The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700

Jeffrey Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415572712
• eBook ISBN: 9781134877553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Missions are an important topic in the history of modern Britain and of even wider importance in the modern history of Africa and many parts of Asia. Yet, despite the perennial subject matter, and the publication of a large number of studies of particular aspects of missions, there is no recent, balanced overview of the history of the missionary moment during the last three hundred years.

The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 moves away from the partisan approach that characterizes so many writers in field and instead views missionaries primarily as institution builders rather than imperialists or heroes of social reform. This balanced survey examines both Britain as the home base of missions and the impact of the missions themselves, while also evaluating the independent initiatives by African and Asia Christians. Also addressed are the previously ignored issues of missionary rhetoric, the predominantly female nature of missions, and comparisons between British missions and those from other predominantly Protestant countries including the United States.

Jeffrey Cox brings a fresh and much needed overview to this large, fascinating and controversial subject.

PART I
THE RELIGIOUS CRISIS OF THE BRITISH IMPERIAL STATE, 1700–1800

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION

Religion and empire in the modern world

DURING THE LAST 300 YEARS, Great Britain colonized large sections of the globe. During the imperial period, British religion experienced a rapid institutional revival in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a period of decline in the twentieth century, one so rapid that by the late twentieth century one distinguished historian can speak of “the death of Christian Britain.”¹ The rise and fall of the British Empire and the revival and decline of British religion are two of the central stories of modern British history. This book is about the uneasy and unpredictable relationship between the British Empire and British religion since 1700.

The decline of Christianity in Britain, and in the European heartland of Christianity more generally, took place at the same time as a rapid growth of Christianity in other parts of the world, including Britain’s former colonies. Some of the fastest growing non-western churches were originally associated with the British missionary movement, and maintain close ties with British churches. By the early twenty-first century, Anglican bishops in Nigeria exerted sufficient power, in a dispute over the status of gays and lesbians in the church, to insist on the exclusion of the Episcopal Church of the USA, and the Anglican Church of Canada, from the counsels of the worldwide Anglican communion. Victorian missionaries set out to create independent, self-governing churches in Britain’s African colonial possessions, but they no doubt failed to anticipate the ways in which Britain’s ecclesiastical empire would strike back at its metropolitan center.

The relationship between religion and empire has been controversial throughout the imperial period. The missionary enterprise has been broadly interpreted in one of three ways. The rulers of Britain’s empire often treated missionaries as marginal figures in the imperial enterprise. The relative indifference of imperial administrators and settlers to the spread of Christianity has had a powerful effect on the writing of imperial history, where missionaries are often simply left out of the story or relegated to a marginal or even a comic role. When in 1807 the Reverend Sydney Smith described the Baptist missionaries in Bengal as “little detachments of maniacs”,²he was only expressing an attitude toward missionaries that was widespread throughout the colonial period in the imperial establishment. The treatment of missionaries as either ridiculous or even insane became a feature of popular culture in the Victorian period when the cartoon depiction of the unfortunate missionary in the cannibal cooking pot became popular in comic papers and music hall jokes.

Anti-imperialists, on the other hand, have often assumed that missionaries were neither marginal nor comical, but something much worse: instruments of imperial rule, cultural imperialists who did the ideological bidding of imperial rulers or, even worse, attempted to colonize the hearts and minds of subject peoples. Direct European colonial control of the Earth’s surface grew in the nineteenth century to nearly 85 percent in a period that coincided with the rapid expansion of European Christianity in the non-western world. That missionaries were simply one kind of imperialist among others appeared obvious to many people even in the nineteenth century, and appears equally obvious to many people today. The notion that missionaries and exploitation represent two sides of the imperial coin is reflected in the popular saying, often quoted by Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “When the white man arrived, he had the Bible and we had the land; now, we have the Bible and he has the land.” That view has had a powerful influence on traditions of anti-imperial history.

While imperial historians have treated missionaries as marginal, and anti-imperialist historians treated them as colonial agents in disguise, missionary supporters depicted missionaries as male heroes. This tradition is alive and well in religious circles, and even in popular culture, as the recent popular interest in the figure of David Livingstone reveals. The modern historical field of mission studies has become vast in the twentieth century. Based initially on nineteenth-century narratives of male clerical heroism, the field of mission studies has become more critical and self-reflective during the last generation. Mission studies historians have struggled hard to overcome the traditions of male, clerical heroism that dominate the field. Despite these efforts, the influence of mission studies on the equally flourishing fields of imperial history, and anti-imperial history, has often been difficult to discern, largely because authors in mission studies often simply assume the centrality of missions as a subject of inquiry worthy in itself.

