Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1888-1955

G.A. Rawlyk is a history professor at Queen’s University and the
author of Champions of the Truth: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and the
Maritime Baptists.

Saving China is a marvelous book. Not only is itlucidly and cogently written but itis groundbreaking in its scholarship. Austin has rescued from historical oblivion scores of Canadian missionaries who served in China in the 1888-1955 period. But he has done more than this. By underscoring the symbiotic relationship existing between Canadian churches and their missionaries to China, Austin has introduced a significant corrective to Canadian religious historiography. He has convincingly shown that the evangelical tradition, for example, did not disintegrate because of the onslaught of Darwin, critical biblical scholarship, so-called modernity, and the rise of comparative religion as a popular and scholarly area of study. Rather, this evangelical tradition, despite the social gospel, continued in the twentieth century to shape significantly the contours of Canadian Protestantism.

There are some unforgettable characters described by Austin. There is the remarkable Presbyterian the Reverend Jonathan Goforth who, because of a religious revival he helped coax into existence, baptized thousands of Chinese converts “five hundred at a time, with firehoses” (p. 121). There is also Suzie Carson Rijnhart, founder of the Disciples of Christ mission to Tibet, who lost her husband and son in Tibet, and thus “alone with God and a revolver” she wandered back to an isolated China inland mission station at Tachienlu.

Austin has superbly blended character and circumstance to produce what I regard as one of the most important books written in recent years about Canadian religious history.