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Donald C. Lord, Mo Bradley and Thailand. Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans, 1969.

The professional study of Thai Protestantism began with the work of Donald Lord and his doctoral thesis, which was published in 1964. Subsequent to his dissertation, Lord published two related articles in 1966 and 1967 and then published Mo Bradley and Thailand in 1969 (see the Bibliography ). His work preceded, thus, the pioneering flurry of professional work done on Thai church history in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a decade and more. For that reason alone, this book deserves attention, but it also deserves that attention because of the quality of the work itself in spite of some weakness and problems. Bradley wrote as a professional historian, and all of his work has the marks of the professional. It is a carefully researched, well written, and credible piece of research that places its subject, Dr. Dan Beach Bradley ( Mo Bradley ), in his historical setting both in the United States and in Thailand. Lord's study of Bradley and his relationship to Thailand is important to the study of Thai church history, furthermore, because of the importance of Bradley himself and the era in which he lived and worked. Bradley stands at the head of the short list of key figures in the history of Protestant missions, and he stood at the heart of the pioneer period in Protestant missions. Lord has thus done the study of the church in Thailand an invaluable service by his research into Bradley's life.

It should be understood from the start, however, that Lord's Mo Bradley and Thailand is not a biography of Dan Beach Bradley as such. It is, rather, a study of Bradley's relationship to the people and rulers of Thailand. The book started out as a dissertation, and normally dissertations have to have a line of argument, a thesis, or, at least, a patently academic theme. Straight biographies for the sake of writing a biography are verboten, as it were. Lord pursues a dual academic purpose in Mo Bradley and Thailand, namely: first, to understand Bradley and the missionary movement in Thailand ; and, second, to describe "the impact both had upon Thailand and three of its kings, Nang Klao, Mongkut, and Chulalongkorn." (page 12) His thesis is that Bradley in particular and the Protestant missionaries more generally had an important modernizing impact on Thailand. He, I think, overstates the matter, but

In picking up Mo Bradley and Thailand to do this review, I was pleasantly reminded that it is a surprisingly up to date work in a couple of important ways. As is more and more the case with historical work generally these days, Lord is conscious of the role of women and makes some effort to include their stories in his work. He also anticipates the importance of intellectual history to the study of the past in his emphasis on Bradley's cultural and cognitive heritage to his work. It is especially helpful that he gives special attention to Bradley's motivation, as the nature of missionary motivation is crucial, historically, to understanding their work. It is to be particularly appreciated that Lord accepts the genuineness of Bradley's religious motivations. He does not share in the tendency found among many secular scholars to discount religious motivation as being merely a cover for deeper "real" motivations, usually pecuniary or having to do with status or power.

What we have in Mo Bradley and Thailand, then, is an introduction to the history of Protestant missions in Thailand from the 1830s to the 1870s, and it is not surprising that the book considers a number of important themes in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary and church history. Those themes include the role of Thailand as the gateway to missions in China, the importance of health and the impact of death on the pioneer generation of missionaries, the impact of the ideology of exclusivism on their work, and even more minor themes such as the importance of reading aloud in a semi-literate society such as Thailand. His description of Bradley's American evangelical heritage is apt, and he presents a generally serviceable description of the Thai context of Protestant pioneer missions as well.

One theme in Mo Bradley and Thailand that deserves particular mention is Lord's repeated descriptions of how Bradley slowly adapted himself to Thai culture. Bradley arrived in Bangkok with a firm set of prejudices against Thai culture, which found even the most innocuous of cultural events or characteristics obnoxiously "heathen." Eventually, however, Bradley even attended Buddhist funeral ceremonies, which other missionaries refused to do and criticized him for attending. What is particularly interesting is Lord's description of Bradley's reasoning that funerals were not "really" religious; they were secular (pages 136-137). This is precisely the sort of

Lord devotes considerable attention to Bradley's relationship with other missionaries, both in the two missions he served under—the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the American Missionary Association (AMA)—and with the members of the other two missions then working in Thailand, the Baptists and Presbyterians. Although those relationships were generally good, they erupted into divisions and tensions in two periods. While serving under the ABCFM, Bradley and his close friend, the Rev. Jesse Caswell., became embroiled in a theological dispute with their ABCFM colleagues over Finney's doctrine of perfection, which led to their dismissal from the mission. Later, when he worked for the AMA, Bradley had to deal with contentious colleagues who made his life miserable and brought an end to the AMA work in Bangkok in all but name.

