Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800-1950

Hugh Morrison, Mary Clare Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315408767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Drawing on examples from British world expressions of Christianity, this collection further greater understanding of religion as a critical element of modern children's and young people's history. It builds on emerging scholarship that challenges the view that religion had a solely negative impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century children, or that 'secularization' is the only lens to apply to childhood and religion. Putting forth the argument that religion was an abiding influence among British world children throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, this volume places 'religion' at the center of analysis and discussion. At the same time, it positions the religious factor within a broader social and cultural framework. The essays focus on the historical contexts in which religion was formative for children in various 'British' settings denoted as 'Anglo' or 'colonial' during the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries. These contexts include mission fields, churches, families, Sunday schools, camps, schools and youth movements. Together they are treated as 'sites' in which religion contributed to identity formation, albeit in different ways relating to such factors as gender, race, disability and denomination. The contributors develop this subject for childhoods that were experienced largely, but not exclusively, outside the 'metropole', in a diversity of geographical settings. By extending the geographic range, even within the British world, it provides a more rounded perspective on children's global engagement with religion.

Part One
Missions, families and childhood

1
Making missions through (re-)making children

Non-kin domestic intimacy in the London Missionary Society’s work in late-nineteenth-century north India

Rhonda Semple

While adoption and fostering, the practice of turning strangers into kin,¹ are experienced in a deeply personal manner, changes in the way intimate non-kin relationships have been fashioned and understood in the modern period are also reflective of much broader change and more formal political, economic, social and cultural customs. Contemporary scholars analytically refer to ‘the political symbolism of children’ and childhood.² The regulation of the passing on of identity, knowledge and material goods from one generation to another is historically something in which communities have been deeply invested, and have facilitated through formal and informal means and from the least to the most elite, throughout human history.³ A variety of systems have existed historically that enabled the co-residential connecting of children with non-kin adults through fostering, apprenticeship and indenturing, boarding out and political exchange. All enable ‘child circulation’, which ‘strengthen[s] social ties, build[s] life-long affective networks for the child[ren] and redistributes the pleasures and constraints of parenting and being a child’.⁴ If non-kin family constructs have historically and culturally always existed, the challenge is to understand changing attitudes towards them in an industrializing and globally connected Western world. Examining ‘the “ideal” family that was being created, recreated, protected, or challenged in various adoption scenarios’, and especially in colonial settings, illuminates some of the ‘gendered and racialized narratives of nation and identity that create[d] social meaning now and in the past’.⁵ We can learn much about a culture by studying the legal and social practices of adoption and fostering.

Rethinking ‘kinship’ in a modern globalizing world

Changes to non-kin domestic support for children in the modern period have received much popular and scholarly attention. The experience and perception of being founded or fostered sit firmly in studies of the welfare state as the provision of care shifted from church and community to state.⁶ Studies trace the differential impact of industry and urban growth on class experience, the influence of evangelical theology and culture on social surveillance and reform, and the effect of increasing government intervention on family life. In particular, a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century institutional scandals left the system that had replaced more informal practices of fostering to be treated with suspicion, leading to closer oversight and introspection that more explicitly linked ‘constructed’ care with the middle-class ideal of a nuclear family.⁷ I would argue that, further to this, much may be gained from placing thinking about non-kin childcare alongside the study of empire. Thinking about adoption and fostering in an international framework is a helpful way to make sense of it across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This is true in general, as the modern industrialized nation state was shaped by imperial capital, and more specifically, as the number of foundlings grew in an urban environment, and they were indentured and fostered to overseas settler colonies.⁸ The focus of this chapter, however, is a related yet separate way in which non-kin child support developed in an imperial setting. In both tropical and settler colonies, fostering practices and the creation and maintenance of orphanages developed into some of the oldest and most durable institutional religious work in modern missions. From their informal beginnings under the supervision of the female relatives of male missionaries, such institutions of social welfare and evangelization sometimes grew into well-regarded education institutions, and in certain cases they grew enough to form the institutional arms of explicit state acculturation policies.⁹ In each case the legacy of the attitudes that informed their work remains today. This chapter examines non-kin child-rearing in modern evangelical missions by focusing on the work of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in the Kumaon region of the United Provinces, north-central India, in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. For the fifty years that LMS workers staffed stations in the Kumaon, integrating local children into mission homes and institutions and raising them to be culturally Western and believing Christians became central to the mission’s purpose. It was this community of formally educated local converts that formed local chapels, and from this community mission staff were employed. Further, it was to an important degree the formal reports and published stories about these institutions and the children in them that elicited interest in and funds for LMS work in north India.

