Reviews

Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 2. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2005.

A book review.  What follows is a review only of Moffett's sections, totaling 23 pages, on the history of Christianity in Thailand.  The publication of this second volume of Moffett's all but monumental history of Asian Christianity is an important milestone both in the historiography of Christian in Asia generally and in Thailand in particular.  As noted in the brief news item above, Moffett's account of Thai Christianity now becomes its most widely available description.  Students, researchers, and casual readers in Asian church history will use it to understand the history of Christianity in Thailand; and instructors will rely on it when they teach about the Thai portion of the Asian Christian story.  Moffett's second volume will be read by audiences the humble historians of Thai church history can never hope to reach, which makes it an important work in Thai church historiography.

Moffett must be given credit for having done an admirable job so far as including Thailand goes.  Thai church history is widely ignored in the standard world and regional histories of Christianity (see "Thai Church History: A Measure of the Field" in HeRB 11), but Moffett has devoted, as mentioned above, some 23 pages to the Christian story in Thailand.  This compares very favorably with its neighbors: Burma is given only 17 pages and Vietnam just 6.  Even vaunted Korea is treated in 32 pages.  I'm not even quite sure that Christianity in Thailand deserves this level of attention, but it is exciting to see the field gain that attention.

The fact that Moffett's actual description of Thai Christian history is largely inadequate is not by any means his fault—at least not entirely.  I do not know why the second volume was delayed so long; it's publication has been expected for a decade.  The delay in publication, in any event, has created a rather serious problem in term of the book's Thailand sections.  While Moffett's bibliography contains a number of more recent works, in the case of his Thailand material it is clear that he wrote it up years ago and did not follow up on more recent sources.  This means that he presents, in my estimation, an inadequate account of Thai church history based on a knowledge of that history that is some 15 to 20 twenty years out of date.  With just a couple of exceptions, he relied on the old missionary historiography to tell his story; and he can hardly be faulted for that because at the time he evidently did his research that was nearly all that was available.  The fact that volume two was published in with a bibliography that includes more recent books leaves the impression that the material contained therein is up to date.  For Thailand, this is a false impression.

One cannot really fault the author, however, for presenting out dated material in an ostensibly recent publication.  Unless he had made a serious effort to include more recent studies, even today he would have probably relied mostly on the same sources he used twenty years ago.  For one thing, a significant part of what has been published more recently is found only in Thai.  This includes what I feel is a fairly important history of pastoral care that I wrote a decade or so ago, which includes the history of Protestantism in central Thailand (Baptists as well as Presbyterians).  For another thing, there has been very little work done on nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century church history in central Thailand in any language.  The history of the early missionaries, surprisingly, has been almost entirely ignored by Thai historians as well as those in the West.  Still another issue is that most of the work that's been done more recently is either specialist studies or focuses on twentieth-century church history, which history lies beyond the scope of Moffett's second volume.  As can be seen in the Bibliography of Materials Related to Christianity in Thailand found on this website, my work is by far and away the most extensive done on Thai church history; and I have focused almost exclusively on northern Thai church history.

Yet another problem Moffett would face in using more recent sources is that many of them are hard to find in the United States.  Maen Pongudom's pioneer study of missionary attitudes towards Buddhism, which was available when Moffett did his research, is a case in point.  Dr. Maen did his studies in New Zealand, and I'm not sure if a copy of his dissertation can even be found in a public repository in North America.  It remains true today that if a researcher is going to "really" dig into Thai church history he or she has to visit Chiang Mai and the Payap University Archives.  There is so much now that is only available in Thai that a reading knowledge of Thai is also important for the study of twentieth-century Thai church and missions history.

Even so, Moffett did overlook at least one key work in missionary history in Thailand that available to him, namely Donald Lord's better than adequate biography of Dan Beach Bradley (see my review in HeRB 11).  Moffett's rendition of early Thai Protestant history would have benefited greatly by using Lord.  Moffett also includes my short study of missionary in Phet Buri, Towards a Clean Church (1991), in his bibliography, but he does not refer to it in the text.  One wonders if he actually saw the booklet, as his citation for it is incorrect.

