- Nearly a third of
the world's population, some 2.3 billion people are Christians of one sort or another. It's a remarkable fact. That's the biggest religious community the world has ever seen,
a very diverse one. And it's also very widely spread. This map, which is based
on 2015 statistics, the numbers haven't changed
very much in that time, shows if the darker, the blue, the higher proportion of the
population are Christians. And of course there are
countries like China or India where the Christian minorities are small in percentage terms, but still number tens
of millions of people. If you compare this map to Christianity's most
serious numerical rival and its most longstanding
competitor, Islam, whose 1.9 billion adherence, just under a quarter of
the world's population, you see that while the
numbers aren't very different, the geographical pattern is strikingly so. Islam dominates a single very substantial, and almost contiguous block of territory. In this series, I'm going to
be telling a part of the story of how Christianity reached this extraordinary level
of global dominance. A strange, largely forgotten part, which I hope is both
interesting in its own right, and revealing, because the histories that
brought Christianity and Islam to these two patterns that
we've just been looking at are very different. Both of them, of course,
are missionary religions, conversionary religions,
which at least in theory, aspire to bring the whole of
humanity into their folds. Although as we'll see that
theory doesn't always apply. And that sets them apart from most of the world's
other major religions. And of course it helps to explain why, even if neither of them has yet to converting the whole planet, they have managed well over half the
human race between them, and that share is only projected to rise. But they got there by
very different routes. Islam's geographical base is pretty much what it has been since the first explosion
of Muslim conquests from the Arabian peninsula
in the seventh century. There's been some
expansion around the edges. Whereas Christianity has
ricocheted chaotically around the planet. It began, of course, as a
Middle Eastern religion. In the third century, its
heartland was in Western Asia, but its chief vector was the Roman Empire. So by the early fifth century, the spread of Christianity looks pretty similar to
that empire's boundaries. But then the sudden emergence of Islam in the seventh century overturns most of that
historic Christian center, and it becomes confined
to the north and the west. It becomes by default, a European religion with minority scattered elsewhere. And so now the known
world seemed to be Islams for the taking. The Christians bottled up in one corner with limited horizons. Maps like the famous Mappa Mundi show how tight those horizons are. I mean, despite its title, it only shows a small
portion of the world. This map is easier for us
to read if we flip it round, so that north is at the top,
the way we're familiar with. So you can see the Mediterranean, the black bit snaking
around in the middle. A squashed Britain and Ireland up in the north-western corner, and in the south-east, the Red Sea, a body about which the monks knew only one substantial thing,
being of course its color. But then in the 15th century, European Christians began to go the only way that they
could, out into the Atlantic. Feeling their way down the African coast, out to minor islands, like
the Canarys, the Azores, leading to a sudden pair of
breakthroughs in the 1490s. The Portuguese circumnavigated
Africa for the first time since the Phoenicians had done
it in the sixth century BC, if you believe that story,
which I must say I do. And of course, this Italian captain mixing brilliant seamanship with crackpot geographical theories, managed the first crossing
of the open Atlantic ever, and established a viable sea route to continents whose existence no educated European had suspected. And of course we know
how the story plays out. South and Central America quickly fell to the armies and the pathogens of the Spanish and the Portuguese, and Christianity was
taken to the new world far more comprehensively and brutally than the Arab armies had ever been when they took Islam to
Christianity's ancient heartlands. And so by the end of the 16th century, Christian missionaries had
spread across the Americas, and also to large parts
of Africa, India, Japan, even to China where the
great Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, produced this
world map for his hosts in 1602, diplomatically putting China as close as he could to the center, but showing that it was
now European Christians who had encompassed the whole
world in their imaginations and were set about making it their own. But, here's the oddity
about this first great wave of Christian globalization. Only a generation after those
first transcontinental voyages by Christian mariners, Christianity's European
heartland was struck by schism. The Latin church, which
looked to the Pope in Rome was riven by a theological controversy, which erupted in a small
German university in 1517. And by mid century,
Christian Europe had split, with a third or more of the population attached to the one of the
so-called Protestant churches, which rejected the Pope and many of the doctrines and practices of Latin Christendom. The remainder held fast to what we can now meaningfully
start to call Catholicism. Now, these Protestant
churches were nothing, if not energetic. They poured missionaries
into Catholic territories, they fought wars against Catholic rulers. They launched a barrage
of polemic and propaganda to make their case. They tried to appeal to the common people by everything from
translating their service into vernacular languages, through fostering new forms of music, to working to ensure that their ministers were properly educated and
weren't suspected of corruption. They did not go from a standing start with a third of a continent
within a generation by accident. This is a religion which
knows how to spread. At least it does within Europe. But further afield, the great
global efforts of this age that I was describing a minute ago, were all the work of
