The Nineteenth Century The Global Expansion of Protestantism
The Nineteenth Century
The Global Expansion of Protestantism
By the end of the nineteenth century, Protestantism was well on its way to becoming a global faith. Catholicism had already made significant inroads in many parts of South America, Africa, and Asia, owing to the great voyages of discovery of the Portuguese and Spanish navigators. It had inflicted serious damage on European Protestantism. By 1590 roughly 50 percent of the landmass of western Europe was dominated by Protestantism; by 1690 this proportion had dropped to 20 percent. This radical curtailment was, of course, partly offset by Protestantism’s growing presence in North America.
Yet Protestantism would soon make up for its European losses as it underwent global expansion. Protestantism spread, like Islam, through a complex amalgam of trading links, colonial activity, and intentional outreach. As Great Britain became a global power, establishing colonies throughout the world, a complex relationship developed between imperial ambitions and missionary activities, creating opportunities and difficulties in about equal measure for the spread of Protestantism. Yet it must be appreciated that there was considerable hostility toward any form of missionary work within Protestantism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Religious revivals within European and American Protestantism during the eighteenth century led to the emergence of an activist approach to faith. Sometimes this was expressed in social action, sometimes in political activity, but above all, it was expressed in support for foreign missions. The rise of missionary societies or associations was one of the most important developments in western Protestantism and would have a defining impact on the shaping of Protestant identity outside the West.
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Great Britain; Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY
James Cook, English explorer, navigator, and hydrographer, 1775–76, by Nathaniel Dance (1734–1811).
EARLY PROTESTANT DISINTEREST IN MISSION
Protestant interest in mission overseas took some considerable time to develop. During its formative phase, Protestantism seems to have had little interest in the notions of “mission” or “evangelism.” Neither John Calvin nor Martin Luther had any particular concern to reach beyond the borders of Christendom. In particular, Calvin’s model of evangelism, evident in his approach to the French situation, is primarily that of the reformation of Catholics—that is to say, the conversion of people from one form of Christianity to another.
Protestantism was initially landlocked, surrounded by Catholic or Orthodox territories; reaching the heathen would have been problematic. Both Luther and Calvin were emphatic that Catholicism and Orthodoxy were Christian; what they required, they argued, was reformation. Even Calvin, who did not deny the validity of the Great Commission (the traditional term used for Christ’s command to take the gospel to all nations; Matthew 28:17–20), maintained that the propagation of the Christian faith was not under the jurisdiction of the church but was the duty of the “Christian” state. After the rise of confessionalism in the 1560s, characterized by the principle cuius regio, eius religio (“whoever rules the region decides its religion”), the primary means of evangelism was through the activities of the local prince. Evangelism was thus seen as a function of the Christian state rather than the responsibility of the individual Christian. On this understanding, evangelism was about reaching non-Christian peoples—such as Jews, Muslims, and, most significantly, the Lapps of northern Scandinavia—within their own territories.
Catholicism was able to race ahead of Protestantism in this respect through the vast maritime exploits of its Spanish and Portuguese mariners. Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits led missions to North America, South America, India, and Japan. Even if it had missionary inclinations (which Protestants generally did not at this stage), no Lutheran or Reformed territory had any serious capacity for such voyages of exploration or evangelism; most, in fact, did not even have access to the sea. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the Christian population of the world had soared through expansion in new regions. Yet Protestantism was largely unaffected by this expansion. To some of its worried supporters, it seemed to have abdicated its missionary responsibilities.
This early Protestant disinterest in mission was first noted by Gustav Warneck in the 1880s.1 His historical research convinced him that there was a simple explanation. Although his observations have been qualified by subsequent scholarship, they have yet to be convincingly rebutted.2 Basing his conclusions on a careful analysis of the sources, Warneck identified three reasons for Protestantism’s lack of interest in missions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Warneck’s third point is well illustrated by a famous incident involving William Carey (1761–1834), later to be one of the most important British missionaries to India. He began to frame the idea of a missionary calling after reading Captain Cook’s account of his voyages in the South Seas. Yet few shared his enthusiasm. In 1792 Carey proposed—to general astonishment, it seems—that a group of Baptist ministers in Northamptonshire discuss “the duty of Christians to attempt the spread of the Gospel among heathen nations.” An older minister rose and rebuked him: “Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine.” Warneck’s third point precisely.
The earliest Protestant advocate of worldwide evangelization is believed to have been Adrian Saravia (1532–1613), a Flemish Reformed theologian who converted to Anglicanism and became a close associate of Richard Hooker.3 Saravia argued “that the command to preach the Gospel to all peoples is obligatory upon the Church since the Apostles were taken up into Heaven, and that for this purpose the apostolic office is needful.” This led him to insist that the obligation to evangelize all peoples rests upon the Christians of every age in history in that Christ, in giving this commission, promised to be with his disciples to the end of time. Since the apostles left the work incomplete, it is the duty of the church to carry out the Great Commission. Both Reformed and Lutheran theologians of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, such as Theodore Beza and Johann Gerhard, argued that the Commission came to an end with the close of the apostolic age. Given this hostility toward mission within classical Protestantism, the rise of missionary activity during the eighteenth century is actually quite remarkable and requires explanation. It was not until the 1830s that most mainline Protestant churches in the West regarded mission as a “good thing.”
