Lecture 5-4: Missions and Empire — The Argument That Will Not Settle

Read the image carefully, because it has usually been read backwards in this context. Jesus does not send his messengers as wolves among sheep, nor as sheep with an armed escort. He sends them defenceless, into danger, and tells them that their only equipment is shrewdness without harm.

The nineteenth-century missionary who travelled on a gunboat's treaty, appealed to a consul when threatened, and was buried with imperial honours was in a position this verse does not describe. That is not the same as saying he was a hypocrite. It is saying that the position was structurally different from the one Jesus assigned, and that the difference had consequences the people around him could see even when he could not.

1. How they became entangled: five mechanisms

"Missions and empire were connected" is not yet an argument. Here are the specific joints.

Routes. Missionaries went where transport, security and law made going possible, and in the nineteenth century that meant imperial infrastructure. Steamship lines, railways, telegraph, coaling stations, consulates. The map of Protestant mission fields in 1900 is very close to a map of European political control, with a few significant exceptions (Japan, Korea, Ethiopia, much of Latin America).

Law. In China, the treaty clauses of 1858–60 gave missionaries the legal right to reside inland and gave converts legal protection. In much of Africa, colonial administrations allocated mission "spheres" and licensed schools. This was not incidental. It determined who could work where, and it meant that a dispute between a convert and his neighbours could escalate into a diplomatic incident — which in China happened often enough to have its own name in Chinese, jiao'an, missionary cases.

Money and personnel. The voluntary societies of lecture 5-1 raised money in the imperial metropole from a public whose picture of the world was formed by imperial newspapers. Recruitment, promotion and reporting all ran through that public. Colonial officials and missionaries came from overlapping social worlds, went to the same schools, and often had family ties.

Services the state wanted. Missions built and staffed the majority of schools and hospitals in much of colonial Africa, frequently with government subsidy. This produced enormous and genuine benefit — literacy, medicine, the first written forms of many languages — and it also made the mission a functioning department of the colonial order, teaching a curriculum a colonial inspector approved.

Ideology. This is the one that did the deepest damage. Two ideas fused in the late nineteenth century that had not previously been joined: the Christian claim that all people need the gospel, and the pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy that emerged after about 1860. The first is a theological universal that levels everybody. The second says some peoples are permanently ahead of others. Where they fused, the sentence "these people need the gospel" started to mean "these people need us." And where the missionary movement had earlier assumed that converts would soon govern their own churches, after 1880 much of it stopped assuming that.

2. The case that must be answered: what "civilising" did

Take the ideology point and make it concrete.

Culture treated as an obstacle. Music, dance, naming customs, dress, funeral rites, initiation, and forms of marriage were routinely classified as heathenism and forbidden to converts. Some of these judgements were defensible; some were plainly matters of European taste presented as Christian requirement. The result in many places was a convert community physically separated from its own society — living in a mission village, wearing imported clothes, singing translated hymns to European tunes — and therefore easy to describe, by its neighbours, as having left its people.

The Kikuyu case, 1929. In Kenya, the Church of Scotland Mission and others required members and their children to renounce female circumcision, then a central initiation practice among the Kikuyu. The demand was made in a colonial context in which Kikuyu land had already been taken for settlers. Large numbers of members left the mission churches; independent Kikuyu schools and independent churches were founded; and the controversy fed directly into Kikuyu political organisation. Notice the tangle here: on the substance, missionary opposition to the practice has been vindicated by later African-led campaigns against it; on the method, imposing it by ultimatum from a settler colony produced a schism and a nationalist grievance. Being right about the thing is not the same as being right about how to press it.

Crowther, and the reversal that proves the point. This is the single most damning episode in the record, and it is damning precisely because of what preceded it.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther was born Yoruba, around 1809, in what is now Nigeria. As a boy he was seized by slave raiders and put on a Portuguese slave ship; the ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy's anti-slavery squadron and he was landed at Freetown in Sierra Leone. He was educated there, baptised, trained, ordained in England in 1843, and became a linguist of the first order — he produced a Yoruba grammar and dictionary and led the translation of the Bible into Yoruba, working from the Greek and Hebrew. In 1864 he was consecrated bishop, the first African Anglican bishop, with oversight of the Niger Mission.

This was not an accident of enthusiasm. It was policy. Henry Venn, secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841 to 1872, held that the aim of a mission was a self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating native church — the "three-self" principle — after which the missionary should withdraw. Venn called this the euthanasia of a mission. Crowther's episcopate was the flagship demonstration.

