From the beginning of the eighteenth century Christianity expanded as part of British culture and activities overseas on an unprecedented scale. Emigrants and temporary expatriates carried their faith abroad. Anglicans, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, and members of other denominations recreated their churches, adapting them to new environments. In a parallel movement, driven by voluntary Protestant missionary societies, Christians and the missionaries they supported—some 10,000 by 1900—set out to evangelize or convert the extra-European world. Imperial control, colonial societies, and the missionary movement intertwined in divergent and ambiguous ways.
Home and colonial governments supported ecclesiastical and missionary expansion wherever it was likely to buttress their authority and promote social order. Nevertheless, religious dynamics proved unpredictable and often counter to imperial needs. In the white settlement colonies a religious establishment at first seemed desirable. However, more even than in Britain, the growth of denominational conflict forced governments to conclude that only a policy of religious neutrality would serve their purpose. Finding state support inadequate and constricting, churchmen too distanced themselves from political authorities. By the mid-nineteenth century formal separation of Church and State was occurring, so that religious influences began to shape imperial ties and colonial identities in less obvious ways. Although most imperial authorities initially distrusted missionary enterprise and missions rejected most if not all political involvement, both sides learned gradually that cooperation had its uses. Missions won extensive popular support at home and often acquired considerable influence with non- European communities. They could therefore not be ignored, and might be turned to imperial advantage. Missionaries came to regard secular authorities in a similarly utilitarian way. British missionary enterprise thus sometimes provided channels through which imperial controls followed; at other times it delayed annexation and colonization, or even subverted imperial authority. In many places (sometimes purposely, often unintentionally) Christian churches, British and indigenous, provided powerful stimuli to communal unity and opposition to colonial rule.
Eighteenth-century precedents provide many pointers to later links between missions and Empire. At various points, the settlement of North America’s affairs required practical answers to serious constitutional and political questions. This was as true at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1701) were founded, as during America’s fight for independence. Key questions centred on securing British sovereignty, respect for continued British colonial rule, and loyal acceptance of political obligations, without exciting colonial discontents. British leaders treated political radicalism as inseparable from religious dissent. Not surprisingly, solutions to the problems at home and throughout the Empire aimed to reinforce ties between religion, especially the established Church of England, and the State. As the SPG’s charter explained, in many of our Plantacons, Colonies, and Factories beyond the Seas... the Provision for Ministers is very mean. And many others... are wholly destitute, and unprovided of a Mainteynance for Ministers, and the Publick Worship of God; and for Lack of... such, many... doe want the Administration of God’s Word and Sacraments, and seem to be abandoned to Atheism and Infidelity and alsoe for Want of Learned and Orthodox Ministers to instruct Our... Subjects in the Principles of true Religion, divers Romish Preists and Jesuits are the more incouraged to pervert and draw over Our said Loving Subjects to Popish Superstition and Idolatry.
Although the charter did not explicitly mention indigenous peoples—North America’s Indians—or black slaves, the term ‘subjects’ meant for many in the Society more than simply white emigrants and settlers. The Dean of Lincoln explained in 1702, The design is, in the first place, to settle the State of Religion as well as may be among our own People there... and then to proceed... towards the Conversion of the Natives this is... the greatest Charity we can show... especially... to the souls of many of those poor Natives who may by this be converted from that state of Barbarism and Idolatry in which they now live.
Equally direct concerns were expressed for the colonial slave population. The early Instructions for the missionaries set out the desired approach via ‘natural religion’ to instructing ‘Heathens and Infidels’. ‘Native’ was increasingly and explicitly taken to include both the Indian peoples of North America and the imported African slave population and its descendants throughout the Caribbean and the Atlantic world.
William Knox, a member of the SPG and Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies (1770-82), asserted in 1786 that ‘the Prevalence of the Church of England in those Colonies is the best security that Great Britain can have for their Fidelity and attachment to her Constitution and Interests’. Archbishop Secker felt we ought to have more [missionaries] upon the frontiers; at least when it shall please God to bless us with a peace. For Missionaries there might counteract the artifices of the French Papists; and do considerable services, religious and political at once, amongst the neighbouring Indians; both which points the Society hath been heavily charged, on occasion of the present war, with having neglected.
Ministers and bishops increasingly regretted their earlier limited attention to the religious life of the colonies. They moved after 1782 to provide ecclesiastical leadership for Anglicans remaining in the United States, while in neighbouring Quebec and the Maritimes, which had received more than 30,000 loyalist refugees, entrenchment of an officially supported Anglicanism was also regarded as constitutionally essential and a wise response to local needs.
However, it is easy to exaggerate the integration of Empire and Anglican missions. Congregations and clergy suffered from inadequate organization, lack of leadership, and limited resources. The Bishop of London’s Commissary in Pennsylvania pointed out that The members of our Church are not the Richest in the Place, the Riches generally centering in the Quakers & High Dutch who are very numerous & carry all before them, and our Church labours under very great discouragement as we have no legal Establishment (as they have at New York) not so much as a Charter of Incorporation to enable us to manage our Business to the best advantage.
Wariness, mingled with indifference to the SPG and its concerns, was the predominant attitude among officials in London. In their eyes the overwhelmingly Protestant character of British North America sufficiently guaranteed that colonial ambitions would restrict French territorial expansion. To provoke colonial religious dissent or domestic political conflict by favouring Anglicanism, even an Anglicanism stripped of its civil powers, seemed both unnecessarily provocative and politically unwise. Capturing the often easygoing expediency of the day, one governor observed of Pennsylvania’s Germans, ‘They fled from oppression, and after having tasted the sweets of a British Constitution, it does not seem probable to me that they will ever look back to their old masters.’
