1 of 3

The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914 The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914: The Interplay of Representation and Experience edited by Andrew Porter Eerdmans, 2003 264 pp. $45 Reforming Empire Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature by Christopher Hodgkins Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002 296 pp. $44.95

The missionary in popular media is often a simple figure moved to action by simple motives for often base or self-serving ends. So it was with the sexually repressed protagonist of W. Somerset Maugham's Rain, the missionary females likewise conquered by carnal passion in Seven Women and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, or the not very clever Congregationalists who mess up the idyllic primitives in James Michener's Hawaii. These stereotypes of popular fiction offer a natural complement to the stereotypes of postcolonial moral outrage. Missionaries as anthropologically challenged stooges for Western imperialist expansion, commercial exploitation, and environmental destruction figure large in the type of postcolonial discourse that is too intense to pause for actual historical research.

Febrile stereotyping is now a special shame, since actual historical research on the motives, mixed achievements, complexities, ironies, and changes over time of Western missionary practice has become very sophisticated. To be sure, this sober historical literature treats directly only part of the worldwide picture. In a helpful distinction articulated recently by Lamin Sanneh, the rising quantity of solid missionary history bears most directly on "global Christianity," or the effort to export versions of Christianity shaped by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the scientific and commercial revolutions of recent Western history.1 Only indirectly does it relate the story of "world Christianity," or the rise of indigenous forms of the faith in non-Western societies that have not been shaped by the main Western developments. Yet so alert have some authors of the newer missionary history been to the complex dimensions of actual situations and events that their contributions to "global Christianity" turn out to illuminate at least some aspects of "world Christianity" as well.

The latest contribution to the outstanding Eerdmans series, Studies in the History of Christian Missions, is an exemplary instance of multi-layered insight grounded in carefully documented research. Chapters of The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914 were first produced under the auspices of the North Atlantic Missiology Project, which during its tenure did more to stimulate first-order scholarship on mission history and theology than any other single program of the last half century. The volume is edited by Andrew Porter, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College, London, and author of several seminal studies on various aspects of the British empire during its broadest extent in the 19th and 20th centuries. Porter's introduction ably outlines the book's general themes: during the period when European powers scrambled to construct empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, British Protestant missionaries could be found enlisting God for the cause of imperial expansion but also employing historic Christian teaching to chastise the builders of empire; even at the height of British expansion, many missionaries (though more in the field than at home in agency headquarters) gained a strong sense of Christianity as an international force breaking free from strict European definition; and, in Porter's own words, "most missionaries were not conscious imperialists in either a political or denominational sense."

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page