These traditions of interpretation—imperial, anti-imperial, and ecclesias-tical—are so strong that many people have already made up their minds about what they think about missionaries. In years of giving talks about missionaries, I have often found that an audience expected to hear stories of missionary heroism only to be disappointed when told that missionaries were rarely as heroic as their image. Other audiences expect to hear missionaries unmasked as racists and imperialists of the worst kind, only to become baffled or annoyed when I put forward a complicated picture of irony and unintended consequences in the missionary story, along with a history of genuine affection and spiritual cooperation across racial and gender boundaries. When the BBC produced a television series on missionaries, the producers received many emotional letters from people who appeared to know very little about them:

Those with a positive view of mission enthused about our project and reeled off the names of their particular missionary heroes and heroines … Those with a less positive view, and there have been many, enjoined us to be sure to stress all the harm that missionaries have done … We have been urged to expose missionaries as cultural imperialists, iconoclasts, paternalists, and even as agents of the CIA.³

Now is a good time for a new overview of the history of British missions. The barriers between three distinct fields of history—imperial history, ecclesiastical history, and mission studies—have been breaking down in the last twenty years. Within these fields the self-confident certainties about the historical role of missionaries are receiving critical scrutiny, and historians have begun to pay attention to anthropologists, who have been interested in missionaries for decades.⁴ Imperial historians are beginning to pay closer attention to missionaries, who even received a foothold in the recent Oxford History of the British Empire. Distinguished imperial historians have recently examined the importance of gender roles, patriarchy, and humanitarianism and its influence on British imperial rule, and have challenged the very distinctions between the empire and the colonies, between metropolis and periphery, that have been taken for granted for centuries.⁵

The anti-imperial strand of interpretation has also been transformed during the last generation. Under the (often unacknowledged) influence of the American literary scholar Edward Said, and the even larger influence of feminist scholarship, there has been a flowering of interest in imperial history and imperial themes that sprawls across the borders between academic disciplines and literary genres. Often referred to as “post-colonial studies,” these new approaches are informed by a tradition of anti-imperial scholarship dating back to the nineteenth century. Like imperial historians, post-colonial scholars often ignore missionaries, for the traditions of Saidian and post-colonial scholarship are relentlessly secular. Like anti-imperial historians, they often treat missionaries, when they notice them, as nothing more than cultural imperialists. Post-colonialism is nonetheless important for the study of missionaries, for two reasons. The first is its breaking down of traditional boundaries that separate the important from the unimportant, especially in relationship to gender.⁶ The second is the broadening of the definition of imperialism to include matters of culture, and in particular the critique of culture in its relationship to imperial power broadly defined.

Edward Said’s justly celebrated book, Orientalism (1978), treated western imperialism as first of all a question of ideas and perceptions of the other. For Said, though, ideas are intimately and inextricably related to power. A secular scholar despite his intense Arab Protestant upbringing, Said had no interest in the expansion of Christianity in the imperial age, but much of what he says about the nature of western perceptions of the non-western world in the age of imperialism, and the distortions of western scholarship created by the imperial context in which it was developed, is directly relevant to the understanding of British missions.

Imperial history and post-colonial studies both appear at times to be dominated by binary distinctions: British and foreign, European and “native,” east and west, black and white, civilized and savage, tradition and modernity, resistance and collaboration, etc. These distinctions are so rooted in historical experience that they are in some respects unavoidable when discussing the past. The anti-imperial heritage of post-colonial studies itself reinforces binary distinctions between imperialists and anti-imperialists. At the same time, post-colonial scholars have struggled to transcend what is called, in scholarly jargon, “binarism.” There is a recognition that binary distinctions have been elevated into categories of analysis that threaten to obliterate the complexity of the past. Perhaps the most fundamental binary of all is the distinction between colonizers and colonized.

Tied to the imperial archive created by colonizers, imperial historians, postcolonial scholars, and mission studies specialists alike approach their topics from one side of this binary, but not without endless frustration. If only we could tell both sides of the story, they ask, and look at imperial history or mission history from the point of view of both colonizer and the colonized, and weave the two points of view into a unified story based on a thorough knowledge of the history and culture of both sides of the binary. Frustrated with binary distinctions, post-colonial scholars have examined the space in between the colonizer and the colonized, describing that space as a “contact zone” or as a region of “hybridity” and labeling what happens in the space as “transculturation.”⁷ It is here, in these “contact zones” of the British Empire and other empires, that the encounter known as the missionary enterprise took place.

