Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (151 page)

When Fascist Italy sought to avenge the shame of Adwa in its invasion and destructive occupation of Ethiopia in 1935 (including the wrecking of historic church buildings), reaction across Africa was sharp in condemning this outrage. As far away as Nigeria, Christians sneered at the Italian Pope for his lack of condemnation of fellow Italians: 'It should be remembered that the Pope is after all a human being like the ordinary run of mankind and therefore heir to human weaknesses, in spite of the traditional claim for him by his adherents of infallibility.'
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Equally Ethiopia has inspired many Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans to express their pride in Africa through their adherence to Rastafari. This syncretistic religious movement takes its title from the pre-coronation name of the last Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, and it meticulously grounds its beliefs in Old and New Testament, in the fashion of Christian Churches through the centuries.

INDIA: THE GREAT REBELLION AND THE LIMITS OF COLONIAL MISSION

The stories of the great Asian empires suggest that although the relationship between Christian expansion and imperial expansion could be intimate, Christianity was as likely to be disruptive as helpful. From the 1790s most British Protestants did not share the particular preoccupation of the London Missionary Society with the Pacific; they viewed former Mughal India as the flagship of mission, since it contained Britain's largest and most rapidly expanding colonial territories. The leading eighteenth-century High Churchman Bishop Samuel Horsley, though a long-standing activist in the old Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and a supporter of missions in Britain's Caribbean colonies, opposed Indian missions, because he did not consider it part of God's plan for Britain to alter the religion of another country, especially since most of India was not then ruled by agents of George III.
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Perhaps Evangelicals should have listened to Horsley, because in the long term India was to prove the biggest failure of European missionary enterprise.

Horsley's was not the only voice raising doubts. The Honourable East India Company (which governed British India at one remove from the British Crown until 1858) was initially extremely wary of disturbing Hindu and Islamic sensibilities. It prized the fact that the admirers of the reformist Muslim scholar Shah Wali-Allah were grudgingly cooperating with British rule. The Company went out of its way to respect Hindu practice, with certain exceptions such as widow-burning which offended European notions of cruelty. Then Evangelical pressure in the British Parliament - another campaign led by William Wilberforce, culminating in success in 1813 - gave the Company no choice but to allow missionaries into its territories.
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An Anglican bishopric was set up in Calcutta, over the next three decades acquiring a stately Gothic cathedral straight out of provincial England, designed by a military engineer. Evangelicals gradually gained influence within Company government as in other colonial territories of the British Crown's own empire. From 1805 the Company's English administrators were prepared for government in its English training college at Haileybury, among whose staff Evangelicals were prominent, and by the 1830s these boys were in positions of executive power. They were administrators of an organization which already in 1815, according to one well-informed contemporary commentator, ruled the lives of forty million people: around 65 per cent of all the people in the British Empire.
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What a prospect opened up for Christian mission!

