Global prospects for mission Christianity looked bleak by the mid-1950s. In China and India anti-colonial nationalist movements appeared to have ended all hope of creating self-sustaining national churches. Mission Christianity in China seemed to have been dealt a near-fatal blow, swept away by Communist victory in 1949. The newly independent Indian nation came to be ever more closely defined in Hindu terms. Religious pluralism guaranteed the survival of the Christian minority, but Prime Minister Nehru aimed to reduce the numbers of foreign missionaries. In Africa, where missionary personnel were most numerous, the situation appeared dicey. Missionaries had looked on with horror at events in Asia, wondering what might take place in their own mission fields.
The large majority of white missionaries... accepted... the legitimacy of a movement towards self-government but greatly hoped it would not come too fast; they welcomed the increased subsidies most governments were now offering the missions for schools and hospitals. In practice they deeply distrusted the rise of political parties and were inclined to see ‘communism’—a vague and abusive word—under every bed. Existing government was good enough and should not be challenged, at least in public.
Along with their aversion to communism, missionaries worried that African cultural nationalism might revive paganism. The blood-curdling oaths sworn by Kenya’s Mau Mau freedom fighters and attacks on church leaders provoked fears of similar outbreaks elsewhere. While most missionaries were at best ambivalent towards decolonization, African clergy in the 1950s, with some notable exceptions, were too few and too badly trained to be heard. The most audible African Christians were the nationalist elites. Educated in mission schools, these men understood the potency of Christian symbols and ideas. But Christianity was only one of the ideologies they used to capture the popular imagination. Ambivalent towards the missions that had nurtured them, they embraced nationalist and socialist ideologies. More often than not they ignored the mobilizing potential of the churches, preferring to work with other institutions within civil society. If Africa had a Christian future it seemed to lie with the so-called African Independent Churches.
Yet Christianity’s African future turned out to be far from bleak. After independence Christian adherence experienced phenomenal growth, from approximately 75 million in 1965 to 351 million in 2000, with much of the growth occurring within the former mission churches. Whereas church leaders played a small part in the anti-colonial struggle, they took a leading role in the ‘second democratic’ revolution against ‘one-partyism’ at the end of the 1980s and in the popular struggle against ‘presidential third-termism’ in the 1990s. China and India also experienced remarkable growth in Christian adherence in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Empire assisted the spread of Christianity, but the faith outlasted its framework of transmission. ‘The irony of world Christianity from the Second World War through the 1970s was that even as scholars were writing books implicating Christianity in European imperialism, the number of believers began growing rapidly throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.’ Clearly the grass-roots adherents ignored the criticisms of the intellectual elites. Indeed, Christianity’s severance from colonialism pre-dated independence. It began with movements of mass conversion—in parts of India at the end of the eighteenth century, Africa in the late nineteenth century, and China in the early twentieth century—in which missionaries played little or no part. The Great Depression of 1929 proved a crucial turning point in Africa when mission Christianity went into quiet decline and African Christians seized the initiative. Henceforth, African laity—peasants, workers, and professional elites—drew increasingly upon biblical idioms both to critique and undermine colonial rule and to respond to the exigencies it created. The mass of African laity sought a liberation beyond anything that could be achieved within the narrow parameters of formal politics. While nationalist elites toyed with socialism and Marxism- Leninism, popular Christianity gathered pace, succeeding even where financial or security restrictions forced the withdrawal of formal Christian workers. The primary concerns expressed by African Christians were their relationship with God and the search for healing and personal security. Thus the role of Christianity in the era of anti-colonial struggle revolved around ordinary folk coping with rapid social change powered as much by black nationalism as by imperialism and colonialism.
While the nationalist charge that missionaries were simply the handmaids of colonialism still persists in some quarters, notably among African clerics and in religious studies departments, most historians see a more complex relationship. As Andrew Porter remarks, ‘religion and empire frequently mingled, but were as likely to undermine each other as they were to provide mutual support’. The sheer diversity of mission organizations divided by denomination, theology, nationality, class, and historical context meant that relations between Church and State were never straightforward. ‘A fusing of the two presupposes a degree of unity upon the ecclesiastical side’ that was seldom present.
