The missionary movement — and the colonial entanglement

In 1786 a young cobbler named William Carey proposed to a meeting of Baptist ministers that the church consider its obligation to preach the gospel among the heathen nations. He was told, by tradition in these words, to sit down: when God pleased to convert the heathen, he would do it without Carey's help.

Carey wrote a book instead. An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792) is a strange and impressive document — part biblical argument that the Great Commission was not exhausted by the apostles, part statistical survey of the world's population and religions, compiled by a man who had never left England and had taught himself Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Dutch while mending shoes.

He sailed for India that year, and the century that followed is the largest voluntary movement of people for religious reasons in history.

What they actually did

Carey spent forty-one years in India and never came home. He translated the Bible, in whole or in part, into some forty languages and dialects; he lost years of manuscripts in a warehouse fire in 1812 and began again; he campaigned against sati, the burning of widows, and lived to see it banned in 1829. He also famously said "expect great things from God; attempt great things for God", and less famously worked as a jobbing indigo planter to fund himself.

Adoniram and Ann Judson reached Burma in 1813 and waited six years for their first convert. He was imprisoned for nearly two years during the Anglo-Burmese war, in irons; Ann kept the translation manuscript hidden in a pillow and brought him food, and died shortly after his release. His Burmese Bible is still the standard.

Robert Morrison went to China in 1807, where preaching Christianity was a capital offence and teaching Chinese to a foreigner nearly so. He had ten converts in twenty-five years, and a Chinese Bible.

Hudson Taylor arrived in 1854 and concluded that the entire method was wrong. Missionaries lived in the treaty ports, under Western protection, in Western clothes, funded by Western societies that told them where to go. In 1865 he founded the China Inland Mission on the opposite principles: go inland, wear Chinese dress, wear the queue, ask no one for money, accept workers of any denomination and — startlingly for the period — send unmarried women to work in their own right.

Most of them were women

By the end of the nineteenth century the majority of the Protestant missionary workforce was female, and the histories written afterwards mostly did not say so.

Mary Slessor, a Dundee mill girl, went to Calabar in what is now Nigeria in 1876, lived in a village rather than a compound, learned Efik, and spent decades intervening against the killing of twins — locally believed to be cursed — fostering the children who would otherwise have died.

Lottie Moon spent forty years in Shandong and starved to death, in effect, during a famine in 1912 after giving away her food and her money. Amy Carmichael spent fifty-five years in south India and never took a furlough, rescuing children from temple prostitution. Gladys Aylward, refused by a missionary society for being academically unsuitable, bought a one-way rail ticket to China and later walked more than a hundred children across the mountains ahead of the Japanese army.

And they went with the empire

This is the part that cannot be smoothed over, and the honest form of it is not that missionaries caused colonialism or that they were innocent of it, but that the two travelled in the same hull.

Missionaries used imperial infrastructure — steamships, telegraphs, treaty rights extracted at gunpoint. The 1858 treaties that opened China to missionaries were signed after a war fought to protect the opium trade, and Chinese Christians have been living with that association ever since. Missionaries frequently arrived assuming that European dress, European names, European hymn tunes and European family structures were part of the package, and that local music, dance and kinship were not merely different but demonic.

There were exceptions who saw it and said so at the time. Henry Venn of the Church Missionary Society argued from the 1850s for the "euthanasia of a mission" — that every mission should aim at a self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating local church, and then leave. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba man rescued from a slave ship, was consecrated the first African Anglican bishop in 1864; a later generation of European missionaries undermined and effectively broke him, which tells you which way the movement drifted.

The answer, and it is a strange one: translation

Lamin Sanneh, a Gambian historian who converted from Islam, gave the sharpest account of this. Islam, he pointed out, holds that the Quran is properly untranslatable: to read it you learn Arabic. Christianity did the opposite from the beginning — the New Testament itself is a translation of the words of a Aramaic-speaking rabbi into Greek — and the missionary movement translated compulsively.

The consequence was not what the translators expected. To translate the Bible into a language, you must decide which local word for God is the right one — and by choosing it you concede that this people already had a name for the God who made them. You must reduce the language to writing, produce a grammar and a dictionary, and teach people to read. You have then handed a colonised people a standard by which to judge the coloniser, in their own language, and the literacy to organise with.

That is very largely what happened. African independent churches, anti-colonial movements and the leaders of independence in a dozen countries came out of mission schools with a vernacular Bible in hand.

The reckoning, and the arithmetic

The Boxer Rising in 1900 killed some 30,000 Chinese Christians and around 200 foreign missionaries. The China Inland Mission declined the indemnity payments offered afterwards, on the grounds that accepting them would prove the accusation that they had come as agents of foreign power.

Edinburgh 1910 gathered 1,200 delegates to plan the evangelisation of the world. Almost all of them were Western. Of the handful of Asians present, V. S. Azariah of India told the conference something it had not come to hear: that missionaries had given money, labour and their lives, and had not given friendship. "We also ask for love. Give us friends."

Within four years Europe was destroying itself in a war that ended the assumption of Western moral superiority for anyone paying attention.

And then the numbers moved. In 1900 there were perhaps nine million Christians in Africa; today there are more than six hundred million. Korea had a handful of Protestants in 1900 and now sends out more missionaries than almost any other nation. In China the missionaries were expelled by 1952, and the church that was left without them multiplied through thirty years of persecution.

What to take from it

Two things, held together.

The movement was carried by people who gave their whole lives, buried their children in foreign soil, learned languages no European had written down, and died young of fevers they knew were coming. Carey buried a son and watched his wife's mind break. Judson lost two wives and several children. The mortality statistics for West Africa in the 1840s were such that missionaries packed their belongings in coffins.

And it was compromised, repeatedly, by the assumption that the gospel and European civilisation were the same parcel — an assumption that Scripture itself, once translated, dismantled.

"How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?" (Romans 10:14). The question is Paul's, and it is still a good one. The answer the last two centuries gave is that they will hear, and then they will read it for themselves, and then they will tell you what you got wrong.