelical Carl McIntire.Footnote ¹⁵¹ McIntire was a vocal opponent of the theologically liberal WCC, and in Bangkok, he targeted mainly the Chinese T. C. (Tzu-ch’en) Chao, dean of Yenching University and one of the six presidents of the WCC, whom he accused of being a communist.Footnote ¹⁵²

In 1945—a few months before the Japanese surrender—Augustine Ralla Ram had prognosticated in his message to Lord Halifax that Japanese imperialism would soon become a thing of the past, and he forecasted that India and China would take up future leadership in Asia.Footnote ¹⁵³ After the Second World War, Ralla Ram worked on Indo-Chinese relations. In 1947, he was part of a small Indian Christian Mission of Fellowship to China. However, border disputes between China and India, which sprung up shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, complicated the evolving relations between the two now-independent Asian powers.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The victory of the communists in the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the PRC affected not only global and Asian politics in general, but Protestant internationalist exchanges in particular.

In summer 1955, the National Christian Council of India approached the Government of India and asked whether they would favour sending a ‘Mission of Fellowship’ to China, and whether the government would render assistance in approaching the Chinese authorities. While the Indian officials expressed their general support for the exchange between India and China, they refrained from officially sponsoring or encouraging the delegation. As Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself noted, at best the only support they could render might be an informal exchange with the Chinese ambassador in Delhi.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The Indian government was reluctant to take any action that might antagonize their Chinese counterparts. A source of concern for the Indian officials was the NCCI’s affiliation with the Anglo-American missionary movement. In contrast to its predecessor, the nationalist Kuomintang government, the new regime of the PRC was opposed to any form of foreign influence and, in particular, targeted Western Christian missionaries after 1949. In 1954, the PRC established the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM; advocating the principles of self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation) as the official supervisory body of Chinese Protestantism.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ As observed in 1956 in Tian Feng, the mouthpiece of the TSPM, by the 1950s ‘missionary work [was] regarded only as one of the supplementary ways for putting current American world policy into practice’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Referring to India’s own difficult relationship with Pakistan, Indian officials acknowledged the ‘Chinese sense of insecurity towards these seemingly harmless tentacles of the west’,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ as they confirmed their intention to refrain from any involvement in the delegation. While in 1945 the British-Indian government’s reservations regarding Ralla Ram’s trip to the United States had been based on the latter’s anti-imperialist stance, it was the Indian Christians’ ties to the ‘imperialist’ Western missionary movement that made the government of the post-colonial, secular Republic of India wary of an official sponsorship of a Christian delegation to China.

Eventually, it was only Rajah B. Manikam, joint secretary for East Asia of the IMC and the WCC, who in early 1956 travelled from India to China at the invitation of the Union Theological in Nanjing and Beijing. Manikam met with Chinese church leaders as well as Prime Minister Zhou Enlai to whom Manikam suggested sending a delegation of Chinese Christians to visit India in return. Zhou Enlai and the church leaders welcomed the invitation from India.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ However, they had a problem with the fact that the invitation was backed by the WCC and the IMC—organizations they now equated with ‘ecclesiastical colonialism’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Ironically, considering the controversies around the Bangkok conference a few years earlier, the main point of the Chinese criticism directed at the WCC was the latter’s alleged anti-communist stance.