In 1910 Gustav Warneck received nominations and support for both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His boosters, mostly from Germany but also from elsewhere in Europe, later speculated that Warneck's failure to secure an award was because his dual nomination prevented enough support for either prize. Instead, they went to the Bureau international permanent de la Paix (Permanent International Peace Bureau) and to German poet and author Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse.Footnote 1 The laudatory merits of the Permanent International Peace Bureau and Heyse aside, what had made Warneck worthy in the minds of so many for a Nobel Prize?
At his death in 1910, Gustav Warneck was undeniably the most influential figure among those involved with German Protestant mission organizations and a man of great prestige in the international mission movement. His nomination for two different Nobel Prizes indicates not just Warneck's perceived impact on German and global culture, but also the import of his cause, German Protestant mission. Missionary leaders such as Warneck did not fully oppose the formal German Empire in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, but they did view its political and economic means and purposes with much skepticism. Presumed by most historians to have been servants of the German colonial state, missionaries' attitudes toward empire were, in fact, far more antistate and antinational.Footnote 2 In 1901 Warneck had proclaimed missionaries' activities to be purely humanitarian and not designed to “make the nations [of the world] into Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Russians, but, instead, into Christians.” Missionaries' task was to “found a heavenly empire whose king [would be] Jesus.”Footnote 3 Warneck's leadership of Germany's Protestant missionaries and his advocacy of an international mission movement make his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize comprehensible. He and the other leaders of Germany's mission movement embraced an internationalist Protestantism that provided stiff resistance to more nationalist urges in German colonialism.
Germany's Protestant missionaries had an important impact on colonial policy in the metropole and in the German colonies. German missionaries, like missionaries of all nationalities, confessions, and denominations during this period, provided educational, medical, economic, and, at times, administrative support in Germany's and other countries' colonies abroad. As part of their activities, mission leaders produced an extensive literature that focused on missionary apologia, theoretical and theological tracts, and popular accounts of missionary activity; participated on the Colonial Secretary's Kolonialrat (Colonial Council); and generally acted to support missionary activities in the political and public spheres. These last two activities represented the mission movement's primary cooperative activity, as the mission societies worked together through the Ausschuß der deutschen evangelischen Missionen (Committee of German Protestant Missions) to influence German politics. Mission leaders' and theologians' cooperative activities transmitted their internationalism to a segment of Germany's most devout Protestants. Their role in colonial affairs meant missionary ideology challenged the more chauvinistic aspects of Germany's colonial and, by extension, foreign policy. As contributors to colonial policy, Germany's Protestant missionary leadership advocated policies and theories that challenged those positions espoused by various experts, interest groups, and colonial adventurers—policies generally designed to maximize the economic or settler exploitation of Germany's overseas possessions.
Warneck's strong evocation of Christian universalism, paired with his cultural impact (as suggested by his Nobel nominations), raise important questions about the role of Protestantism and nationalism during the period of German imperialism. As the standard-bearer of the German Protestant mission community, Warneck represents a constituency among Germany's Protestants who valued their Protestant identity over their German identity.
Most historians assume that by the late 1870s, Protestant support for the German state was absolute, but they have not devoted enough attention to the politics of the German Protestant mission movement, a movement whose significance cannot be overlooked.Footnote 4 By 1905 sixteen Protestant missionary societies were drawing support from German donors, and ten of those societies were operating in the German colonial territories. A mission census in 1903 indicated that more than 1,000 missionaries performed the work of these sixteen societies in the mission field for approximately 500,000 converts.Footnote 5 Mission societies collected an average of fifty-four million marks per year from the German populace to finance their activities.Footnote 6
For the historian, missionaries' close contact with colonized peoples, on the one hand, and the Protestant missionary leadership's close association with the various colonial policy-making and -influencing groups in Germany, on the other, place missionaries at the nexus of colonial politics.Footnote 7 Close attention to the nuances of missionary debates about colonialism, politics, and evangelization are therefore important for understanding Germany's nineteenth-century history.Footnote 8 German Protestant missionaries, though socially and politically conservative, rebuked efforts to appropriate their evangelical and other activities in Germany's overseas colonies for empire-building purposes. At the same time that missionaries showed their aversion to nationalist politics, they embraced the internationalization of Protestant mission work by participating wholeheartedly in international missionary conferences. At these conferences, German missionaries enacted internationalism as a direct contradiction to aggressive nationalism. They imagined themselves to be members of an international community, one that sought a global, communal commonweal of Protestant Christian brotherhood against nationalist devotion to difference. In this vision of globalization, Germany's Protestant missionaries were not unlike the socialists of the Second International or other international unions. For these reasons, Germany's Protestant missionary leaders opposed aggressive and pro-German colonial policies and instead fostered internationalist associations before 1914.
The German Protestant Mission Movement
Missionaries are generally assumed to have served the goals of the German colonial state because they were loyal subjects of a German state whose Protestant clergy “emphasiz[ed] duty and sacrifice to the German cause.”Footnote 9 Thomas Nipperdey argued that particularly after 1871, “a definitive nationalism flowed into the church, a ‘pastoral nationalism’ marked by an evangelical and national ethos for Kaiser, empire, and Protestantism.”Footnote 10 Hans-Ulrich Wehler agreed, writing that after 1871, “the traditional alliance of ‘throne and altar’ acquired new lustre.”Footnote 11 And, as Nipperdey described it, by the 1880s mission societies had already united behind a religious nationalism that bound together imperialism and a German mission in the world. This union was strengthened because the “international links of German Protestants were never very strong” and thus cooperation between the national policy makers and mission leaders was quite natural.Footnote 12 More recent histories of Germany's colonial history have also largely overlooked missionaries, instead focusing on questions of continuity or discontinuity between the colonial and National Socialist periods through analyses of other colonial themes and actors.Footnote 13 In short, the Protestant missionary movement has been misunderstood as an important source of colonial theory and praxis.