Catholic missionaries. So within Europe, the
Protestants missionary energies are uncontainable. Beyond it, they hardly register. And that pattern persists
for nearly three centuries, or so we've been told. The conventional story goes like this. Eventually the Protestant powers do launch their own empires, England, Scotland, the
Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, all build maritime empires. But unlike their Catholic counterparts, these don't see substantial
missionary efforts. There's talk of spreading
the Protestant gospel, but not much more than talk. When Protestants settle across the seas in North America, elsewhere, they don't make much effort to convert their indigenous neighbors, and sometimes actively
resist any efforts to do so. And the real change on
the conventional telling only came at the end of the 18th century. It's traditionally dated to 1792, when the English Baptist
minister, William Carey, published his inquiry into
the obligations of Christians to use means for the
conversion of the heathens. He argued that it was Protestants' duty to take their soul-saving
message, their gospel, to all the people of the world. And this triggered the great wave of Protestants' evangelical
missionary activity, which two and a bit centuries later, has left us with a world in which there are close
on a billion Protestants, and most of them don't live in Europe. So you see the puzzle. This is an aggressively
expansionist variant of an already expansionist religion, born at a historical moment when huge new opportunities for expansion was suddenly appearing, and when its great rival, Catholicism, was doing its utmost to
exploit those opportunities. And yet Protestants spent
nearly three centuries turning a blind eye. I first stubbed my toe on
this puzzle about 10 years ago when I was researching something else, and I thought it would be interesting to think and write a
little bit about this. And surely it would only be a little bit. After all, I'd be writing about something that didn't happen. The great global Protestant
missionary effort of the 16th and 17th
centuries that wasn't. And the best thing about
writing about something that doesn't happen is that
there's not much to say. How wrong I was. As I dug into the many, many
aspects of this subject, following in the steps of many brilliant scholars and specialists with deep knowledge of
each individual territory and cultural context, it became clear that there
was much more to this story than the conventional accounts tell us. So much so that I'm still
deep in researching it, and every time I think
I've reached the summit and have at least got a decent
overview of the subject, I find that there's
another climb ahead of me. In these six lectures, I'm
going to give you an overview of this largely untold story of the early spread of
Protestant Christianity. The next four lectures
are going to be devoted to the four continents in which this global spread took place, and the last one we'll try
and tie the story together and say something about what it all means. But today I want to go
back to my original puzzle, which has changed, but
isn't much less puzzling, because it turns out that Protestants during the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries really did make some
pretty substantial efforts to spread their faith to
the non-Christian world. So why haven't we noticed? And I think the answer to that one is interesting and important. Now I know what you're thinking. You are detecting me seeking out molehills with my magnifying glass and preparing to proclaim
them as mountains, that I'm going to cobble
together a few isolated examples of early Protestant missionaries and pretend that they're the equivalent of the Spanish conversion of the Americas. Well, I admit that the Catholic effort was on a larger scale, but there are more than just a
handful of isolated examples. The story begins close to
home in Northern Scandinavia. The Sami people were still at most superficially Christianized
by these people. The rival Lutheran churches of Sweden and of Denmark, Norway,
launched contrasting efforts to bring these last European
pagans into the fold. A rather different Arctic
people, the Inuit of Greenland were the recipients of an
extraordinary missionary project undertaken from the 1730s onwards by the Moravian brethren, a revivalist Protestant church with a particular zeal
for missionary work. As to North America, Protestants
were talking earnestly about converting that
continent's indigenous people well before they themselves
actually arrived. The leaders of the
earliest Protestant colony, a short-lived settlement
in Florida in the 1560s, were convinced that the
conversion of their new neighbors was within their grasp. The English in Virginia after 1608, were enthusiastic about conversion, raised a great deal of money
to support missionary projects, paraded their high profile converts. The short-lived Swedish
colony in what's now Delaware, produced the first ever attempt to write down a North American language, the work of the colony's Lutheran pastor. Further north in Massachusetts, the Wampanoags peoples
of the offshore islands were converted during the 17th century, and the Boston minister, John Elliott, came to be known as the
apostle to the Indians. Enormous sums were raised
to support his work, used amongst other things to
print the first full Bible ever printed in North America in the Algonquin language in 1663. And missionary work amongst native peoples continued throughout the 18th century, much of it undertaken by the
first missionary agencies in the modern sense, in particular, the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. And the SPG, as well as
missionizing Native Americans, also made considerable efforts to make Christians of enslaved
people of African descent, both on the mainland, and
in the Caribbean islands. Further south, Protestant
ventures are more short-lived, but they're still energetic. The disastrous Scottish colony
established in Panama in 1699 was serious about its
missionary intentions. The more substantial British presence on the Mosquito Coast in modern Nicaragua, also includes a significant
