Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (148 page)

The classic case of colonial rule following missions is provided by the first major area of Christian success, the Pacific Ocean (Oceania), where in the end virtually everywhere fell under the rule of either European powers or the United States. Stirred by the triumphs and quasi-martyrdom of Captain Cook, the London Missionary Society made Pacific islands its especial priority straight away in the 1790s. Here missionary concerns were very close to the Enlightenment: the primarily Congregational leadership was from that intellectually lively Dissent which threw its enthusiasm into the scientific advances of its day, moving in the same circles as Anglican Enlightenment figures like Captain Cook's naturalist colleague and fellow explorer Joseph Banks or the agricultural writer Arthur Young. It was not a problem to combine a theology of nature, in which the believer could delight in the wonderful works of the Creator, with expectation of the approaching millennium, for which one could prepare by exploring those wonders: a form of purposeful meditation on the Last Days.
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Nevertheless the London Missionary Society's Evangelical outlook gave it a different perspective from Banks's fascination with an apparent oceanic paradise. Its leaders saw the Pacific hosting no primeval Edens but rather sinks of ancient corruption needing urgent Protestant remedy - not least for relaxed sexual mores, homosexuality included, qualities which to other European observers seemed so attractive.
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So the Society planned an ambitious and imaginative project with its first voyage to Tahiti and elsewhere in 1796. An entire community of thirty-plus hard-working practical English people embarked not exactly to colonize, as Puritans had done in New England, but to set the degraded islanders a good Protestant example as a mission community whose intentions emulated the communal ideal of the Moravians. On board were all the respectable characters of a large English village (with the exception of the squire, who might bring his own sort of European corruption): besides four clergy, there were weavers, tailors, shoemakers, a gardener. They had no doubt that they would spread the useful arts and better moral aspects of European civilization along with the good news of Christianity.
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The results from the settlements planted in this voyage of the
Duff
were disappointing in the extreme; the colonists exhibited some spectacular backsliding from godly ways, and the LMS did not repeat the experiment. Instead it fell back on a model of activity equally prone to chance but less in need of elaborate infrastructure: the single male who, with luck, training and prayer, would impress and motivate local leaders, who would then order their people to become Christians. It was, after all, the pattern which had worked well in bringing Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England twelve centuries before, and many missionary organizations followed suit. There were casualties: several missionaries themselves suffered Captain Cook's fate as some initially promising local situation soured, but far more numerous were native deaths, particularly as other Europeans arrived with a greater and more exciting range of Western amenities, including alcohol and its handmaid, sexually transmitted disease. As in the earlier American experience of European-borne epidemics, demographic disaster undermined faith in traditional religion and lent plausibility to those respected local leaders who decided to give the new religion their backing. Quite early, some local converts became Christian prophets who promised that their flock would be rewarded with the whole panoply of desirable objects brought by Europeans, an anticipation of the 'cargo cults' which still flourish in Melanesia.
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Alongside such local adaptations of their message, missionaries did not forget the LMS's first emphasis on practical skills, so much continued to be on offer from the European arrivals, and not merely in trade goods.

