Christianity has a long prison record. Ever since the days of the Apostle Paul, Christians have been familiar with the barred window and the dungeon cell. And ever since the first Good Friday when the cock crew and Peter wept, Christians have died rather than deny their faith and save their skins. This is the strict code of the Christian prisoner, but what of the compromises in between? Last week one missionary publicly castigated another for keeping his religion but buying his freedom with falsehoods.
In Chungking in November 1950, Methodist Missionary Francis Olin Stockwell, 52, from Perry, Okla., was just sitting down to Sunday supper when the
Red China police arrived. He kissed his wife goodbye, gathered up his New Testament, and departed for what he thought would be about five days' imprisonment. It lasted just under two years.
For 14 months Missionary Stockwell was in solitary confinement. He paced the floor, prayed, made up poems, and studied the Bible. When absurd accusations of spying and conspiracy were made against him, he denied them. Then he got a brainwashing.
He was moved to a small cell with seven other prisoners, all Chinese, where they were forced to discuss every detail of their past lives for hours on end, interspersing the discussions with interminable readings from Communist propaganda material. At intervals, a government official grilled Stockwell on his "crimes" and angrily ordered him back for further reflection when he denied them. Stockwell began to see that what the Communists wanted was not just a confession but a conversion—a new way of looking at the world. He decided to give them what they wanted and win his freedom.
A Missionary Spy. It was hard work. Methodist Dr. Stockwell learned to parrot a Marxian view of the news, and to give an interpretation of his missionary life as an act of aggression against the Communist government". "I admitted," he later wrote, "that my speaking and writing had made the Chinese friendly to the United States and cool to revolutionary doctrine . . . and that if this was what they meant when they said I was a spy, then I would have to admit that I was a spy, a missionary spy ..."
To explain a fake code message that had been mailed in his name, Stockwell fabricated an elaborate cops & robbers story that implicated no one else within Communist reach. He was even compelled to join in the .attempted conversion of other political prisoners.
At last, after 9^ months of this, two Red guards shoved him across the border at Hongkong, the last Methodist missionary to leave China (TIME, Dec. 8).
In a book, With God in Red China (Harper; $3), and two articles in the Christian Century, Methodist Stockwell described what had happened to him and the choice he had made. In last week's Christian Century, the Rev. Kenneth J. Foreman Jr., 31, a Presbyterian missionary who spent 7½ months under house arrest in Kunming, attacked what he called the "sin" of Missionary Stockwell. He contrasted Stockwell with Vernon Stones, an English Methodist whom the Communists kept in solitary confinement for many months but who refused to make any confession of guilt.