Company policy steadily moved towards favouring Christianity at the expense of existing Indian religion. Protestant missionaries were very willing to fund the provision of higher education, which both they and prominent members of the India Company administration increasingly saw as the way to produce a cooperative Westernized elite. By 1858 Lord Stanley's view from the India Office was that 'while professing religious neutrality we have departed widely from it in fact'. Now he was writing in reflective mood after a grave crisis for British rule the previous year: the Great Indian Rebellion, or first Indian War of Independence, long called by the British 'the Indian Mutiny'.
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The most serious nineteenth-century uprising against any Western colonial power, it was partly triggered by efforts to promote Christianity in India, bringing Muslims and Hindus into alliance - famously, one other flashpoint for rebellion which promoted this cooperation was the rumour that bullets issued to Indian soldiers were greased with pig or cow fat, insulting both Hindus and Muslims. The figurehead for independence, the aged Bahadur Shah Zafar II, last member of the Muslim Mughal dynasty to reign in Delhi, proved a reluctant leader, but he did his best to discourage strict Muslims from alienating Hindus in the insurrection by demonstrations of their own intolerance like cow-killing.
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Even so, the British Indian Army overcame the rebellion partly because significant sections of Hindu and Muslim elites remained neutral in the conflict, despite having been leading voices in the hostility to Christian missions. That was a powerful incentive for the new British government of India abruptly to turn from the trajectory of supporting Christian expansion. Queen Victoria's proclamation ending Company rule in 1858 emphasized that the new government was under instruction to 'abstain from any interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects', an important statement of policy on the part of a deeply serious Christian monarch whose personal feelings led in the other direction: it ran parallel to the legislation ending virtually all legal discrimination among Christians in Great Britain itself. Subject to the untidiness always associated with local implementation of policy at long distances from its origin, Christian missionaries were now stripped of official support in the largest colonial possession of the world's greatest power.
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By the end of the century more perceptive missionaries were realizing that Christian missionary work had not achieved the critical mass necessary to success in India. Like Catholics before them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestants found that the Indian caste system was a formidable barrier to promoting a religion whose rhetoric emphasized the breakdown of barriers among all those who followed Christ. British-run schools continued to flourish, but they did not deliver many converts or enough native Christian leadership to stimulate mass conversion. Indians took what they wanted from European education; Christian schools enjoyed a great success, but it was of a different order from that in similar Evangelical schools founded by the Church Missionary Societies in Egypt (see p. 890). There the intake had also been from an elite, but an elite already Christian. In India, few pupils were from Christian families, and few decided that they would take on a new faith, even while they benefited from Western culture. In fact the challenge to faith and intellect posed by the Christian onslaught had prompted Hindus to self-examination and eventually to self-confidence and pride in their heritage. They were aware and proud of a growing interest in their culture in the Christian West, ironically often as a result of their excellent education in Christian colleges.

From the beginning of the century, there had been correspondence and even meetings between a small number of outward-looking Indian religious leaders and European and American Unitarians, mutually impressed by the possibilities which their respective revolts against traditional understanding of religion might open up in their search for a common and greater religious truth, in which the constraints of particular cultures were left behind. These contacts were spearheaded by the reformist and controversially ecumenical Bengali Rammohun Roy (
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. 1772-1833), who travelled across the oceans to Britain to defend the reforms of Hindu customs like widow-burning promoted by his former employees the East India Company; he died in Bristol, where the grand classical chapel built by prosperous Unitarian merchants in the city centre still proudly houses a plaque commemorating his life.
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In the 1880s a growing self-confidence among Hindus encouraged a much wider 'Hindu renaissance' and a significant number of Hindu reconversions among Christian converts (conversion was indeed a borrowing of a Christian concept). The 'positivist' theories of the Western anticlerical philosopher Auguste Comte were among the influences in some modernizing reconstructions of Hindu faith which sought to sidestep priestly power but justify the continuing existence of the caste system.
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Conversely Indian missionary struggles and setbacks bred a new spirit of humility among Christians. It was among Protestants in India that the impulse first arose to forget old historic differences between denominations which meant little in new settings and to seek a new unity. This was the chief origin of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement (see pp. 953-8).

CHINA, KOREA, JAPAN

The greatest Asian empire was China, ruled by the Qing dynasty. It tottered but did not quite fall during the nineteenth century, only just surviving determined efforts by first the British and then other Europeans and Americans to exploit its huge territory. The arrival of Christianity and interference by European powers identified with the Christian faith contributed to a catastrophic rebellion, and almost a century would follow from the collapse of the Qing in 1911 before the Churches could free themselves from association with imperial humiliation. The decay of the empire at the end of the eighteenth century gave opportunity both for Roman Catholics to pull together the surviving congregations of their old missions (see pp. 705-7) and for Protestants to begin their own assault on China for the first time. To this day, the official Chinese attitude to Catholicism is that it is different from 'Christianity' - that is, Protestantism - since the two religions arrived at different times in Chinese history. Protestant penetration was made possible by a series of treaties with European powers initiated by the British in 1842, the result of wars presenting a different face of Britain from that so lauded in Lecky's pronouncement on abolitionism. Simultaneous with that 'perfectly virtuous' act was a policy illustrating the selective imperial morality of the British, who made up their trade deficit with China by exporting opium grown in India.