Then Venn died, and a new generation of young European CMS men arrived on the Niger in the 1880s, formed by a harder evangelical revivalism and by the racial confidence of the age. They investigated Crowther's African clergy, dismissed and suspended a number of them on charges of laxity, and progressively stripped the aging bishop of authority. Crowther resigned his direct oversight in 1890 and died in 1891. He was succeeded not by an African but by a European bishop. It would be decades before another African held that office.

The policy did not fail. It was reversed. That is the sentence to remember. The claim that Africans were not yet ready for leadership was manufactured after the fact, against a working example, by people with an interest in the conclusion. And one direct consequence was the growth of African independent churches — the Niger Delta Pastorate and others — founded by African Christians who concluded that self-government would have to be taken rather than granted.

3. The case usually left out: missionaries against empire

Now the other column, because a lecture that stops at section 2 is also propaganda.

Congo. The exposure of Leopold II's Congo Free State — a private colonial regime that extracted rubber by hostage-taking, mutilation and killing on a scale that depopulated whole regions — was largely the work of missionaries. William Sheppard, an African-American Presbyterian, travelled into the Kasai and documented what he found, including the severed hands collected as proof of expended ammunition. John and Alice Harris, Baptists, photographed mutilated survivors and toured with the images. Their evidence, combined with E. D. Morel's campaigning and Roger Casement's consular report, forced the Belgian state to take the colony from the king in 1908. Sheppard was prosecuted for libel in 1909 by a concession company and acquitted. This is missionary testimony bringing down a colonial regime, and it is not a marginal case.

India. Missionaries campaigned against sati, against child marriage, and for the education of girls and of low-caste and Dalit communities, frequently against the preference of a colonial administration that wanted no trouble with Hindu opinion. Mission schools were, for many Dalit families, the first institution that would teach their children at all.

China. Many missionaries, Hudson Taylor among them, campaigned publicly against the opium trade that their own governments were profiting from and had gone to war to protect.

And most importantly, the people the missions trained. The list of anticolonial leaders formed in mission schools is long enough to be an argument in itself. John Chilembwe, a Nyasaland Baptist trained partly in the United States, led an armed rising against colonial rule and settler labour abuses in 1915 and was killed; he is now on Malawi's banknotes. V. S. Azariah became the first Indian Anglican bishop in 1912. Jomo Kenyatta was educated at a Church of Scotland mission; Kwame Nkrumah at Catholic mission schools; Nelson Mandela at Methodist ones. William Wadé Harris, a Liberian preacher in no European society's employ, walked through the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast in 1913–15 and brought perhaps a hundred thousand people to Christian faith in about eighteen months — more than all the European missions in the region had managed in decades — and was arrested and deported by the French authorities for his trouble.

That last case is the sharpest. The most effective evangelist in West African history was an African, working independently, whom the colonial state treated as a threat.

4. Where readers will not agree

This is a point where readers will not agree, and the disagreement is not between the well-informed and the ill-informed. It runs between serious scholars and serious Christians who are looking at the same evidence.

The prosecution. In its strongest form — set out with the most care by the anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff in Of Revelation and Revolution, working on the Tswana — the argument is not that missionaries were agents of the state. It is subtler and harder to answer. Mission worked as a colonisation of consciousness: it reorganised time (the week, the clock, the Sabbath), work (wage labour as virtue), the body (clothing, hygiene, privacy), the household (the nuclear family, the enclosed dwelling) and language itself, and it did this by consent rather than by force, which is exactly why it went deeper than any administrator could reach. On this reading a sincere missionary is not an exception to colonialism but its most effective instrument, and sincerity is beside the point. Writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o press the same case about language and self-understanding, and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is the most widely read version of it.

The defence. Brian Stanley, in The Bible and the Flag, argues that the relationship has to be established case by case and that both the sweeping indictment and the sweeping vindication fail on the evidence. Missionaries were frequently at odds with settlers, traders and administrators — over land, over forced labour, over liquor, over the treatment of workers — and they were as frequently accused by colonial officials of stirring up the natives as they were of serving the state. Stanley's point is not that the movement was innocent; it is that "missions were the religious arm of imperialism" is a thesis that the archives do not support as a general rule, and that treating it as settled removes the need to look.