The history of the German Protestant mission movement begins in the late seventeenth century. During that period August Hermann Francke gathered pietists at Halle. These gatherings ultimately stimulated early organizations of German Lutherans for foreign mission work in India and the Americas.Footnote 14 In the 1790s, British Christians responded to cobbler-turned-pastor William Carey's An Enquiry Into the Obligations of Christians by expanding the existing mission movement with a collection of new British mission societies.Footnote 15 These missions, with the help of the Basel Mission Society (Evangelische Missionsgesellschaft Basel), founded in 1815, recruited extensively from the continent and especially Germany, thus further stimulating German Protestant mission energies.Footnote 16
The Protestant identity of this large movement originally represented eighteenth-century anti-institutionalist movements such as the Pietists and the Moravian congregations of Germany. The Moravians possessed a unified leadership and identified themselves as members of the Brüdergemeine, a larger association of Moravian communities that drew support from member communities across Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States, and managed to coexist with the Lutheran, Reformed, or Union episcopates of their states and regions.Footnote 17 Other mission societies founded in the nineteenth century, in particular the Berlin Mission, adopted a “mild Lutheranism” in an attempt to balance their Reformed and Lutheran supporters.Footnote 18 Still, some mission societies asserted more distinctive confessional identities. The Leipzig Mission's hostility to Lutheranism informed its institutional organization throughout its history. The society's board members regularly debated the society's relationship with “backsliding” congregations and synods that had or appeared to have abandoned a pure Lutheran liturgy.Footnote 19
Though the German mission community's oldest and most influential mission societies were Lutheran and Reform, denominational matters held little sway over the movement's shared definition of Protestantism. Whatever theological aggravations a given mission society might have felt, they were almost exclusively directed toward the established church hierarchies rather than other mission societies. Over time the movement expanded and further diversified and, by 1914, the German Protestant mission movement included Baptist, Seventh-Day-Adventist, and “liberal” Protestant societies as well. Mission leaders worked carefully to include all of these groups within the larger organizational framework, and there is little evidence that any disagreements about theology affected missionaries' commitment to internationalism.
Missionswissenschaft
At the heart of the German Protestant mission movement were the publications and practitioners of Protestant Missionswissenschaft (Mission Studies). And at the center of Missionswissenschaft was the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift. The editorship, led by Gustav Warneck, established the journal to awake sympathy for mission among educated Germans while improving the rigor and character of mission itself. Warneck declared in the inaugural issue that the journal would bring to missionaries' attention those “culturally and religiously historical, geographic, ethnological, and similar questions” that bore upon the “evangelization of the peoples.” The Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift and Missionswissenschaft were directed by the leading lights of German mission work toward the furtherance of the Christian Gospel, over and above more particularistic concerns of colonial development or empire building.Footnote 20
When it began publication in 1874, the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift joined a crowded field of missionary periodicals in Germany and across the mission nations. These mission journals drew upon diverse source material to produce texts designed to reach a broad range of people in order to rally support and stimulate donations.Footnote 21 These texts had originally been viewed as close cousins of books, but by the end of the nineteenth century, they were yet another example of the many magazines and digests that made up a significant portion of middle-class life.Footnote 22 In Germany and elsewhere, mission societies published periodicals to cover a wide array of topics within the mission field and to appeal to a wide range of interests. These periodicals sought to educate supporters of a given mission society about more than just its activities. To provide such extensive coverage, mission periodicals frequently reprinted, paraphrased, or reported on other journals' content.Footnote 23 In general, mission societies were able to proclaim significant publication counts, often in the hundreds of thousands, and which, according to the Missionswissenschaftler Julius Richter, brought in millions of pounds for mission societies in Britain alone.Footnote 24
The Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift, the central print locale for the development of a Protestant mission ideology, was both a part of this general mass of mission periodicals and a distinctive publication. While most mission periodicals did not hold strictly to denominational distinctions, the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift belonged to a very small pool of mission publications in Germany that operated independently of any specific church or mission organization. It was published by a producer of religious works and had a circulation of 2,600 by the end of the 1880s and a peak of 3,000 subscribers in 1912.Footnote 25 This number is misleading, however, since there was likely considerable sharing of issues among mission supporters, which was common for such periodicals. Like other periodicals of the genre, the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift drew reports from other mission societies' publishing ventures and was a similar source for other journals. Additionally, the journal's unique position as the dominant source of intellectual investigation and conversation about mission work and mission politics meant that the reprinting of the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift's material extended the influence of the journal's internationalist mission vision beyond the journal's own subscribers.Footnote 26 Furthermore, the journal's remarkably consistent message line on the correct relationship between missions and the state kept missionary internationalism a continually updated topic with which readers could engage.