The trade grew huge, and it led to a crisis of addiction throughout the Chinese Empire which the imperial authorities desperately tried to contain, chiefly with efforts to prohibit imports and destroy shipments of drugs as they arrived. Britain went to war in 1839 to defend its profits, and its technological superiority ensured military and naval victory. Missionaries arrived in association with this less than perfectly virtuous result, because the Treaty of Nanjing opening the trade once more in 1842 also reversed an imperial prohibition on Christian belief proclaimed a century before. A good many missionaries arrived entangled with the opium trade, sailing above holds stacked with chest on chest of the drug, and generally mission finances were kept afloat by the credit network maintained by the opium merchants - let alone funds which missions received directly from firms connected with the trade (that is, virtually any Western commercial enterprise trading with China).
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For both Chinese people and their government, missionaries became associated with assaults on their fundamental assumptions about the world. The knowledge of military defeat and the social misery caused by the opium trade made ordinary Chinese not only hostile to missionaries but disgusted with their own regime; many remembered that the ruling Qing dynasty, Manchu in origin, was actually as foreign as their British and French tormentors.

A contradictory mixture of popular anger and fascination with Western culture fuelled the Taiping Rebellion, which broke out in 1850. Its first ideologue and leader, Hong Xiuquan, had four times failed in that traditionally indispensable key to success in China, the examinations necessary to enter the civil service. In a state of nervous breakdown, he took to reading Christian books, encouraged by a young American missionary. He became convinced that he was chosen by God for leadership, and he preached of his vision and of the redemptive power of Jesus. His movement embodied an incendiary combination of nostalgia for the Ming dynasty, traditional rebellious zeal to end corruption and a melange of notions from Christian sources, including a drive to social equality - all united by Hong's continuing visions from God.
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All over the world in mid-century, the sudden escalation of Western interference in traditional culture led to such ideological fusions, in which the Christian idea of the Last Days was a favourite galvanizing force, usually with devastating results. So in the same decade that saw the Taiping explosion, the Xhosa of South Africa tried to slaughter all their cattle; they were convinced by prophecies from the young girl Nongqawuse that they must remedy their impurities, in preparation for the return of a former Xhosa leader, allegedly now commanding the Russians against the British in the Crimean War, who would bring them a new abundance. Yet the Xhosa had found that only horrific hunger and death rewarded their delusional devotion; the same reward awaited the Taiping.
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China's huge scale magnified the effects of apocalypticism in the Taiping Rebellion. It took over most of central China, and proved far more traumatic even than India's Great Rebellion. Taiping means 'Great Peace', but this was the most destructive civil war in world history, far outstripping the contemporary American Civil War, and little outdone in mayhem by the Second World War a century later. The Taiping created an entire governmental structure, with a formidable army, but Hong Xiuquan's rapid accretion of power did nothing for his fragile mental state. He lapsed into passivity and withdrawal, his favourite reading the new Chinese translation of John Bunyan's Protestant classic
Pilgrim's Progress
. His Protestant cousin Hong Rengan, arriving at the Taiping capital of Nanjing in 1859 after years of residence in British-ruled Hong Kong, tried to pull the movement out of its antipathy to foreigners and create a more rational organization, combining the best in traditionally meritocratic government with what attracted him in European culture: this would be a thoroughly modernized China, based on the Taiping's new syncretistic faith and the Chinese version of the King James Bible. Even when Taiping military power collapsed in the wake of Hong Xiuquan's final illness in 1864, Hong Rengan, now a prisoner of the Imperial Army, obstinately reaffirmed his pride in his cousin and the 'display of divine power' which had sustained the movement for fourteen years. Flare-ups of resistance persisted for years, and although a combination of dogged provincial-led armies proved a good deal more effective against the rebels than central forces, the empire never recovered. Even while the war raged, a new round of unequal treaties with external powers in 1858-60 gave new freedoms to missionary work within the imperial boundaries.
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