The third position, which is not a compromise. Lamin Sanneh — a Gambian historian, born Muslim, who worked at Yale — argued in Translating the Message that the decisive fact about Christian mission is that it translates. Islam holds the Qur'an untranslatable in its essence; Christianity, from Pentecost onward, has had no sacred language, and mission has therefore always meant putting Scripture into the vernacular. In the nineteenth century that meant missionaries producing the first grammars, dictionaries and written forms of hundreds of African and Asian languages.

Sanneh's claim is that this act had a logic of its own that ran against its authors. To translate a people's Scripture into their language is to say that their language is adequate to God — that God speaks Yoruba, Bemba, Tamil, Mandarin — and that is a levelling statement no amount of racial hierarchy can absorb. It also puts the text into local hands to be read, argued with and applied without a European in the room. Vernacular Scripture supplied the standard by which the coloniser could be judged and, repeatedly, was. Sanneh calls the alternative model diffusion, in which a religion spreads carrying its founding culture as a fixed requirement, and argues that Christian mission, whatever its practitioners intended, mostly did the other thing.

Andrew Walls makes the complementary point about the whole history: Christianity has no permanent geographical or cultural centre, and each transmission of it into a new culture is a genuine translation in which something new is discovered about the faith. He pairs an indigenizing principle — the gospel makes people at home in their own culture — with a pilgrim principle — it also makes them strangers in it, under judgement. Neither alone is Christian.

What a fair statement looks like. You are not required to adopt any of these. You are required to be able to state them in the form their own advocates use, and to know what would count as evidence.

If the Comaroffs are right, we should expect vernacular Christianity to remain culturally derivative and to fade when colonial power withdrew. If Sanneh is right, we should expect vernacular Christianity to grow fastest after the missionaries left, in forms the missionaries would not recognise, led by people who read the translated text against the translators. The second is closer to what happened, in West Africa, in East Africa, in China and in India — which is a genuine point for Sanneh and Walls. But it does not dispose of the Comaroffs' evidence about what mission actually did to Tswana time, dress, work and family in the nineteenth century, because both can be true: a movement can restructure a society in the coloniser's image and hand that society the tools to reject the coloniser, in the same generation, through the same schools.

The honest verdict is therefore not a verdict. It is a rule for reading: ask of each mission, each decade, each person, which of these two things it was doing — and expect the answer often to be both.

5. What is still being unloaded

Three things follow for now, and none of them is a matter of feeling bad about the past.

Money still decides. The Crowther episode is not about racism in the abstract. It is about who paid. The Niger Mission's funds came from London, so London's committee could depose a bishop it had consecrated. Wherever a church's budget originates outside itself, that structure is available. This applies as directly to a Korean, Brazilian or American agency funding a partner church in 2026 as it did to the CMS in 1890.

Culture is not the same as the gospel, and telling them apart is hard work, not an attitude. Everyone agrees in principle that the gospel is not Western. The difficulty is that no one presents their own cultural assumptions to themselves as cultural. The only reliable check is the one the nineteenth century mostly refused: let the local church decide, and be prepared to be told you were wrong.

The people evangelised are the church now. Roughly two-thirds of the world's Christians live outside Europe and North America, and the great majority of Christian conversion in the nineteenth century was accomplished by local evangelists whose names were not recorded — the catechists, the Bible women, the freed captives, the traders who carried a message down a road. Any account of the missionary century that leaves them as scenery has not understood the century.

The missionary century carried the gospel and the empire in the same ship, and the unloading is not finished. It is not finished because the cargo was never fully separated on the dock, and every generation since has had to go back down into the hold and sort it again.

The four positions, side by side

5. Going to the Sources

• The Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference reports, digitised in full. Read Commission I, then find the address of V. S. Azariah — an Indian speaking to 1,200 delegates of whom only a handful were non-Western — asking not for the missionaries' goods or their labours but for their friendship. Then count the non-Western names in the delegate list. The conference is the movement at its most confident and its most exposed.
• Henry Venn's minutes and papers on the "euthanasia of a mission" (CMS, 1850s–60s), read against the 1890 CMS Niger Mission proceedings concerning Crowther. Policy and reversal, in the same organisation's own paperwork.
• Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers (1855) — a formerly enslaved African bishop's own account of his own country, written before the reversal. Read it for the voice.
• Roger Casement's Congo Report (1904) and the Harris photographs held by Anti-Slavery International — the evidence itself, not a summary of it. Be warned that the photographs are what they are.
• Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message (1989), chapter 1, and Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag (1990), the introduction — the two arguments in their authors' own words, and short enough to read in a sitting each.