The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire

2. The Protestant Bible and the Birth of the Taiping Christian Movement

2 The Protestant Bible and the Birth of the Taiping Christian Movement C atholic Christianity, for all its long history in China, did not set the spark to the Taiping Rebellion. Chinese gentry and o‹cials during the rebellion attempted to trace the fuse of the rebellion back to the Heavenly Lord sect, but that fuse was laid and lit by Protestant Christians. At the time of the first Opium War (1839–42), 200,000 to 250,000 Chinese followed the teachings of Catholicism; by contrast, Chinese Protestants amounted to just a handful of believers. The Protestants got oª to a very late start in the enterprise of missions. Indeed, the most dramatic contrast between the Protestant and Catholic missionary movements was in the timing of their endeavors.While Catholic missionaries had been working in China since the late 1500s, Protestants first arrived in China only in 1807. Protestants were not only late arrivals to the Chinese mission scene,they were late arrivals to the entire world of missions.There was no significant Protestant mission eªort anywhere until the end of the eighteenth century . The English Baptist William Carey published his An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen at this time, during the turbulent tides of the Evangelical Awakening.1 This religious movement, which arose in the early eighteenth century and endured through the first decades of the nineteenth, aªected all the Protestant denominations, particularly those in England and America. It gave birth to the Methodists and other Wesleyan groups as well as to evan54 gelical social crusades, such as the anti-slavery campaigns and temperance societies. This movement also produced the first Protestant missionary societies. Some Protestant attempts at missions had occurred before this period, notably those mounted by the Moravians, a German Pietist group, which coincidentally profoundly influenced Rev. Karl (Charles) Gützlaª (1803– 1851),a missionary who would play a critical role in the birth of theTaiping. But these early attempts were mainly scattered and short-lived. Moreover, church leaders did not feel they had a responsibility to undertake the task of missions. As suggested in Carey’s title, the Calvinistic churches of England and America believed that if God wanted such people saved, He would do it himself. John Wesley’s (1703–1791) revivalistic eªorts would spark a change in this view. The first modern Protestant mission society, the Baptist Missionary Society,was formed in 1792,immediately after Carey published his appeal.The London Missionary Society was formed in 1795 and was the first mission to send evangelists to China.2 While Carey’s appeal does mark the beginning of this Protestant missionary endeavor, it can hardly account for the origins of the movement. Many scholars have looked for the origins of the missionary impulse in the imperialistic designs of Britain. Although imperialistic imagination, which often accompanied imperialistic enterprise, did contribute to the movement,it is also widely recognized that the trade barons who were constructing their economic empire often clashed openly with the missionary bishops who were building their ecclesiastical empire. Dramatic changes coinciding with the loss of the American settlement colonies and the gain of the entire Indian subcontinent were certainly afoot in Britain’s idea of empire at the end of the eighteenth century.The progress of the Industrial Revolution further aªected the British idea of empire and provided the economic conditions that made the missionary movement possible . Nevertheless, the sponsors of the trading and economic empire did not warm to the zeal of the emerging religious enthusiasts.3 The British Crown had granted the East India Company the monopolistic right to trade in Asia, and it had become a matter of company policy to prohibit missionary work among native peoples. In fact, William Carey, the English The Birth of the Taiping Christian Movement 55 Baptist who became the first modern Protestant missionary, was forced to launch his evangelical career in a part of India governed by Denmark because of this very policy. The search for the origins of the Protestant missionary impulse has yet to take into account the response of British evangelicals to political events in France and on the Continent, a factor that probably contributed more than any other to the missionary movement. Millennial visions were a prominent feature of early British Protestantism,and the dates for the founding of all the modern missionary societies correspond to a renewed sense of the imminence of the...