This important transition is partly explained by a classic feature of the development of Protestantism: the shifting interpretation of core biblical texts. Definitive interpretations of those texts were offered and accepted by one generation, only to be overturned by another; a new understanding of the identity and mission of Protestantism thus arose as being self-evidently correct. In this case, the text was Matthew 28:17–20, which relates how the risen Christ commissioned the apostles to take the gospel to the ends of the earth:
Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
The command is clear—but to whom is it addressed? Who is being asked to take the gospel to all nations?
Warneck’s point is that early Protestants interpreted this command as being spoken to those present on that occasion—the apostles. The task was specific to them and to their age; with their passing, the command was no longer binding on Christians. After all, the apostles had traveled to the ends of the known world to spread the gospel. That task was over. Yet when the eighteenth century revisited this interpretation of the passage, it was found to be increasingly problematic. Voyages of discovery had opened up vast new territories, unknown to the apostles. Why should not the gospel be proclaimed there?
Perhaps more significantly, Pietistic and evangelical forms of Protestantism, which emphasized personal conversion, were naturally oriented toward the idea of reaching out to those who were not converted—whether in Christianity’s heartlands in western Europe, then passing through a period of religious indifference, or in the new territories being opened up through exploration.4 German Moravian Pietists, though a small community, were engaged in missionary work in Greenland, America, and Africa by the 1750s and saw this work as the natural extension of their calling as Christians.
Yet Warneck’s analysis needs expansion, and perhaps a little modification, if the surge in Protestant missionary work in the eighteenth century is to be understood. Important though the new interpretation of the Great Commission might be, this theological adjustment was inadequate in itself to transform the situation without the means to project the gospel into distant lands. The new theology might create aspirations, but it could not solve the practical problems that attended them. A Protestant mission to a region required a Protestant presence in that region. But how could Protestant churches carry out evangelism when they lacked the means to reach those parts of the world where evangelism was possible?
THE GLOBAL EXPANSION OF PROTESTANTISM
As it happened, the answers to such questions lay to hand. Two historical developments transformed the situation, allowing the evangelistic wish (stimulated, as we have seen, by evangelicalism) to become a reality: the expansion of Protestant sea power, leading to the establishment of European colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and the development of the “voluntary society,” an evangelistic agency that bypassed the inertia of the churches. Each of these developments offered new opportunities.
With the expansion of Protestant sea power, Protestant European nations were able to establish colonies, which allowed the model of evangelism determined by confessionalized churches to come into operation. A colony was a region under the authority of the state; therefore, the state church was able to exercise a pastoral and evangelistic mission within this region. We have already noted this principle in operation in the establishment of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. It is thus no accident that the first major Lutheran mission, located in India, was a direct result of a Danish crown colony being created at Serampore. After the establishment of Dutch colonies in Indonesia (then known as the “East Indies”), Reformed churches were founded in that region. However, because Britain was by far the most active colonial power, English-speaking forms of Protestantism became widely established through imperial expansion, especially in the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, and Australasia.
The second development, the rise of the voluntary society, led to a new model for evangelism that eventually displaced older models in American and Great Britain—but not, it must be emphasized, in Germany and other European nations.5 Traditional models of evangelism were based on a Protestant state or denomination and thus depended on an official bureaucracy. In the second half of the eighteenth century, missionary leadership passed into the hands of entrepreneurial individuals who created dedicated missionary societies. Their members were highly motivated individuals who arranged their own fund-raising, created support groups, and identified and recruited missionaries.
For the great American missionary Rufus T. Anderson (1796–1880), such associations were critical to the success of the missionary venture.6 Only Protestantism, he argued, could have created such missionary societies, by bringing together clergy and laity, actors and donors, for this specific purpose. “This Protestant form of association—free, open, responsible, embracing all classes, both sexes, all ages, the masses of the people—is peculiar to modern times, and almost to our age.” This theme persists throughout the recent history of Protestantism, as we shall see when considering its development in North America in the twentieth century.
The origins of the London Mission Society illustrate this trend well.7 News of William Carey’s missionary work in India generated much interest in England in 1794, particularly among those working for the abolition of slavery. John Ryland, a Baptist minister, began to gather together a group of interested persons, both lay and ordained, who met in Baker’s Coffee House in London to plan interdenominational missionary work. The number of supporters grew, and funds were raised. A boat was purchased, missionaries recruited, and a potentially significant mission undertaken (not, it must be said, entirely successfully) to the South Pacific.
