The Book of Books (34 page)

In many cases, colonial and later imperial rule followed the missionaries: and in many cases, devastation of local cultures was the result. It is difficult to tell the missionary story with enthusiastic one-sidedness. While it is impossible to doubt the integrity of the majority of individual missionaries and possible to give their guiding organisations full credit for what they saw as a need for the world to be ‘improved', ‘saved', and ‘brought to Christ', some of the human and cultural results, often the debris, are still with us. And ‘enthusiastic one-sidedness' cannot escape blame.

Whether, given the way the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became harnessed to the unbridled horsepower of the industrial and then the technological and then the ideological revolutions, the ‘native' peoples would have stood a better chance without Christianity, who can tell? We cannot trust the thesis that all the ‘natives' lived in a state of innocence until the arrival of the horrors of the Europeans and the Americans. There is too much evidence in pre-colonial life of mayhem, murder, savagery and oppression. The attempt to zone the world geographically into the
good
and the
bad
does not seem to work: the bad is always present, the good has always had to be struggled for and ‘civilisations' come out of that struggle.

Nevertheless there was much to mourn on the part of those who met the zealous brunt of the Protestant missionaries: as there was much to mourn among the missionaries themselves whose lives were cut down, whose teachings were ignored and whose influence was often minimal. Despair and loss were often shared.

Oceania was a priority for the London Missionary Society. It had become England's province of the tropical imagination after the bold voyages of Captain Cook and the botanical harvesting of Joseph Banks. Tahiti would be the goal and a ship carrying about thirty practical English missionaries set out with an expectation not unakin to those of the Pilgrim Fathers. It was an all but total
disaster. Some went native in what proved to be a treacherous Eden; others were murdered; at least one missionary went insane – he had tried to teach Tahitians Hebrew, but the connection is not established – until only one missionary remained. Yet his story, of which more later, can be seen as inspirational and in the longer view of the Christian mission can be claimed to be successful.

Other Pacific Islands were boarded with, at first, little success, though there again, the sheer obstinate belief in themselves and their mission which was displayed by a handful of Christian Englishmen bore Christian fruit in longer terms. It was a strange, mad enterprise, looking back, this assault on deep, alien, illiterate, untechnological oceanic cultures by these raw platoons of theologically primed, industrially educated, European-based men. Even stranger when we realise that to these peoples with their own gods, their own ways, they brought what must have seemed such a weird story.

The story was of a monotheistic, invisible, all-powerful, allmerciful God and His Son Jesus Christ whom He had watched crucified on the Cross to save the world from sins which most oceanic people did not see as sins at all. Yet Christ became the figure who was eventually to bridge the divide between these wide-apart cultures.

The Maoris took more readily to Christianity and by 1845 we are told that at least half the Maori population was worshipping in churches – outnumbering European churchgoers. They followed Isaiah's lead in the Old Testament. And they discovered to their relief that nothing in the King James Version forbade tattooing. But when the colonists grew in number, following Roman Catholic colonists in Central and South Africa, and Protestant colonists in North America, they wanted more land, in this case Maori land, without Maori interference or participation. It was
easier to murder them and rob them of their territories than to convert them, and this is what happened.

The Churches stood in the way of this ethnic cleansing but the Churches were pushed aside. Lust for land swept aside the Bible however much those who slaughtered might give it homage and, in a bewildering way, respect. And they had read in the Old Testament that God's chosen people in the Old Testament had not flinched from slaughtering whole peoples whom they saw as their enemies. God had not discouraged them. The missionary project exposed the Bible to some sceptics as merely a pawn, just another power-political player on the board. There was one Bible for war and another for peace, it seemed; one for the strong, another for the weak; one for contemplation, another for action; one for murder, another for compassion.

In Australia it was even worse. In all but the rarest cases, the missionaries gave up on Australia's native population and joined sides with the colonial imperialists. Those who tried to ‘save' them were swept aside by the conscious and unconscious decision that the Aboriginals were doomed and deserved nothing. There was little attempt to preserve their languages or their culture.

For almost a century and a half innumerable children were ripped away from their natural parents and forced through a mission education which fitted them for little more than deracinated depression and varieties of near slavery. Even here, though, it would be unjust to blame the Church solely. The mission school education was sincerely and correctly thought to be an improvement on the education in the new state that the children could expect elsewhere. They had been abandoned to the marginal remains of their shrinking homelands. The priorities and the firepower of the white British Protestant immigrants chose to ignore the Sermon on the Mount.

Good work was done with those who had been exiled to
Australia for ‘crimes', many of which nowadays we would regard as pardonable or trivial. Courageous men of the Churches went into those dangerous early antipodean settlements much as their colleagues braved the dark satanic mill towns of England, and an alternative to the desperation of exiled imprisonment was offered and sometimes taken up.

In time white-dominated New Zealand and white-dominated Australia laid fair claim to be part of a Christian – an Anglican-nonconformist Roman Catholic – global fraternity, and the Pacific Islands were and are also alongside. In that time much of the indigenous culture has been erased.

The African experience was different in crucial ways and, in my view, hardly surprisingly, it mirrors the African-American experience which came out of slavery. In short, the Africans took Christianity and moulded it to fit their own religions just as the African-Americans took nonconformist Christianity and made it theirs.

In Africa, the Christian missionaries met other strong faiths – Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, and the greatest of these was Islam. It seemed, according to MacCulloch, that ‘in the early 19th century, the most plausible picture of the future was that black Africa would have become overwhelmingly Muslim, and Muslim growth there remained spectacular throughout the century.' However, the Christian mission in that same century made even more spectacular progress. The British missionaries took breathtaking risks in their pursuit of converts.

