Religion: Report from the East

If the G.I. in Europe often misrepresented his country through bad behavior, he was a brilliantly successful ambassador of good will in the East. He also did more “softening up” for Christianity than any number of missionaries.

This is the report brought back from a seven-month, 36,000-mile swing around the Near and Far East by two top U.S. Jesuits: Missionary-Photographer Father Bernard Hubbard (“The Glacier Priest”) and Father Calvert Alexander, onetime reporter for the St. Louis Star-Times and now editor of the monthly Jesuit Missions.

The two priests found Christianity making great headway in Japan, largely because of G.I.-Japanese postwar friendliness, plus General MacArthur’s Christianization campaign (“You can’t have democracy without Christianity”). Only in China did they find hostility to the U.S. in general. This, they felt, was not so much the result of Communist activity as the natural resentment of the Chinese at being dependent on the U.S.

Said Father Alexander: “Your grandchildren may see the center of power in the world go around to the East. If we give its people the best of our Christian tradition, and not the combination of Christianity and 19th Century politics which they have for the most part been handed, the Orient may become a great democratic power. The Orient needs a democracy whose rights are protected by religion against the likelihood of degenerating into a dictatorship. The opportunity for Christian missions there is seven or eight times—in some places 100 times—what it was before the war.”