As someone who spent a number of my teen years as a missionary kid (MK), historian Holly Berkley Fletcher’s The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism hit home in powerful ways. As an MK herself, she manages to put words to experiences, questions, and disillusionments that are common to the missionary kid experience. While there are missionaries I deeply respect and admire, I’ve also known others who fit uncomfortably well into the unhealthy patterns Fletcher describes.
One of the strengths of this book is her ability to hold together the beauty and the brokenness of the missionary world. She writes, “MKs live the complex reality of missions: the good and the bad, the beautiful and the brutal, the wondrous and the woeful, the bullish and the bullsh**.” That paradox is something most likely every MK can relate to. We were expected to keep the missionaries looking good (don’t complain, don’t screw up) all while carrying deep grief and often unspoken trauma.
Fletcher doesn’t shy away from exposing the all too common darker undercurrents of the mission field. Abuse, neglect, and dislocation were far too common, with surveys showing missionary kids experiencing trauma at higher rates than almost any other group. She points out how damaging it is when flawed parents are presented as untouchable saints: “Missionaries who put their kids in traumatizing or dangerous situations are not ‘heroes of the faith.’ They are bad parents. And a culture that encourages them to do this is toxic.”
I appreciated that Fletcher doesn’t reduce the MK story to just pain. She uses the MK story as a lens to examine the wider culture of white evangelical missions, with all its myths of indispensability and superiority. She reminds us that Christianity thrived for nearly 1,800 years before the first American missionaries showed up, a humbling truth for a culture that often sees itself as central to God’s work in the world.
For me, this book was a mixture of recognition, lament, and gratefulness. Recognition because so many of her descriptions mirror things I have seen. Lament because of the ways missions have harmed the children caught up in them and just how common that harm is. And gratefulness because her book and research is helping to break the silence around the darker side of missions.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants a more honest, unvarnished picture of global missions and its legacy.
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