found in christianity today, 2.2014; about the research by robert woodberry
...the lecture was by kenneth a. bollen, and UNC-chapel hill professor and one of the leading experts
on measuring and tracking the spread of global democracy.
bollen remarked that he kept finding a signficant statistical link between democracy and protestantism.
someone needed to study the reason for the link, he said.
woodberry sat forward in his seat and thougt, THAT'S ME. I'M THE ONE.
...in search of answers, W traveled to west africa in 2001.
setting out one morning on a dust road in lome, the capital of togo,
W headed for the university of tog's campus library.
he found it sequestered in a 1960s era building.
the shelves held about half as many books as his personal collection,
the most recent encyclopedia dated from 1977.
down the road, the campus bookstore sold primarily pens and paper, not books.
'where do you buy your books? W stgopped to ask a student.
'oh, we don't buy books, he replied.
'the professors read the texts out loud to us and we transcribe.
across the boarder, at the university of ghana's bookstore, W had seen floor to deiling shelves lined with hundreds of books,
including locally printed texts by local scholars.
why the stark contrast?
the rason was clear:
during the colonia era, british missionaries in ghana had established a wholed system of schools and printing presses.
but france, the colonia power in togo, severly restricted missionaries.
the french authorities took interest in educating only a small intellectual elite.
more than 100 years later, education was still limited in togo.
in ghana, it was flourishing.
...evidence kept coming.
while studying the congop, W made one of his most dramatic early discoveries.
cong's colonial era exploitation was well known:
colonists in both french and belgian congo had forced villagers to extract rubber from the jungle.
as punishment for not complying, they burned down villages, castrated men and cut off children's limbs.
in french congo, the atrocities passed without comment or protest, aside from one report in a marxist newspaper in france.
but in belgian congo, the abuses aroused the largest international protest movement
since the abolition of slavery.
why the difference?
...protestant missionaries, it turned out, were allowed only in the belgian congo.
..to convince skeptics, however, W needed more than case stgudies.
anyone could find the occasional john and alice harris or john mackenzie,
discard the nathan prices and assemble a pleasing mosaic.
but W was equipped to do something no one else had done:
to look at the long term effect of missionaries using the wide angle lens of statistical analysis.
in his fifth year of graduate school, W created a statistical model that could test the connection between missionary work and the health of nations.
he and a few research assistants spent two years coding data and refining their methods.
they hoped to compute the lasting effect of missionaries, on average, worldwide.
'i felt pretty nervous, he says. i though,
what if i run the analysis and find nothing?
how will i salvage my dissertation?
one morning, in a windowless, dusty computer lab lit by fluorescent bulbs, W ran the first big test.
after he fomosjed [re[[omg tje statostoca; [rpgra, pm jos cpm[iuter. je c;ocled 'emter'
and then leaned foprward to read the results.
'i was shocked, sayd W,
is was like an atomic bomb.
the impackt of missions on global democracy was HUGE.
i kept adding variables to the model
-factors that people had been studying and writing about for the past 40 years
-and they all got wiped out.
it was amazing.
i knew, then, i was on to something really important.
..W could now support a sweeping claim:
area wher protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past
are on average more economically developed today,
with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women) and more robust membership in nongovernmental associations.
in short; want a blossoming democracy today?
the solution is simple
-if you have a time machine: send a 19th century missionary
(note: when they went out believing God had called and God would provide,
rather than kicking in the business model of raising and maintaining 'support').
..'we don't have to deny that there were and are racist missionaries..
we don't have to deny thaere were and are missionaries who do self centered things.
but if that were the average effect,k we would expect the places where missionaries had influence to be worse places
than places were missionaries weren't allowed or were restricted in action.
we find exactly the opposite on all kinds of outcomes.
even in places where few people convedrted, (missionaries) had a profound economic and political impact.'
there is one important nuance to all this:
the positive effect of missionaries on democracy applies only to 'conversionary protestantss'.
...independence from state control mad a big difference.
'one of the main stereotypes about missions is that they were closely connected to colonialism...
but protestant missionaries not funded by the state were regularly very critical of colonialism.
..he notes that most missionaries didn't set out to be political activists.
locals associated christianity with their colonial abusers,
so in order to be effective at evangelizing, missionaries destanced themselves from the colonists.
they campaikgned agaisnt abuses for personal, practical reasons as well as humanitarian ones.
...while missionaries came to colonial reform through the backdoor,
mass literacy and mass education weremore deliberate projects
-the consequence of a protestant vision that knocked down old hierarchies in the name of
'the priesthood of all believers'.
if all souls were equal before God, everyone would need to access the bible in their own language. ..
.....if you look worldwide at poverty, literacy is the main thing that helps you rise out of poverty.
unless you have broad based literacy, you can't have democratic movements.
as W observes, although the chinese invented printing 800 years before europeans did,
in china the technology was used mostly for elites.
then protestant missionaries arrived in the 19th century
and began printing tens of thousands of religious texts,
makeing those available to the masses
and teaching women and other marginalized groups how to read.
not until then did asia(s)...start printing more widely.
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