“Are not religion and politics the same thing?”

Abstract

The common thread tying together the three books under review is that of Protestant missionaries in Asia. In his chronological history Alwyn Austin, a Canadian professional writer born in Asia of missionary parents, covers both Protestant and Catholic Canadian missionaries in China between 1888 and 1959. Kenton Clymer, a historian at the University of Texas, El Paso, deals with cultural aspects of U.S. Protestant missionaries in the Philippines from 1898 to 1916. Brian Taylor, a missionary priest who worked in Borneo in the 1960s as a schoolteacher, has written a straightforward chronicle of a particular Protestant denomination in what used to be known as British Borneo. However, because Taylor's account is not a history and “few conclusions are drawn” (preface), some of the remarks made in this review may not apply with equal force to Taylor's book.