Mo Bradley and Thailand also focuses on Bradley's and the Protestant missionaries' relationship to key figures in the Thai government of their day, and to a degree Lord documents something of what we might call the "politics of modernization" in the Thai state during the Third and Fourth Reigns. He pays, as would be expected, particular attention to Bradley's (and Caswell's) relationship to King Mongkut, and while he may give the Protestant missionaries more credit than they are due for the Westernization of nineteenth-century Thailand, Lord is also aware of Mongkut's unique role in the process of Westernization and modernization. Lord, in particular, goes out of his way to correct the misunderstandings of Mongkut and Thai history fostered in Britain and America by Anna Leonowens largely fictional books about her experiences in Bangkok, later made famous by Margaret Landon's unfortunate book, Anna and the King of Siam.

Lord's Mo Bradley and Thailand is thus a generally useful work, but we should also note that it is by no means perfect. Mo Bradley and Thailand is flawed in a number of ways, although its flaws do not detract from its value for the study of missionary and church history in Thailand. Most importantly, perhaps, Lord chose to use a thematic rather than chronological approach, arguing that Bradley was engaged in so many activities that it makes more sense to discuss each

activity separately. Thus, he has separate chapters on Bradley's medical, printing, and evangelistic work. What is lost is a sense of the development of Bradley's life. People do not live their lives thematically but chronologically, and Lord has to engage in a fair amount of back-and-forth explaining in order to make sense of events. In fact, Bradley's life divided itself into three clear periods—before Thailand, as a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), and as a missionary under the American Missionary Association (AMA)—and using a chronological framework would have worked quite well and would have been easier to write, I suspect. Just as one example of the problems with this thematic approach, we learn on page 104 that in the course of his work in Thailand, Bradley's attitudes towards participating in purely social events mellowed; and Lord refers to an event in 1871, at the end of Bradley's life, to make his point. Yet, the point itself is made in the middle of the book and given no chronological context. We don't observe the logic of this very important change within the overall context of Bradley's life, and because it is not placed in that context Lord mentions it in only three sentences at the end of a paragraph describing Bradley's personality.

Lord is also now and again guilty of failing to keep sufficient critical distance from his subject. The task of the historian is to maintain what we might term "intimate distance" with respect to her or his subject, and Lord sometimes fails in this task. Thus, for example, on page 88 he favorably compares Bradley's medical skills with a supposed cure used by "local Catholic priests," which was to drink liquor and shut their patients off from the sun in a smoke filled room. In this passing reference, Lord manages to convey uncritically the early Protestant missionaries' disdain for Catholics, priests, and liquor without considering the somewhat doubtful wisdom of relying on an English source to describe the activities of French priests. Lord also has a propensity to highlight "quaint" Thai customs that have supposedly survived from Bradley's time down to the present, evidently as a way to emphasize the difficult conditions under which Bradley worked. Lord, unintentionally surely, seems to share some of the old-time missionaries' less than flattering attitudes about "the Thai."

Although Lord has written a book sensitive to intellectual and cultural themes, moreover, he completely overlooks the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment

philosophy of common sense realism on the thinking and behavior of Bradley in particular and the pioneer generation of American missionaries to Thailand in general. While this is not the place for a discussion of the role of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in nineteenth-century American religious history (see "Prelude to Irony," Chapter Three ), Lord's failure to mention it means that he has failed in one important regard to locate Bradley and the other missionaries in their own time. In his defense, it must be said that in the early 1960s, when Lord wrote his dissertation, historians of American religion were only just beginning to recover common sense realism's role in American Protestant history. One of the key works in that recovery, Henry F. May's, The Enlightenment in America, was not published until 1976, more than a full decade after Lord's thesis.