missionary element. The boldest venture in this region was the work of the Dutch, whose West India company
conquered and ruled a large chunk of Brazil
between the 1620s and '50s. And they poured resources into efforts to win their most important
indigenous allies, the Tupi people over to Protestantism. But Dutch ambitions go
further than Brazil. They made missionary attempts during their short-lived
conquest of Angola, and also during a pair of
doomed quixotic attempts to colonize Chile and Peru. Attempts based on the hope that they might make a religious alliance with the indigenous people
in order to liberate them from the oppression of the Spanish. And the Dutch are joined by
the English and the Danish in establishing footholds on the southern coast of West
Africa in the 18th century. And there is some modest missionary work attempted there too, not least through two African converts who were ordained and then
returned to their homelands as Protestant missionaries. Further south, the Dutch
waystation established at the Cape of Good Hope from 1652, also saw a series of optimistic efforts to convert indigenous peoples. But the most important
Dutch missionary efforts were further east, on
the island of Sri Lanka, most of which was under Dutch rule from the 1650s to the 1790s. A comprehensive system of
Christian churches and education was established. A even more ambitious
version of this was attempted on the island of Taiwan, part of which the Dutch ruled
between the 1620s and '60s. And in many of the islands of the eastern Indonesian archipelago, the Dutch poured in efforts
to build Protestantism. But the Asian story isn't
entirely about the Dutch. One of the best known early
Protestant missionary efforts, which isn't saying very much, was launched at Tranquebar in
what's now Tamil Nadu in 1706. Remarkably international effort, sponsored by the King of Denmark because Tranquebar was a territory of the Danish East India company. But the mission was staffed by Germans and funded by donations from England. Now so far, I've been talking
about Imperial ventures that have got a missionary
dimension to them. And of course, there's no
doubt that Imperial Congress was by far the easiest way
for Christian missionaries to gain access to non-Christian peoples. But like the Catholics,
Protestants looked beyond the scope of their own territories. The two most powerful
states of the far east, China and Japan, remained
inaccessible to them, although there's a lot
of Protestant interest in missions to China. The great mathematician, Godfried Leibniz, was enthused about this. But close to home, there
are other opportunities. By common consent in this period, converting Muslims to Christianity
was almost impossible. Although this didn't stop
several Protestant attempts to solve that vexing problem, ranging from the naive and
very dangerous attempts launched by some Quakers
who had a bit of a tendency to get off the boat in Alexandria and start declaring their
gospel in the street. Through the long theological debates, which pious merchants
were often keen to have with their Muslim hosts, through to the attempts by
English and other merchants, surreptitiously to distribute
Christian literature in the improbable hope that some Muslim might stumble across it. But Protestant missionary
hopes in the Middle East, generally rested on the
indigenous Christian communities, the eastern and oriental Orthodox churches whom Protestants saw as groaning under both the Muslim yolk and also their own errors and corruptions. A series of Protestant books for an Eastern Christian readership were produced and distributed
at considerable cost by rival Dutch and English
missionary entrepreneurs. The German Lutheran
minister, Peter Heyling, went one better. He traveled to Egypt himself, and in the 1630s, then south to the ancient
Christian kingdom of Abyssinia, where he helped prepare a
translation of the New Testament into the Ethiopian Christian
vernacular language of Amharic. A common thread holding together all of these Protestant projects in and near the Islamic world, was the hope that the
way to convert Muslims was through reviving and energizing the regions' ancient
Christian communities. It was assumed they'd be better placed to win over their Muslim neighbors than would European outsiders. So these are some of the
main elements of the stories I'll be telling in these lectures. This isn't everything, but it's
enough to be going on with. So why hasn't this story been told? Why have we so long thought that early Protestants
weren't really doing this? And there are some humdrum reasons which don't really need to detain us. It's clear that the pace
of Protestant missions does pick up in the 19th century. In contrast, the earlier
effort looks underwhelming. There's also an archival dimension. A lot of missionary history has been written out of the archives of formal missionary societies, who helpfully gather all
the documents together into one place, whereas I know to my cost, that this story has to be hunted down through a much more varied
and disparate set of sources. And of course, there's Imperial reach. It's only in the 19th century that the Protestant powers start to amass really substantial territorial empires, giving them easy access
to really large numbers of potential converts. So maybe it's not very surprising. But there's a deeper reason
why we've missed this subject. You may have noticed as I was doing this quick round the world trip, that I spent a lot of time
talking about missionary efforts and not much about results. Because the inescapable truth about Protestant missionary
project in this early period, before the late 18th century, is that they are distinguished
by their lack of success. There's variation, there are projects which
were dead on arrival, like the attempt to spread Protestantism in the Ottoman Empire, by circulating expensively
printed books there. There are the ones which
never have the time to get off the ground, where there are short-lived
colonial ventures, like the Swedish in Delaware,
or the Scots in Panama, or the Dutch in Angola. There are ones which
show promise for a while and then fizzle out for
