19 the attacks this past Easter against Christians in Sri Lanka were horrific in themselves, but the horror deepens when we realize that they fit a broader pattern of global persecution. unfortunately, in the West, certain sensibilities and assumptions hinder us from perceiving the magnitude of the problem. for this reason, several months ago, the British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, made know an independent review into how the British government responds to worldwide persecution. a feeling of post-colonial guilt, he assayed, has hindered people's ability to grasp the enormous scale of the issue, as Christianity is often associated with 'white privilege' and missionaries are regarded contemptuously as agents of imperialism.
Hunt is on to something. but the problem is not confined to British society. the Western academy at large in North America and Europe, in its thralldom to 'post-colonial theory', has some answering to do.
Since Edward Said's landmark Orientalism ( 1978), study after 'post -colonialist' study has produced a rigid orthodoxy. Colonizers lorded it over the colonized,
20 exploiting them economically, socially and culturally. the 'White Man's Burden', Europe's mission civilisatrice, was a sanctimonious justification for the ruthless suppression of indigenous peoples in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. integral to this outlook is the assumption that Christina missionaries were dupes of colonial power 'imperialism at prayer', according to one scholar. in the 'presuppositions of a Saidian master narrative,' Jeffrey Cox has summed up, missionaries are 'simply, imperialists; if different from other imperialists, it is because they were marginal, or because they were worse'. frequently assigned books such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart of Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, both scathingly critical of Western missions, enforce to unwitting under-graduates the general consensus.
to be sure, this outlook contains considerable truth. colonialism could be a cruel force and missionaries sometimes abetted it. the historical record on this is quite clear. but sweeping theories bout the past usually err not in being wholly wrong, but in reaching farther than their grasp allows. in this case, the role of missionaries and their global legacy today are far more complex than post-colonialist theorists have recognized. what is more, uncritical adherence to the post-colonialist narrative blinds one to the vastly under-reported humanitarian crisis of
Christian persecution, especially of lower-class and minority groups drawn to Christianity during colonial times. the post-colonialist outlook also leaves one at a loss to fathom the post-Western flowering of Christianity taking place today in the erstwhile colonized world.
fortunately in recent years, the academy has also produced several studies that controvert reductive versions of the post-colonialist perspective. these studies deserve a much wider hearing than they currently have.
The Conversionary Protestant Missions
the first is by Robert D. Woodberry of Baylor University, author of 'The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy', published in the American Political Science Review (2012), among the most highly awarded articles in this prestigious journal's history. setting his sights on those who would ignore or contemn missionaries, Woodberry argues that the global activity of 'conversionary Protestants' (CPs) from the late 18th to the early 20th century is a leading cause of the global spread of liberal democracy over against various forms of tyranny and oppression. 'CPs', he argues 'where a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty;, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations.
*21 most major colonial reforms and the codification of legal protections for nonwhites'. these innovations in myriad global mission sites studied by Woodberry in turn 'fostered conditions that made stable representative democracy more likely'.
Woodberry stresses the Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura. unlie some past missions that focused on elites, he claims, Protestant ones emphasized popular literacy and education, two key ingredients of civil society and the emergence of liberal democracy;. what is more, in their search for converts, Protestant missionaries regularly reached out to lower-class individuals and despise minorities, such as Dalits ('untouchables') and tribal classes in India. in this respect. writes Woodberry, CPs 'influence class structure by dispersing education to women and the poor, making texts widely available, spawning civil society among non-elites and moderating abuses of power - with demonstrable political consequences'.
for their part, minorities and lower-class individuals were disproportionately attracted to Christian notions of human dignity (imago Dei) and the gospel's emphasis on spiritual equality. as the Apostle Paul put it in Galatians: 'There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus'. Gal. 3.28 as was often true ;in the Roman Empire, conversion to Christianity frequently came to the downtrodden as liberation from age-old structures of ostracism and indignity.
Woodberry's thesis is nuanced. (def - subtle difference or distinction) he is aware that European state churches were often part of the problem. he therefore emphasizes that he is particularly concerned with Conversionary Protestants - the ones the British have tagged as 'Nonconformists'. collectively, they amounted to so many gnats in the face of Empire, as well as being disrupters of indigenous forms of complacency toward the poor and the marginalized. 'In trying to spread their faith, Woodberry summarizes his argument, 'CPs expanded religious liberty, overcame resistance to mass education and printing, fostered civil society, moderated colonial abuses, and dissipated elite power. these conditions laid a foundation for democracy'.
Putting Flesh on Persecution StatisticsProcesses of decolonization after World War II, of course, opened new chapters in the history of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. the withdrawal of colonial powers produced a flurry of new political regimes, subscribing to various forms of self-determination. but in the process, non-elite and minority groups who had converted under colonialism often came to be seen as pariahs, 'contaminated' by past Western influence and hence especially vulnerable to discrimination. this is a significant claim of a more recent study, Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians respond to Persecution (Cambridge University Press, 2018), edited by Daniel Philpott of the University of Notre Dame and Timothy Samuel Shah of Georgetown University.