Throughout the region, a consistent pattern developed from the example of Tahiti, the first large-scale success in founding Christian communities in the Pacific. Missions drew on the highly developed skills of Pacific peoples in seamanship, sending out local converts along old sea routes to other island groups. Rather than a detailed grasp of Christian theology, they brought charisma, a shrewd sense of what might appeal to local leaders in the Christian package and a determination to destroy the power of traditional cults. As the social disruption provoked by European contacts repeated itself across the Pacific, these were a winning combination. Various political leaders realized just how much advantage they might gain against rivals from missionary backing - often, as large-scale conversions took place, combatants in murderous wars would ally with missionaries of rival denominations, who frequently did not quite grasp how they were being used in local politics. When the Wesleyan Methodists and the LMS, in a laudable attempt to end their own rivalries, agreed in the 1830s to allot Samoa to the LMS and Tonga and Fiji to the Wesleyans, local Wesleyans on Samoa were furious. They would not compromise their Wesleyan purity even by using the same Bibles and hymn books as the LMS folk, and after twenty years of ill-will and agitation, European and Australian Wesleyan missionaries returned in some embarrassment to Samoa.
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The Maori in Aotearoa (the pair of major islands which Europeans have known as New Zealand) were part of the same oceanic culture. They had both a lively curiosity about European culture and an exceptional ability to exploit it: they learned the hard way that not all innovation was beneficial, when their acquisition of large quantities of muskets horrifically escalated casualties in their habitual and hitherto partly ritual warfare. Christianity in its various missionary forms offered more promising paths into adjusting to the European presence: by 1845, in under fifty years, at least half the Maori population was worshipping in Christian churches, far outnumbering European churchgoers on the two islands.
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Maoris found much to interest them in the Bible. When, with the help of missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, they negotiated a treaty with the British Crown at Waitangi in 1840, the Maori leadership regarded it as a covenant on a biblical model, and, despite many subsequent colonial betrayals of the treaty's spirit, it endured as the basis of a more just settlement for the Maori people in recent years.

One of the most creative leaders in the generation after the treaty signatories was a devout Anglican, a chief's son baptized William Thompson (Wiremu Tamihana in Maori). Tamihana had initially followed his European missionary mentors in their hostility to traditional Maori tattooing, but by the 1850s he was pleased to proclaim to his people after his own more careful scrutiny of the biblical text that nothing in scripture forbade it. This was an important element in Maori self-assertion at that time, and formed part of Tamihana's greater political purpose in appealing to the Bible to remedy the deteriorating situation after the treaty. Thanks to him, Old Testament Israel provided the Maori with inspiration for an attempt to create a monarchy to unite all their feuding tribes in the North Island; they had no other model for kingship in their tradition. By 1860 the scheme degenerated into war with the British, and Tamihana looked back sadly on his work in a reproachful letter to the British Governor:

I considered, therefore, how this blood could be made to diminish in this island: I looked into
your books
where Israel cried to have a king for themselves to be a judge over them . . . on his being set up the blood at once ceased . . . I do not allude to this blood lately shed; it was your hasty work caused that blood.
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By then, the swelling number of colonizing immigrants had changed the balance of sympathy among Church leaders of European origins; most supported the military suppression of Maori aspirations. That terribly undermined existing Churches, principally the Anglicans. The gap was filled by syntheses of traditional religion with Christian practice, engineered by prophets more radical than Tamihana, along with imported alternatives to British religion such as the Mormon Church (see pp. 906-8).
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The saddest story of contact between Christianity and native peoples in the Pacific or Australasia is that of the aboriginal peoples of Australia. Pushed aside after 1788 by British colonial settlement which aimed (with broad success) to reproduce British patterns of life and religion in an infinitely sunnier climate, the aboriginals were left the vast expanses of their continent which the British did not want. Commonly missionaries did what they could to provide a way into European society by encouraging a new set of social patterns, as certainly seemed to work for the Maori; the missions were given grants of land in marginal territories on which aboriginals could form settled communities. But the gulf between traditional semi-nomadism and these Christian settlements was too great. Traditional leadership and cultural practices could not be sustained, and in any case, the general assumption of missionaries of whatever denomination was that it was not worth trying: aboriginals were a dying race, and it would be best if they were integrated into the modern world, without much great attempt to preserve their own languages. In an effort to destroy cultural memories which were seen as an insuperable barrier to integration, for nearly a century and a half countless children were removed from their parents for mission education: an unimaginable accumulation of separations, betraying any positive theory of Christian family life, whose consequences are still unravelling in Australian society.
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In the end, only one Australasian or Pacific territory, Tonga, escaped direct European or American rule, through an astute alliance with Britain by a newly established monarchy, basing its legitimacy on a unique construction which might have gladdened the heart of that High Tory John Wesley: a Methodist established Church. Christian groundwork was laid by LMS-inspired Tahitians in the 1820s, but a decade later Methodist initiatives began. Taufa'ahau, an ambitious and talented member of the Tupou family in the Tongan Ha'apai group of islands, allied with John Thomas, a Methodist minister once a blacksmith in Worcester; Taufa'ahau encouraged Thomas's mission and drew on the abilities of a Tongan aristocrat now a Methodist missionary, Pita (Peter) Vi. Between them they launched a vigorous campaign against traditional Tongan cults, which ran parallel with Taufa'ahau's growing power throughout the Tongan archipelago. In 1845 Thomas had the satisfaction of adapting English coronation rites for Taufa'ahau's enthronement as King George I, founding a royal dynasty which endures to this day.