one reason or another. That's one of the most common patterns. And there are a handful which
actually seemed to build, to show some promise and build
a small community over time. For example, the British
mission to the Mohawks in the colony of New York, or the slow church building
project in Dutch, Sri Lanka, or the contrasting transnational
mission to Tamil Nadu, or various missions to enslaved peoples in North America and the
Caribbean eventually. But I don't want to get carried away even with these comparative
success stories, which were slow, hesitant,
costly, and fragile. When you read earnest attempts by Protestant mission promoters
during these centuries, trying to drum up enthusiasm for whatever their next project might be, it is hard not to hear the
cheerfully defensive tones of someone who is engaged
in the triumph of hope over experience. John Sergeant was a New Englander, keen to press his new scheme for mission to the Native
Americans in the 1740s. And he wrote, "It's well-known
that Vertue and Piety "make but a slow Progress amongst them "in the Methods that
have hitherto been used "to promote these Ends." He believed had cracked the problem, but the disappointing
results of his scheme, which we'll hear more about next time, in a couple of lectures' time,
suggested that he hadn't. Everywhere, Protestant
would-be missionaries faced something ranging
from an uphill battle, to a brick wall. Philip Quaque, who I mentioned earlier, as the African who was ordained in the Church of England in
1765, and returned to his home on the Cape Coast of West
Africa the following year, he was maybe not unreasonable to hope that he at least might be able to break this cycle of failure. "As a Native," he wrote, "I flatter'd my self, "they wou'd give a more attentive heed" to his preaching, compared
to the stony reception that his white predecessor had faced. But no, he wrote after two years in post. "They seem to be a very
Stoborn & stiffnecked People, "extremely bigoted to their
own Principals & Customs, "which is the hardest thing in Nature "for the most sagacious
Man that ever lived "to root out of them." These are his own relatives
he's talking about. 12 years later, he was, if
anything, more despondent, writing that "I am much of Opinion "that Something more than a Human effort "must work that effectual Cure "of their Bigotry and Superstition." For which he still hoped and prayed. He remained in post for 50
increasingly bitter years. William Carey, the Baptist
who supposedly founded Protestant missions
with his 1792 pamphlet, was famously confronted by
an older Baptist preacher who told him that when God
wanted to convert the heathen that he would do it himself without needing to call on
any busy body do goodess. That comment's been much
derided as a prime example of self-satisfied obscurantism. Given the last 200 years of experience, the 200 years before that,
it was just common sense. Converting the heathen to
Protestantism had been tried, and the rate of success
had been at best meager. Now we know from our perspective, that Protestant
Christianity absolutely can leap across cultural and language barriers and win converts. It has spent much of the
last 200 years doing so. But expecting that in
the late 18th century took a pretty heroic act of faith. So why were these early
efforts so unsuccessful? I think this is the
really important question. Because looking into this shows us that what early Protestants
thought about these issues, about how they should relate
to the rest of the world, and that they did so in ways that are fundamentally different
from what we might expect, but with consequences
that are still with us. I said at the start that Christianity is a missionary religion with the ambition to
convert the whole world. It's more or less true. But in this period for these people, the story is more complicated than that. The very principle was contested. A lot of these debates came to turn around one iconic verse of the Bible. At the very end of Matthew's gospel, when the risen Jesus tells the apostles immediately before his ascension, "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, "baptizing them in the name of the Father, "and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." This command was and
remains the key proof text for the missionary enterprise. It's the centerpiece of Carey's book. But earlier Protestants
were not at all agreed on what it meant. For many of them, especially the Lutheran
churches of Germany, this was a command that Jesus had given to the apostles themselves,
to those individuals. And it was limited to that
handful of first century men. And they cited statements in some of the early church fathers, who said that the apostles
had preached the gospel to the whole world, and they argued that that
meant exactly what it said. The great 17th century
Lutheran Johann Gerhard argued that the apostle, Thomas, had traveled not only
to India as longstanding and not entirely
implausible tradition holds, but had then gone
further east across Asia, and ultimately to America, which he argued was the same
place as Plato's Atlantis, and was therefore known to the ancients. This may seem a bit
farfetched by 100 years later, it was being widely questioned, but plenty of scholars still defended it. And I mean, ridiculous as
it might seem, it mattered, because if the Christian gospel
had already been preached to all of the peoples of the world, and some of them, most of them, indeed, had rejected it or fallen away from it, then Jesus' initial
command to preach to them had expired, and there
was no need to renew it, indeed, no right to renew it. Jesus also told his disciples not to cast pearls before swine. Maybe this sounds
perverse, and self-serving, and over-clever way of
reaching a conclusion plainly opposed to centuries'
long Christian practice. Well fair enough. But if so, why? To some extent, it reflects
the fragile political situation in 17th century Germany, in the age of The Thirty
Years' War and its aftermath, that definitive Lutheran ruling that missions to the
heathen were illegitimate, comes only three years
after the end of the war. The Treaty of 1648 that tries to establish