Under Caesar's Sword recognizes and rues the many forms of global religious persecution that exist today, including those more recently in the news: Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and Uighurs in China.
but a focus on these truly heart-wrenching cases, coupled with the post-colonialist assumption that Christianity is largely an oppressive force in history, obscures the true global reality today. according to Open Doors USA, 211.5 million Christinas (one out of every 12) experience h;high, very high or extreme persecution, with hundreds of deaths each month. the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary puts the figure much higher. in 2009, the International Society for Human Rights, a secular NGO based in Frankfurt, Germany, estimated that 80% of all acts of religious discrimination in the world were directed at Christians. other monitoring groups corroborate these findings; the most conservative figure is 60%. a report of the U. S. State Department shows that Christians face persecution in over 60 countries, while reports from the non-partisan Pew research Center have consistently shown the preponderance of persecution directed against Christians. although a few scholars and journalists have documented the phenomenon, it is not a burning cause for the mainstream media, most human rights organizations, and, not least, the academy, which otherwise bristles with global 'social justice' causes.
Under Caesar's Sword adds flesh and bone to the raw-statistics. Christians in India and Sri Lanka, for example, are perceived as 'foreign' elements in their won countries. they are reminders of colonialism, who compromise the political agendas of Hindu nationalists in India and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka. something similar holds for the Hmong minority in Vietnam and Laos, and for the Kachin people in northern Myanmar, who now face a 'slow genocide', according to a recent article in The Guardian. the difficulties that Christians face in China and
*22 especially in North Korea have been well established, as has the resistance that non-Orthodox Christians face in former Soviet countries.
In Iraq and Syria, Christians are 'on the brink of extinction', according to Kent R. hill, as they are in many places throughout the Middle East. 'The global reputation of Islam is at stake, he pleads - a situation that 'provides incentive for both Muslims and Christians to work together for a ...more peaceful future'. in 1900, Christians made up an estimated 14% of the population in the Middle East; today it is 4%. the spread of militant Islam is also a major problem in post-Soviet central Asia, Indonesia and many African counties - to say nothing of the well-documented Coptic Christians' agonizing plight in Egypt, where church bombings on major Christian holidays have become routine.
Under Caesar's Sword echoes and adds scholarly heft to the findings of 2 other recent books: John R Allen Jr's The Global War on Christians and Paul A. Marshall, Lela Gilbert and Nina Shea's persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians, both published in 2013. given the scale of violence taking place, these authors, too, are at a lost to explain the relative inattention the topic receives in the Western media and academy, although Allen helpfully explains that anti-Christian persecution falls into an unfortunate liminal (def - of, pertaining to situated at the limen (threshold) ) or realm: the topic is 'too Christian' to excite the left and 'too foreign' to excite the right - and simply too many dots need connecting to grasp the scope of the problem.
sadly, even Western Christians regularly miss the big picture. for many, the persecution of Christians is simply too far away and they are consumed by domestic political issues, their own internecine battles and self-inflicted wounds. additionally, for many liberal churches, Allen notes, complaining about the persecution of christians runs against' interfaith correctness'. Liberals do not want to be accused of special pleading and too many embrace the post-colonialist narrative in toto. worries about being regarded as Islamophobic, moreover, stifle those who would soberly point out the appalling record of religious freedom in many Muslim-majority countries.
Focusing on Reception over Transmission
If Edward Said and His sympathizers were correct about missionaries,one would think that decolonization would have coincided with massive, voluntary de-Christianization. of course, this has not happened - just the opposite in fact. Christianity is growing in the 'Global South', as scholars such as Philip Jenkins, Peter Berger, Dana Robert, Todd Johnson and Lamin Sanneh have long shown. the share of Christians worldwide who live in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase dramatically between now and 2060, from 26% to 42%, due to high fertility in the region. in sheer numerical terms, Africa has already nearly eclipsed Latin America as the global region with the most Christians. China and India are poised, too, to witness significant growth in their Christian populations in the coming decades.
except for isolated pockets, the Western academy has not seriously reckoned with the changes afoot. Yale Divinity School's (late)Lamin Sanneh helpfully explains that European and American scholars too often focus on the agents of imperialism, including missionaries. in this 'elite discourse', one finds much that corroborates Said's outlook. but if the focus shifts to how non-Western peoples Received the Christian message and Translated it into their own cultural realities, a very different picture emerges.
these facts, observes Sanneh, have 'all but slipped from scholarly consciousness, in large part because attention was directed to the priority of foreign transmission rather than local reception; since transmission focused on organizing the missionary effort in Europe and North America, attention shifted there rather than to the local setting'. such a focus, he continues, enforces the image of missionaries as 'the earnest journeymen of imperialism'. but eh reality is far more complicated. Sanneh again on the academy's blind spot:
Missions cultivated local sensibility and that greatly complicated the language of colonial control. instead of welcoming this complexity as a boon for scholarship, scholars of missions demurred, reluctant to abandon the claim of foreign mischief and eager to retain their reputation as progressive champions of victims and oppressed groups.
*23 fortunately, outliers (def - the person or thing that lies outside) exist in contemporary scholarship. Jeffrey Cox's Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2002) incisively complicates the Saidian master narrative. Boston University's Dana Robert and her students have done exceptionally careful work on missions and the global indigenization of Christianity, including her own widely acclaimed Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
A Luxury We Can't Afford
several other examples could be adduced. unfortunately these are the exceptions that confirm the rule: the academy at large remains beholden to the post-colonialist master narrative.
again, the narrative is not without insight into the darker aspects of colonialism. but embracing it too sweepingly presents one with a simplistic Manichean outlook, in which Christian missionaries and their legacies, due to associations with Western colonialism, are ipso facto accomplices of evil.
over-reliance on the narrative, furthermore, prevents one from fully grasping what Sanneh calls Christianity's 'post-Western awakening', one of the most remarkable developments in modern world history. more gravely still, it fosters and unconscionable blindness to the fiery ordeal that many Christians the world over now experience.
Ignorance of these realities is a luxury that we and especially they, can no longer afford.
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