In what follows, we shall provide a brief sketch of some features and themes of the expansion of Protestantism in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, before moving on to consider some of the issues that helped shape global Protestantism at the time and their implications for the future of the movement.
Africa
Christianity became established in North Africa during the first centuries of the Christian era.8 Churches were established along much of the North African coast in the areas now known as Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. A particularly strong Christian presence developed in Egypt, with the city of Alexandria emerging as a leading center of Christian thought and life. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most significant Christian leaders and writers of all time, was based in this region.
Much of this Christian presence in Africa was swept away by the Arab invasions of the seventh century. Coptic Christianity survived in Egypt, although as a minority faith. The situation began to change gradually during the later sixteenth century. When Portuguese settlers occupied previously uninhabited islands off the west African coast, such as the Cape Verde Islands, they established Catholicism there. However, such offshore settlements had little impact on the mainland of Africa.
The coming of Protestantism to sub-Saharan Africa, which can be dated from the eighteenth century, was closely linked with the great evangelical awakening in England at this time. Many were appalled at the slave trade, in which British merchants bought slaves from local tribal leaders in Africa before exporting them to the plantations of the American colonies. The conversion of John Newton (1725–1807), a former slave ship captain, to evangelical Protestantism created a growing awareness of the problem. Newton celebrated his conversion by writing one of the world’s best-known hymns, “Amazing Grace,” which told of his spiritual transformation.9 This same writer also wrote hymns such as “The Negro’s Complaint,” which spoke of the dignity conferred on all people by God, which slavery could not diminish.
Evangelical Protestants responded to this new concern for Africa in two ways: first, by working for the abolition of slavery, a project especially associated with the English politician William Wilberforce and his circle; and second, by bringing the gospel to this region of the world. These were powerful visions, and they caught the imagination of many in the 1790s. Three major British missionary societies were active in Africa during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the Baptist Missionary Society, founded in 1792 and initially known as the “Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Heathen”; the London Missionary Society, founded in 1795 and initially known as the “Missionary Society”; and the Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799 and originally known as the “Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East.” Each of these societies focused on a specific region: the Baptist Missionary Society on the Congo basin, the London Missionary Society on southern Africa (including Madagascar), and the Church Missionary Society on west and east Africa. All of these societies were Protestant as well as strongly evangelical in their outlook. Like John Wesley, they believed passionately in the need for conversion and regeneration and saw the overseas mission field as a priority.
Missionary work in the 1790s led to the establishment of small Christian communities among native tribes, particularly the Khoi. Gradually, surrounding tribes began to convert to Christianity. Here, as in many other situations, the motivation for conversion varied considerably. Some conversions clearly stemmed from a deep spiritual experience; others reflected a conviction of the truth of the Christian gospel; other conversions might have been rooted in a belief that Christianity would make the benefits of Western civilization more widely available to African culture. This was particularly clear in the case of the Ganda tribe of east Africa, among whom the decision to convert to Christianity (rather than Islam) seems to have been partly influenced by the superiority of British technology and the possibility that such conversion might lead to this technology becoming more widely available to the tribe.
The dominant feature of sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth century was the growing presence of colonial powers in the region, some of which had Protestant state churches. Because the forms of Christianity dominant in Belgium, Britain, France, and Germany—all of which established colonies in this region during the period—varied considerably, a considerable diversity of churches became established in Africa. Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Lutheranism were all well established by the end of the century; in South Africa, the Dutch Reformed church had a particularly strong influence among European settlers. A disturbing perception arose in some quarters that Protestantism was merely the religious component of colonial power, a Western import to the region that would not survive any subsequent Western withdrawal.
Perhaps the most celebrated colonial evangelist was David Livingstone (1813–73). Livingstone was convinced of the importance of commerce in relation to the Christianization of Africa. In 1838 he offered his services to the London Missionary Society, declaring his intention to go to Africa “to make an open path for commerce and Christianity.” Exploiting the British government’s interest in replacing the banned slave trade with more legitimate forms of commerce, Livingstone obtained government backing for an expedition to explore the Zambezi River as a potential gateway to the interior. He believed that the interior would be capable of commercial exploitation, such as the growing of cotton, then greatly in demand by the cotton mills of Lancashire. Although the expedition was a commercial failure, it opened up the interior to missionary activity. Livingstone himself became a role model for many younger British Protestants. A series of addresses he delivered at Cambridge University led to the founding of the university’s Mission to Central Africa in 1860.
Whereas the London missionary societies primarily sent white evangelists to Africa, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States believed that the best strategy was to send Afro-Americans to the region.10 At least 115 black American missionaries are known to have been present and active in Africa during the period 1875 to 1899. Following the establishment of the west African republic of Liberia (1847) as a refuge for former slaves, black Protestant missionaries and church-builders went to the region, seeing their work partly as evangelism and partly as nation-building. Their work generated some friction with white missionaries in this area; nevertheless, the presence of black missionaries in Liberia was an important staging post on the road to the indigenization of mission.
