India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, the largest the world has ever known, was won mainly by attrition, though some of the later additions to it, like Burma, were taken by force. Almost no attempt was made to interfere with native religion. The enduring image of the 19th-century "scramble for Africa", however, was of rapacious Europeans with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other.
"Soldier of God" deals, as the subtitle tells us, with Gen. Douglas MacArthur's attempt to Christianize Japan after its own imperial ambitions had been forcefully subdued in World War II. It is a story that the author, Ray A. Moore, has studied for a long time, and which begins in the 16th century, when Catholic missionaries first arrived on these shores. After the closing of Japan to the outside world in the Edo Period (1603-1868), Christianity was proscribed, eventually on penalty of death.
When Japan was forced open again to trade in 1853, the status of Christianity was less certain, though it soon became apparent that the edicts banning it would no longer be enforced, and so the missionaries gradually returned. Initially there was a spread of enthusiasm, with many conversions, though this went into retreat in the 1890s. By then, however, Christians were well established in the fields of medicine and education in which they had attempted to exert influence and win converts.