The journal thus provides an invaluable tool for evaluating the views of mission leaders in Germany. Furthermore, its place in the network of mission publishing suggests the extent of those leaders' influence. Overwhelmingly the contributors to the journal represented the elite of the German mission movement. These included the mission scholars Gustav Warneck and Julius Richter; the leaders of mission societies such as Karl Axenfeld and Franz Michael Zahn; and academics with a distinct missionary interest, such as the linguist Carl Meinhof. In fact, the editorship of the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift during this period demonstrates the deep links the journal possessed with the mission movement in Germany. Editor Gustav Warneck and his son Johannes had both worked for the Rhenish Mission Society, and both men would take up positions as academic faculty in Halle and Bethel respectively; Franz Michael Zahn served as director of the North German Mission Society; Charles Buchner, editor of the journal from 1900 to 1908, served on the Missionsdirektion (Mission Directorate) for the Brüdergemeine; Julius Richter was affiliated with the Berlin Mission Society and eventually joined the theological faculty at the University of Berlin; and another founding editor, mission theologian Theodor Christlieb, was on the faculty of theology at the University of Bonn. These men represented a particular, educated approach to mission activities and theory that interpreted the universalist message of Christianity as demanding an internationalist theology and structure for Germany's mission movement. The institutional positions of these men extended beyond their immediate academic or professional positions. In addition to their roles as scholars and administrators, a number of the men whose ideas are considered in this article were also represented in other national mission bodies.
In particular, the Ausschuß, the national organization of German Protestant mission societies, operated as an effective national organization of missionaries in Germany. The Ausschuß was founded in 1886 at another major institution of German mission life, the Bremen Continental Mission Conference. By the mid-1890s the Ausschuß was the main liaison between the German mission societies and the German imperial government. The organization's founding secretary and leading light was Gustav Warneck. Its leadership would also include Zahn, the Berlin Mission leader Karl Axenfeld, and other important figures of German mission work. In most of the major institutions of political activity for Germany's Protestant missionaries, the Missionswissenschaftler predominated.
The leaders of the German mission movement overwhelmingly agreed that their work as Christian messengers arose from a divine source. Missionary theologians and leaders judged that the “Great Commission” in the Book of Matthew, which directed Christians to bring the Gospel to all peoples, superseded any and all of the other motivations that fed colonial expansion.Footnote 27 In particular, politics in all its forms—inter-power rivalry, the false idol of the nation—state, and the meanness of public policy—was, at least intellectually, seen as a menace that would undermine missionaries' duty to evangelize all peoples. At the same time, as Thorsten Altena and others have pointed out, Germany's missionaries saw both the modern state and modern capitalism as threats to Christian values in Germany and abroad.Footnote 28 The suspicion and fear excited by modernity, as the missionaries perceived the concept, reinforced German Protestant missionary intellectuals' commitment to internationalism. To missionaries, modernity encapsulated a number of developments with which they were not completely comfortable. On the one hand, missionaries embraced the spread of railroads, steamships, and telegraphy for their practical role in bringing more people into the reach of the Gospel.Footnote 29 On the other hand, German missionary figures' deep-seated suspicions of the Enlightenment and the effect of industrial capitalism on traditional communities solidified their strong ambivalence toward “modernity.”
When the missionary leadership chose to articulate their opposition to nationalist politics in greater detail, they highlighted three specific concerns. First, missionaries' interpretation of the Gospel and Epistles rendered any theological or ethnological segregation of humanity, other than a basic distinction between Christians and non-Christians, invalid. This conclusion meant that from at least the 1870s onward, missionary intellectuals maintained that no other human goal could possibly outweigh a truly Christian evangelism. Thus, they rejected nationalist politics as inconsequential when weighed against mission work. Second, missionary leaders rejected politics as generally corrosive to missionary endeavor. In their view, the worldly concerns of colonial administration, economic development, and national loyalty held the dangerous potential to lead mission work and workers astray. And, finally, in missionary leaders' view, should missionaries manage to maintain a completely autonomous missionary enterprise, the mission societies still needed to keep themselves as clear as possible of international colonial competition. If missionaries and mission societies supported the territorial ambitions of the colonial powers, then they would be unable to stand outside the conflicts among colonizing powers that would almost certainly follow. Political crises would unduly disrupt missionaries' loftier purposes. Warneck and the other intellectual and political leaders of the German Protestant mission movement worked consistently, for practical and principled reasons, to keep missionary activities and ideology free of national “corruption.”
The Primacy of Evangelization
German missionary leaders argued from the very beginning that Christian loyalty must always supersede any other obligation or commitment; mission could never be allowed to blend fully with politics. Missionaries took the Great Commission as the justification for the most basic practice of their faith, the support and promotion of missionary work among Christian and non-Christian peoples.Footnote 30 Out of devotion to their purpose, missionary authorities did not tolerate any other entity, concept, or group siphoning away one iota of support. This was the most forcefully argued of all missionary views and one that shaped every other element of German Protestant missionary activity. German missionary leaders occasionally acknowledged their role in some larger European (i.e., Christian) task of civilizing the uncivilized, but balked at any direct association with political or economic conquest.