One is also bound to say that while Mo Bradley and Thailand is a study of Bradley's relationship to Thailand, Lord's grasp of Thai history is just adequate. Perhaps most troubling is his claim that Thai culture is largely a static one, which he argues means that historians can read from contemporary Thai society back to the nineteenth century (see page 22). This attitude may help to explain his tendency, mentioned above, to repeatedly argue that numerous "quaint" aspects of Thai society and culture in Bradley's time may be seen in contemporary Thailand today (well, in the 1960s, at any rate). Again, one of the problems facing Bradley was that the sources for the study of Thai history in the 1960s were relatively meager. It is also likely that he was laboring under a static notion of "traditional" societies that has since been discredited.

A few final quibbles. Eerdmans clearly published this book "on the cheap." It is good they published it, but the book deserves at least a few illustrations and its readers deserve a map or two to help them orient everything geographically. Given the thematic arrangement of the book, it would be very useful to have a timeline of key dates and events.

In sum, the strengths of Lord's Mo Bradley and Thailand outweigh the weaknesses, and the book remains one of the key works in the study of Protestant missionary and church history in Thailand. It is not likely that any other author will take up the same story any time soon, and in the meantime Lord's study will remain useful. That is saying a good deal for a historian who had no scholarly body of

knowledge to call upon for supplementing and interpreting most of the material in his study. Lord was very much on his own, and while his efforts did not lead directly to the development of the field of study of Thai church and missionary history, as it stands today, it does contribute substantially to that field of study.

Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History. New Haven, Connecticut : Yale University Press, 2004.

One of the basic premises under which I work as a historian of Protestantism in Thailand is that we cannot understand the present condition of the Thai churches without giving careful consideration to their missionary heritage, which means that a knowledge of American church and religious history is crucial to the overall study of the church in Thailand. Hence this book review. Sarna's American Judaism has received good reviews in the United States and deserves our attention here for two reasons. First, the author provides us with an insightful look into American religious history seen through the lens of a minority faith. Second, he describes how the many disparate, foreign Judaisms that came from Europe and elsewhere to the United States gradually became American Judaism. We learn more, that is, both about the religious and culture milieu of the American missionaries to Thailand, and we are provided with a fascinating case study in religious and cultural accommodation.

Let me start by saying that this book is, in and of itself, a good read and good history. Those who read history for pleasure will tenjoy it. Since I am not a specialist in American ethnic religious history, I am not qualified to judge the book's accuracy as a history of American Judaism, but it has all of the marks of a well-researched, professional, and credible piece of work; and Sarna has been writing about American Jewish history for a long time. He is a "name" in his field. Furthermore, his rendering of American religious history in the period I know best, the nineteenth century, is right on. What is different is the perspective.

Sarna's central theme in American Judaism is that the American religious environment, from colonial times to the present, has offered the Jewish people with both a grand opportunity to be relatively free of the persecution and social isolation they faced elsewhere and a threat to their very existence as a people. In other nations and eras, Jews were forced politically and socially to be Jews. They could only melt

into the general population if they converted to Christianity. In the United States, however, there was no political repression of any religion; it is a free religious market place, and in that pluralistic religious and social environment Jewish immigrants had to reinvent Judaism. At the same time, however, from its inception the United States has been a Protestant nation in every sense of the word but officially. Sarna points out time and again how the Protestant religious context has influenced American Judaism for good and for ill, transforming immigrant Judaism from a "nation" into an indigenous "denomination." While the United States is a secular nation politically, thus, local and state governments still historically enforced laws protecting the Christian Sabbath, laws that worked real economic hardship on observant Jews whose Sabbath is Saturday rather than Sunday. Or, again, Jewish synagogues took on the structure of American Congregationalism in their polity and many of them borrowed various forms of Protestant worship, including the "promiscuous" seating of women with men in the congregation, the use of organs, and mixed male and female choirs.