religious peace in Germany, forbids cross-border attempts to conversion by either
Protestants or Catholics. And the Protestants who,
with very good reason, feel themselves to be on the back foot against resurgent
counter-reformation Catholicism, see this rule as a vital defensive line. Missionary ventures overseas weren't exactly banned by the treaty, but they're not really in
keeping with its spirit. They look like de-stabilizing radicalism. And there's a more principled
side to this as well. The disparity between the huge, apparently successful and
energetically publicized Catholic missionary effort, and it's much less dramatic
Protestant counterpart. was already obvious, and Catholic polemicists
seized on it triumphantly. They argued that a true Christian Church spreads the gospel and wins converts. We're doing it, the Protestants aren't, so who's the true church? It's a painfully powerful argument. Many Protestants took it to heart, some berating themselves and each other for their shortcomings. But many others, including
these Lutheran mission skeptics I'm talking about, turn
the argument around. They said, "Let's look at these great
missionary achievements "the Catholics keep boasting of. "Are they really what
they're cracked up to be?" It wasn't hard to mount a critique. It wasn't just that
Catholics tended to favor breadth over depth of conversions, often being content with bare conformity to Christian sacraments and outward forms. Given that for Catholics, the sacraments themselves
have got real intrinsic power to save souls, that
approach made some sense, and it was the pattern in which Catholic
missionaries had followed with the pagan peoples of
Europe for many centuries. More to the point was
the violence and cruelty which accompanied Catholic missions in which conversion was
sometimes enforced at gunpoint. And in which people who
had converted in this way, suddenly found themselves therefore subject to the inquisition. The brutality, especially
of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, didn't really need to be exaggerated, but Protestants exaggerated it anyway. Citing especially the work
of the Spanish Bishop, Bartolome de las Casas, who was a passionate 16th century critic of conquistador brutality. Protestants argued that this kind of thing discredited the entire missionary project. Gerhard argued that the
cruelties of the Spanish weren't converting Native Americans, they were alienating
them from Christianity. And as well as missionary cruelty, these folks are quick to
criticize missionary arrogance. I do not mean that they are
modern cultural relativists who thinks that every
religion has its own truth. They're very clear that Christianity, and indeed one form of it, is the universal and absolute truth. But they are very skeptical
of anyone who sets himself up as a preacher of that truth, who comes up with clever
schemes to preempt what ought to be God's work, who believe that they can get off a boat, and with a few words, convince people who'd
been sunk in barbarism for a thousand years to abandon
their time-honored rights and embrace a new faith. They argued that the
conversion of the heathen would take a miracle, and
miracles are God's business. Who do you think you are? The savior of the world? Drop that Messiah complex. Remember that you are a small
Christian in a big world. Serve God in the place
that he's actually put you by his Providence and be grateful. Now, as I've been saying the extreme version of this position, the one that turns its back
on missions of any kind, is a long way from majority opinion, especially amongst the
maritime Protestant powers who are actually coming up
against non-Christian peoples. But those who are in favor of missions have many of the same concerns. If there is one claim that Protestant settlers in the Americas make more often than any other from the very earliest times onwards, it is that they are not
like the wicked Spanish. They're not going to conquer
the native peoples, they say. They're going to treat them fairly and trade with them equally. In particular, they're not going to impose Christianity on them. Instead, and this is the
word they use the whole time, they are going to allure
them to the true faith. Their principle missionary method, at least in the beginning, was to establish model
Christian communities amongst the heathen, and to demonstrate by the means of their peaceful, orderly,
pious, prosperous lives, that their mode of living, and the Christian faith
which underpins it, is self-evidently superior to living in the filth, chaos,
and barbarism, and tyranny of the witchdoctors, which they
see amongst their neighbors. Put aside the profound
condescension and cultural arrogance for a second. There is in this some real restraint. I mean, as arrogance and condescension go, this is almost charming,
and certainly naive. Protestant settlers are
genuinely surprised and perplexed when it doesn't work. Or more commonly, they blame
that failure on themselves, on their own failure actually to live out the pious standards, which they'd hoped to model. One major reason why
Protestant missionary projects are slow to get off the ground is that in most settings, the first generation spend their efforts simply quietly demonstrating
Protestant living, and waiting for it to take. And they only laterally begin to wonder if something more active
might be necessary. Now, don't get me wrong,
the reality of relations between Protestant settlers
and indigenous peoples in almost every setting is
much uglier and more violent than this idealistic guff suggests. The difference is that the
violence is not being done in the name of religion. Protestant settlers are just as content as any other Europeans are to find pretexts to torture
villages, enslave captives, and seize land. But their pretexts are
almost never connected to converting them. Behind all of this lurks a question, which is worth talking about directly. And this is the issue of race. As we all know, by the 19th century, Christian Europeans had generally embraced one of various forms of
human racial hierarchy, which divided humanity
