Christianity in the Twentieth Century

A World History

Brian Stanley

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400890316
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

A history of unparalleled scope that charts the global transformation of Christianity during an age of profound political and cultural change Christianity in the Twentieth Century charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. Written by a leading scholar of world Christianity, the book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today--one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia.Brian Stanley sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. Rather, Stanley provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom's fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe.Transnational in scope and drawing on the latest scholarship, Christianity in the Twentieth Century demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.

CHAPTER ONE

Wars and Rumors of Wars

THE RESPONSE OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN
CHURCHES TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR

I. The Global Religious Legacy of the First World War

The First World War—or the Great War, as it was most often called until 1939—continues to dominate historical memory of the twentieth century. For some historians, the significance of the war is so momentous that the nineteenth century is granted special dispensation from the normal mathematics of time, enabling it to become “the long nineteenth century,” miraculously elongated over the whole period from the French Revolution of 1789 to 1914. The outbreak of war on August 4, 1914, is thus invested with the status of the “real” beginning of the twentieth century, or even of that indefinable entity, “the modern world.” Such interpretations have a long ancestry. In 1917 the Scottish Congregational theologian P. T. Forsyth (1848–1921)—the most creative theological thinker in the British Free Churches—observed that the war had revealed to humanity what it had chosen to overlook, namely the terrible reality of evil in human nature. “This discovery,” he reflected, “means the real end of the Victorian age, of the comfortable, kindly, bourgeois, casual Victorian age, so credulous in its humanism.”¹ Two years later, Archibald T. Robertson, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, wrote that “The old world passed away when Belgium took her stand in front of the Kaiser’s hosts. Modern history began on that date.”²

In reality, history does not proceed according to such neat punctuation, but what is beyond dispute is the enduring imprint of the First World War on popular consciousness. In Britain, France, and Belgium, as in the United States and some Commonwealth nations, the forms of remembrance of the wartime dead that were developed in 1918–19, and in many cases the actual date of the Armistice of November 11, 1918, continue to this day to provide the template for all national commemorations of war and its myriad victims. This war changed everything, or so it seemed in retrospect to many who survived it. Whether, as an older generation of historiography implied, the First World War can in fact be identified as the tragic watershed separating the Victorian age of faith from the increasingly secular Western world of the twentieth century is much more doubtful. This chapter suggests that the consequences of the war for patterns of Christian belief and the life of the churches were indeed great, but that they stimulated, not an immediate loss of faith, but rather the emergence and increasingly distinct self-definition of some of the most characteristic themes and divergent styles of Christianity in the modern world.

Much of the scholarship on the impact of the First World War on the churches concentrates on Britain, France, and Germany, just as the bulk of the massive literature on the war itself is preoccupied with the Western Front, to the comparative neglect of other theaters of war. The ambiguous legacy of the war to religion in Britain is indeed the subject of the second section of this chapter. But too narrow a focus must be resisted. The Protestant character of the new world order of 1919, implemented by the Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson, has tended to divert attention from the important consequences of the war for the Catholic Church. In France, Italy, and Germany, participation in the armed forces transformed the position of Catholics in society and politics, removing the stigma of antipatriotism that the Catholic communities in these countries had borne for decades. Despite the fact that Pope Benedict XV steadfastly maintained the neutrality of the papacy throughout the war, the mobilization of both Catholic clergy and lay organizations in the Italian war effort brought church and nation into a harmonious relationship for the first time since Italian unification. The moral reputation of the Church also benefited from the massive involvement of the Vatican in relief work throughout Europe, which saw more than 82 million lire spent on ministries to civilians and prisoners of war, bringing the papacy to the brink of bankruptcy in the process. Yet the war also unleashed the serious political and social disorder that would provoke the rise of Fascism in Italy, a trend that under Benedict’s successor from 1922, Pius XI, would ultimately prove damaging to the moral stature of the papacy.³

On a wider canvas, the war was indeed a global cataclysm, a clash of world empires, which affected all continents to a greater or lesser extent. Thus Australia experienced proportionately much higher casualty rates than did Britain (whose losses were also much lower than those suffered by the French, German, and Serbian armies).⁴ Of all Australians who embarked for the war in Europe—and they were all volunteers—68.5 percent were either killed or wounded, compared with only 52.5 percent of all British forces. The dreadful casualties suffered by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) following the landing on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula on April 25, 1915, gave rise a year later to the institution of Anzac Day. In Australia especially this became the focus of a variety of civil religion, enabling an increasingly unchurched population to discover sacred meaning in the annual commemoration of their war dead.⁵ More than 2 million Africans served in the war, either as soldiers or porters; more than 200,000 of them died, some in action and many more from epidemic disease; almost all traveled long distances from home, in the process encountering different African peoples, varied expressions of religion, and enticing ideas of independence from the white man’s rule.⁶ India recruited more than 1.5 million men for the British imperial cause, more than 1 million of whom served overseas.⁷

As historians begin to explore the reasons for the takeoff of Christianity in Africa and parts of Asia in the years after 1918, they may yet discover that the implications of the conflict for the destiny of Christianity in the non-Western world were as substantial as they were for the course of church life in Western Europe. Five main implications of the war for Christianity on a world stage may be identified.

