The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism

The legacy of the modern missionary movement has been studied from many angles, but one angle that has yet to be adequately explored is what this religious vocation means to the people who are passengers to their parents’ divine callings and religious fervor: “missionary kids.” Historian Fletcher’s (Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century) study is based on surveys and interviews of missionary kids as well as her own experience growing up as a Southern Baptist missionary kid in a Kenyan boarding school. Fletcher engages readers in a poignant, disturbing, and complex conversation about the impacts that the history, institutions, theologies, and culture of white American evangelicalism have had on the children standing in the shadows of those religious apparatuses and narratives. A reflective reckoning with the culture of American evangelicalism as it relates to the children left on the margins of its global outreach.