At certain times, especially in colonies with significant white settler populations, there seemed to be little distinction between missionaries and Europeans. In Southern Rhodesia, Anglicans and aristocratic English Jesuits acted as chaplains and padres to soldiers and schoolchildren; they were regular guests at settler clubs and dinner tables. Some of them came to accept the colour bar. Here too Anglicans attempted to make themselves into the quasiestablishment Church. But the sheer diversity of Empire and the plurality of missions thwarted such schemes. ‘The British government, having long ruled a multicultural and multireligious Empire, whose most important territory was Hindu and Muslim India but which also included Catholic countries like Malta and Quebec, let alone Ireland, had every incentive for maintaining its distance overseas from the Protestantism of Britain.’ The British Empire never forged as close a link with the established Church of England as the Portuguese and Belgians maintained with particular denominations. Moreover, many missionaries, particularly Nonconformists and Pentecostals, remained apart from settler society, disapproving of its moral failings and excesses. Catholic priests with no family and thus no ‘domestic colonialism’ often preferred to take their ‘emotional refreshment’ from Africans whose lifestyles posed less of a threat to their vows. Having chosen celibacy, Catholic and Anglo-Catholic priests could ‘live in’ African societies in a way that was difficult for married missionaries with families. Class or social background excluded others from settler societies. In Kenya an Italian Consolata Father might be left standing outside a settler back door rather like an African visitor. In Southern Rhodesia, German Trappists were interned during the First World War. In other British colonies German missionaries were expelled or forced to flee. Throughout the twentieth century there was a steady increase in the number of American Protestant missionaries whose religious heritage left them with a deep-seated mistrust of the British colonial establishment. Unfettered by a colonial nexus, American and Scandinavian missionaries could uphold an international humanitarian tradition. Cutting across settler and non-settler colonies was a rural-urban divide. Missionaries with black congregations in the bush had more room to manoeuvre than those in town, who had to guard against upsetting white congregations.
Many missionaries envisaged an Empire radically different from the designs of secular colonial officials. While the incarnationalist aspects of Catholic teaching could stimulate nationalism, particularly within Europe, its universalist tradition asserted, for example, by propaganda fide looked to a global communion transcending such particularities. Moreover, its clericalism made it less vulnerable to local pressures than many other churches. None of these tendencies, universalism, incarnationalism, or clericalism, bolstered the notion of formal colonial rule. A similar internationalism underpinned the work of Protestant organizations such as the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches. On a more mundane level mission organizations often worked in a landscape bearing little relation to the colonial State. Pioneering missionaries located their mission stations on highways or natural frontiers with little concern for the region’s eventual political landscape. The pioneers of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa station had this in mind when they built a station on Likoma Island, Lake Malawi.
The clergy of mission churches showed an increasing openness to democracy. The connection was becoming clear in the late nineteenth century in Anglo-Saxon and Free Church Protestantism. The Catholic Church moved more slowly but was energized in the 1920s by the threat of communism and loss of monarchical allies. After 1945 it supported democracy in politics but not within its own church structures. A similar situation pertained within the Anglo-Catholic movement, which stressed the authority of episcopacy. By the 1930s the leadership of the main Anglo-Saxon missionary churches ‘felt committed, gently but fairly explicitly, to a democratic future for Africa towards which they had a duty to work’. In the meantime they reasoned that British colonialism was increasingly benign, and saw themselves as having a ‘watching brief of a basically political sort to safeguard African interests until Africans could do so for themselves within a Western-style political arena’. A decade earlier they had shifted their attentions from the pastoral needs of the countryside to the formation of a new elite through secondary schooling, whose leading institutions were modelled on British public schools and universities. All were ‘almost self-consciously cradles of democracy, even if run a little autocratically’.
It was precisely in this modernizing project of education (and healthcare) that mission and colonialism came closest together. In a post-Versailles age, epitomized by Lugard’s Dual Mandate (1922) and the Phelps-Stokes Commissions on African education, missionaries helped provide a crucial legitimizing ideology of development to the colonial State, receiving in return much-needed subsidies. Thus, despite their increasing democratic sensibilities, missionaries became a pillar of colonial rule. There were critics of missionary strategy such as Arthur Shearly Cripps in Southern Rhodesia. Though Cripps was a lone figure, remote from ecclesiastical establishments, his misgivings about the growing identification of missions with the temporal authority in the field of education proved prophetic. Cripps not only perceived the danger of becoming an appendage of the State in the domain of education, but also comprehended the strength of the African response to the Christian message, arguing that proselytization and pastoral care should be missionary priorities.