The problem Moffett faced in sources is seen even more clearly in his brief descriptions of Catholic history in Thailand.  They are much more brief and limited in large degree to the doctoral thesis of Dr. Surachai Chumsriphan, completed in 1990.  Moffett's skimpy treatment of Catholic history in Thailand reflects the totally inadequate state of our knowledge of that history.  It is to be hoped that at some point the Catholic Church in Thailand will develop a much larger body of historiographical works than exists at present.

Moffett can be faulted, however, for his entirely inadequate grasp of Thai history generally.  His description of the historical background of the Thai churches is, at best, inept.  It is particularly regrettable that he chose to feature Anna Leonowens' work in his introduction to later nineteenth-century Thai history (page 595).  In his description of Thai Christian history, Moffett also makes a few errors that he should have avoided.  For example, he confuses the relationship of the two Presbyterian missions in Siam with the presbyteries found by those missions and suggests that the founding of the North Laos Presbytery resulted in the establishment of the Laos Mission—not true at all (page 603).  More generally, Moffett makes a series of small mistakes that reflect his lack of familiarity with Thai culture, history, and even geography.  He several times refers to central Thailand as "the south" (see. esp. page 356), which is an interesting blooper as it implies a northern Thai perspective.  At another point he seems to confuse two chao luang ("princes") of Chiang Mai, Chao Intanon with Chao Kawilorot (page 596).  One has to expect such mistakes in a work as broad as Moffett's two volumes, but they do detract somewhat from his overall description of Thai church history.

At still other points, Moffett simply does not do a good analytical job.  One glaring example is his description of the Buddhist reaction to Protestant missions in Thailand (pages 598-599).  The sum total of his description is, first, to mention King Mongkut's reforms of Buddhism, which he does not link to the missionaries at all; and, second, to relate an anecdote taken from Khrischak Muang Nua about a young boy's avowal that he was a Thai, not a Christian.  This is all the evidence he cites to make his point that Thai Buddhist national culture "was an almost impermeable wall against the penetration of other religions from foreign cultures."  That generalization is not without truth, but the facts he marshals to back it up are totally inadequate.  Otherwise, in that section on Buddhist reactions he devotes a fair amount of space to the work of Dr. Samuel R. House, which has no bearing on the subject heading of the section at all.

Given the sources he used and his constraints in terms of space, it is difficult however to quibble with Moffett's interpretations of Thai church history.  He does capture a number of key themes, and his critical analysis is adequate generally.  Overall, however, his 23 pages on Thailand are not all that helpful.  It's as if all of the work done over the last twenty years doesn't even exist.  Furthermore, knowledgeable historians of Thailand will have trouble taking Moffett seriously because his general understanding of Thailand and Thai history is seriously flawed.  In sum, while we can be glad that Dr. Moffett has given Thailand a prominence it seldom receives, one still wishes the final product could have been stronger than it is.  It too much resembles the outdated historiography it relied on to tell the story.

David McCullough, John Adams.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

A book review.  John Adams (1735-1826) was a key figure in the American Revolution, one of America's first diplomats, and ended his public life by serving as the second President of the United States (1797-1801).  His son, John Quincy Adams, was also President (1825-1829), and his wife, Abigail, was widely known for her independence of thought and political savvy.  McCullough's biography of Adams has won fulsome and deserved praise for its quality; it is an excellent example of the biographer's art.

John Adams played a large role in one of the most fascinating periods of American history, the long era when Americans transformed themselves from colonials living in 13 separate colonies into the citizens of one independent nation.  That historical movement began well before 1776 and continued well beyond the ratification of the Constitution in 1788.  As both a politician and diplomat, Adams was deeply involved in the life of the emerging republic.  He was a leading figure at the Continental Congress that eventually declared independence.  He served as an American representative to France and to the Netherlands during the Revolution and had a major hand in the peace treaty with Britain that brought the Revolutionary War to its conclusion.  He was America's first ambassador to Great Britain.  He was the first Vice President of the United States and then its second President.  Even in retirement, Adams carried out a wide correspondence with several of the great figures of his nation and day, notably Thomas Jefferson, who was both his friend and political rival.