An early defense of the primacy of mission's religious purpose came from a leader of the oldest German missionary church, Ernst Reichel of the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine. In 1886, Missionsdirektor Reichel argued that missionary leaders must protect the missions' “godly, . . . international, and . . . [politically] independent character.” And, he emphasized, “Colonization and mission must remain cleanly separate from one another,” even when religious interests seemed to coincide with secular goals.Footnote 31 In Reichel's opinion, the European effect on colonized peoples could be either positive or negative, a dichotomy between “Jesus” and “the devil” in Reichel's words.Footnote 32 Missionaries, as bastions of the positive effect of European culture, had to maintain their autonomy in order to preserve the relative purity of their endeavor. Reichel cautioned Germany's mission societies that “colonies serve the spread of power, the expansion and prosperity of the earthly fatherland. Mission serves the spread of a kingdom that is not of this world, and that advances the power and honor [of Jesus Christ].” To Reichel the ultimate goal of Christian mission must be the “saving of heathen souls through the Gospel” and the “forming heathen [of] peoples into Christian peoples.”Footnote 33
At the Saxon Provincial Mission Conference in Halle in 1891, Warneck echoed Reichel's principles.Footnote 34 Warneck's text was then reprinted by the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift that same year, illustrating the multiple venues from which missionary leaders disseminated their vision for the German mission movement. “Jesus Christ,” Warneck told his listeners and readers, “is as the founder of mission without doubt also the highest mission authority; his judgment [is] thus authoritative on the mission project.” And, according to Warneck, the biblical teachings of Jesus emphasized that evangelization ought to be governed by the dictates of education and enlightenment rather than any technocratic or bureaucratic plans for colonized peoples. Warneck argued that missionaries should continue the work of Jesus and reveal God's love through teaching and sacrifice to all peoples and not exclusively in service to the German Empire.Footnote 35
Dissociation from the German Empire made a lot of sense to missionary leaders at the time. To them, the colonial state was just another manifestation of dangerous trends in contemporary society and culture. Warneck reminded his readers that “civilization” did not and could not “bring Christian faith.” He counseled his audience to be skeptical of the colonial state and its supposed “civilizing mission.” As he put it, “Just like happiness, contentment, and virtue . . . belief in the Gospel is not dependent upon a particular degree of civilization.” Since the missionary enterprise and Christian evangelization were not dependent upon the advancement of “modernity,” Warneck argued, Germany's Protestant missionaries had no obligation to adhere to the requests and demands of secular political and economic groups.Footnote 36 Missionaries needed to remain autonomous, and Warneck's segregation of Christian mission from the secular “civilizing mission” was a cornerstone of the antinationalist position of Germany's Protestant missionaries.Footnote 37
Warneck's and Reichel's views reflected the general mood of missionary leaders regarding the appropriate relationship between their work and the national project of building Germany's colonial empire. But the most reasoned and detailed critique of nationalist pressure came from Franz Michael Zahn of the North German Mission Society. Zahn, by the 1890s a thirty-year veteran of mission, was a well-known skeptic of Germany's colonial plans.Footnote 38 In 1896 he penned a theological critique of nationalism's central tenets. His critique had been precipitated by the ongoing efforts of German nationalists to restrain German mission resources solely to serve German colonies.Footnote 39 In Zahn's opinion, nationalism was little more than an intellectual edifice built on shifting sands.
In Zahn's view, the biblical origins of human difference as described in the tale of the Tower of Babel made it a “moral imperative” for Christians to respect human diversity. He argued that an attempt to attach essential characteristics to any group of people, such as the Germans or the English, would be an error. As he put it, “National character is always becoming, and its development takes place and is influenced not only from the inside out but also from the outside.” The mobility of peoples and the fluidity of state boundaries proved that every people of “world historical significance” was also a “mixed Volk.” God's intent, Zahn felt, was that all humanity concern itself more with Christian faith and practice than with the relative superiority or inferiority of any culture or history. After all, Zahn argued, “One gets a correct image only when one places national virtues beside national failings,” and it was in the fighting of a nation's own weaknesses that a Christian community matured.Footnote 40
It was only an “immoral patriotism” that did not recognize the truth of human commonality. Only a “sickly overemphasis of national feeling” could cause one to move away from this communitarian purpose. Therefore, mission's duty was to help bring together the diversity of humanity into one community, to create unity in Christian salvation. This glorious future, Zahn warned, would be undermined by nationalism, and an “emphasis on nationality in mission would be a deplorable regression” from the progress already achieved by the mission movement.Footnote 41 The real future of Germany's missionaries, Zahn maintained, required an embrace of the international brotherhood of Protestant Christians, which would help to tear down the false barriers of human difference. Zahn reminded his readers that “the highest service to God [Gotteswerk] of mission [was] not . . . service to national egoism,” but rather being “dutiful to Christ.”Footnote 42
Reichel's, Warneck's, and Zahn's arguments for the intellectual, theological, and spiritual superiority of missionary work over and above colonial political motivations held strong for nearly four decades. Their rhetorical commitment to the primacy of evangelization overruled calls for a more economically or nationally motivated policy. To the early missionary leaders, mission work was a moral project through and through. Warneck insisted that “the salvation of souls remain[ed] the soul of mission work.”Footnote 43 The pursuit of souls for Christian salvation was extra-political and extra-national. For the missionary leaders of the nineteenth century, mission priorities could not be constrained by worldly matters.
International Mission Conferences
German missionary leaders' resistance to nationalist pressures and their devotion to a more open community provide historians with a useful perspective on cultural and intellectual connections within the Atlantic world. Germany's Protestant mission community applied its internationalism to its relations with other mission communities and, in particular, with the Anglophonic mission communities of Great Britain and North America. The British mission movement provided German Protestant missionaries with a powerful model and a promising ally in their work to evangelize the world. German missionaries' enthusiastic participation in international missionary conferences provides the most tangible proof that the missionaries' imagined international community was nevertheless real to Germany's evangelizing Protestants.
