The Unexpected Christian Century

The Reversal and Transformation of Global Christianity, 1900-2000

Sunquist, Scott W.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781441266637
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

2015 Book Award for Excellence in Missiology, American Society of Missiology Named an Outstanding Mission Book of 2015, International Bulletin of Mission Research In 1900 many assumed the twentieth century would be a Christian century because Western "Christian empires" ruled most of the world. What happened instead is that Christianity in the West declined dramatically, the empires collapsed, and Christianity's center moved to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. How did this happen so quickly? Respected scholar and teacher Scott Sunquist surveys the most recent century of Christian history, highlighting epochal changes in global Christianity. He also suggests lessons we can learn from this remarkable global Christian reversal. Ideal for an introduction to Christianity or a church history course, this book includes a foreword by Mark Noll.

1
World Christianity

The Gilded Age through the Great War

[Governments] are thinking of the world chiefly as a market house, and of men chiefly as producers and consumers. We now seldom have wars of succession or for mere political dominion. Places are strategic primarily from the commercial standpoint. . . . If the product tarries too long in the warehouse, the mill must shut down and discontent will walk the streets . . . the battle for markets is at its fiercest. The great quest for governments is for markets.

Benjamin Harrison, speaking at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York City (Ecumenical Conference on Foreign Missions, 27)

We are face to face with the great question of the evangelization of Africa. We need to send the natives to evangelize their fellow-men, natives of the country and trained on the spot.

Rev. Robert Laws of the Free Church of Scotland, giving his report on Africa for the same conference (ibid., 461)

The year 1900 was not 2000, and yet it seems so little has changed. In the two quotations above we see some of these themes that are so similar and yet are at the same time worlds apart. Global consumerism, mentioned by a former president in 1900, is even more of an issue for the church and the nations of the world today. However, the concern for evangelization of Africa is not the same at all. A century after this comment was made, much of Africa has been evangelized and Africans are planting some of the largest churches in Europe.

In this chapter we want to look carefully at what global Christianity looked like at the moment when the very confident and very Christian West, without blushing or winking, could say to the world, “This will be the Christian Century.”1 On the basis of the spread of Christian empires most church leaders agreed that this miracle would clearly lead to global Christianization. It was a very small logical step, although a large theological leap, to imagine that if Christian nations ruled the world, then the world would become Christian. The theological leap that is required would mean that Jesus’s kingdom, a kingdom of peace and gentleness, would be ushered in by the multinational corporations and armies of Christian nations. It has always been a problem to identify Christian rulers with the King of kings or Christian nations with the kingdom of God.

Rather than just looking at one year (What was global Christianity like in 1900?), we will look at the dynamics at play in Christianity around the turn of the century. Broadly speaking, we will look at Christian presence globally during the transition from the Gilded Age2 (1870s to 1900) through the Great War (World War I). This will give us a more accurate feel for Christianity as a movement through time and space, rather than as a static institution at the beginning of the “Christian Century.”

Entering the Twentieth Century: Globalization, War, Flu

At the time of the Great War, Christianity’s center was shifting, but it was a very brief shift across the Atlantic. It was not so much the spiritual and theological weight of North American Christianity that caused the shift as it was the political dominance of the latest imperial power. In earlier centuries we have seen how global powers have dominated the Christian religion, and yet we now know that this is seldom the main story. Even as American “big business” Christianity was influencing the direction of the ecumenical and missionary movement, the real center was (almost imperceptibly) moving away from the North Atlantic region to Latin America, Africa, and Asia. But early in the century there were only hints that the North Atlantic Christian dominance was more a veneer painted by worldly mammon than a spiritual furnace for the global church. Despite the theological divisions over evolution, science, higher criticism, and the Holy Spirit, North Atlantic Christianity was still flooding the world with missionaries and building institutional Christianity in far-off cities and villages. Big American and European money built YMCA buildings in Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, Cape Town, Mexico City, Madurai—everywhere missionaries and international businesspeople traveled.