up into distinct groups based on appearance and descent, with skin color the most important, but not the only signifier, and with the assumption that
some of these so-called races were innately superior to others, superiority chiefly being
measured in intellect and morals, but sometimes in other ways too. And of course we are still
living with the toxic dregs of this worldview, a worldview that most of us
have consciously disowned, but is still deeply woven into our culture and habits of mind. As such, it is quite difficult for us to get our heads around the fact that 16th and 17th century Europeans rarely did not see the world
and its people in that way. Of course they're aware
of ethnic difference if they're very interested in them, but the overwhelming consensus
of all thinking people, and especially if anyone who's thought is shaped by Christianity, is that those differences are
superficial and malleable. They generally believed that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old, that all humanity is directly
descended from Adam and Eve, and indeed more recently
from Noah and his sons. Plainly, whatever differences
they've managed to acquire during that time could only be skin deep. Physiological differences between different human populations weren't taken to signify much, except that God in his mercy had shaped people to
fit their environment. It was usually assumed
that those differences in themselves were trivial, that anyone who moved to
a different environment might soon assume the same traits, or at least their descendants would. So, when Europeans called the people that they meet around the
world, "heathens", "barbarians", "savages", "degenerate",
"the very ruins of mankind", those insults don't mean
quite what they would mean in our maths. Because they're accompanied
with the unspoken words, "There but for the grace of God, go we." They assume that whoever
they meet around the world are fundamentally no
different from themselves, that they could easily become
as civilized and sophisticated as Christian Europeans. The Moravian brethren, one of the most enthusiastically
missionary Protestant sects openly celebrate the multiethnic
nature of their converts, from Greenland, through the Caribbean, to South Africa, and beyond. This famous painting from the 1740s is their vision of the kingdom of God. It seems almost churlish to point out that in the midst of all this
exuberant multiculturalism, that Jesus is still white. But this assumption that barbarism could be thrown off like a
cloak also has its opposite. Civilization too, is only skin deep. Christian Europeans who fell
in with indigenous people could degenerate fast. I'm not saying that
they weren't prejudiced. Obviously there were. But the nature of their prejudices
was different from ours. Racism in the sense that we know it, isn't something they
brought to their encounter with alien peoples. Although as we'll see in
the following lectures, it's something that they
develop through that encounter. Often when their naive expectations of how easy it would be
to remold these people in their own image were disappointed. If there's a key distinction that they use to interpret the world and its people, it was not white versus black, it was not even Christian
versus non-Christian. It was civilized versus heathen. As my Durham colleague,
Patrick McGee, has pointed out, "heathen", and its equivalent words in other Germanic
languages, is a loaded term. It's linked to the word "heath",
to notions of wilderness. Heathen people are wild people. Whereas the civilized
are the civis, citizens, people of the city. What do you do with a wild barren heath? You cultivate it, you
tame it, you tend it, you make it fruitful. You turn it from a tangle
of thorns into a garden. That's what the early Protestants who met non-Christian peoples thought they were trying to do. I've been using the word "missionary", which is a term that they used, but it's not their preferred one. It comes from the Latin,
"mittere", to send. It implies a hierarchy in which a church charges
certain specialists with a particular task. A lot of Protestants feel that's a bit too Catholic for comfort. They preferred another term, which Catholics also used to be fair. The propagation of the faith. And that's of course a
horticultural metaphor. New churches were to be planted. The seeds of the faith were
to be sewn in heathen hearts. They're to be watered with tender care. And that process is by definition,
a slow and organic one. You can't simply roll out the AstroTurf. It happens at its own pace. It calls for patience, for an understanding of local conditions, a recognition that the
real miracle of growth isn't something which any
human missionary or propagator can perform him or herself. One plants, another waters,
but God gives the growth. It may lack the spectacle and speed of the mass conversions
of the Spanish Empire. But unlike them, at least the
theory was, it had deep roots, which makes it all sound very cuddly. But those of you who are gardeners will know that gardening
is a violent business, at least from the perspective
of the plants and of the land. Indeed, it is genocidal. Weeds are rooted up, unruly
growth is vigorously pruned, soil is cleared and harrowed. Propagating the faith to new
lands can be done in two ways. The preferable one is to
cultivate the native plants, to train, to civilize them. But if that turns out to be impossible, or just more laborious than is worthwhile, if you've scratched
yourself on their thorns one time too many, there's a perfectly viable alternative, which is just to root
them up and burn them, and replace them with imported varieties, varieties which you knew could be trusted to grow
reasonably straight and true. The new land would be
cultivated and claimed for God's church either way. Maybe that's not what mission, what preaching the gospel
to all nations might mean to modern sensibilities. But again, there are a deep
underlying assumptions here that we do not share. Part of what made William Carey's call for missionary activism controversial was his assertion that
the time to act was now. His confidence, optimism in