By 1900, missionary associations and supporters had been connected with organizations of common purpose outside the German lands for at least a century. These connections eventually created a layer of international mission conferences and conventions that settled neatly over the top of long-running local and regional conferences in Germany. The international gatherings bound German Protestants into a network of evangelical groups and organizations that were international in scope and cosmopolitan in outlook.
For Germany's Protestant missions, collaboration among mission societies was a fundamental activity. The most complete organized form of collaboration held within Germany was the Continental Mission Conference, also known as the Bremen Conference. Started in 1866 and repeated at roughly five-year intervals thereafter, the Bremen Conferences were guided by principles that were formally articulated in 1909.Footnote 44 The declared principles of the Continental Mission Conference were designed to “strengthen the unity of spirit and nurture personal relationships through the discussion of current theoretical and practical mission questions” at quinquennial meetings of “Protestant mission societies from the European continent.” The associated mission societies would work together to protect their common interests and promote, whenever possible, a unified expression of continental mission “togetherness.”Footnote 45 The program of any given Bremen Conference was always focused on practical or tactical discussions germane to the work of Germany's mission societies.Footnote 46 The gatherings in Bremen were, at least in part, international affairs, though Germans made up the majority of attendees.Footnote 47 The Bremen Conference also appealed to interested parties in the German government; representatives of the Prussian Kultusminister, the Colonial Secretary, and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck regularly attended.
The Protestant missionaries of Germany were pleased with the support their prosaic concerns received at the Bremen Conferences. But from the beginning, Germany's Protestant missionaries were eager to expand their movement and its contacts beyond the European continent. They criticized early international conferences in England for their practical focus, and argued that international missionary gatherings should provide broad, strategic fora for the development of a globally coordinated international mission movement. Gradually the German missionaries' vision for the international conferences became dominant, but only after three international mission conferences of significance had been organized in Britain and the United States. Germans' critiques of these conferences illustrate German expectations. The satisfaction German missionary leaders felt about the 1910 World Missionary Conference revealed German Protestant missionaries' internationalist passions in conferential form.Footnote 48
The first significant effort at a truly international mission conference was the 1878 General Missionary Conference in London. Attendance from English mission supporters was “less than the combined attendance of the various mission societies' annual celebrations” across England; as a result, the conference was generally a disappointment for missionaries in Germany and elsewhere. A report in the Basel Mission journal observed, “For the motivation of mission interest and the spread of mission knowledge in wider circles, this conference did not amount to much.”Footnote 49 Though the London Conference had been a failure, the author concluded, it should not serve as a negative mark against the hopes of international cooperation and the “blessings of Christian community.”Footnote 50 Warneck, writing in the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift, expressed hope that this first attempt at an international mission conference would be succeeded by subsequent and more successful gatherings. Representing the general German attitude, Warneck suggested future international conferences be directed toward, as he described it, “thoroughly talk[ing] through a single important topic,” rather than a diverse program of minor or specialized subjects, a position with which the Basel Mission Society's Evangelisches Missions-Magazin agreed.Footnote 51 To improve on the quality of conversation, Warneck also argued that the conference should be more exclusive, more “professional.” And to encourage the general populace's mission zeal, educational “general assemblies” could be colocated for mission supporters.Footnote 52 German missionaries did not expect the international conferences to deal with the tactical and practical concerns of missionaries (how to organize missionary schools, fundraising in the Heimat, etc.), but rather to bring together missionaries to shape grand strategies for international mission effort.Footnote 53
Ten years later a second conference was held in London. The most comprehensive assessment of the 1888 Centenary Conference on the Protestant Missions of the World came from Alexander Merensky, whose work in British South Africa made him one of the best-known German missionaries. Merensky celebrated the size of the conference and its success in bringing together missionary leaders from both sides of the Atlantic for the first time. In his judgment, the conference demonstrated the durability and value of the “decennial conference” for missionaries around the world and had expanded on the potential of the 1878 Missionary Conference.Footnote 54 According to Merensky, the Centenary Conference had introduced Germans to the strengths of the American mission movement while simultaneously providing the rest of the mission world with exposure to German missionaries' superior academic knowledge. The conference was painted by Merensky as a grand gathering of international significance. The conference attendees had functioned across confessional and national divides to form a “coalition for a grand global struggle.”Footnote 55 Merensky's article marked one of the first appearances of what became a commonplace description of Protestant mission as a three-legged stool, i.e., as an international project supported on three legs: the British, American, and German mission movements.Footnote 56
Warneck added his imprimatur to Merensky's hearty endorsement. Like Merensky he was pleased that “this time [as opposed to the 1878 Conference] special gatherings of experts” were organized for the discussion of theoretical and practical missionary questions. He hoped this trend would continue and the international conferences could narrow their focus to “especially current questions” such as “the position of mission to contemporary colonial politics, . . . the international importance of mission, [and] the challenges of Protestant mission with regard to the growing Roman [Catholic] aggression”—all three items of universal concern to Protestant missionaries whatever their nationality.Footnote 57 Warneck implored the organizing committee for the next international conference to include “fewer topics but a more exhaustive practical treatment [of those topics] and a wider space for discussion, and an exclusion of [superficial] rhetoric.”Footnote 58 Warneck's suggestions were intended to make the international conferences into venues for the formulation of the grand strategy of international evangelization.
