Race and Redemption

British Missionaries Encounter Pacific Peoples, 1797-1920

Jane Samson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467448833
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Race and Redemption is the latest volume in the Studies in the History of Christian Missions series, which explores the significant, yet sometimes controversial, impact of Christian missions around the world. In this historical examination of the encounter between British missionaries and people in the Pacific Islands, Jane Samson reveals the paradoxical yet symbiotic nature of the two stances that the missionaries adopted—"othering" and "brothering." She shows how good and bad intentions were tangled up together and how some blind spots remained even as others were overcome. Arguing that gender was as important a category in the story as race, Samson paints a complex picture of the interactions between missionaries and native peoples—and the ways in which perspectives shaped by those encounters have endured.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Anthropologies

One of the most defining moments in my research for this project occurred when I encountered the mid-twentieth-century journal Practical Anthropology. A Christian publication aimed primarily at missionaries and their supporters, the journal obviously saw nothing contradictory in relating academic anthropology directly to missiology or vice versa. Its 1954 inaugural issue revealed a deep entanglement between science and religion, declaring its aim to be “a medium for the orientation of thinking Christians toward a cross-cultural view, toward an understanding of culture which is not bound to the narrow experience of the West, but which is molded by a respectful recognition of the way of life of people everywhere.”¹ The struggle to obtain anthropological training for missionaries had already been a prolonged one: “To many [missionaries] there is no apparent connection between anthropology and the Christian ministry,” admitted the editors.² We will see that for many anthropologists there was no apparent connection either. The journal’s relatively brief existence under its original title underscores the main point of this chapter: the distance, even hostility, between missionaries and anthropologists was neither natural nor inevitable, yet it developed and persisted.³ In response to a puzzled missionary in the field, who was wondering how to start developing an anthropological approach, the editor of Practical Anthropology suggested learning “to ask the right questions of ourselves” (emphasis original). This type of reflexivity was an important part of the ancient discipline of theological anthropology, a concept that must be carefully distinguished from the academic anthropology that developed in the later nineteenth century. They both share an intellectual quest for theories of the nature of the human person, but to speak of anthropology in a theological context can encompass scholarly work from the second century CE to the present day. The story of the emergence of modern anthropology is well known, as is the variety of Christian interactions with its secular theories.⁴ For our purposes, however, the most important feature of theological anthropology is its emphasis from the earliest days on the unity of humanity. All people were made in the divine image and in relationship both with God and with one another. Every non-Christian Other was also a brother.

What to do about this was another matter. Missionary activity had not always been an essential feature of Christianity. Interest in missions waxed and waned over time and varied between denominations. Nevertheless, where there was missionary expansion, the paradoxical relationship between othering and brothering emerged, even in Christianity’s earliest days when the Jewish Christian norm was challenged by others—Samaritans, Gentiles—who were Other.⁵ The Book of Acts tells of a vision experienced by the apostle Peter in which he was commanded to abandon ritual purity in order to preach the gospel to non-Jews (Acts 11:1–10).⁶ This was also the approach of the most famous of the early missionary apostles, Paul. In the scriptural account of Paul’s activities, he articulated a “one blood” anthropology in support of his mission to the Gentiles, explaining how God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. . . . That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:26–27). Even during periods of persecution, sometimes very severe, Christian anthropology of one blood continued to envision a humanity united by a common origin and destiny.

Centuries later, when Christian European powers began building empires of their own, this theological universalism was challenged by many different factors including what we now conceptualize as “race.” The universalism of one blood stood in opposition to othering on a global scale, even as the concept of race was being invented and reinforced by imperial power.

This tangle confronted all missionaries taking up the biblical Great Commission and its simultaneous othering and brothering of non-Christians. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus orders his disciples to go and “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 28:19). Those in need of baptism were fundamentally Other according to this theological anthropology, but they must simultaneously be kindred of one blood, or the gospel could be neither preached nor received. Some sort of genuine engagement had to be possible. After Spain’s discovery of the Americas, some Roman Catholic missionaries began calling for debate about the humanity and integrity of indigenous peoples. Conversion was the ultimate goal, to be sure, but the beginnings of a concept of human rights can also be traced to this period, and especially to the arguments of Bartolomé de las Casas and other theologians at Salamanca in the sixteenth century.⁷ The conviction that indigenous peoples were fully human produced some sensitive observations of their cultures, leading some scholars to identify the sixteenth-century mendicant friars of New Spain as the first modern ethnographers.⁸

The British undertook some evangelization of Native Americans in their settler colonies during the early modern period, but the Reformation had raised questions about mission work. Some Protestant theologies denounced the presumption of the idea that Christians could do anything at all about the salvation of others. They asserted that looking to one’s own spiritual interests and leaving the rest to God is all we are called to do. These quietist convictions were strong among Calvinists, and they affected the newly emerged Church of England and remained present among Presbyterians and other dissenting denominations in the British Isles.⁹ Both Anglican and Protestant interest in missions was limited as a result.