The British missionary movement has always operated between worlds, in spaces between the colonizer and the colonized that are difficult to place within recognized traditions of interpretation. If binary distinctions are eroding both in imperial history and in post-colonial studies, they are also being worn away in ecclesiastical history. Because of the power of the distinction between “British and Foreign,” often enshrined in the names of missionary societies, the study of British religion at home and religious activities abroad has often proceeded on separate tracks. The traditions of British ecclesiastical history have been insular ones. The great revival of British religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its decline in the twentieth century, have often been treated as either distinctively British or at best European developments, with nods to the trans-Atlantic character of the evangelical revival. Owen Chadwick’s classic two-volume history of the Victorian Church, published in 1966, failed to mention the foreign missionary movement even once, and Callum Brown’s Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain(2006) makes only passing reference to the importance of missions to the domestic life of Britain’s churches.⁸When I wrote my book on the decline of British churchgoing, published in 1982, I ignored the large amount of evidence I found in parish and chapel records of the deep involvement of Britain’s churches with the wider world. I was, after all, interested in British history, not foreign history, and the history of missions took place in foreign countries.⁹

Like imperial historians and post-colonial scholars, British ecclesiastical historians have recently taken notice of the large amount of scholarly work done in the field of mission studies. Books such as Susan Thorne’s Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England(1999) and Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects. Colony and Metropole in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (2002) are mandatory reading for ecclesiastical historians, who are taking seriously the words attributed to John Wesley: “I look upon all the world as my parish.” Despite the great variety of writing on missionaries, however, there is no recent one-volume summary of the modern British missionary movement. Bishop Stephen Neill’s beautifully written History of Christian Missions, first published in 1964, is still in print but dated, and Brian Stanley’sThe Bible and the Flag(1990) has been out of print for many years.¹⁰ These books are worth consulting, as is Kenneth Scott Latourette’s encyclopedic AHistory of the Expansion of Christianity (v. 1–7, 1937–45), and his subsequent five volumes on Christianity in a Revolutionary Age (1958–62).

Each of these works approaches the topic with a different point of view from this one. Bishop Neill’s Historybegins with the words of Christ, and the footnotes in the first chapter and much of his second chapter refer largely to the Bible, while Stanley’s is a justification of the missionary enterprise in an imperial age. Latourette’s volumes constitute a narrative of triumphant Christian progress. In The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 I intend to approach the topic in a more critical spirit, and incorporate and address the anti-imperial critique of the modern missionary enterprise. This book nonetheless shares one significant characteristic with the earlier one-volume histories. Bishop Neill confessed that he had only been able to bring his story up to the 1960s in one volume because of “a resolute determination to omit.”¹¹ Even though I begin nearly 1,700 years later than Bishop Neill, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and limit my story to missions originating in one European cluster of islands, I too must make some hard choices about what is most important in the story.

Chronology and geography are fundamental to every work of history. This book begins in 1700, around the time when British Protestant Christians created two missionary institutions: the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1698 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in 1701. These were not the first British missionary efforts, but they were the first permanent missionary institutions. They provided an institutional setting that both attracted and stimulated missionary effort, leading to debates about Britain’s relationship to the rest of the world in the eighteenth century. Some historians date the modern missionary movement later, to the period of the evangelical revival of the later eighteenth century, and there are good reasons for that, but as we shall see there was considerable interest in missions in the course of the eighteenth century by Protestants of all persuasions. That story is worth telling in order to understand the rapid proliferation of evangelical mission work in the very late eighteenth century.

I have also decided to set geographical as well as chronological limits, and concentrate on the history of Protestant missions originating in Great Britain. That approach is an old-fashioned one in some ways, resembling the Protestant triumphalism of British mission historians who identified the origins of all modern missions in the British evangelical revival, and attributed the worldwide spread of Christianity to a Protestant missionary movement that was dominated in its early days by British missions. As recently as 1955 the British Baptist historian Ernest Payne published a history of British missions and called it “the story of the modern missionary movement.”¹² In addition to running the dangers of reinforcing nationalism, a strictly British approach to missions could minimize the transnational character of Protestant missions, which got its start not in Great Britain but in Germany, among the Pietists at the University of Halle (though with a strong and sustained British contribution), and continued throughout its history as part of an international movement with a multinational and eventu...

Table of contents

• Christianity and society in the modern world
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PART I THE RELIGIOUS CRISIS OF THE BRITISH IMPERIAL STATE, 1700–1800
• PART II BUILDING A MOVEMENT, 1800–1870
• PART III IMPERIAL HIGH NOON, 1870–1945
• PART IV POST-COLONIAL MISSIONS SINCE 1945
• APPENDIX
• FURTHER READING
• NOTES
• REFERENCES (IN NOTES)
• INDEX