The Great Century for Missions is generally assumed to have ended with the 1910 World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh. Periodization is seldom an exact science, and the end of the Great Century is a prime example of this difficulty. Christianity was firmly enmeshed in empires, movements of civilization, and ideas of social uplift. Many missionaries who traveled to the East and the South in the early decades of the twentieth century brought with them ideas of teaching democracy, economic theory, and modern science, along with the Christian religion. The Great War changed all of that. The early decades of the twentieth century were a period of global transition; the great influenza pandemic of 1918–19 is a type of marker. It was a period of Christian transition globally. Western Christianity was suffering a crisis of credibility after such a bloody war, in which Christians were killing other Christians. The revelation that European Christians were warlike Christians was not lost on Christians in Asia and Africa who witnessed the conflict between German and British missionaries. Western Christendom suffered one tragedy upon another. The great flu was a global pandemic, killing more than fifty million people in the first year. Soon after, the world suffered from a major economic collapse, which was followed by the rearmament of Germany and increased global tensions in Europe and Africa. Ironically, Western Christian missions remained confident and progressive thinking. Plans went ahead for ecumenical conferences to bring together Christians to work for unity on issues of faith and order and for cooperative work in society. The movement for missionary unity continued also, though delayed by the Great War. Non-Western church leaders were quite aware that Western Christianity was struggling to rise above its own materialism and nationalisms.

Will there be any good prospect for the native after the end of the war? Shall we be recognized as anybody in the best interests of civilisation and Christianity after the great struggle is ended? . . . In time of peace the Government failed to help the underdog. In time of peace, everything for the European only. . . . But in time of war it has been found that we are needed to share hardships and shed our blood in equality.3

The first decades of the twentieth century were truly a period of transition for Christianity as a world religion, but it was not the transition that most theologians, clerics, or missionaries in Christendom had expected. The main story would not be the rise of a powerful ecumenical movement based on a modern Western business model. The war, flu, and economic collapse slowly revealed the vulnerability of Western Christendom. The main story would be the spreading decay of this Christianity in the West (a continuation of the decay wrought by the Enlightenment and Philosophe scholars) and the remarkable vitality of Christianity from the margins, a Christianity that was planted by that same waning Christianity in the West. Even the amalgamation of Christianity and commerce, along with the loss of Christian confidence in faith, did not prevent Christianity from becoming a modern faith for the non-Western world.

Colonialism and Christianization

One of the greatest themes of this period of transition in the early twentieth century was the relationship between Christian missions and colonialism. While Western Christendom’s decline was accelerating, Christian missions and Western colonialism were still showing signs of vitality. It was this delicate and complex relationship between mission and empire that took center stage.

Historians have tried to make clear statements about the relationship between Christian missions, Christian growth, and colonialism, but it has proved very difficult to do so. Colonialisms were not of a single type, and missionary lives in various global contexts were as diverse as the agencies and individuals who were involved. Here we give a few examples of the diversity involved, showing that any consensus understanding of the relationship between colonialism and Christian missions must be very general and heavily footnoted.

Colonialism and Christian mission in East Asia in the nineteenth century was a very diverse experience. The Philippines were heavily colonized over a period of four hundred years by a country whose king was obligated to spread religion and rule as one interwoven fabric. It is hard to refute the observation that as a result the Philippines, named after a Spanish king, became mostly Christian. Vietnam was colonized for only a century by France, and Christianity is much less prominent in that country. The Dutch slowly increased their colonial rule in the East Indies for more than three and a half centuries, and yet the Christian population remained very small. In actuality, Christianity grew much more after the Dutch were removed. Siam (Thailand) was not colonized, missionaries were intermittently free to work there, and yet it is one of the least Christian nations in Asia. China was colonized only along the coasts; it had a very long history of missionary work, and also decades of intense religious persecution and Communist secularization, yet today Christianity is growing very rapidly. In China, Communism proved more of a stimulus to growth than imperialism did. Japan also had a long history of missionary involvement; it was never colonized, and Christianity is a very small minority community. Then we have Korea, colonized not by a Western Christian nation but by China and Japan. Its terrible history with foreign nations and its very brief period of evangelization have helped to produce a very strong Christian presence by Asian standards. We pause to underscore that there was no Christian imperialism to support the missionary work in Korea, and yet it became one of the most Christianized of nations in Asia.