Though German representatives were few at the 1900 Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York, the extensive German-speaking diaspora in the United States helped to keep the German mission movement supplied with reports of the next international conference. One such report in the Evangelisches Missions-Magazin of the Basel Society declared that the New York Conference was the “greatest ecumenical mission conference” that had inaugurated a new “mission century.”Footnote 59 In New York, once again, Germans celebrated the triumvirate of American, British, and German Christianity; “America, Germany, and England are the only Christian lands in possession of the Bible. Upon them rests the great, holy duty to bring God's Word to the rest of the world.”Footnote 60 Instead of national governments, the missionaries' commitment was to “the Lord whose kingdom is not of this world.”Footnote 61
The Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift, Gustav Warneck, and Alexander Merensky all agreed that the mission conference in the Empire State had achieved great things. In a letter sent to the gathering and read by the prominent American missionary Judson Smith, Warneck celebrated the cooperation among missionaries.Footnote 62 According to the German Missionswissenschaftler, Protestant missionaries needed to come together and share their practical wisdom and systematically work together to evangelize all the continents. The New York Conference had supported that goal. Warneck's urge to participate in the conference, even from afar, demonstrated the growing utility that Germans saw in these international gatherings.Footnote 63 Merensky, unlike Warneck, attended the New York Conference.Footnote 64 He wrote that the conference was a “wondrous, hope-awakening sign for the future of Protestant mission work,” and that it was “a victory of mission interests.”Footnote 65 In German mission leaders' eyes, the general esteem for international conferences grew in direct proportion to the gatherings' relative success in aiding in the collective action of Protestant missionaries of every country.
The 1910 World Missionary Conference and the Continuation Committee
In 1906–1907, German mission representatives met to organize a statement of Germany's proposed contributions to and expectations of the next international conference, set for Edinburgh in 1910.Footnote 66 In May 1908, the German mission societies sent deputations to a German meeting to compile a shared proposition for the Edinburgh Conference. The German mission societies proposed that the Edinburgh Conference take on major international themes of Protestant mission work, specifically the “encroachment of Islam in Africa and the defense against it,” and “alcohol in West Africa, and a resolution against opium.”Footnote 67 The assembled also made suggestions for greater cooperation across borders, including the creation of an international mission library and the standardization of a statistical rubric for recording and studying mission work.Footnote 68 The minutes of that meeting clearly revealed the intentions and expectations of German missionaries that the international conferences should be strategic and collaborative. At an October 1908 meeting of the Ausschuß, Julius Richter celebrated the interest that the British and Americans had shown in German assistance “like never before.” This good will required a lively participation by Germany, he continued, and Warneck quickly seconded that notion.Footnote 69 For both men the international conferences provided invaluable opportunities for cross-pollination among the Protestant mission communities.
When the World Missionary Conference closed on June 23, 1910, after ten days of lectures, seminars, and prayer meetings, Germany's missionary leaders felt they had witnessed the apotheosis of Protestant internationalism. As one of the German movement's leaders, Paul Otto Hennig of the Brüdergemeine, put it, the conference was the “most important gathering since the Reformation.”Footnote 70 He described a gathering of all the national mission movements, “men from the missionary battlefront, and beside the sons of the Old World [were] members of a new Christianity: Indians, Japanese, Chinese . . . even . . . a Negro!”Footnote 71 Other German missionaries reveled in the unity of Protestants gathered in the Edinburgh Assembly Hall as a direct continuation of the gradual renewal and perfection of Christianity begun by Luther in 1517.Footnote 72 One, Walther Trittelvitz, felt that at Edinburgh, the ancient tradition of Christian unity had been resurrected by the diverse representatives of Protestantism seated together in daily communal prayer and consultation.Footnote 73 According to many attendees and the mission press, national and denominational differences had fully surrendered to communal mission spirit that summer in Edinburgh.
Hennig experienced his ten days in Edinburgh as proof of the universal power of Christianity; he declared the conference's 1,200 attendees representatives of the “entire Christian world.”Footnote 74 Trittelvitz of the Bethel Society wrote that for ten days, Edinburgh was the “spiritual center of the Earth, the capital city of Christendom.”Footnote 75 The Jahrbuch der vereinigten norddeutschen Missionskonferenzen (Yearbook of the United North German Mission Conferences) called the Edinburgh gathering the “most important event” in modern mission history.Footnote 76 Hennig evoked the globe-spanning reach of the conference by noting that journalists sat in specially reserved seats with quick access to express telegraphs and postmen so that they could “transmit the latest news of the Congress to every corner of the world.”Footnote 77 The great mass and diversity of attendees at the mission conference made clear that Germany was but one piece of the international mission movement. The Jahrbuch agreed and celebrated the attendance of German missionary leaders in Edinburgh and the honors conferred on them by the British.Footnote 78 The Germans were not alone in their experience. For all attendees, whatever their background, the Edinburgh Conference was an intoxicating religious experience that left most participants feeling they had partaken of a profound spiritual event.Footnote 79
The key event of the Edinburgh Conference for German Protestant missionaries was the creation of the Continuation Committee of the World Missionary Conference. The Continuation Committee was empowered by the delegates in Edinburgh to organize the next international mission conference in 1920 and to pursue other missionary interests in the intervening decade; this new body was itself an embodiment of the ecumenicalism of a wished-for future, and had been “seconded by a Presbyterian, supported by a Methodist and a German pastor, and acclaimed by the Bishop of Durham, a Quaker, and many others.”Footnote 80 The supposed Protestant unity of the Conference was transmitted by Hennig, who described the communion on the final Sunday:
