Ch 7: Phase 5 - Enculturation of Missionary Microculture
This chapter is concerned with how the West China missionaries produced and reproduced mores and practices within their transnational microculture. It engages the concept of moral ambition to explain how and why one finds multi-generational families of missionaries, pastors, doctors, educators and public servants emerging from this missionary community.
We look at how ideas circulate within the community through book clubs, discussion groups, lecture series, church services, bible study groups and publications such as the West China Missionary News. Pastimes such as tennis, tea parties, theater productions, and musical recitals also wove the missionary community together forging common values and social customs. Through these practices we trace the growth over time of religious micro-cohorts within the larger community, particularly those associated with the teachings of Henry Burton Sharman and the Oxford Group movement, contrasting with the earlier proselytizing enthusiasms of senior missionaries.
This chapter also explores how endogamous marriages among missionaries, and the avoidance of interracial marriages, ensured the isolation of the missionary community from the larger Chinese society. Likewise, missionary children did not go to schools with Chinese students, but rather had their own school, the Canadian School in West China in Chengdu (and also at times in Chongqing and Jenshow), where missionary children followed the Ontario curriculum. Many missionaries also home schooled their children and those of others in small groups, if they were too far from the CSWC, or if they disagreed with the curriculum.