Yet the rise of Protestantism caused tensions to arise within traditional African societies. An excellent example of this can be seen in the boarding school for girls established in Madagascar in 1872 by Lutherans from the Norwegian Missionary Society.11 At that time, Christianity was becoming increasingly influential in the region. Although Madagascar became a French protectorate in 1885, the Norwegians, in part because their nation was not a colonial power, enjoyed a particular advantage in the region. The difficulty was that the Norwegian women missionaries brought contemporary Norwegian notions of domestic life to a context in which they were totally alien, thus complicating—if not compromising—their missionary agenda.
A further issue concerned marriage customs. Western Protestantism was strongly monogamist; African culture had long recognized the merits of polygamy. Increasingly, the European Christian insistence upon a man having only one wife was seen as a Western import that had no place in traditional African society. The United African Methodist Church, an indigenous church that recognized polygamy, traces its origins back to a 1917 meeting of the Methodist church in Lagos, Nigeria, at which a large group of leading laypeople were debarred from the church on account of their practice of polygamy. They responded by forming their own Methodist church, which adopted native African values frowned on by the European missionaries.
By the year 1900, Protestantism had been firmly established in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But there were major questions. Was its presence in the region simply a consequence of Western colonial authority? Would it disappear in the future, along with other expressions of colonialism? Similarly, the forms of Protestantism established in the region bore the unmistakable hallmarks of their predominantly European origins. The services and structures of the “Church of the Province of South Africa”—one of two Anglican organizations in the region—looked remarkably like those of British Anglicanism.12 How would such obvious importations or transplants survive in such a different cultural context? And what would happen when the British had to go home? Could these planted churches survive without their colonial patrons?
Much the same questions were raised by Protestant attempts to expand in Asia, to which we now turn.
Asia
By the end of the nineteenth century, Protestantism had established what might best be described as a precarious presence in Asia, often protected by the diplomatic and military power of Western nations. The most significant Protestant presence was in India, where Christianity is traditionally believed to have been established in the first century in the form of the “Mar Thoma” church. This group of Christians traced their origins to St. Thomas the Apostle, who was believed to have come to India within two decades of the crucifixion of Christ. According to this ancient tradition, Thomas first set foot in India at Cranganore near Cochin, at that time an important seaport on the Malabar coast with important trade connections with Palestine and its neighbors. The voyages of the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) led to the opening up of the coastal regions of the subcontinent to Catholic missionaries, with Goa as their center of operations.
Protestant missions were relatively slow to establish themselves; indeed, evangelism was often seen as subsidiary to commerce, and occasionally as an impediment to it. The first Anglican clergy in India, for example, were ship’s chaplains, appointed by the English East India Company to provide pastoral care and spiritual support for the crews of their ships so that they might carry our their commercial tasks more efficiently.
However, the intrinsic importance of mission in the area was recognized by Humphrey Prideaux, the Anglican dean of Norwich (1684–1724) who penned an Account of the English Settlements in the East Indies, together with some proposals for the propagation of Christianity in those parts of the world. Prideaux pointed to the need to train people for the specific work of evangelism. In his prophetic idea that a “seminary” be established in England, with a view to preparing mission workers until such time as the work could be handed over to agencies based in India itself, may be seen the basis of the missionary movement, which was destined to exercise a significant influence over Indian Christianity.13 This new interest in evangelism was encouraged to no small extent by the 1773 decision of Pope Clement XIV to suppress the Society of Jesus, which was by then undertaking major Catholic missionary work in this region.
The first major Protestant mission to India was based at the Danish crown colony of Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast, south of Madras. Lutheran orthodoxy remained hostile to missionary activity, for reasons noted earlier in this chapter; Pietists, however, were strongly in favor. Among the German Lutheran Pietist missionaries of note in this undertaking were Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (who directed the mission from its founding in 1706 to 1719) and Christian Frederick Schwartz (director from 1750 to 1787). Members of the Lutheran faculty of theology at Wittenberg—Luther’s old university—were outraged at such a development and tried, unsuccessfully, to have it closed down.14
In the event, this mission bore some fruit. A Lutheran community of many thousands arose in and around the cities of the region, such as Tranquebar itself, Tanjore, Tiruchirapalli, and Tirunelveli. Danish Pietism went into decline around the year 1800, partly because of the growing influence of rationalism, and much of the work in the region was taken over by the Anglican Church Missionary Society. Around 1840, the Dresden-Leipzig Mission sent missionaries to the region, leading to many Tamil Christians reverting to Lutheranism.
The growing political power of Britain in the region, however, inevitably favored the activities of British missionaries, even though the East India Company did not want its commercial work disrupted by such activity. English Baptists began work in Bengal in 1793, settling in the Danish colonial town of Serampore, upriver from Calcutta, beyond the authority of the East India Company.15 The founding of Serampore College in 1818 was a landmark; it was presented to its supporters back in England as an institution that would train Indians to replace Europeans completely as missionaries and so create a truly indigenous church. While this claim may have been somewhat inflated—it was designed, after all, to encourage existing donors and secure new ones—the objective was of considerable strategic importance in view of the growing suspicions about the missionaries’ relationship with the British colonial authorities.