I found myself beside . . . a cleric of the Scottish state church, . . . a Baptist missionary out of distant India, . . . one or another of the German delegates, . . . and in the pew opposite me an Indian cleric and his . . . wife, both in their national dress. Beside him a Japanese woman, in the background the black face of a Negro. We celebrated communion with one another, the repast that the Lord bequeathed to his Church.Footnote 81
And Trittelvitz, representative of the strongly nationalist Bethel Mission, which was the closest of the missions to the secular colonial movement, celebrated the Edinburgh Conference as proof of Protestants' “fighting camaraderie [Waffenbrüderschaft] against a shared enemy, against heathendom and Islam.”Footnote 82
While the leadership and participants in the Edinburgh Conference were well pleased with the gathering, it is also important to consider the reception of news about the conference in Germany. Many, according to Richter, saw that “German prestige [could be] promoted through German mission.” Richter hoped the success of the conference would be a sign of a new era, a new recognition for German missionaries' labors.Footnote 83 To Richter, a man whose influence in German mission circles was growing daily, the Edinburgh Conference opened new possibilities for German and international mission. The cooperative structures formed and launched at Edinburgh promised a renewal of the international program of evangelization. The establishment of the Continuation Committee had been the “high point” of the Edinburgh Conference.Footnote 84 Three years later, at the 1913 Bremen Conference, Richter's enthusiasm remained undiminished. He told an audience that the Edinburgh Conference was the “greatest, most unforgettable occasion in Protestant mission culture,” and every delegate at the conference would remember the “charm and magic” of that “holy day” as one of the most valuable memories of his or her life.Footnote 85
Paul Otto Hennig of Herrnhut joined Richter in sharing the joyful news out of Edinburgh. He reported to an English colleague that he had toured Germany in the months following Edinburgh and “found everywhere the most hearty reception.”Footnote 86 Later, Hennig elaborated, “Edinburgh showed us challenges like never seen by God's Church. The Lord [had] opened wide the gates of the world.”Footnote 87 The Edinburgh Conference had created in Hennig and among other mission leaders a tangible sense of international purpose.
Shortly after the formation of the new Continuation Committee, Richter began to tout the contributions Germany could make to it. Germany's model of national association among missionary organizations, the Ausschuß, needed a counterpart in England so that the “chains of union” could be forged. In addition, Germany's well-developed system of academic and practical missionary training should be transmitted to the American and British mission societies for a general improvement of global evangelism. Richter proposed a unified statistical collection and a global effort to influence public opinion through the daily press, as well as the creation of an “international mission journal.” Finally, he hoped that this grand international system of evangelical governance could create a more specialized international commission that would help to intercede between Protestant mission societies—whatever their ostensible nationality—and the various colonial and national governments.Footnote 88 This idea was supported by the leaders of the Continental Mission Conference. Key German mission leaders Theodor Öhler and August Wilhelm Schreiber backed Richter's proposal in a letter to the members of the Continental Mission Conference, organizers of the Bremen Conferences.Footnote 89 Richter jumped with both feet into the expanding international movement and demonstrated the enthusiasm for internationalism that existed in Germany and that was being fed by an international mood after 1910.
At its February meeting in 1911, the Ausschuß delineated its expectations for the new international mission commission. The commission, the Ausschuß felt, should serve the general interests of the international mission movement by caring for individual missions' needs. This could be done if the international commission concentrated on “societies whose rights [had] been interfered with by governmental procedures.” The commission should also promote the general interest of the mission societies in matters of the reduction of the spirit trade; abolition of the opium trade; promotion of international treaties on the protection of indigenous peoples; opposition to slavery, the “coolie” trade, and the like; as well as by eliminating “infringements upon the rights of Christians and ensuring the interests of mission schools with regard to government policy in the mission territories.” In short, the international commission should pursue activities in the global sphere that the Ausschuß itself pursued in Germany.Footnote 90
This general enthusiasm for the international mission movement meant that many in the German movement had rekindled an earlier desire for an international conference to come to German soil.Footnote 91 Less than a year after the Edinburgh meeting, leading German missionaries sought to arrange a German host city for the next international conference. The Continuation Committee undertook the planning for the 1920 World Mission Conference immediately after the Edinburgh Conference closed. The Canadians proffered Toronto as a host city, but the Ausschuß felt that a location on the European continent would be better suited, and Öhler led the presentation of its case for a continental host city to the German mission societies. The Ausschuß's argument featured four major points. First, Protestant mission had three wings: American, British, and continental—Merensky's three-legged stool of international mission restated with a different metaphor. The 1900 Conference had been in New York, the 1910 one in Edinburgh, so the 1920 meeting should therefore convene somewhere on the continent. Second, continental mission culture had a unique character with special “gifts and strengths”: a continental host city would allow these to come to their fullest potential. Third, if the mission conference were held in Toronto, attendance from the continent would be very low, and as a result, the conference would be a purely Anglo-Saxon affair. The Edinburgh Conference had shown, by contrast, that a European location was no hindrance to North American attendance. Finally, by placing the conference on the continent, Christian missionaries would place “scientific and practical work” at the center of the goals of mission by recognizing the importance of the continental (i.e., German) traditions of mission work.Footnote 92 Öhler's proposition received support from both the Berlin Mission's governing Komitee and the Missionsdirektion of the Moravians.Footnote 93 Soon both the Ausschuß and the Bremen Conference of 1913 endorsed Germany as a host nation.Footnote 94