In the transnational, multicultural and religiously and ethnically varied setting of empire, the practice and growth in regulation of adoption allow historians insight into the profoundly held beliefs and values that shaped the modern world.¹⁰ In this work I am less concerned with the meanings of non-kin identity and inheritance being negotiated in this cross-cultural evangelical community, in order to focus on the analytic space between the breaking of former identities and the reconnecting of identities formed from a merging of old and new kin connections. The practice of raising orphans by adult non-kin in mission homes and institutions might represent a break – a break between adult kin and their biological offspring, and, for missions, a break between community and child, and between the belief practices of their former communities and the child. But the ‘orphans’ raised by missions were also welcomed into new identities: identities that missionaries intended to form through the provision of physical care, formal education, cultural reshaping and spiritual conversion – in the case of the LMS, to liberal mainstream Christian belief. The adult converts would be poised to succeed in the modern imperial system. Their liminal position as educated and Christian yet not quite culturally Western positioned converts as marginal to expatriates, and (potentially) invaluable evangelists to local communities. At times Kumani Christians and non-Christians alike acted to normalize the potential disruption of the fostering/adoption process. Rather than simply being good or bad, the institutional non-kin care created by the mission both met its intended outcomes and, as this chapter argues, became something quite unexpected. Children raised in missions could serve as connectors between expatriate missionaries, the newly created Kumani Christian community and the rest of the local community.

Background

Within half a century of its founding in 1795, missionaries of the LMS had established work in southern Africa, throughout Asia, in the Russian Empire and in the South Pacific.¹¹ The work initiated in various locales reflected the evangelical imperative of this liberal mainstream organization to preach the gospel and create converts, but this general object was pursued variously through direct evangelization, or work broadly defined as being in aid of social well-being or cultural transformation. The latter was variously argued as a necessary precondition for conversion¹² and/or a work of Christian charity. Debate continues as to the efficacy of these approaches.

The specific work of each mission station evolved according to a number of additional conditions: the period in which it was founded and the funds available to support its work; the needs – both real and perceived – of the local community; Western perceptions of those needs and the potential of the community; and the skills and interests of the personnel that established mission work. LMS work in the Kumaon of the north-central Himalayan foothills in India began in the 1850s. The society had extended its work in north India from Calcutta to Mirzapur and Benares in the 1820s and 1830s, and then smaller outstations were opened across the latter half of the nineteenth century.¹³ Like mission stations elsewhere, LMS work in the United Provinces included supporting destitute women and orphans and providing schools for local children almost from the outset. The mission opened its first tertiary leper institution in the late 1850s, and eventually the Almora asylum was one of several that housed a community of hundreds throughout the district. The institution offers a home to a community of roughly a dozen people today.¹⁴ For the LMS, this was the site of significant numbers of converts in the province.¹⁵ A variety of sources – formal mission reports (published and otherwise), the personal papers of various mission personnel, and a local Christian community – offer evidence of the small but vibrant Kumani Christian community that emerged. Despite this local interest, between 1926 and 1938 the LMS almost completely withdrew its funds and its Western personnel from the United Provinces – an unwelcome decision forced on the society by its inability to financially support and staff its widely scattered stations.¹⁶ In 1926 the American Methodist Episcopal Mission (later the Methodist Church in Southern Asia) subsequently assumed most of the buildings and work begun by the LMS.

Adoption as meeting a real need

Modern evangelical mission always put a great deal of effort into working with children, for a number of reasons. Spiritually, young people were perceived to be vulnerable to conversion efforts, and, materially, it was out of this group that the next generation of church members and workers was forged. Missions ended up responsible for a population of the vulnerable, because of their willingness to provide support for children (and others) who appeared unable to access support through local political and cultural systems. Certainly, on stations offering social support, it was groups made mar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: contours and issues in children’s religious history
• PART ONE Missions, families and childhood
• PART TWO Educational approaches and opportunities
• PART THREE Literature and discourses
• PART FOUR Religious communities and citizenship
• Bibliography
• Index