Although British missionary societies and individuals were able to operate in India without any major opposition from other European agencies from about 1775, they received no support from the British authorities. The East India Company, for example, was opposed to their activities on the grounds that they might create ill will among native Indians and thus threaten the trade upon which the company depended. However, the Charter Act, passed by Parliament on July 13, 1813, revised the conditions under which the East India Company was permitted to operate. From now on, British missionaries were given protected status and a limited degree of freedom to carry out evangelistic work on the Indian subcontinent. Their privileged status would inevitably cause them to be seen as agents of British rule and values. The Serampore program opened the way to the introduction of indigenized forms of Protestant churches.
Britain was by no means the only Western nation with missionary involvement in the Indian subcontinent. The first major American missionary undertaking had its origins at Williams College in Williamstown, Maryland, in 1810: a group of students who had been studying the history of the East India Company came to believe that they were called to serve as missionaries in the region. The General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts would form the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions that same year and send a group—including some of the original Williams College students—to Calcutta.
The issue of the relation of Protestantism to Indian culture remained important throughout the nineteenth century. It seemed to many that Protestantism was not only alien to India but insensitive to its cultural values and norms. The “Sepoy Mutiny” of 1857 is often seen as a revolt against alleged attempts to Westernize Indian culture as much as a rebellion against colonial rule.16 Christians and Christian institutions were targeted precisely because they were seen as the instruments or outcomes of Western culture.
A similar situation arose in China. A Christian presence had been established in China in 1294 when Franciscan missionaries reached the country. However, the church never achieved any great success in conversions. One of the many effects of the Opium War of the 1840s was to open the “Middle Kingdom” up to Western missionaries. China had been isolated from the West until the nineteenth century, when growing interest in commerce opened up the region to Western missionaries, predominantly from America and Britain. Hampered by a lack of knowledge of the written or spoken language, these missionaries labored under immense difficulties.17 One of these missionaries, the Englishman James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), may be singled out for special comment.
Hudson Taylor was initially a missionary with the Chinese Evangelization Society. Dissatisfaction with this organization led him to found the China Inland Mission in 1865. This mission was unusual in several aspects, not least its willingness to accept single women as missionaries and its interdenominational character. Hudson Taylor showed an awareness of the cultural barriers facing Christian missionaries in China and did what he could to remove them—for example, he required his missionaries to wear Chinese, rather than Western, dress. The China Inland Mission stood virtually alone among missionary societies at this time in recognizing the need for its missionaries to be taught Mandarin in schools especially established for this purpose. Other missionary societies merely provided their workers with language manuals and advice from native speakers.
The Western powers gained major footholds in China as a consequence of the Opium War (1839–42). Under the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), China was forced to make major concessions to Britain, including the granting of “extraterritoriality” (that is, exemption from Chinese laws) to British nationals. This proved to be the first of a number of “unequal treaties” that were imposed upon China by Western powers and led to growing Western influence in the region. During the period 1861 to 1894, the “Self-Strengthening Movement,” championed by Qing Dynasty scholars and officials such as Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) and Zuo Zongtang (1812–85), attempted to achieve a confluence of Western technology with traditional Chinese culture. Western missionaries were generally welcomed, not least on account of their perceived potential as educators.
However, China’s defeat by Japan in the disastrous Sino-Japanese War of 1895 led to new tensions. A new conservative elite gave support to the anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement of secret societies that came to be known as “the Boxers.” In 1900 Boxer bands were active throughout north China. Christianity was seen as something Western and hence un-Chinese. Foreign Christian missionaries were particularly at risk, as were any buildings associated with Christianity. Chinese Christians were massacred in many areas. Such was the scale of the action that foreign concessions in Beijing and Tianjin were besieged in June 1900, and eventually the Western powers were provoked to make an armed intervention. At this point, the Qing court formally took command of the Boxer forces and led a coordinated yet ultimately unsuccessful program of resistance to the Western relief army. The Peace Protocol imposed upon the Qing court on September 7, 1900, marked a final humiliation for the dynasty. It did nothing, however, to advance the cause of Christianity, which was clearly identified as a Western import.18
In Japan, Christianity first gained a presence in 1549, when the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima. The small church in Japan experienced a long period of isolation from the West during the Tokugawa shogunate. When Japan finally opened its doors to the West in 1865, the continuing presence of about sixty thousand Christian believers in the country was revealed. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), Protestantism gained a growing following in the country.19 However, it never achieved the significant growth that some anticipated. For many Japanese, Christianity, like butter, was seen as a Western import: the colloquial Japanese term for Christianity can be translated as “it tastes of butter.”
