ABSTRACT
With half of the world living under communist regimes by 1950, some sections of the American evangelical missionary world submerged their strategic geo-religious ecclesiastical ambitions in a global anti-communist crusade under the American nuclear umbrella. An American Baptist missionary, John Birch, killed by communist troops in China, was proclaimed the first fatality in the Cold War, and one of the most resolutely right-wing American political
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of the missionary period in China was no heroic male anti-communist, but Gladys Aylward. A pious parlourmaid whose educational qualifications were too low even for the China Inland Mission, Aylward nonetheless succeeded in devoting her life to serving the poor people of China as an independent missionary. She was expelled from China along with all of the other missionaries. After her life was dramatized on BBC radio and became the subject of a popular biography, she was portrayed (over her vehement objections) by Ingrid Bergman in the 1958 Hollywood movie The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. The missionary was depicted as an a-political humanitarian of humble origins, not a martyr in the cause of American geo-political expansion. Gladys Aylward became a missionary hero, not for the number of conversions to Christianity under her influence, but for her life of service to the people of China.