Thirty years later there followed a written monarchical constitution for Tonga, shaped by an Australian Methodist minister, Shirley Baker, whose aspirations outran his self-restraint and brought a bizarre and sour twist to Tongan politics. Now Prime Minister of Tonga, Baker escaped the discipline of an increasingly alarmed Australasian Wesleyan Conference by resigning his ministry, and he encouraged the King to form an independent Tongan Methodist Church. Schism with Conference loyalists resulted, and between 1885 and 1887 there followed a brutal persecution of Methodists by Methodists, until the British High Commissioner intervened. By the end of George I's long reign in 1893, Baker had become a marginal figure, and the royal Church of the Tupou dynasty had returned to a less bloodthirsty Methodism. Queen Salote, majestic and generously proportioned heir to the light-touch British Protectorate established in 1900, was a much-appreciated visitor to England at her fellow monarch Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953.
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AFRICA: AN ISLAMIC OR A PROTESTANT CENTURY?

Nowhere else in the world was the relationship of Christianity to colonial expansion so straightforward as in the Pacific, partly because elsewhere Europeans encountered cultures based on faiths also claiming a universal message or with the potential to do so: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. Of these, Islam had the widest reach, and contacts were consequently the most varied. We have already noted how a far more confrontational attitude to Christianity arose in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire (see pp. 854-5), but for more than a century before, there had been revivals throughout the Islamic world, reactions to the humiliation of the failing empires of the Ottomans and Mughals. In the face of growing European military success in late-eighteenth-century India, Shah Wali-Allah began considering how Muslim society might adapt for the first time in its history to losing political power. He pleaded eloquently both for Islamic social reconstruction and for a reconciliation of Sunni and Shi'a within Islam, and his son 'Abd al-'Aziz sustained and developed his movement, combining tradition with a recognition of the reality of British India.
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On the fringes of Ottoman power in Arabia, an austere revivalism founded by Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (1703-87) gained support from tribal leaders of the Sa'ud family; al-Wahhab rejected more than a millennium of development within various branches of Islam, to return to basic texts, in a move not unlike the Protestant Reformation. In 1803 the Sa'ud temporarily conquered the holy city of Mecca, and thereafter remained a significant force in the politics of Arabia until eventually they became its rulers.

During the nineteenth century, this Wahhabite religious movement in a peninsula dominated by desert and with no great political or economic power seemed to have little wider importance. It was in North and West Africa that a new surge of life extended Muslim frontiers, and the agent was a very different form of Islam led by mystical Sufi orders: the first significant sign of Islamic renewal that Christian missionaries encountered anywhere. If Christian expansion in Africa did eventually become linked to military success, reforming Islam had already set the pattern in late-eighteenth-century West Africa, through the strength and proselytizing zeal of the pastoralist Fulani people. Their establishment of a string of emirates in place of previous kingdoms was spearheaded by movements of
jihad
(struggle) to establish a purer form of Islam, the greatest of which was led from 1802 by the campaigning Sufi scholar Shehu Usman dan Fodio. In the early nineteenth century, the most plausible picture of the future was that black Africa would have become overwhelmingly Muslim, and Muslim growth there remained spectacular all through the century.
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In fact, Christianity came to equal Islam in outreach in Africa, and this spurt of Christian growth was in the first place a mission pushed forward by self-help. Only belatedly did it gain increasing protection from European military power; even at their apparently most powerless, Africans made their own choices within the offer of Christian faith.