The South Pacific
The term “Oceania” is now generally used to refer to the 1,500 or so islands in the Pacific Ocean. Oceania is further subdivided into three regions. “Polynesia” designates the group of islands stretching from Hawaii (known as the “Sandwich Islands” in earlier centuries) in the north to New Zealand in the south, including Tahiti and Pitcairn Island. “Micronesia” refers to the group of small islands between Hawaii and the Philippines, including the Caroline, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands. “Melanesia” refers to the group of islands south of Micronesia and north of Australia, including Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and the New Hebrides. The population of this vast and dispersed region is relatively small; however, it was considered by nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries to be of major importance. Indeed, the predominant form of Christianity initially established in the region in the early nineteenth century was English-speaking Protestantism.
Missionary interest in the region was first awakened by reports of the voyages of Captain Cook during the eighteenth century. In 1795 the London Missionary Society was founded with the primary objective of sending missionaries to “the islands of the South Sea.” The first major missionary expedition to the region set off in August 1796 when thirty missionaries of the London Mission Society set sail for Tahiti. Although this mission faced considerable difficulties—not least of which related to the very different sexual mores of England and Tahiti—it can be seen as marking the beginning of a sustained effort to establish Christianity in the region.
The geographical nature of the region made one of the most reliable means of evangelization—the establishment of mission stations—impossible. The populations of the islands were generally too small to justify the building and maintenance of such settlements. The most successful strategy to be adopted was the use of missionary vessels, which allowed European missionaries to direct and oversee the operations of native evangelists, pastors, and teachers in the region.
The most significant Christian missions in the South Pacific were located in Australia and New Zealand, which eventually came to serve as the base for most missionary work in the region. Christianity came to Australia in 1788. The circumstances of its arrival were not entirely happy. The fleet that arrived in New South Wales was transporting convicts to the penal settlements that were being established in the region. At the last moment, William Wilberforce persuaded the British naval authorities to allow a chaplain to sail with the fleet. With the dramatic increase in immigration to the region from Britain in the following century, the various forms of British Christianity became established in the region. The formation of the “Bush Brotherhoods” in 1897 laid the basis for the evangelization of the interior of the continent.
The first missionaries arrived in New Zealand in 1814. A small group of missionaries, sponsored by the Church Missionary Society and led by Samuel Marsden, made contact with the Maori people and secured a positive response to Christianity. By the 1830s, many Maori had converted to Protestantism, while adapting it to reflect their own distinctive values. However, when serious tensions arose after the arrival of large numbers of colonists in the 1850s, many Maori reasserted more traditional forms of religion in reaction to the excesses of the British émigrés. The consolidation of Christianity in the region was largely due to the efforts of Bishop George Selwyn (1809–78), who was appointed missionary bishop of New Zealand in 1841. During his time in the region, he had a marked impact on the development of Christianity, particularly in relation to education.20
Throughout the South Pacific region, a major issue has been the relation of Christianity to the native peoples of the region, particularly the Australian Kuri (often still inappropriately referred to as “Aborigines”) and New Zealand Maori peoples. For some, Christianity is a Western colonial phenomenon to be rejected as destructive of indigenous culture; for others, Christianity has no necessary connection with Western culture or power and can be put at the service of indigenous peoples and cultures. The use of Christian rituals throughout the region to reaffirm traditional social and cultural values has been particularly significant.21
PROTESTANT MISSION AND NATIVE AMERICANS
While the predominant model of Protestant mission in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century involved missionaries working abroad, it is important to appreciate that a quite different model emerged in North America as Protestant settlers encountered Native American cultures. Missionary work began in New England in the seventeenth century as Puritan settlers made contact with local tribes. The Puritan missionary John Eliot (1604–90) became interested in the culture and language of the Native Americans who lived around Roxbury, and he learned Natic (as this regional variant of Algonquin was known) to preach to them. He was able to attract support for his missionary work in the region and in 1649 gained parliamentary approval for the establishment of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. Between 1661 and 1663, he translated and produced a Natic-language Bible, using a professional printer, Marmaduke Johnson, sent over from England in 1660 on a three-year contract.
In the eighteenth century, mission work shifted into a higher gear as the Great Awakening kindled interest in spreading the gospel among Native Americans. Various groups were involved in this enterprise, including European émigrés influenced by the revivals in Germany and England. Unusually, Moravian settlers were prepared to live among, and even marry, Native Americans, much to the concern of the British colonial authorities. This special relationship with Native Americans proved to be of particular importance evangelistically.22
A quite different form of engagement emerged in the early nineteenth century in response to the religious changes of that era. The revivalism that developed in Kansas during the Second Great Awakening led to growing interest in evangelization of the native tribes of the area. Baptists and Methodists—the two denominations most affected by the Awakening—undertook major missionary enterprises at this time.
