Iin his fascinating 2015 book God or nothing, Cardinal Robert Sarah speaks warmly of a group of French missionary priests who established their headquarters near his native village of Ourous, in remote northwest Guinea: “I will always admire these men who left France, their families and their ties to bring the love of God to the ends of the earth. Sarah’s parents were ordinary subsistence farmers, converting to Catholicism from their traditional animism. Their son had a very distinguished career in the Catholic Church. He was appointed archbishop at just 34 years old and is a true intellectual and polyglot.
When the Fathers of the Holy Spirit arrived in the district of Ourous in 1912, Guinea was under French control and remained so until 1958, a good part of Cardinal Sarah’s lifetime. As in many parts of the world, the spread of Christianity in West Africa was closely linked to European colonialist efforts.
However, it would be wrong to adopt a simplistic view of the interaction between proselytism and imperial expansion. These were not simply priests and missionaries marching arm in arm with invading armies. In the early days of British rule in India, the East India Company – the dominant power until 1858 – strongly opposed Christian missionaries operating in their territory, on the grounds that this was potentially destabilizing and would arouse discontent. This ban had weakened considerably in the 1820s and 1830s, but distrust of evangelists among British authorities on the subcontinent remained. Even in the late 19th century, after the EIC government had been replaced by direct rule from the Crown, official British policy was to work with and carefully manage India’s religious diversity, rather than to supplant it with Christianity.
Individual missionaries were often, at best, ambivalent about the imperial projects of which they were a part. Colonial expansion may have made their work possible, but European domination often threatened what these Christians saw as the God-given dignity of conquered subject peoples. The Jesuits, for example, were expelled from Portuguese territory in South America in the 1750s because they had participated in indigenous resistance to forced population movements. Many of them had defended the rights of indigenous tribes. There is also a wonderful story told by Archbishop Desmond Tutu about the Anglo-Catholic priest and anti-apartheid campaigner Father Trevor Huddleston. As a young boy in 1940s South Africa, Tutu saw Huddleston tip his hat to Tutu’s mother, Aletha, a cook. For a white man to show such respect to a working-class black woman was very unusual, and Tutu never forgot it.
The widespread creation of religious schools in almost all regions of the European empires undoubtedly worked against the sustainability of imperial projects in the long term. These schools eventually gave rise to generations of eloquent and educated indigenous leaders, whose newly acquired familiarity with Western tradition and the teachings of Christianity led them to hope for and demand better treatment and equal rights, and to emphasize the moral failures of imperialism in terms of what would prick the conscience of their supposed masters. The partial integration of imperial subjects into European civilization enabled by such schools made it more difficult for the middle classes of London, Paris, or Brussels to view Africans or Asians as inherently foreign and inferior.
During the high imperial period, between 1870 and World War I, atheism and skepticism about Christianity were far from rare among the European ruling classes, including those sent to govern the colonies. In the British context, district officers exercised enormous de facto power, particularly in more remote areas, and an individual who did not care for evangelical fervor could create considerable difficulties for missionary work. Some had no particular antipathy toward Christianity but were fascinated by and intensely protective of the cultural and religious traditions of their particular region. Sir Charles Bell, a longtime colonial administrator in the Indian province of Sikkim, developed a great love for Tibetan culture, learning the language and befriending the ninth Panchen Lama, and he was certainly not the alone in his profession in maintaining a strong affection for the local inhabitants. socio-religious practices. Such individuals could and did seek to thwart the missionaries’ efforts, viewing them as cultural vandals or ignorant outsiders.
It is therefore simply false to say that European imperialism and Christian evangelists have always and everywhere worked together in a vile conspiracy. On the one hand, missionaries often came from countries that had few or no imperial possessions, such as Denmark and Sweden, or were themselves subject to foreign rule, such as Ireland.
And yet Church of England commissioners recently published a report containing a recommendation that some sort of official apology was in order for “denying that black Africans are made in the image of God”. But one could search the writings of hundreds of colonial-era missionaries and find no such assertions about African humanity, except perhaps a handful of unrepresentative eccentrics. If such sentiments were to be found anywhere, it would be far more likely among secular civil servants or soldiers.
… there is something deeply strange about the idea that Christians should regret that people abandon false religions and embrace Christianity
Oddly, the same report also raises the idea of an official apology from the Anglican Church for “destroying” traditional African belief systems. It is undoubtedly true that some of these systems have been subject to violent repression and that forms of coercion have been used in some places. There is, however, something deeply strange about the idea that Christians should regret that people abandon false religions and embrace Christianity. I suspect that serious, practicing African Christians, like Robert Sarah, would be very skeptical. I think of my former priest, an accomplished and pious man from Togo, whom I cannot imagine regretting the arrival of Christianity in this country, even if certain circumstances are imperfect and unsatisfactory. I also think of the priest in Malawi who posts on Twitter the simple piety of his faithful and the enormous distances they will travel to hear him say mass. Clergymen from Africa and South Asia are among the world’s strongest defenders of Christian orthodoxy. in the face of the instinctive abasement of the exhausted and timid Western Churches. It would be very surprising to learn that such men spend long hours worrying about the fate of the religious practices of their ancestors.
Cardinal Sarah records in God or nothing that one of the first fathers of the Holy Spirit to come to Ourous, Father Montels, died after only a few months and is buried there near the church. Even if this is not the intention of the commissioners, their notion of an apology looks a lot like distancing, even contempt, from the immense sacrifices made over the centuries by thousands of men and women for the Most forgotten, just like Father Montels, who made long sacrifices and dangerous journeys to parts of the world they barely knew, out of love for the people who lived there.
