Missions and Politics Robert D. Woodberry.

Citation: Woodberry, Robert D. 2007. Politics. pp. 347-50 in Encyclopedia of Missions and Missionaries. Jonathan Bonk (ed.). New York: Routledge.

Missionaries have often had strict instructions to stay out of politics. But, politics influenced the ability of missionaries to fulfill their main goals converting people and assisting the local church. Thus, many missionaries were drawn into politics. During the colonial period some Western missionaries were strongly anti-colonial, but most were not. Where missionaries thought colonialism was inevitable and/or missionary work was prohibited, they sometimes encouraged colonization by governments that suited their interests. However, when missionaries did not think colonization was inevitable and had freedom to proselytize, nonstate missionaries often helped indigenous rulers resist colonization as in Thailand, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and post Opium Wars China. Regardless, most missionaries wanted a moderate form of colonization. Colonial abuses angered local people against Christianity which most associated with the West and thus made conversions harder. Missionary writings are full of complaints about how abuses by Western powers undermined their best efforts to win converts. Missionaries were also in a crucial bridging position. Indigenous people had little power in the colonizing state, and settlers, business people, and colonial officials had no incentive to expose their own abuses. Moreover, colonial governments generally used settlers to staff the police, courts, and colonial administration. Thus, local legal and judicial institutions seldom challenged settler interests. However, missionaries had (1) incentive to fight abuses, (2) personnel directly exposed to abuses, (3) a support base in many colonizing countries, and (4) a massive media network to mobilize pressure against policies that hampered mission interests. Missionaries were more effective reformers when they were independent of direct state control as in colonies of the British, U.S., Australia, and New Zealand and in areas where they were financially independent of local white settlers. In French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian colonies, the state made/forced agreements with the Catholic

Church under which the state paid missionary salaries, chose/approved bishops, and restricted Protestants. This usually silenced overt criticism of colonial policy, although there are exceptions such as Barolome de las Casas. In German and Dutch colonies the government also maintained substantial control over missionaries which hampered protest. The British originally banned or restrict missions in their colonies, but the missionary lobby forced the British to expand religious liberty initially by blocking the British East India Company charter in 1813. Over time, this independence of religious groups transformed British colonialism for example, by spurring abolitionism. In the West Indies Anglican clergy worked primarily with whites and defended slavery. But nonconformist missionaries worked with slaves. They initially stayed apolitical because they needed slave owners permission to do their work. However, missionaries gathered slaves for group meetings, trained church leaders, and taught congregants to read. Literate slaves interpreted the Bible for themselves, read newspaper accounts of political rights in Europe, and initiated a series of slave protests and uprisings which drew missionaries into political action. In 1823 slaves rebelled in Demerara (now Guyana). Planters blamed John Smith, an LMS missionary, and sentencing him to death. Slave owners in other British colonies burned nonconformist churches, harassed missionaries, and restricted missionary access to slaves. This infuriated evangelicals. Under evangelical pressure, the Colonial Office recalled the governor of Demerara and Parliament passed a slave code restricting abuses of slaves and mandating provision for slaves religious instruction. Thus, missionaries gained legal grounds for meeting with slaves. However, Caribbean magistrates and officials were closely tied to planters and generally ignored the code. Thus missionaries increasingly complained directly to the Colonial Office. Two incidents spurred this transformation. In June 1829 a Methodist slave, Henry Williams, passively resisted a ban of all Methodist services in St. Anns District, Jamaica. Similarly, in 1830 a Baptist slave, Sam Swiney, lead an extemporaneous prayer meeting on Easter Sunday. Both slaves were imprisoned and severely beaten. Missionaries intervened to save their lives. When local courts dismissed the cases, missionaries complained to allies in the Colonial Office, who dismissed three magistrates and

eventually the governor. Thus, conflict over religious liberty engendered legal protections for slaves, freed missionaries from slave-owner control, and let slaves know they had rights which the government would occasionally defend. The next year (1831) nonconformist slave church leaders organized an uprising in Jamaica. In response, planters torched nonconformist churches, attacked missionaries, and barred slaves from meeting for worship. For nonconformists this was the final straw. Not only was slavery abusive, it threatened the eternal destiny of African souls. Exiled missionaries toured Great Britain making fiery speeches and distributing petitions for the immediate abolition of slavery. They had witnessed the brutality of slavery and could describe it vividly. Over 59 percent of adult nonconformists and over 95 percent of Wesleyan Methodists signed these petitions. The movement forced the British to ban slavery in 1834 against direct opposition by planters and traders at a time when slavery was highly profitable and practiced by Englands competitors. Spurred by this success, missionary supporters established The Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes in 1835 lead by Thomas Fowell Buxton, vice president of the Church Missionary Society. This group commissioned a worldwide investigation of what measures ought to be adopted with respect to the Native Inhabitants of Countries where British Settlements are made, ... in order to secure them the due observation of justice and the protection of their rights, ... and to lead them to the peaceful and voluntary reception of the Christian Religion. Much of the testimony came from missionaries and was used to initiate colonial reforms. Over time missionary influence on colonial policy waned as businesspeople and settlers created counter-lobbying organizations and journals and the rise of scientific racism hardened British attitudes about the racial inferiority of subject peoples. Still, missions continued to influence policy. Other examples of missionary initiated reform include: leading the fight against the opium trade, fighting forced labor in Melanesia and Kenya, Rev. James Long and the Calcutta Missionary Conventions intervention on behalf of landless peasants in India, bringing colonial officials to trial for killing blacks after the Morant Bay Rising in Jamaica, and John Philip and John Mackenzie fighting race-based laws and settler expropriation of indigenous land in southern Africa.

