Sarah Ruble is riding the crest of a wave of interest in the scholarly study of missions, thus joining a larger community of scholars, like Dana Robert, who are revisiting a subject that has often been caricatured and maligned. Ruble concentrates on American Protestant missions after World War II. She argues that the post-war Protestant missionary enterprise is best understood in light of the emergence of America as a world power, which had a formidable and formative impact on the vision, strategy, and work of missionaries. Over time, however, the declining fortunes and loss of luster of America caused mission agencies and missionaries to distance themselves from America and to criticize America's role in the world. Nevertheless, Protestant missions and missionaries continued to advocate certain Wilsonian values, as Ruble terms it, such as the absolute good of freedom and democracy, even as they criticized how America as a nation imposed those values on the world. In so doing they continued to promulgate a kind of American exceptionalism, assuming that they knew what was best for the rest of the world. Ruble identifies this as the “American paradox.”

Ruble focuses her research on the “public conversation” about missions and missionaries from three perspectives—mainline, evangelical, and anthropological. Her sources include such popular publications as the Christian Century and Christianity Today, which provide the broadest perspective; but they also include denominational publications and individual church records (she selects a United Methodist Church and a Free Methodist Church as case studies, as well as select publications and records of those denominations). In addition, she traces the conversations and debates that some anthropologists conducted in their journals about American missionaries. Finally, she uses three popular novels about the work of American missionaries to address the role of gender. In each case she identifies a clear change of perspective that occurred over time but suggests that the American paradox nevertheless continued: Americans—including its missionaries—honored freedom, national autonomy, and human rights, but they also assumed they knew best how that should be worked out in the world.

Her research on Protestant mainline missions demonstrates that in the years following World War II Protestant leaders were poised to provide leadership for the world, largely because they believed, as custodians of American cultural values, that they could establish the sturdiest foundation upon which to build a new world order. Their perspective began to change in the 1960s when the Cold War turned American foreign policy into a single-minded fight against communism. The agenda of missions changed, becoming a struggle against oppression. Mainline Protestants began to distinguish between the church's work and the nation's work, which catapulted the mainline into a series of conflicts over the role of American missions in the world.

Evangelicalism emerged after the war as a movement that hoped to exercise greater influence on the culture. At first these neo-evangelicals supported American foreign policy with little reservation, but over time they, too, began to distance themselves from certain aspects of American foreign policy and the American way of life. They still wanted to spread the gospel around the world. But their success in that endeavor forced them to reckon with an increasingly indigenized global Christian movement. Important conferences like Lausanne and Urbana introduced them to new voices from the global church that confronted traditional cultural assumptions about America.

Ruble's chapter on anthropologists changes the angle of vision considerably. Early on American anthropologists displayed antipathy toward American missions and missionaries, and for two reasons: first, because the missionary message was sectarian; and second, because missionary work seemed too cozy with American global interests. But the scientific standards of the discipline persuaded scholars to question their assumptions, which led them to conduct studies of missionaries in the field. The results thawed the relationship, opening the way for representatives of the two groups to make common cause in areas such as human rights.

Ruble devotes a chapter to the role that gender played in missions during the same period. Two popular novels—At Play in the Fields of the Lord and The Testament—serve as her primary sources. She argues that, no matter how much the mission enterprise changed, the conflation of masculinity and authority—what she calls “hegemonic masculinity”—prevailed, however critical the novels were of the abuse of American power abroad. Even The Poisonwood Bible, as critical as any novel could be of both missionaries and American foreign policy, reinforces the assumption that Americans, including popular authors and elite academics, know what is best for the world.

At times Ruble seems to stretch her thesis. It is hard to imagine how cultural location and national identity would not affect one's view of the world. The people in her study—mainline Christians, evangelicals, anthropologists, and novelists—are in fact all Americans and have thus been shaped by American history and American values, though in very different ways. For that matter, so have academics who write books on the subject, thus exhibiting their own form of American exceptionalism. It is possible to criticize America and still demonstrate an underlying confidence that America is still the last best hope for the world.

But times are changing, as Ruble explores, however (and too) briefly, in her chapter on evangelicals. The globalization and indigenization of the Christian movement is changing the nature of the “conversation,” as Ruble calls it. America might still deploy thousands of missionaries around the world, but majority-world countries like India and South Korea are catching up. The Lausanne and Urbana conferences keep convening, and every time they do a larger cadre of people and churches from other parts of the world play a more visible and vocal role.