the face of long experience, that winning converts would be possible. And that was because, in common with most Christian
missionaries in any age, he fitted his ambition
to spread the gospel into his theory of history. His hopes and expectations for the future. He thought, partly based on
the spread of European empires, that it was time to act. And some Protestants in earlier centuries had agreed with him. They read the signs of the times, and they concluded the way
people tend to conclude, that they themselves stood
at the critical moment in God's plan for history. Maybe all previous efforts
to win converts had failed, but they remembered God's
words to the prophet, Isaiah, "Behold, I shall do a new thing." Others took a different view. Those Lutheran opponents of missionizing didn't intend to leave the
heathen in their blindness as they saw it for all eternity. They simply thought that God
had laid down a sequence. First would come the great
cosmic battle with antichrist, then, at the crux of that battle, prophecy told them to expect
the conversion or mass of the Jews to Christianity. Only then at the end of time, would the harvest of
the heathen be reaped. On this view, trying
to convert the heathen wasn't fundamentally wrong. It was just premature, and therefore as doomed as trying to plant a new garden in mid-winter. And even for those who do
favor missionary efforts, that's only as part of their bigger apocalyptic expectations. And above all, again, that means that great
battle with antichrist. And since we're talking about Protestants, antichrist means the Church
of Rome, the Whore of Babylon, the Synagogue of Satan. The central mission of a
Protestant church, they felt, was to confront that great cosmic evil, as they were convinced it was. Trying to convert the
heathen might or might not be one area of that battle. There's been a lively
discussion amongst scholars about the Dutch commercial
empire of the 17th century, which spanned the Atlantic
and the Indian Oceans. Was it a solely commercial entity, or was its religious
dimension genuinely important? But that alternative is misleading. The commercial mission
of the Dutch Empire, was at bottom, a religious mission. It was a means of waging economic war against Spain and Portugal to break those great empires
of the popeish antichrist, and liberate their oppressed subjects by trading with them freely, and offering them the true gospel rather than seeing them enslaved to brutality and false religion. And if the Dutch state had
found a way to wage that war, which also happened to pay
for itself along the way, well, that simply proved to them that their struggle was favored by God. I hope I've by now persuaded
you of one thing at least, which is that these
arguments and preoccupations don't fit neatly into
our modern categories. To modernize the very
notion of Christian mission of converting the heathen, looks fatally compromised
by cultural imperialism and moral condescension. But, which is worse? The person who does the best,
according to their own lights, to bring a better way of life
to people who are in need? Or the person who ignores them or who conquers and commodifies them? Or the person who chooses not to act because the right moment in
history has not yet come? Should we praise those
who took onto themselves responsibility for alien peoples? Or should we join with
those who condemn them for asserting that they
had a right to do so? Are these people admirable
for their blindness to our modern category of race? Or are they contemptible for
their own cultural arrogance? Is the notion of
cultivating the wilderness, gentle or is it sinister? Is the Moravian vision of the first fruits splendidly inclusive, or
is it crassly homogenizing? I don't want to pretend that we can ignore these
kinds of questions. They touch on too many neuralgic points of our own public morals. What I hope to do in these lectures is to chart a path through the subject that doesn't simply give
into our modern categories. If you are looking for things to praise or to condemn in this subject, you are going to find plenty of both, and in the way of things,
rather more to condemn. But both praise and condemnation are basically about making us feel good. And that's not really what
I'm trying to do here. These people encountering
a much wider world for the first time, thought about it in ways that
are deeply unfamiliar to us. They didn't know that they were part of the early history of Protestant missions. If anything, they thought of themselves as being at the end of time, as a continuation of the
Protestant reformation into one last theater. As we follow their
adventures around the world in the rest of these lectures, I don't expect you to like them, but I hope it's worth the
effort to understand them and the world that they bequeath to us. Thank you. (audience applauding) - What is your method in judging the success of missionaries? How can one determine the
percentage of religious growth in a populous way back in the 1600s? - That's an excellent question. And it's one that, they
themselves, agonized over. For Protestants particularly, this is a really deep
and profound problem, because for Catholics, it's a little bit more straightforward, because they will often,
and it makes sense within a Catholic theological
framework to do this, measure conversion by
conformity to outward rights. So a number of people baptized, and communicants attending mass so forth. For Protestants who insist that conversion is something profound and inward, it's difficult enough to judge that within their own cultural context, nevermind when you're looking across the profound barriers of culture. And so they start looking
for various proxies by which to measure conversion. The, sometimes it's about orthodoxy, if people are able to
recite their catechism, and to answer questions appropriately. Or indeed for some, it is about baptism and admission to church membership, which would often require, not just being able to recite texts, but to give an account of
their own religious experience, which seemed convincing to the ministers. That doesn't mean it can't be faked, and they're very well aware of
the dangers and possibilities of hypocrisy. And one of the results of this
