Hearts and Minds

Abstract

From the 1930s through to the end of the American war in Vietnam, writing by the missionaries from the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) consistently represented Christian conversion as a healing intervention focused on Montagnard bodies. As late as the 1970s, Missionary Charles Long continued to mobilize the tropes of sickness, sin, and demons to represent conversion—at a time when the heavy firepower of the American military’s war against the Viet Cong guerrillas was destroying Montagnard houses, villages, farms, and bodies, and displacing hundreds of thousands of Montagnards into squalid refugee camps. But the CMA was not the only Western missionary organization active in Vietnam during the war. Organizations such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, and United World Mission carried on similar evangelical work on a smaller scale. In addition, there were several dozen humanitarian relief organizations active in the country during the war—not as evangelists of the gospel, but as “witnesses for peace” in Vietnam.