First, the war came close to destroying the spirit of Protestant internationalism that had been so powerfully symbolized and fostered by the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in June 1910. As Allied forces moved swiftly to take control of German colonial possessions in Africa and the Pacific, German mission leaders confidently expected that their missions would be regarded as part of the transnational Protestant missionary enterprise, and would be permitted to carry on their work uninterrupted. These expectations were soon dashed. German missionaries, operating in the former German colonies, and in British possessions such as India, were interned or expelled. Karl Axenfeld, director of the Berlin Missionary Society, voiced the outrage felt among German mission leaders by penning at the end of August 1914 an appeal “To Evangelical [i.e., Protestant] Christians Abroad.” This manifesto, signed by twenty-nine German mission leaders and theologians, deplored the abandonment of the principle of the supranationality of missions, and defended Germany’s decision to go to war to thwart the “Asiatic barbarism” of Russian aggression.⁸ The reply from forty-two British church leaders, led by Archbishop Randall Davidson of Canterbury, gave no quarter in its insistence that the responsibility for the war lay with Germany, and that the British churches stood for the principles of “international good faith” that Germany had violated through its invasion of Belgium.⁹ The chairman of the Edinburgh conference, the American Methodist John R. Mott, tried to mediate between these diametrically opposed standpoints. Mott’s sympathies, however, were clearly with the British, and, once the United States entered the war in April 1917, his mediation collapsed. A profound alienation ensued between Anglo-American and German Protestantism that lasted throughout the 1920s, and that helps to explain the indecent enthusiasm with which some elements of the German Evangelical Church greeted the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 as a fulfillment of the same ideals of the Volk as German missions had pursued in Africa and Asia.¹⁰ More broadly, the First World War set Protestant—and even Catholic—missions in a more nationalistic mold than had been true in the past.¹¹ Paradoxically, Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations served not to limit nationalism but rather to disseminate the ideal of national self-determination in Asia and Africa. As chapters 2 and 8 will show, it was an ideal taken up in 1919 by Christian nationalists in such contrasting locations as Korea and Egypt.

The second legacy of the war to some extent moderated the impact of the first. Although the Treaty of Versailles expanded the world’s two largest colonial empires—the British and the French—to their largest geographical extent ever, the role of humanitarianism in those empires (especially the British) became more pronounced after 1918. Under mandates from the newly established League of Nations, former German colonies in Africa and the Pacific passed into the hands of France, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan; about 1 million square miles of African or Pacific territory were thereby added to the British Empire alone.¹² Further mandates entrusted France and Britain with vast tracts of the former Ottoman Empire—in the British case, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Transjordan, and Palestine. As the next section emphasizes, British involvement in Palestine, in the wake of the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and the fall of Jerusalem to General Allenby’s army on December 9, 1917, had great symbolic significance for many evangelical Protestants. The fact that this enormous increase in British colonial territory came as a trust bestowed by international authority subtly redefined the moral tone of the providentialism that had become so marked a feature of British Protestant attitudes to empire during the nineteenth century. The balance of justification of empire began to shift from the classic Victorian evangelical position that it was a divinely appointed means to the end of evangelization toward a more diffuse civilizing rhetoric shared by Anglicans and Nonconformists alike. British Christian thinkers in the 1920s portrayed their nation’s empire as uniquely committed to disseminating the distinctively British values of liberty and progress toward democracy; Protestantism was still an integral part of the mix, but it was now often presented in a broader unsectarian perspective as the embodiment of British “character.”¹³ J. H. Oldham (1874–1969), secretary of the International Missionary Council established in 1921, and the most influential British spokesman for this view, argued in his Christianity and the Race Problem (1924) that the most cogent justification for the rule of “more advanced” peoples over what he termed “weaker” ones was that the former should promote the “care and advancement” of the latter in a spirit of genuine trusteeship.¹⁴ To a postcolonial generation, Oldham’s words may appear odious, but his record of fearless agitation on such issues as forced labor in Kenya suggests that his humanitarianism was authentic.¹⁵