Figure 2. This photo is a great example of the complex relationship between mission and empire at the turn of the century. President McKinley (who had particular Protestant interests in the Catholic Philippines) and Admiral George Dewey bow in prayer as Cardinal Gibbons gives the opening benediction for a celebration in Washington, DC, to honor Dewey’s successful defeat of the Spanish during the Battle of Manila Bay, October 1899. [Library of Congress]

And so we might ask, did colonial experiences help the growth of Christianity or hinder it? The answer is both. Oppression, more than colonialism or imperialism, seems to be the most important factor. Suffering imposed by local or foreign powers is an important variable, more important than the support of a colonial government. However, other variables are involved. Japan, an oppressive imperial power in East Asia, had a “Christian century” (1550–1650) during which it seemed that Christianity was going to win the hearts and minds of the Japanese, but then the change in rule crushed the young Christian movement. Later Christian influence, with minimal Western colonial influence, had little impact on the rising imperial nation.

But Christian impact is only one of the questions. The larger historical question that needs to be asked to understand this complex history is about the intent of the colonial powers and the intent of the missionary societies. Were the colonial powers intent on dominating other nations to the extent that the local peoples would become “European” in life, language, and religion? Not at all. This could be applied to earlier Portuguese and Spanish expansion, since the pope had given the kings the responsibility to spread the faith wherever the Portuguese or Spanish flag was unfurled. These Iberian missions were taken up from a position of power, from which Spain or Portugal enforced their rule. Spain proved to be the enforcers and soldiers, while the Portuguese were the traders and sailors. The Dutch and British had no such dream of evangelizing their overseas lands, nor did they have papal obligation to do so. When their religion got in the way of trade, they made treaties that would exclude missionaries and missionary meddling in local cultures. We have seen this in both Africa and Asia. However, when missionary schools would help to train civil servants, the colonial rulers would provide financial support for the mission schools. Many of these mission schools became the best schools in Asia and Africa. Most European imperialists were powerful businessmen: pragmatists when it came to rule and religion.

Belgian colonialism was unique. The Belgian Congo was basically a private holding of the Belgian king, Leopold II. After attempting to buy the Philippines from Spain, he turned to Africa and procured his own private empire by force. Nineteenth-century imperialism was never a pretty thing, but the severed hands of children and adults make Leopold’s empire one of the worst. Finally, after decades of investigations, followed by imprisonments and violent responses, the combined efforts of missionaries and reporters forced the king’s violent empire to be turned over to his government. In an interesting twist of events, it was an early Presbyterian African American missionary, Rev. William H. Sheppard, who led an international campaign to end the Belgian king’s rule in the Congo. After the private kingdom was nationalized, missionaries slowly trickled in, but not before an estimated ten million Congolese suffered premature deaths caused by Belgian imperialism. In the first decade of the twentieth century not only Belgium but also France was trying to step away from its own history of genocide in the Congo.4

German expansionism, a very late form of colonialism, was much more clearly a matter of cultural domination and not just economic exploitation. Otto von Bismarck, who helped to unite Prussia and Germany, sought a new Weltpolitik (world policy) to extend German influence. It was not his early desire to become a colonial power, but imperialism became the German design, and so Germany extended its cultural influence into Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

Missionaries, much more concerned with making Christians than making Germans, often resisted German cultural hegemony. One example will illustrate the tension. Franz Michael Zahn was a German Pietist mission statesman who headed up the Bremen Mission working in Togo, a British land that was taken over by the Germans in 1890. Germany refused to let the missionaries teach English to the indigenes because it would promote African independency and ideas of emancipation. Zahn fired back, “I feel we should make use of any means at our disposal to win the privilege of the freedom of mission. Therefore, I suggest we complain again, first to the Reichskanzler . . . then, to the Kaiser, to the Parliament, and to the press.” He was very clear that the German idea of Kulturvolk (“civilized people”) was the enemy of Christian ministry in Africa. As director of the Bremen Mission, he wrote to one of his missionaries in 1888, “I am against colonies anyway, and naturally, that is enough today for one to be branded a traitor to the Fatherland. But if a missionary enters into politics, and through his influence supports the German colonial acquisitions and motives—then, whatever he may think otherwise, I regard this as a grave mistake, not to say a crime.”5

Such attitudes became prevalent especially in the last decades of colonial expansion. Colonial powers were wary of the rise of well-educated local people, the very thing that missionaries, at their best, were working to effect. Christian leadership demanded literacy, education, and independence. Much of the independence was granted later than hoped for, and yet work with indigenes was t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. World Christianity
• 2. Christian Lives
• 3. Politics and Persecution
• 4. Confessional Families
• 5. On the Move
• 6. One Way among Others
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: African Independence and Colonizers
• Appendix 2: Asian Independence and Colonizers
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover