The overall political influence of Western missionaries in Asia, especially Chinese-speaking East Asia, has been at best mixed. Nineteenth-Century German Protestant Karl Gützlaff combined preaching the Gospel in South China with interpreting for British opium dealers, making Marx's dictum about the delusionary effects of religion literally true. In the 20th century, Chairman Mao Zedong branded foreign missionaries “spiritual aggressors” for their alleged collusion with China's enemies. Modern revisionists such as Robert D. Woodberry see a positive political role for at least evangelical Protestant missionaries (“The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” American Political Science Review 106 [May 2012]: 244–274), yet not everyone is convinced. In this relatively depressing literature about Western Christians’ self-deception and exploitation of native Asians, therefore, flames of ethical light such as those offered in Milo Thornberry's autobiography Fireproof Moth burn all the more brightly.
To realize the political importance of Thornberry's contribution to Taiwanese democratization, one must recall that Taiwan (a.k.a. Republic of China), in which he and his then-wife Judith served as Methodist missionaries during the 1960s and early 1970s, was a brutal, anti-Communist police state strongly backed by the American military. Nationalist-Party (Kuomintang) President Chiang Kai-shek publicly claimed to be leading a democratic “Free China” and almost single-handedly holding off the Chinese Communist hordes. At home, however, Chiang's regime imposed martial law, banned opposition parties, harassed intellectuals, repressed independent media, and imprisoned or “disappeared” political dissidents. Scholars and activists now refer to this authoritarian period from the 1947 massacre of the Taiwanese elite to the 1987 lifting of martial law as the “White Terror.”
Arriving in Taiwan in 1965 to teach at a Taipei seminary, Thornberry quickly became acquainted with many Taiwanese democracy advocates through his contacts at the Taiwan Theological College. The most politically significant person the American missionary met was former political science professor Peng Ming-min, who had just been released from prison (for having written an anti-regime manifesto) and who in 1996 become the opposition-party candidate in the first free presidential elections in Taiwan (see Peng's autobiography, A Taste of Freedom: Memoirs of a Formosan Independence Leader). Rapidly becoming deeply involved in the democracy movement alongside native Taiwanese, Thornberry ultimately chose to risk his life and career by helping to smuggle Peng out of the country before the secret police could assassinate the pro-democracy leader. For his troubles, Thornberry himself was arrested, deported to British Hong Kong, and finally stripped of his right to travel outside the United States.
Though this non-fiction text reads like a spy novel, it contains several insights useful for political scientists. First, it documents how foreign and native Christians acted out their faith politically and negotiated hazardous moral ambiguities when living in an authoritarian regime. Second, the work illustrates how at least one American missionary applied Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian Realism in an Asian socio-political environment. Third, the book confirms the hypothesis of what one might call “ethical snowballing,” or the idea that altruism is a habit or way of life, not a single exemplary act. Just as the Holocaust-era rescuers of Jews in Le Chambon, France, had earlier become accustomed to welcoming ill or poor children into their homes before World War II, Thornberry and his missionary friends began their efforts on behalf of persecuted Taiwanese by providing for the material needs of the families of political prisoners (see Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There). Only later did the writer of the book take the much more dramatic step of helping to disguise Peng as a Japanese tourist to prevent him from being murdered.
Despite its high interest for political scientists, the text shows a few signs of having been rushed to press so as to appear before the January of 2012 elections in Taiwan. Clearly, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party wished for English- and Chinese-language versions of Thornberry's work to appear in bookstores to remind wavering voters about the evils of the martial-law-era Kuomintang and its supposedly still-problematic current incarnation. The copyeditor could have been more exacting in eliminating more of the relatively frequent typos, for example. Overall, however, this book provides both lay and specialist readers with a fascinating entrée into political conditions in authoritarian Taiwan and into how foreign Christians struggled for justice in this high-risk environment.
