Double-Crossed: A Double Disappointment

I was eager to pick up Matthew Avery Sutton's 'Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War', hoping to find an account of reflection and regret, of ethical wrestling and theology. I guess I was a bit overly optimistic if not naive.

The book started out rather interesting touching on some of the controversies of the day in terms of the Church in Germany, American Fundamentalism, and the heretical spectre who repeatedly haunts the pages - Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). Niebuhr's so-called realist ethics affected not only Mainline Christianity, but post-war Anabaptism as well. Even figures like James Comey and Barack Obama cite his influence.

He is sometimes presented as an opponent of Mainline Theological Liberalism and its humanistic approaches to ethics, theology, and the Social Gospel and is often lumped together with figures like Karl Barth and the larger Neo-Orthodox movement. And yet for theologically conservative Christians, a quick read of Niebuhr reveals that he has little faith in the Bible, prophecy, or in the Divine Nature of Christ. His textual commentary is both astonishing and atrocious and testifies to the fact that he was (in Biblical terms) an unbeliever.

He's as much a theological modernist as any in the mainstream. And basically his realism amounts to this - the New Testament ethic of Christ doesn't work and so it has to be modified and even set aside for real world considerations. He takes a consequentialist and sometimes utilitarian approach. Let us do evil that good may come for the greater number is how I would put it. And so many who took up the sword (or rather gun) and engaged in espionage - that is to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, and even kill could do so with a clear conscience, and this because of the bankrupt theology of this false teacher who is still with us today. I've written before about his influence among the Anabaptists which combined with contemporary mammonism has proved disastrous.

Sutton is clearly not a Christian and his reasoning repeatedly demonstrates this. He realizes there's a potential problem with Christian missionaries engaging in intelligence work alongside the military but never can quite work out the real theological and ethical issues. He dances around them but never gets there. In the end his conclusion is that while it was acceptable, it wasn't the best way for either the military or the missionaries.

Given that the US had not yet fully established an organisation like the CIA, the largely ad hoc OSS needed all the help it could get and missionaries were already familiar with the lay of the land, languages, and cultural nuances. They could move about and glean information and as such the OSS was keen to use them. Those familiar with this time will be very familiar with names like Wild Bill Donovan and General Claire Lee Chennault. From Sutton's standpoint it wasn't ideal but it worked and was (he seems to think) necessary.

I also found Sutton's writing style to be awkward at times with some strange and out of place attempts at humour and like so many modern authors he seems eager to probe anything psychological or sexual. I found these inquiries often to be gratuitous and usually resulted in non sequitur.

Of the missionaries covered, most seemed to be of the Mainline-Modernist stripe which proved uninteresting to say the least as most of these people had by the twentieth century abandoned orthodoxy and replaced it with Enlightenment Humanism. It utilized a Christian lexicon but the content was changed - a point argued by J Gresham Machen in his 1923 work 'Christianity and Liberalism'. Like Pearl Buck, they were missionaries of the Enlightenment West (which utilized Christian forms) but they were not (by any historical definition) promoting Christian doctrine or the gospel.

As such these people tended to be post-millennial types who believed in a progressive Christendom that was marked more by Humanistic values than Christian ones or at best a fusion of the two. While in some respects there is a similarity to today's postmillennialists, the latter group relies more on a Judaized theological structure and yet like the modernists they too rely on a fusion of synthesis of the world's ideas and categories with their own distorted understanding of the New Testament faith. The resulting 'worldview' is a syncretism that looks very similar but happens to take a Right-wing turn. This can be explained readily enough by a series of events that span the 20th century.

John Birch (1918-1945) receives considerable treatment in the book and in some respects his story is the saddest. Fundamentalism had attempted a radical return to New Testament thinking just a few decades earlier but its leaders failed to work out the implications and (I would argue) lost their way. While many rejected participation in World War I and maintained a strict separation from the world, by the 1920's this wall began to develop some cracks. The Russian Revolution spawned a great deal of fear and this was exacerbated by the American Red Scare of the 1920's. The growth of communism became an obsession for some and while many participated in World War II, the fact that the US was in an alliance with the USSR generated mistrust and conspiracy theories - fueled by the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb, Mao's victory in China, and later controversies surrounding MacArthur, Truman, and Korea.

This would play out in McCarthyism and finally the rise of the John Birch Society (JBS). This organization accused everyone from Eisenhower to Kennedy of being communist and basically (to this day) argues that McCarthy and his inquisition were right. The JBS deeply infiltrated Fundamentalist circles and has experienced a resurgence under Trump. It must be remembered that Trump's mentor was Roy Cohn - McCarthy's right-hand man in the 1950's.

Birch is viewed as a Christian martyr by many but he died as a soldier in a US military uniform. He was killed by Chinese communists in the immediate aftermath of the Asian War - just as the Chinese Civil War was reigniting and entering its final phase. Some refer to him as the first casualty in the Cold War. He died as an agent of the US meddling in the internal affairs of another country. He was fervent in his profession of Christianity but clearly never was able to put it all together. Repeatedly he expressed divided loyalties confusing and conflating the United States with his Christian identity and service to the Church - an error that lives on to the present. He's also on record making some atrocious statements. He died but a few weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and he rejoiced in its utilization and hoped that many more such bombs could be used in China.

It's easy enough to see why the army might celebrate him but in terms of Christianity he was unfaithful and disobedient and no martyr for Zion.

Sutton has no real ethical issues with missionaries engaged in such work - though he repeatedly tries to almost sensationalize this and suggest there's a scandal. But again, he never really is able to put it together. He's simply glad that the US now has professional intelligence agencies that can do this work and that the government no longer needs to rely on missionaries. It's a conclusion that begs too many questions to address and is less than satisfying.

Sadly, the US still engages in such activities as missionaries are often collaborators and debriefed by US officials. I'm sure often they are State Department employees and yet many of these same figures have been known to double as CIA agents.

The book left me unsatisfied and instead read as a kind of would-be wartime thriller reporting the exploits of these men in Germany, Asia, and the Middle East. He inadvertently also revealed at how compromised the churches were long before the war in the founding of various schools and universities in places like Lebanon and Egypt - institutions that also functioned as soft-power arms of American Empire. I've been reading about (and at times interacting with) the modern missionary movement for almost thirty years and I have to say my estimation of it has been one of steady decline.

It was as if Double-Crossed focused on all the points I found uninteresting and omitted or ignored the issues salient to my own inquiry. So be it. Sutton had a different story to tell. I persevered through the book - I hate to quit mid-way but there were many times I almost gave up. Fundamentalists won't appreciate Double-Crossed but I can imagine many Evangelicals will find it heady and inspiring.