Although contemporary scholars often ignore the roll of missionaries in colonial reform, this roll is clear when we compare places they were, with places they were not such as French and Belgian Congo. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries demand for rubber exploded. Congo rubber companies extracted wild rubber by giving villages annual quotas. If a village did not meet its quota, soldiers retaliated by burning the villages houses and crops and slaughtering villagers. Soldiers also kidnapped women and threaten to rape or kill them if their men did not transport company goods. To avoid these abuses, Congolese fled to the jungle where many starved or died of disease. Although exact figures are impossible, scholars estimate that in the rubber growing regions of both French and Belgian Congo the population declined by about 50 percent in 20 years. Yet, although these abuses happened at about the same time in neighboring colonies, Belgian abuses spurred a massive international protest which forced the Belgian government to intervene; identical French abuses spurred 3 belated articles in a French Marxist newspaper, LHumanit and no government intervention. Why the difference? In Belgian Congo, non-state Protestant missionaries worked in the rubber-growing regions, photographed abuses, wrote letters to their supporters, helped rally an international outcry, and served as guides and translators for international inspectors. In the rubber growing regions of French Congo Protestant missionaries were systematically excluded. Thus, the only people exposed to the abuses directly benefited from them.

After decolonization, missionaries are still sometimes involved in politics, but their centrality has diminished. Now, most people get their international news from secular sources, not missionary periodicals. Missionaries are no longer in a crucial bridging role. They generally do not have much influence with post-colonial governments and can be kicked out by these governments if they complain. They have had moderate influence on U.S. foreign policy e.g., encouraging a pro-Arab foreign policy in the mid-20th century, advocating anti-communism in the 1950s and 60s, protesting human rights abuses in Central America in the 1980s, pressuring for guarantees of religious liberty in the U.N. declaration of human rights, and serving as

sources for Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. But their political influence is minor relative to the 19th century.

Many missionary activities also had indirect political consequences for example, mission initiated mass education, vernacular printing, organizations outside state control, and religious liberty. Protestant missionaries wanted everyone to read the Bible in their own language. This required mass literacy and vernacular printing. Thus, Protestant missionaries generally initiated Western formal education, created the written form of oral languages, imported the first printing technology, developed the first vernacular fonts, and began mass printing of Bibles, tracts, textbooks, and newspapers. When competing with Protestants, other religious groups also invested in mass education and printing and pressured governments to expand state education without religious content. This education created new elites who often challenged old elites in their home societies. Foreign language training also gave reformers access to writings on democracy, nationalism, Marxism, and the Enlightenment which reformers modified and used to critique Western colonialism and even Christian missions. Vernacular printing and literacy created the foundation for national public discourse. Missionaries also introduced new organizational forms which reformers copied and adapted for their own uses. In India, Protestant missionaries initiated campaigns against Sati (burning widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands), to allow untouchables to use public roads and wells and wear clothing above the waste, to ban consummation of marriage prior to age 12, and so on. Their reformist and conversionary activities spurred Hindu reaction some for reforms, others against reforms, but most against conversion. These new organizations such as Bramo Samaj, Aria Samaj, and Dharma Sabha copied the organization forms and tactics of missionary reform organizations. The British allowed these new organizations because they were initially anti-missionary, not anti-colonial. However, over time these groups gained power and provided the basis for the political parties and civil society that gradually forced the British to devolve power. A similar patter of missionary sponsored reforms and local religious response is clear in such diverse places as Sri Lanka, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Korea, Japan, China, and elsewhere.

The importance of missionary influence is highlighted by the disproportionate number of early nationalists, reformers, and journalists who studied at mission schools or work at mission presses. Virtually all early African nationalist leaders graduated from mission schools. In the Middle East, the first wave of Arab nationalists and journalists generally also graduated from mission-related schools (particularly the American Universities of Beirut and Cairo). In China, Korea, and India early nationalists and reformers were also disproportionately mission educated. For example, Chinas first president, Sun Yetsen and many of the initial Guomindang cabinet members and ministry heads were Christians and/or mission educated. Similarly, in Korea about half of those who signed the Korean Declaration of Independence in 1919 were Christians although Christians were about 1% of the population. Nationalist movements often became increasingly anti-Western and anti-Christian, especially after the failure of Versailles to apply national self-determination to non-Europeans and the rise of Soviet ideology and funding. But this does not negate missions role in midwifing early nationalist leaders. Similarly, statistical evidence indicates that the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in the democracy of nonwestern societies and removes the impact of former colonizer, GDP, percent European, percent Muslim, and many other factors traditionally associated with democracy in the social sciences. Clearly, the missionary movement has had profound political implications which are still measurable today.

Main Sources:

Etherington, Norman. 2005. Missions and Empire. New York: Oxford University Press.

Turner, Mary. 1998. Slaves and Missionaries. Kingston, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies.

Woodberry, Robert D. 2004. The Shadow of Empire: Christian Missions, Colonial Policy, and Democracy in Post-Colonial Societies: Ph.D. dissertation. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.