Author explains the difficult path some children of white evangelical missionaries must navigate

LOUISVILLE — Dr. Holly Berkley Fletcher grew up as a white American child in Kenya — in her words, “a doubting, struggling fearful Christian with bold, unwavering missionary parents.” 

“I used to feel I was without a culture, without a true home, that I was a zebra without stripes, to use a traditional African metaphor,” she wrote on her website. “These days, I just embrace the ambiguity. It turns out we’re all oddballs when you get down to it.”

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Fletcher has worked as an academic historian of American history and, for 19 years, as an Africa analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. Her third act is as a writer and essayist, an observer of American religion and of life in general. The author of “The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism” was the most recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” hosted each week by Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Listen to their 66-minte conversation here.

The research for Fletcher’s book included interviews with more than 80 other missionary kids and a survey of 200 others.

“Their experiences varied,” she told Catoe and Doong. “There were people like me who mostly had a happy childhood. Others had abusive situations or were raised in dangerous and traumatic situations. Some were still true believer white evangelicals; others had left Christianity altogether.”

One thing Fletcher picked up from her interviews with others who’d grown up in evangelical missionary settings is “a myth that white evangelicals tell themselves,” she said. “It’s this idea that American Christians are key to the world’s salvation,” that “they see themselves as the default Christianity. There are ideas about indispensability, about how good they are as people.”

Missionary kids “are well-positioned to see through these myths,” she said. “There is more partnership [in mission] than there used to be, but there’s still the idea that American Christians are the ones who get it right and know how to do things and that the Gospel will suffer if they aren’t in charge.”

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Trained as a historian, Fletcher “found it revealing to go back and look at the beginnings of this style of U.S. evangelical missions in the 19^th century.” She noted “a real absurdity and a dichotomy between sending [white evangelical] missionaries to work with people of color, people they considered inferior and heathen, at the same time slavery was happening here and, after slavery,” the Jim Crow era, which included lynchings.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and other practices comprised what Fletcher called “ridiculous justifications for excluding immigrants,” including the idea that “oh no, you have to evangelize in the nation of origin” and “the Bible says ‘go,’ not for people to come” to the United States.

Doong spoke about how mission terms in the PC(USA) have evolved from missionary to mission co-worker to the current-day Global Ecumenical Liaisons. “We’re trying not to sound quite so evangelical,” he said.

Fletcher said mainline denominations “did a lot of mission work alongside more theologically conservative people” during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. “Liberal Christians started to cede that ground in the wake of World War II,” she said. “I’m not a theologian, but I will say there is an inherent arrogance in the idea of a Christian missionary going to another country because you know something they need to know or you have something they need.”

Back in the day, “it was explicit cultural superiority,” she said. Now, “it’s more subtle and implicit.”

“For theologically liberal Christians, you’re conceding up front in your theology that you don’t know everything and there’s a comfort with uncertainty and doubt and thinking things through with dialogue and debate,” she said. “It allowed them to learn a lot more because they arrived on the scene more open-minded.” One of the themes of her book “is not to critique missions per se,” she said. “It’s to critique the American church itself and how little missions have impacted them.”

The author David Hollinger argues in “Protestants Abroad” that early missionaries “of a more liberal mindset were huge educators of American culture on the world and on multiculturalism,” Fletcher said. “With mainline denominations, I think it’s more of a dialogue.”

Doong cited this frequently asked question: If we believe in equal partnerships, shouldn’t we be receiving people from other places?

The U.S. immigration systems has structural barriers that can make that difficult, Fletcher said. “Other countries do send missionaries to the U.S., but they end up ministering to migrant populations,” she said.

There’s now “more awareness of the needs of missionary kids and a lot more support for them,” Fletcher said. In the people she interviewed, “I had hoped to see a shift, but I was dismayed to find this wasn’t the case. They still felt de-prioritized. They still felt this pressure to take care of themselves and not create complications because the calling was so important.”

“A universal experience that came through is the intense grief of leaving the mission field at the end of your childhood and returning to the U.S. to live your adult life,” she said. “There is a wholesale loss of self, and that came out clearly.”

She said she never felt the urge to re-enter the mission field after college. “You would think it would be a cosmopolitan upbringing, but it’s actually insular,” she said. “I think that’s why the grief [over leaving] is so intense, because there is no replicating that experience.”

Fletcher grew up in Kenya but didn’t learn much about it. The nation held its first multi-party election during her senior year in high school. “We did have to do drills as part of a contingency plan in case there were evacuations. That was it,” she said. Her own experience as the child of missionaries was part of “a bizarre world that was very self-assured and self-contained and not terribly open intellectually.”

“It’s a weird upbringing to be sure, and people [who have read the book] say they’re fascinated to learn about a world they didn’t know existed,” she said. “The other thing people have responded to is the missionary kid experience of feeling alienated, like you don’t belong where you are.”

“Most of us figure out ways to create deep bonds with people even if we don’t have much in common on the surface, and to find our people and our family in many different places,” she said.

“That’s a lot for a child or a young person to go through,” Doong said.

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.