One of the most significant and effective forms of missionary work was education.23 Baptist workers set up a training school near Topeka, which became a major center for evangelism in the 1850s.24 Medical missions also played an important role. Jotham Meeker (1804–55) combined his professional expertise as a printer with a somewhat amateur interest in medicine, using both as a way of establishing contact and trust with the Shawnees, Stockbridges, and Ottawas during the 1830s and 1840s.25
The motivation of these Protestant missionaries to evangelize Native Americans was complex. Virtually all of the missionaries I studied in preparing this section believed deeply and passionately that the coming of the gospel would enlighten and liberate the people to whom they were ministering. Yet other motivations can be discerned, paralleling rather than contradicting their primary concern. One such motivation was a desire to preserve the identity and interests of Native Americans in the face of rapid social change. At times, this motivation was accompanied by a naïveté that led to serious misjudgments—such as Isaac McCoy’s belief that reservations held the key to the safeguarding of the cultural identity of Native Americans.26
The case of the Canadian Baptist missionary Silas T. Rand (1810–89) illustrates this concern well, while also demonstrating the importance of Protestant missionaries for historical anthropology.27 Rand had aspirations to serve in foreign mission fields. However, his missionary interests were redirected in 1846. While ministering in Prince Edward Island, he became familiar with the Micmac language. Although the Micmac people of the Maritimes had already encountered Catholicism, Rand believed that he had a mission to them, and he was supported in this goal by a somewhat aggressively anti-Catholic group of supporters in Nova Scotia.
Rand believed that Christianity would deliver the Micmac from the predations and depravations of white culture, and he came to love and respect the Micmac language and folklore. Determined to preserve both, he acted as an advocate for the Micmac people in land rights disputes and published both the original texts and translations of their oral traditions. He was heavily criticized for doing so: why, a strict Baptist newspaper demanded, was Rand concerning himself with such “fables” when he was meant to be preaching the gospel? Here, as in so many other cases, our knowledge of the traditions, customs, and languages of America’s first peoples were preserved and transmitted by missionaries, many of whom developed a deep respect for the cultures within which they were working.
Similarly, the Hawaiian language was preserved because missionaries in the 1820s insisted on learning the native language in order to explain the gospel—and then came to see its preservation as an important issue in itself. Hiram Bingham (1789–1869) even refused to teach the islanders English, believing that this would destroy their linguistic—and hence their cultural—identity.28
A similar pattern can be seen in the ministry of Asher Wright (1803–75), a missionary to the Seneca people in Buffalo Creek, New York. After graduating from Andover Seminary, Wright joined the Buffalo Creek mission and would spend forty-four years working with the Seneca. His missionary work was not especially successful; however, his commitment to the people and knowledge of their language and customs led to the preservation of their distinctive features.29 Wright’s ministry is one of many examples that raise questions about the “colonial” stereotype of missionaries, until recently widely encountered in accounts of the Protestant missions of the nineteenth century.
COLONIALISM, IMPERIALISM, AND PROTESTANT MISSIONS
There has been a surge of interest in the history of Protestant missions in recent years on account of its multiple facets. The study of these missions possesses the capacity to illuminate a wide variety of issues—such as the history of specific Protestant denominations, the relation of mission to the practically simultaneous global expansion of capitalism and imperialism (summed up for many in David Livingstone’s slogan “Christianity, commerce, and civilization”), and the place of Christianity in the development of the religious and cultural histories of indigenous peoples.30 Each of these areas of research proves to be more complex and nuanced than previous generations of scholars had appreciated.
Until recently, it was common to argue that Protestant missions created a “state of colonialism” that was the precursor to the advent of a colonial state.31 On this view, the colonization of a region began with the assertion of the superiority of the values and ideas of the missionaries, which created a state of cultural subservience that was amenable to colonialist exploitation. The missionaries prepared the way for Western imperial rule by undermining native confidence in their own ideas, values, and civilizations. Such studies tend to be based on local situations—often in Africa—that are detached from the astonishingly broad range of Protestant missionary enterprises of the nineteenth century.
Yet this traditional view has now been challenged by detailed scholarship that has exposed its many flaws. Many missionaries attempted to subvert the “colonial mentality” that depersonalized indigenous Africans and often viewed them as little more than economic commodities. Perhaps the most interesting example of this is provided by Franz Michael Zahn (1833–1900) of the Bremen Mission in the German west African colony of Togo in the closing years of the nineteenth century. An aristocratic Pietist colleague of Gustav Warneck’s, Zahn energetically defended the right of the indigenous population to use their own language, against the opposing views of the colonial authorities, and sought, on the basis of his theological convictions, to reaffirm the basic humanity of the colonized.32
A study of the work of the London Mission Society among the Khoi people of southern Africa has proved particularly important in undermining the simplistic set of binary oppositions set up by the now-discredited “mission as colonialism” approach.33 Far from propounding colonialism, they provided the Khoi with an ideology of resistance against their Afrikaner masters. Furthermore, Protestant missionaries were active in many parts of the world that never came under imperial rule—indeed, in some of these cases missionaries worked to subvert any such possibility.34 It is impossible to present any one case as “typical,” as if there were a single controlling narrative.