When an evangelical revival began in Britain in the early eighteenth century, the outcome for missions was far from clear. Two areas of society that generally looked upon each other with mistrust joined forces as the lower-class constituents of revival movements (especially Methodism) allied with elites who were skeptical of evangelical political loyalty. The lack of procedures for appointing Church of England bishops overseas hampered the growth of Anglican missions as well.¹⁰ Anglican chaplains abroad concentrated mostly on the spiritual welfare of British settlers, military personnel, and commercial staff. In territory ruled by the East India Company there was open hostility to any attempt to convert Indians to Christianity, and British missionaries had to be forced on the Company through acts of Parliament in the early nineteenth century.¹¹

Nevertheless, the expansion of British rule in North America and Asia, the growth of British overseas commercial enterprise, including the transatlantic slave trade, the rising respectability of evangelicalism, and the impact of Enlightenment notions of progress all played a role in fostering a more favorable attitude toward missions in Britain by the nineteenth century. Norman Etherington warns that “not only is it difficult to point to any one cause of missionary enthusiasm, but different causes predominated at different times.”¹² The influence of Moravian missiology, however, was one of the most critical factors. Moravian missions had been operating in British territory for some time, notably in what is now the Canadian North, and it was at a Moravian chapel in London that John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, first experienced the emotional response to faith that would characterize his evangelicalism.¹³ Stuart Piggin’s neglected study of mission theology and training outlines the Moravian theological position: its highlight was a modification of Calvin’s notion of predestination in order to permit a preaching of the gospel “which invited all men to receive the mercy of a loving God.”¹⁴ This moderated Calvinism, together with the Arminianism of John Wesley, generated a missiology that emphasized human universality. So successful were these theological arguments that by the later eighteenth century “to an extent perhaps unequalled in British ecclesiastical history before or since, the Church, whether conceived of in narrow denominational terms, or as embracing all believers, was thought of as a missionary Church.”¹⁵ Although some later Pacific missions had a more catholic or high-church Anglican origin, for the first fifty years they were dominated by the evangelical efforts of various denominations, and their missiology was grounded in individual passion: the passion with which the classic evangelical experience of conversion was embraced.

This intensity of religious experience and the urgent evangelical call to salvation generated prominent debates about eschatology, especially those concerning the nature and timing of the anticipated second coming of Christ. By the early nineteenth century, millennial prophets and theologies had become popular, even fashionable. Some had diagnosed the end times in such events as the rise and defeat of Napoleon, the globalization of European influence, and the social dislocations of the industrial revolution. Views differed about whether or not mission activity was desirable in the end times: a reflection of longstanding Protestant quietism. One of the most popular eschatologists of the day, Edward Irving, taught a form of pre-millennialism that sought to “hasten the return of Christ by a policy of rapid evangelistic expansion” since “Christ could not return until every nation had had an opportunity of responding to the gospel.”¹⁶ The vast majority of evangelical Christians, however, believed that sustained spiritual, intellectual, and financial efforts were needed more than apocalyptic visions. Still, the popularity of preachers like Irving helped to boost the development of new mission societies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The first of these to focus on the Pacific field was a mainly Congregationalist society founded in 1795 and known from 1818 as the London Missionary Society (LMS). The LMS chose Tahiti for its first mission in response to Captain Cook’s accounts of Pacific peoples. Stories of human sacrifice and cannibalism, set amid tropical beauty, were compelling motivations for missionary service. So too was the growing British dominance at sea. After defeating Napoleon in 1815, Britain would remain a naval superpower for most of the nineteenth century, and missionaries were conscious of the role of naval power in their ability to undertake distant missions. “To this diffusion of light and truth the naval greatness of Britain eminently contributes,” declared LMS founder Thomas Haweis in 1812, “facilitating conveyance into all lands, and the most distant isles of the sea.”¹⁷ Maritime routes carried the empire’s ideas, emigrants, trade, and troops around the world. In the vast Pacific the role of the Royal Navy was simply crucial, and it was significant that so many navy officers and crew members in the early and mid-nineteenth century were enthusiastically Christian. Missionaries enjoyed special privileges: regular visits to their stations by passing warships, mail services, transportation between islands, and, on controversial occasions, armed support.¹⁸ Assisted by enthusiastic sponsors at home, aided by the reliable maps now readily available from the Admiralty, other mission societies began their own Pacific ventures in the wake of the LMS pioneers. In 1814, the evangelical Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) began operations in New Zealand and, a little later, in Australia. In 1822, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) settled in the Tongan islands and spread, by means of auxiliary missio...