Official imperial detachment from Anglican missionary ambition was modified only temporarily in particular circumstances related to Indians and colonial security. SPG efforts among the Mohawk were ignored until threat of war made their alliance strategically valuable. Then Sir William Johnson (British Commissioner for Indian Affairs, 1744-74) and the SPG missionary John Ogilvie (1749-62) worked together on New England’s frontier to secure their loyalty in the Seven Years War, believing that conversion and support for the British went together, as on this occasion they did. However, as Pontiac’s War of 1763-4 demonstrated, professed Protestantism and missionary contacts failed to stop treaties being broken by both sides. For some time after 1763 no more official imperial enthusiasm was shown for either Indian missions or episcopacy.
Not until the 1780s, when the imperial government found itself strategically caught between Roman Catholic dissent in Nova Scotia, Quebec’s staunchly Catholic French Canadians, and the newly independent United States, did it again seek support through missionary expansion of the established Church. With the white colonists and the need to counterbalance Roman Catholicism uppermost in mind, it created bishoprics in Nova Scotia (1787) and Quebec (1793). However, local pressure for another diocese in Upper Canada was refused, and insufficient provision was made for the costs of religious establishment. The Canada Act 1791 provided only an initial endowment on the assumption that self-sufficient religious hierarchies would develop their own endowments and facilities for training local clergymen with help from colonial assemblies and local congregations.
In principle, therefore, new or revived colonial churches, combining parochial and missionary work, increasingly under the leadership of colonial bishops, were acknowledged as useful adjuncts to the civil authorities, who relied on them to underpin the imperial connection, to provide moral leadership, social cohesion, and education on a scale suited to individual colonies. This pattern of Church-State relations, framed for British North America between 1784 and 1793, was adapted throughout the colonial Empire up to the 1830s—in Calcutta (1814), and Jamaica and Barbados (1824). Supervision of Dissenters was left to the colonial authorities. Nevertheless, where populations were small, resources to support Anglican expansion more limited, and governors’ powers far greater, as at the Cape and in New South Wales, imperial governments remained content with even scantier provision.
Applied unevenly, imperial principle also encountered resistance. The endowment of Protestant clergy with reserved lands, and preference for the Church of England, aimed to counterbalance the well-endowed Roman Catholic hierarchy of Quebec and to stall the progress of dissent and irreligion. Yet in every colony the mushrooming reality of denominational diversity was inescapable. Many migrant loyalists were Presbyterians or Dissenters, as were emigrants from Britain to the Canadian provinces; the religious affiliations of convicts transported to the Australian colonies were equally varied, including Roman Catholicism. Anglican self-assertion only stimulated political conflict with the denominationalism it hoped to marginalize. An articulate colonial alternative to the Anglican linking of imperial Church and State underpinned with missionary enterprise was thus elaborated, first again in British North America, then elsewhere.
In colonial North America, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians were still less inclined than the SPG to push their missionary work beyond the boundaries of the white communities. Focusing on the close community of the religiously like-minded requiring a minister’s constant attention, they were neither theologically nor institutionally committed to evangelism. The potential for revival within existing nominally Protestant communities took priority over incorporation of non-Christian peoples into the Christian world. Limited resources compelled missions to select the most promising sites, as both the Moravians from the 1730s onwards and Methodist communities superintended by Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke after 1770 demonstrated. Many people felt that Methodist rules against slavery had already demonstrated excessive partiality towards Africans, and the resentment these bred only contributed to increase hostility and resentment on the part of the colonists against Wesleyans themselves. Asbury’s political sense was sufficiently acute to appreciate that greater efforts to evangelize enslaved Africans could endanger the entire Methodist enterprise.
By 1790 it was widely felt that the results of nearly a century of British Protestant missionary activity had been disappointingly slight. Practical experience with evangelistic work among the heathen had bred pessimism everywhere. Nevertheless, from the confused patchwork of ecclesiastical structures and personnel, and the varied stock of theologies and missionary strategies, there were lessons to be learnt. Irrespective of denomination, missionary interests had carried little weight in contests with other agents of empire—settlers, merchants, local assemblies, colonial agents, imperial politicians—to shape the character of Empire and management of colonial society. The SPG struggled as the missionary wing of the established Church in colonial contexts. Its experience demonstrated that attempts to tie missionary enterprise to the interests of the imperial government were likely to falter. The imperial government’s commitment was fickle, too vulnerable to shifting political assessments of domestic or colonial demands, and too reluctant to increase ecclesiastical power and resources, even for a national Church to rely on the secular power to sustain its missionary activities. Dissenters had long known this, and found their influence over government policies further declining after mid-century. Anglicans increasingly feared the same, and therefore began to look for alternative models of Anglican missionary enterprise.
Dissenters and Nonconformists, expecting less from colonial or imperial authorities, often felt less constrained than the SPG clergy. However, their missionary efforts suffered as much as the SPG’s from a lack of effective ‘denominational’ or overall control. Methodists hoped to balance religious freedom and ecclesiastical order in a system of itinerant preachers, circuit organization, and annual conferences. However, where the source of missionary initiative and regulation of missionary activity should lie in such a system remained obscure. Thomas Coke found that denominational prejudice or inertia could easily scupper individual initiative, even though he remained a thorn in the denominational flesh. Moravians insisted on firm, even dictatorial, control of their missionaries, but undermined their policy through their requirement that every mission station be self-sufficient.
Thus eighteenth-century missionary endeavour was overwhelmingly influenced by the vagaries of individual inclination, subject only to the limited power of such central organization and authority as existed. All evangelical communities struggled to recruit missionary volunteers and prepare them for the field (if special preparation was thought necessary, which commonly it was not). Nowhere could there be found a coherent theology or practical strategy for promoting Christian missions.