is that you find missionaries becoming deeply skeptical of the people who are claiming to convert, and very reluctant to believe any of them, especially once they've
been stung once or twice by conversions, which as it
appears to them have unraveled. They also look at changes
in moral behavior, especially if there are
differences in cultural norms. So think, in particular, embracing Christian marriage practices, is seen as a real and serious
marker of Christianization. But also, and I mean, this is maybe one of the
most important proxies that they use, they
talk about civilization, and that one needs to be civilized in order to become Christianized. You see this in particular with the native peoples of the Americas. The insistence is, they've
got to learn to live in settled agricultural communities. No more of being pastoral
itinerants, moving around. They need to live in settled communities with church buildings to be
living a European style of life, and indeed until they do that and can be sending their
children to school regularly, it's impossible to Christianize them. So this is a deep problem
which they are wrestling with, and their inability to come up with a particularly
good answer to that is, it's going to be one of the
factors that we'll be seeing playing out in a lot of
these different settings. It certainly means that they
pursued depth of conversion over breadth. And so when you see some of them writing home from a vast
continent saying proudly, I've now got, I baptized 30 people, and four of them have now
been admitted to communion in my church. And for them that's a big deal, even if it's taken them
sometimes many years to get to that point. - [Audience Member] Thank you
very much, Professor Ryrie. What I wanted to ask you
was that, do you find, I fully understand what you're saying, but it has been the experience
of a number of people, and particularly in, you
can say colonial countries, who have been to Christian
missionary schools, who have not converted, but have imbibed, and they seem to be
quite proud of the fact, certain Christian value systems. Now, I don't know how you
would like to interpret that, whether that's been a definitely
a beneficial thing or not. - I mean, whether it's
beneficial is a deep question which I'm not best placed to pronounce on, but certainly that phenomenon, that I mean, you've seen this
especially in the modern era, but it's very much at play in the period I'm talking about as well, of schools being set up
because missionaries assume that education is an essential, either an essential part
of Christianization, or an essential prerequisite to it. And yet those who are actually
attending the schools, regard the process rather differently. Maybe in Dutch Sri Lanka, we see this very, very clearly, where it becomes clear that attending one of
the Christian schools in Columbia or Jaffna is an essential, the only pathway to a job with
the Dutch East India company. If you can go through
this educational process, learn at least enough Dutch
to be able to function, and to be able to recite
the right kind of prayers and show some degree
of outward conformity. The schools are set up in the hope that they're going to train people who will want to become
Christian missionaries to their communities. But it turns out that the
large majority of those who are attending to them are interested in doing so as in order to pursue their own careers, and are trying to use the
Christian educational system that's being set up to that end. And of course the missionaries
are well aware of this. And so there becomes
this sort of long dance that you see played out
in many different settings between missionaries who are attempting to construct educational systems that will achieve their end, but which will also draw people into them, will offer something that
seemed to be of value. So then they've got to play
along with what people want, except in those cases
where they're attempting to recruit children for
these schools by force, which does happen. You see that, especially in
cases where schools are set up for enslaved people, but it does happen in other
circumstances as well. But whenever you've
actually got to entice them, then of course, you've got to offer
something that's of some use, and the danger from their point of view, comes to be that they're
being used to that end, and actually very few
converts are being made. Who is exploiting who
under those circumstances? Obviously the missionaries have the power of the Imperial authorities behind them, but they're also hugely outnumbered in an alien cultural context and their ability to understand people who are often running rings
around them is very limited. - And we've got just about time, is there another question in here, or I've got one on my pad here. I'll quickly asked the one on the pad. Were missionary efforts
likely to be more successful in mission fields with developed civil and
criminal justice systems? - Tricky. - [Host] Do we have to
wait for the next lecture? - Yeah, there's not much
in there that we would call fields with developed similar, developed systems of that
kind during this period outside of the great
monarchies of China and Japan, which Protestants simply
don't have access to, because both of them forbid entry. It's certainly the case that where they're dealing with largely, or wholly illiterate societies, as in most of the Americas, and as in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. The power balance works
differently from the way it does in large parts of Asia. In East Asia it's similar
as well in the islands. The power of literacy, that missionaries are able to
bring in illiterate societies, and people very quickly become aware of how powerful a tool this is, and how important it is to find
a way of getting hold of it becomes a key part of
their cultural offer, even when the rest of what they're doing is regarded with suspicion. So I think that might be
the key distinction I'd use between literate and illiterate societies, rather than questions
about the justice system at this point. - Great. Professor Ryrie, thank
you very much indeed. (audience applauding)