At the heart of it all, as Sarna makes abundantly clear, was the issue of the very survival of Judaism as a distinct religious faith. Appreciative of their religious freedom, Jewish immigrants still agonized over how best to preserve their Jewishness in the American religious environment. They, at times, fought bitterly among themselves over the best strategies for preserving their faith, and as a consequence American Judaism fragmented into a number of different branches, particularly the Reformed, Conservative, and Orthodox branches. Here, too, Jews replicated the American marketplace religious pluralism that has given birth to hundreds of Protestant denominations and sects, large and small. Even those Jewish immigrants who struggled to preserve their European Jewish heritage unchanged had to contend with the vast difficulties of such things as a dearth of trained rabbis, difficulties in finding kosher meats that were really kosher, and the pressure to work on Saturdays just to make a living. It was far easier to maintain a sense of Jewish identity and piety in the face of European political and legal discrimination against Jews than it was where, as in the United States, there was no such discrimination.

Sarna has written a book that provides fascinating insights into the historical development of American Judaism. His book is sensitive to the American religious

context of Judaism. He focuses not so much on dates as on developments, and he does an excellent job of describing the many permutations European Judaism underwent in America. Sarna does what is now generally expected of all historians in giving attention to the particular experience of women as a part of the larger story. And, he describes the ebb and flow of that story as Judaism in America sometimes flourished and at other times receded somewhat. His seems to be a balanced book without much in the way of overt editorializing.

If we read Sarna's American Judaism from within the context of church history in Thailand one of the most important insights to be gleaned from his text is that Jews in the United States have responded to the particularities of the American social and religious environment in many different ways. He makes it clear that Jewish immigrants had absolutely no choice concerning the accommodation of their faith with their new national context, and he makes it equally clear that Jews in American have fought tooth and nail over how best to respond. This, I think, is a theme waiting to be further developed in the study of Protestantism in Thailand, namely the different ways in which Thai Protestants reinvent the Protestant faith in Thailand. My sense is that those of us who have studied Protestantism in Thailand, including myself, have been too monolithic in our studies—as if there has been one central model or response.

A second insight from Sarna is that the conflict of contending approaches, theologies, and ideologies is an important and "natural" part of the mechanism of accommodation. Sarna does not exactly celebrate the many, multi-variable battles that have taken place among American Jews concerning the best ways to accommodate faith and culture to each other, but he surely does not decry the process either. He takes the whole process out of the realm of "good guys" and "bad guys" and sees all of the contentiousness as a healthy sign of religious vitality. In the Protestant churches of Thailand, there has been less overt contentiousness, apart from that between foreign missionaries, but Thai Protestants do not agree on the key issues of their faith as both Thais and Protestants; and perhaps more attention should be given to the diversity of their responses to the relationship between their faith and their cultures.

While the American Jewish and Thai Protestant experiences are very different, there is some similarity as well. Judaism began as a small, incredibly alien religion when it first arrived in colonial America, and Jews in America long remained a small minority that most Americans considered to be, somehow, "un-American" in the sense that Americans must be Protestant Christians in order to be truly American. To a degree, Thai Protestantism continues to be not only the faith of a tiny minority of Thais but also a foreigner's religion. "Real" Thais are Buddhist. Yet, by the 1950s Judaism had become so much a part of the American religious scene that it was accepted as normal and "good Americans" could be Jewish or Catholic as well as Protestant. One sees some signs in recent decades that Thai Protestantism is being somewhat more accepted as a legitimate faith for Thais; and if the Jewish experience in America is any guide at all, it can be expected that Protestantism (and Catholicism) will be increasingly seen as a "normal" presence on the Thai religious landscape.

Studies like Sarna's American Judaism serve the useful purpose of helping us to stand back a bit and see how the process of religious accommodation impacts other people in other places. In the early twenty-first century, there is no more pressing issue facing peoples of all religions all across the planet than the question of accommodation. In a world in which the only constant seems to be change, people of faith have to accommodate time and again their world to their faith and their faith to the world. Sarna provides us with an important case study in religious and cultural accommodation that reveals something of the complexity of the process and that helps us to understand a little more clearly how that same process is at work among Thai Protestants and Catholics.