Bishop Stephen Neill: From Edinburgh to South India (review)

Dyron Daughrity declares Bishop Stephen Neill one of the most important figures on the world Christian scene during the twentieth century. That may be an exaggeration, but Neill has certainly been an influential figure in global Anglican circles and in the broader world of Protestant missions and the ecumenical movement, both as a scholar and senior church administrator. His reputation rests mainly on his authorship of sixty-five books including A History of Christianity in India, 1707–1858 (Cambridge, UK, 1984); the widely consulted A History of the Ecumenical Movement, coauthored with Ruth Rouse (Philadelphia, 1954); and A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth, UK, 1964), a beautifully written volume in the Pelican History of the Church series.

A talented scholar and linguist, Neill came from an Ulster evangelical family with clerical and missionary connections, and was educated at an evangelical boarding school and at Cambridge. He won many academic prizes before surprising his academic mentors by going to India as a missionary educator. Throughout his life he remained unmarried and established close friendships with young men, leading to speculation about his sexual orientation. In 1939 he became bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Tinnevelly (Daughrity sticks to the colonial spelling) and threw himself into the work of building a trained, Indian clergy. Although not sympathetic to Mahatma Gandhi or Indian nationalism, Neill regarded the missionary presence in India as temporary. He was committed to “the euthanasia of the mission” and the building-up of a self-governing, self-sustaining, and independent Indian church that would not only survive but also thrive after the inevitable end of the British Empire.

In 1944 Neill left his diocese under a cloud, and was later a staff member of the World Council of Churches in Geneva and a lecturer and professor at the universities of Hamburg and Nairobi. At the heart of Daughrity’s book is an attempt to come to terms with the reasons for Neill’s departure from Tinnevelly, which has been treated for the most part with a “conspiracy of silence” by others who have written on Neill’s life. Owen Chadwick, for instance, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, refers vaguely to health problems. Daughrity’s research and interviews establish that Neill had to leave because of a sadomasochistic relationship he developed with young Indian pastors in training, one that included regular confession of sins followed by the use of a cane as a form of discipline.

The most interesting aspect of Daughrity’s attempts to make sense of this event lies in his treatment of the ambivalence felt about Neill by Tamil-speaking Christians, many of whom continue to revere him as a devoted church leader with a deep commitment to Indians despite his political views. Others, however, at the time and since, have linked Neill’s treatment of Indian pastors to the broader phenomenon of imperialism, as a reflection of the dependency of non-Western Christians on powerful Western leaders in a missionary church.

Daughrity’s book is in serious need of proofreading and copyediting, but it raises important issues in the global history of the church. Unlike many evangelical historians of mission, including Robert Frykenberg and Lamin Sanneh, Daughrity is neither dismissive of nor defensive about the issues raised by Edward Said on the relationship between imperialism and the informal wielding of power by those in possession of professional and literary authority. His thoughtful attempts to address the significance of Neill’s concealed disgrace are very much worth reading.