Karl Axenfeld, Mission Director of the Berlin Mission, produced another endorsement of Germany as host nation for a world mission conference just a month before Germany's declaration of war on France and Russia in 1914. This proposal met with such approval from the rest of the Ausschuß that parts of it were reproduced in whole in a memorandum that the Ausschuß submitted to the Continuation Committee on July 31, 1914. According to Axenfeld, only Germany among the continental mission nations possessed large mission fields in every region of Protestant mission work around the world. He argued that Germany had fought for its political unity and had become a global power “overnight.” Holding the 1920 Conference in Germany could support the victory of German unity and Christian development and help bring the full strength of Germany into alliance with the international mission community.Footnote 95
As already mentioned, Axenfeld had become an influential member of the German mission movement and the Ausschuß duplicated his ideas for the 1920 Conference in its “Expert Opinion of the German Mission Council on the Next World Mission Conference and its Meeting in Germany.” German missionary leaders also preserved Axenfeld's argument that the next mission conference should be a strategic meeting. The topics covered at the Edinburgh Conference (e.g., developing indigenous churches, mission school policy, medical mission) were important but threatened to “schematize and flatten mission work.” The Ausschuß proposed concentrating on broader themes, ones less likely to be distorted by local political and cultural conditions in mission fields—in other words, strategic and broadly theoretical issues of Christian mission.Footnote 96 The guns of August would drown out German calls for a German host city for the 1920 World Missionary Conference; the hostilities of 1914–1918 would also put a final end to German missionaries' internationalist ideology. The excitement felt about the 1910 Edinburgh Conference nevertheless strengthened many German missionaries' hopes for an international community of Protestant Christians collaborating to create a heavenly kingdom.
Conclusion
German missionaries' Protestant internationalism was an alternative adaptation to the dislocations and anxieties of globalization during the late nineteenth century. German missionaries, already skeptical of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and secularism before the establishment of the Kaiserreich in 1871—let alone the creation of a German colonial empire in 1884—found in their internationalism a ready-made response to the difficulties presented by a shrinking world. If World War I was an “escape forward” for the old regime in Wilhelmine Germany, then missionary internationalism might also be considered an “escape forward” for Germany's missionaries—a leap into a global world to forestall the intrusions of nationalism into their evangelical project. But German missionaries did not construct a false ideal to justify their response to globalization. Their internationalism was sincere and consequential. Missionary intellectuals and leaders in Germany fashioned and adhered to a remarkably consistent ideology of missionary internationalism into the twentieth century.
The findings of this study belong to a growing literature on Germany's transnational and global history during the nineteenth century.Footnote 97 Beyond the historiography of Germany's nineteenth century, other corporate groups found themselves between loyalties in the decades before World War I. Scholars who have studied the history of internationalism argue that scholarship on nationalism inappropriately ignores the international context of the nation-state.Footnote 98 In fact, John Boli and George M. Thomas have argued that the tensions between the nation-state and the various forces of transnational groups strengthened both the state and transnational structures, supporting the view of myself and others that, like the colony and the metropole, internationalism and nationalism are mutually constitutive.Footnote 99 In this context, Akira Iriye has argued that groups of people have historically striven to create alternative communities bound together by cultural interests. To the extent that a national community can be “imagined,” as Benedict Anderson argued, Iriye posited that the international community must also be “imagined.” The history of the Protestant mission movement, socialism, Catholicism, and, interestingly, Pan-Africanism all confirm the significance of international communities to transatlantic and global history and the bonds that German Protestants could imagine with Protestants of many stripes and colors around the world.Footnote 100
German missionaries' commitment to the priorities of Protestant universalism, as they saw it, meant that they consistently chose an internationalist course even when pressured by powerful and influential nationalist voices within Germany. These nationalist voices, part of a general movement that included influential organizations such as the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League) and the Navy League, and less extensively researched organizations such as the Army League and the Eastern Marches Society, have received more attention from historians of Germany.Footnote 101 The German Protestant mission societies matched many of these organizations in membership, however, and outstripped all of them, except perhaps the Colonial Society, in devotion to colonial questions. This would be less significant had not so many historians of Germany's nineteenth-century political history identified colonialism as an important component of the conservative Prusso-German state. Missionary internationalism raises important questions about the apparent successfulness of policies of Sammlungspolitik pursued by German chancellors from Otto von Bismarck into the twentieth century. If the socially conservative, anti-Catholic, and antisocialist leaders of the Protestant mission movement could not be motivated by a nationalist program of colonial development, then the effectiveness of such a program at drawing in Germany's Protestant population also needs to be questioned.
The Protestant missionaries of Germany occupied an influential position in the international missionary conferences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their participation points to a Protestant missionary movement that was able to wield far more influence within and outside Germany than has been credited to it up to this point. Missionaries' close entanglement with the colonial state in the German colonies and the colonial administration in the German metropole meant that missionaries' Protestant universalism and internationalist sentiments had an important influence on Germany's colonial culture. Missionary leaders' influence, paired with their opposition to statist and economic colonialism, demand that scholars of Germany's colonialism consider more carefully the relationship between German Protestantism, German nationalism, and German colonialism. Missionaries were not servants of German colonialism; they were far more interested in an international movement of Protestant evangelization than in any program of German Weltpolitik or other program of imperial expansion and development.