More broadly, Woodrow Wilson’s insistence in 1918 that the forthcoming territorial settlements must be “in the interests and for the benefit of the population concerned, and not as part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims against rival states,”¹⁶ reinforced the willingness of both Protestant and Catholic missionary spokesmen to hold imperial governments to their professions of beneficence toward their subject populations. Benedict XV in his apostolic letter, Maximum Illud, issued on November 30, 1919, expressed the hope that the Catholic missions would soon recover from the “severe wounds and losses” inflicted by the war, but also uttered grave warnings against any missionary devoting himself to “attempts to increase and exalt the prestige of the native land he once left behind him” rather than to the spread of the kingdom of God.¹⁷ Though increasingly dependent on colonial government subsidies, both Catholic and Protestant missions invested heavily in education and medicine after 1918; in tropical Africa and the Pacific Islands, they supplied almost the entirety of the educational provision until 1945. In parts of Africa, such as northern Nigeria, such investment in the social gospel of education paradoxically may have helped to reap the substantial evangelistic harvest of church growth that marked the African mission field in the interwar period and beyond,¹⁸ but it was also an attempt by the churches to discharge the debt of colonial welfare imposed by the Versailles settlement. The war also enabled some African church leaders and their congregations to flourish in the absence of missionary supervision, even though the missions were quick to resume the reins of control once the war had ended.¹⁹

Trusteeship implied a duty to disseminate the imagined benefits of Christian civilization. Yet, a third consequence of the war was the gradual erosion of credibility of the European ideal of “Christian civilization,” and consequent softening of the antithesis between “Christian West” and “Non-Christian East.” J. H. Oldham, when writing his editorial survey of the year 1914 for the International Review of Missions, resorted to the geological analogy of “some gigantic prehistoric catastrophe,” twisting and breaking the rock strata, in order to convey the magnitude of the “tremendous upheaval of the war,” which had opened up “a huge fault” in the apparent unity of the Christian West expressed at Edinburgh.²⁰ The war questioned the assumption, so foundational to the Edinburgh conference in 1910, that Christian mission could be understood as a movement from the Christian nations of the West to the non-Christian nations of the East. There is little evidence to support the case that the war produced a short-term fall in religious observance in Europe; if anything, the reverse is true. Nevertheless, the war appeared to weaken the claims of Europe to be the ideal embodiment of Christian civilization, while at the same time its imperial outcomes encouraged the growth of Christianity outside Europe.

Fourth, the war led some theological interpreters to question the more facile expressions of Christian liberalism and social optimism to which sections of the Protestant churches had succumbed since the dawn of the twentieth century. The best-known example of such a reaction is the young Swiss Reformed pastor Karl Barth (1886–1968), who responded with disgust to the uncritical endorsement of German war aims by his former theological teachers at the universities of Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. Under the impact of the war, Barth began to move away from his commitment to German social democracy, with its often naïve confidence in human capacity to build the kingdom of God.²¹ In July 1916, when still a village pastor in Safenwil in the Aargau, he began writing his commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans, which gradually led Barth to the conclusion that “...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Wars and Rumors of Wars: The Response of British and American Churches to the First World War
• Chapter 2: Holy Nations? Uneasy Marriages between Christianity and Nationalism
• Chapter 3: The Power of the Word and Prophecy: Pathways of Conversion in Africa and the Pacific
• Chapter 4: Making War on the Saints: The Church under Siege in France and the Soviet Union
• Chapter 5: Contrasting Patterns of Belonging and Believing: Scandinavia and the United States
• Chapter 6: Is Christ Divided? The Ecumenical Movement and Its Converse
• Chapter 7: The Voice of Your Brother’s Blood: Christianity, Ethnic Hatred, and Genocide in Nazi Germany and Rwanda
• Chapter 8: Aliens in a Strange Land? Living in an Islamic Context in Egypt and Indonesia
• Chapter 9: That the World May Believe: Christian Mission to the Modern World
• Chapter 10: Good News to the Poor? Theologies of Liberation in Latin America and Palestine
• Chapter 11: Doing Justice in South Africa and Canada: The Human Rights Agenda, Race, and Indigenous Peoples
• Chapter 12: A Noise of War in the Camp: Human Rights, Gender, and Sexuality
• Chapter 13: The Spirit and the spirits: Global Pentecostal Christianities
• Chapter 14: The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Modern World
• Chapter 15: Migrant Churches
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• A Note on the Type