There were key features in Christianity which meshed with many of the African belief patterns. These patterns were not the messages which were being preached by those who brought their Bible learning into Africa, but they were deep in Christianity and they became the binding that fed the rapid growth of an African evangelical Christianity. Today in some African countries, it is as vibrant and confident as any in the world.

The King James Bible is a book of signs and wonders, miracles and coded messages revealing to the spiritually aware and to the initiate that this is how God shows his face. Africans were used to looking for such signs and interpreting such wonders and messages. The Bible spoke of spirits – commonly present in African religions – and explained in mysterious terms but in terms demanding to be believed, how the world came about. It described in detail the descent of the family of man. The genealogies were a perfect fit with African familial traditions.

Polygamy was a stumbling point for the Christian missionaries but not for the Africans who knew their Old Testament and admired the marital customs of the great patriarchs. Certain enlightened missionaries admitted that the Africans' argument from the Bible was sound. John William Colenso, a Cornishman who became the first Bishop of Natal, argued that the Zulus made a good biblical case for polygamy. He wrote about this in 1862 in a pamphlet addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was condemned as a troublemaker.

It was a subject which did not go away. In 1917, sixty-five Yoruba ministers were expelled from the Nigerian Methodist Church for polygamy. They went off and founded their own Church: the United African Methodists. Later there was a growing feminist voice which criticised and condemned polygamy. In countries where women were often the most dedicated and gifted Christians, theirs became an increasingly influential argument.

Meanwhile the Churches went about their wider agenda by funding schools – in South Africa the Xhosa word for ‘Christians' was ‘schools'. And the Bible itself was not only the location of the Word of God, it became a sacred object which to touch was to be calmed or healed.

India, by contrast, was a failure for the Protestant missions. There were those, most prominently Bishop Samuel Horsley, who
was a supporter of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospels, who did not think it was part of God's plan that Britain should seek to change the religion of another country. In the Caribbean he had supported the mission because he had seen no religion.

The East India Company, so powerful that its own army was bigger than the British Army, agreed with Bishop Horsley. They were most reluctantly forced to support the missionary movement in 1813 after a campaign led by William Wilberforce. Proselytisers saw this massive subcontinent as an unparalleled opportunity to bring millions of souls to God. But Hinduism and Islam were deeply entrenched and Taoism and Buddhism had a strong hold: these deep faiths were not to be overturned easily. It proved that they were not to be overturned at all, despite some small gains for the Protestant mission. And the East India Company's insistence on favouring Christianity instead of maintaining a traditional neutrality was one cause of the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857, the most serious mutiny against any European colonial power in the whole of the nineteenth century. The company was to rue the day it abandoned its successful policy of leaving indigenous religions alone.

After that rebellion, Queen Victoria ended the ascendancy of the East India Company and ordered the new government to ‘abstain from any interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects'. The lesson had been hard learned. The zeal of Wilberforce and others had unexpected consequences of an undeniably negative nature.

The belief that there was one God only who reigned to rule all the world and that this God had to be made known to the world that had lived in darkness without His light, was gone. The royal decree of King James in 1611 had declared the Bible to be the Word of the sole God and he had declared himself to rule by Divine Right. That was extinguished. Christianity from now on
was but one religion among many and Protestantism was but one branch of Christianity.

This did not stop the missions. It did not for many years strip individuals of their conviction that the Word of the Christian God had to be spread abroad and the way of the path of Jesus Christ was the only road to sinlessness and salvation. It did, though, mark a turning point. In India, Christianity, admittedly with few representatives but nevertheless with the might of 250 years of the Protestant Advance behind it, had come up against Hinduism and Islam in their implacable might: and retreated.

In China there was a momentous episode of Christian fanaticism which sparked a war called ‘the most destructive civil war in world history' – worse in casualties and damage than the American Civil War and almost as devastating as the First World War. This was led by Hong Xiuquan, who had been encouraged to read Christian books by an American missionary. Hong, who had suffered several nervous breakdowns, received many visions from ‘God'. The mix of his new philosophy and the breadth of his appeal included a wish to return to the Ming Dynasty, a promise to end corruption and a vow to bring about social equality. He brought about massacres.

The missions of the Protestants, which followed earlier missions of the Jesuits in China, made converts and held on to them after the collapse of the Hong Xiaquan phenomenon. But as in Japan and Korea, the twentieth-century tornados of ideological change swept away all but a valiant few.

The most stunning success for the Protestant mission was in the United States of America. In 1815, active Church membership was around a quarter of the population, which then stood at 8.5 million. A century later it was about 50 per cent of a population which had reached 100 million. MacCulloch writes: ‘that growth reflected the dynamism, freedom, high literacy rates and
opportunity available in this society, and the Christian religion seemed to owe its success to a competitive and innovative spirit as much as did American commerce and industry.' More subdivisions in the Protestant Church seemed to spring up by the year. The idea of a mission became part of a wider American vocabulary. The overall mission was to do God's work in America, though knowing what would bring Godly benefits was not always certain. The evangelicals, for example, fuelled the temperance movement or mission which led America to prohibition which led to widespread organised crime. This, perhaps, is a classic example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

The Mormons – the Latter Day Saints – were another mission and despite the ridicule and persecution, the Mormons persisted and persist. Their polygamous ways trouble the authorities. These same authorities also find another group, the Jehovah's Witnesses, troublesome. They refuse to bear arms or acknowledge the state. They are on an endless world mission. The Jehovah's Witnesses still knock politely on doors throughout the English-speaking world.