Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (review)

This collection of essays on the interaction of missions and nationalism in the era of independence/postcolonialism originated at a conference organized by the Currents in World Christianity Project at the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies in 2000. The contributors teach history, theology, and mission in universities in both Great Britain and the United States. The chapter by Adrian Hastings was one of his last and provides the mature musings of a pioneering scholar in the field of African Christianity. These studies fill a gap in the study of mission and the role of religion during this critical era. Together these essays demonstrate the ambiguity of mission response to the end of colonialism in a variety of circumstances. The theoretical framework for this collection is the complex interactions—rather than the oppositions—between the national and the international mission impulses.

Most of the chapters deal with African case studies (Elphick, Porter, Peterson, Stuart, Howell, Gaitskell, and Kalu), while there are some good comparative cases from India (Brown) and China (Yip and Bays), one study on German missionaries (Lehmann), another on an international "secular" organization (Boobbyer), and an introduction and opening articles that are more general and theoretical (Stanley and Hastings). The articles also deal primarily with European missionaries and/or mission sources, with some notable exceptions (Peterson and Brown). The chapters dealing with the historical contexts that conditioned mission response discuss theological and ecclesiastical support for fascism (Lehmann) and apartheid (Elphick), as well as isolation from or hostility toward movements for change (Porter). The essays on construction of national identity, with the exception of Derek Peterson's, come from India and China. Peterson's excellent study shows how early Christian readers and later Mau Mau nationalists in Kenya retranslated the Bible for use in their internal arguments over the "moral implications of change." Instructive for Africanists, too, is the question of why in India and China it was difficult to be both a Christian and a nationalist, while in Africa that was rarely the case.

Although the editor, Brian Stanley, claims that the essays explore the role that missions played in decolonization, in the end one is left with the sense that missions were at best irrelevant to the process and at worst obstructionist. Missionaries were generally suspicious of African nationalism and supported the status quo until confronted by the threat of mass disaffection of African Christians (Stuart). In the Kingdom of Buganda the Anglican missionaries' reluctant support of the return of the Kabaka backfired, resulting in a closer identification with colonial policy and little influence in the process of decolonization (Howell). In fact, the only two positive examples of the church's role in decolonization appear in Philip Boobbyer's study of the evangelical Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement in international reconciliation work and Ogbu U. Kalu's argument that independent charismatic Christians in Africa successfully sabotaged the "passive revolution" of missionaries to maintain power. Because these essays are largely about the actions of European missionaries, rather than national Christians, one might conclude that the church is irrelevant in the postcolonial era. Since this is not the case, particularly in Africa, these essays are recommended for their nuanced and complex views of the failure of missions at a critical juncture in history.