There is now abundant evidence to suggest that Protestant missionary undertakings were far from the imperialist adventures that older research suggested they were, whether by accident or design. The thesis that Protestant missionaries colluded with or collaborated in the enterprise of empire has a certain superficial plausibility, yet ultimately it rests on a series of problematic assumptions about cause and effects, actions and identity, and above all on a failure to engage with the many agents in such a narrative. It was inevitable that British, German, Dutch, and Danish missionary enterprises would become entangled with the dynamics of empire. And while the clarification of the origins, mechanisms, and outcomes of such interconnections is historically important, it has not shown Protestant missionaries as half-witted colluders with the imperium, far less as its willing accomplices.
The nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounter with other cultures had a significant impact on Protestant identity, and it is important to reflect on how this took place. The interaction of missionaries with culture is typically presented as one-way: the missionary, through an act of intellectual and culture imperialism, imposes his or her views on a native culture. This stereotype of the missionary still lingers in the darker recesses of cultural anthropology, some of whose practitioners persist in portraying them as rigidly ethnocentric.35
The reality is otherwise. While exceptions can easily be identified—and presented as the norm by those with vested interests—it is clear that missionaries were “far from being rampant cultural imperialists” and instead were usually “extremely diffident about imposing their own views.”36 The essential point is that the missionary enterprise has always been dialogical and interactive—that is, the missionary physically and mentally inhabits the world of the group to which he or she feels called. The seeds of the notion of cross-cultural mission were laid in this great era of missionary expansion, even if the lessons learned were implicitly absorbed by individual missionaries rather than explicitly stated and analyzed by their successors.37
Moreover, the alleged universality of the Enlightenment, which had been assumed by many Protestant missionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, began to lose its plausibility.38 Increased understanding of non-Western cultures began to expose the wide variety of cultural and intellectual norms that existed across the world. Eighteenth-century advances in physical geography had not been accompanied by a mapping of the world’s rationalities and moralities, which proved to be far from universal. Cultural geography thus proved to be at least as important as its physical counterpart. Indeed, the reports of missionaries in such regions did much to advance the discipline of cultural anthropology, which insisted that each ethnic group had its own essential characteristics that could not be shoehorned into preconceived molds.
The high point of this era of Protestant missions was the World Missionary Conference, held at Edinburgh in 1910. This conference represented a serious attempt to reflect on what had been learned to date and to consider how these lessons might be applied to the future. Enormous effort had been directed into preparation for the conference. There was a sense of urgency and excitement as insights and visions were shared and networks were shaped and expanded.39 Yet with the benefit of hindsight, the conference can be seen to have reinforced existing Protestant paradigms of mission at a time when redirection and review were increasingly necessary.
The missionary movement’s best analysts and thinkers worked on the assumption that there was a reasonably homogeneous Christian world, primarily in Europe and North America, that was fully evangelized; beyond it lay at best a partially evangelized world, with many regions that had yet to be evangelized at all, such as Latin America. While the movement recognized the emergence of a “Native Church” in parts of the world, it saw that church as a tender plant in need of supervision from the West as much as Western resources. Evangelism would remain the business of the “Home Church”—in other words, the spiritually and numerically robust churches of the West. The paradigm of a church-shaped mission remained unaltered, even though increased interdenominational collaboration had broadened the base of the “church” in question. The tasks of mission produced a remarkable consensus among those who attended the conference, which is often regarded, for good reason, as the seed of the subsequent ecumenical movement.
But other, perhaps wiser, voices were not heard. Gustav Warneck did not attend the conference, partly in protest against the preponderance of American and British delegates and theological viewpoints. Warneck and other German thinkers and practitioners regarded the Anglo-American approach as culturally simplistic, being linked as it was to the conversion of individual souls rather than committed to the creation of indigenous churches grounded in the cultural and social realities of the region.40 The church could not be based on Western models, still less embody or proclaim Western norms; instead, the gospel had to be related to and expressed through indigenous social and cultural institutions.
But little came of these ideas. Other, more pressing matters intruded to force them to the margins of Protestant reflections. The great era of Protestant missions came to an end in 1914 with the outbreak of the Great War, as it was then known (now referred to as the First World War). Many of the tentative patterns of collaboration between missionaries across national and denominational boundaries were overwhelmed by a tidal wave of nationalism unleashed by the war and the economic and political uncertainties that ensued.41
It is entirely fitting to regard the outbreak of the First World War as bringing down the curtain on the classic era of Protestantism, when a set of seemingly secure and settled beliefs and assumptions prevailed. As events proved, the twentieth century would see greater change in the movement than ever before—a matter to which we return in the third part of this study. It is now appropriate, however, to probe the inner identity of Protestantism in far greater detail, and so we turn to consider its ideas and attitudes in some depth.