McCullough captures all of this vividly and leaves his readers feeling that we've met Mr. Adams and his family in a personal way.  He was the bold protagonist of independence who loved his wife deeply and fought a life-long battle with his weight.  He was the President who had an alcoholic for a son.  He was the doting father of John Quincy Adams, one of the brightest figures in American public life in the early decades of the 19th century.  Adams was a plainspoken and plainly clad diplomat in Paris where he discovered a whole new world of sophistication while he served his fledgling nation as representative to the one country that could rescue it from Britain.  By the end of this biography, the reader feels a deep attachment to John Adams, irascible and self-serving as he could sometimes be.  We feel Adams's pain when Abigail died in 1818.  We watch him haltingly begin his professional career as a lawyer and feel his pain when, as President, he became the target of dirty, divisive political knife work.

McCullough writes well.  He is a good storyteller.  He also provides yet another description of events that have been written about almost ad nauseam in a fresh way.  For those who love a good historical read, this book is a treat.

It is difficult to offer much in the way of criticism of John Adams, but at times the author seems more taken with Abigail Adams than with her husbands.  There are long digressions into her writings, opinions, and experiences that McCullough does not tie back into her husband's life directly.  Arguably, the book also devotes more attention to Thomas Jefferson than a biography of John Adams warrants.  Admittedly, along with Adams, Jefferson was one of the dominant figures of the eras of the American Revolution and the early republic.  Admittedly, Adams and Jefferson had a long and fascinatingly complex personal relationship based on both personal friendship and intense political rivalry after the Revolution.  Still, McCullough seems almost as taken with Jefferson as he is with Adams.

From a church history perspective (always the perspective assumed on this website), one might wish McCullough had paid more attention to Adams's personal religious life than he did.  It is clear from the biography that he had a deep religious faith.  He believed that world, national, and personal events happened under the direction of a ruling Providence.  He attended church regularly, as was expected in his day and age; and he must have been an articulate Christian, but we have little sense of that likelihood in this biography.  His religious views are limited to a few pages and incidents, such as when he attended a Catholic mass for the first time (pages 83-84).  From this point of view, a little less on Abigail and on Jefferson and a little more on the role of religion in Adam's life would be good.

This biography, in any event, offers some interesting insights into the early 21st century American and world scene as well.  Political commentators in the United States frequently refer to the nation's bitter political, cultural, and religious divisions between the so-called "reds" (conservatives) and "blues" (liberals).  McCullough makes no references to contemporary events in our time at all, but his description of politics in Adams's time makes it clear that such divisions have been with us since the founding of the republic.  Federalists, of which John Adams was one, wanted a strong federal government and did not want to put too much political control directly into the hands of the people.  They were frequently "anti-French" after the French Revolution.  Republicans, led esp. by Thomas Jefferson, distrusted centralized power and wanted as much power as possible placed in the hands of the people; they were often vocally pro-French and welcomed the French Revolution.  To read McCullough's biography (and other histories of the early republic), the divisions between these two parties were just as bitter and brutal as those of our own day.  Adams and many others lamented the division and feared that it could even portend an early end to the "American experiment" in federal democracy.

I probably should have warned readers that this book review has nothing to do with Thai church history directly or even indirectly.  Although no longer a professional historian, I continue to read history and enjoy good historiographical works such as this.  If I have to justify the matter, I suppose I would also say that it is important for those who are engaged in Christian ministry in all of its forms to know the history of the place where they work.  In Thailand, this means reading the works of Wyatt, Tongchai, and the distressingly small list of other authors writing in the field of Thai history.  But the joy of having one's own website is that I get to write reviews like this even when they aren't relevant to the theme of the website.