The Movement of World Revolution

4. The Missionary Expansion of Western Christendom

51 4 The Missionary Expansion of Western Christendom The position of christianity in the world today has been rarely considered by modern historians. It is none the less a question of central importance for the understanding of modern civilization . For twelve centuries Christianity has been the religion of a culture —that is to say, it has had an organic relation with the social and moral structure of one particular society of peoples. It has held somewhat the same place in Europe that Islam has held in Western Asia, Hinduism in India, or Confucianism in China. It has been the official creed of Western man; it has moulded his institutions, ruled his education and either created or influenced his moral values and his spiritual ideals. During the last two centuries the bonds of this organic union have been loosened and modern civilization has been progressively detached from its religious roots. Yet at the same time this has not involved the disappearance of Christianity as a living religion—on the contrary, these centuries have witnessed a remarkable expansion of Christianity throughout the world, an expansion which is partly due to direct missionary activity and partly to the extension of Western civilization across the Atlantic and the colonization of the empty spaces of the world by peoples of European stock and Christian tradition. What is the significance of this twofold and apparently contradictory process? Is this modern expansion of Christianity merely the religious aspect of the world hegemony achieved by Western civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Or does it portend the advent of a new and truly world-wide Christendom in which Christian- 52 The Movement of World Revolution ity will achieve a new organic relation with the world civilization of the future? There is much to be said for each of these alternatives, but hitherto the question has never been adequately discussed. In particular, there have been few attempts to study the expansion of Christianity in the last one hundred and fifty years, apart from Professor Latourette’s massive seven-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity. First of all we must recognize the ambivalent character of the nineteenth century. This period has seldom been regarded as a great religious age, and has more often been viewed as an irreligious century, the age which saw the passing of the old order in Church and State and the birth of the new scientific and industrial civilization. Yet there are some, like Professor Latourette, who take a very different point of view. For them the nineteenth century was pre­ eminently an age of hope and unlimited opportunity for spiritual as well as material achievement. And it is certainly true that it has only been in the last century and a half that Christianity, for the first time in its history, transcended the limits of a particular culture and became a world-wide movement which reached every continent, and almost every people and language. In the nineteenth century this expansion was very closely linked with the colonial and economic expansion of the Western peoples—so closely that it has often been regarded as the same process in a religious form. In the present century, however, under the impact of the new non-occidental nationalist movements, the connection between Christianity and the expansion of the West has been weakened. The leadership in the missionary Churches is passing from the foreigner to the native element. But at the same time the advance of Christianity has continued with increasing intensity. In the last thirty years the percentage of Christians among non-occidental peoples has been doubled or more than doubled in spite of the fact that the new political and social movements which have been characteristic of the age have been unfriendly or openly hostile to the Christian faith. This in itself is a remarkable achievement, and at first sight it seems to justify the optimism with which some Christians face the prospect of the decline of the West. But it is as yet too soon to say whether Missionary Expansion of Western Christendom 53 the Christian penetration of the non-European world is profound or superficial. Our views on this question will depend on our view of the nineteenth-century development from which it sprang. And the degree of one’s optimism will be especially determined by the judgment one passes on the specifically “Anglo-Saxon” type of Christianity which contributed so much...