- The New Shape of World Christianity
Have twentieth-century American missionaries been instruments of American imperial expansion much as their predecessors are charged with serving the interests of the older European empires? If not, then what is the relationship between the American missionaries and their state, the missionaries and their plantings, and their converts and the stunning growth of Christianity in Africa, Latin America, and Asia? If American missionaries merely planted the seed, why are there so many parallels between the shape of American Christianity, especially its evangelical wing, and the churches now ringing the globe? What has been the American role in creating the “new shape of world Christianity”?
Noll, the premier historian of North American evangelicalism, while modestly claiming that this book is an “interim report” with “provisional conclusions” (14), seems to have carried the issues well [End Page 92] beyond the “interim” stage with answers that are hardly “provisional.” To answer his questions he reaches into the work of American, British, and African historians and missionaries and into sociological data on the growth and shape of African and Asian congregations, and expands his knowledge by extensive travel and contact with the congregations themselves. The twentieth-century controversies over the extent and character of American influence in missionary fields supplies Noll with three possible answers to his questions: (1) the American role amounts to “malevolent manipulation” of the missions for imperial interests; (2) the American role has been “influence” rather than control and manipulation; and (3) the fact that world Christianity shares in similar and parallel historical experience and thus takes on similar shape and characteristics. He rejects the first, agrees to the second, and favors the third formulation.
Missionaries, American or otherwise, provide a starting point in a pattern of development that appears relatively early involving local appropriation of Christianity by local agents for local reasons in the context of local cultural, political, and economic realities. Missionary Christianity becomes African and Asian Christianity. This amounts to influence rather than manipulation and control. In fact the notion of control is preposterous given the rapidity with which the former missions have become themselves missions to the point that American missionary efforts have shrunk in comparison to the astounding “inculturation” of the Christian gospel and to the percentage of African and Asian missionaries in the field. Charges of American Christian “ethnocide” must cede to the facts: American Christianity has not dominated the growth and shape of world Christianity; it has “filled lesser and supporting roles” (97). The second half of the book is given over to Noll’s explanation of this conclusion, illuminating historically the parallels in structure, shape, and character between American and the other Christianities.
In his eleventh and final chapter [“Reflections”] Noll offers this summary: “The main point of this book is that American Christianity is important for the world primarily because the world is coming to look more and more like America . . . . But correlation is not causation . . . (U)nderstanding American patterns provides insights for what has been happening elsewhere in the world . . . . American actions by no means dominate or simply ordain what is happening elsewhere” (189). [End Page 93]