The study of Christian missions has produced some of the most insightful scholarly work in the field of cultural history. This is the case, in part, because missionaries generally left very good archives. The other reason why the study of Christian missions has generated such engaging scholarly work has to do with the politics of post-colonialism. Nowhere are the stakes higher, and nowhere are the lines of debate more clearly drawn. Nationalists in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia accused missionaries of cultural imperialism, of foisting a foreign religion on their converts, and of severing them from their native cultures. Nationalism involved the definition and elevation of certain cultural forms as indigenous (as in the case of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, shown by Stephen Berkwitz in the volume under review). It also involved the denigration of cultural imports.
Today, the rapid demographic growth of Christianity in the global South has made it hard to accept the cultural logic of nationalism uncritically. Plainly, Christianity is no longer a foreign religion (if indeed it ever was) in Africa and Asia. But scholars still feel obliged to counter nationalists' vituperation. That is the animating spirit behind Heather Sharkey's edited collection, assembled out of a conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. The aim is to show that missionaries were not the authors of Christianity: “the history of missionary encounters has been a history of the unexpected insofar as the changes set rolling often went far beyond, or even astray from, what the missionaries intended,” writes Sharkey (2). Sharkey and her colleagues want to “shift the spotlight away from missionaries and onto the manifold changes that surprised everyone” (3). The individual contributors reiterate Sharkey's argument. Indeed, they seem to have been told to use Sharkey's phraseology: authors take pains to identify the “most unexpected outcome” of missionaries' work, the “most unexpected aspects” of missionary encounters, or their “most enduring — and most unexpected — impact” (202, 70, 177). Historian David Gordon even refers to the “unexpected Christianities” of central Africa in the title of his chapter.
The book yields unexpected and rich insights. There is, for example, a chapter from historian Paul Landau showing how missionary translator Robert Moffat settled on the word Modimo to render the word “God.” Moffat entered the Highveld in the 1820s, a time of profound social dislocation and change. Even as his African interlocutors were working to uphold and reconstruct the ties of kinship and hierarchy, Moffat placed Modimo — which had hitherto referred to ancestors — at the center of Christian worship. In this way church-building borrowed from — and depoliticized — the idiom of chiefship. Other chapters similarly illuminate the profound debates that colonized people conducted in their own languages and traditions. Mrinalini Sebastian, Chandra Mallampalli, Beth Baron and Stephen Berkwitz show how the legal, moral and intellectual challenge posed by Protestant missionaries obliged Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus to organize their religions in new ways: as doctrinal systems, with creeds, belief statements, and a disciplinary architecture. Sharkey's chapter is a wonderfully piquant study of the bibles that missionaries translated into the colloquial dialects of Arabic. They hoped to reach the population of women and lower-class men who were not privy to the polished, urbane language of the mosque. But by the 1930s the idea of Arab unity was coming to the fore, and classical Arabic was the idiom in which pan-Arabism was expressed. Nationalists condemned colloquial bibles for dividing up the unitary people they sought to convene. The odd and idiosyncratic bibles of North Africa fell out of print as classical Arabic came to dominate the market for literature.
This book's emphasis on the “unexpected consequences” of mission work liberates contributors from the confines of church history and allows them to follow Christian ideas and texts as they were translated, reformed, and argued against by colonized people. But I wonder whether this way of thinking about cultural history forecloses other, more multi-dimensional approaches. As soon as we speak of consequences, we are obliged to think in sequences, to place one thing prior to another, to conceive of cultural history as a matter of action and reaction. Thinking of history in this way prompts us, in turn, to look for colonized people's “responses” to mission work. That is what Stephen Berkwitz does: he studies three Buddhist texts to show the “range of responses expressed by Buddhists in their encounters with Christian missions” (101).
The effect of thinking in terms of sequences is to reduce a complex and multi-dimensional social situation to a two-way interaction, screening out tangents, isolating causal agents, and consolidating different timescales into a straightforward “encounter.” Is there another way to chart religious change? As a starting point, we ought to find a wider chronological lens. As Paul Landau shows for southern Africa, ideas of community, hierarchy, and the otherworld were already under debate when Christian missionaries arrived. If we enter the scene alongside the missionaries, we are obliged to see the world as they did: as a contest between two ways of life. If we widen our angle of vision (and expand our source-base), missionaries appear as one among several agents of change. It is for this reason that Landau's chapter, and even moreso his book (Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 [Cambridge, 2010]), anchors religious change within the longue duree of history.
Heather Sharkey is to be congratulated for assembling such a compelling group of essays. Together, they help to illuminate the unlikely places to which Africans and Asians have taken missionaries' religion. We await, however, a scholarship of Christianity that takes us into the times, scales, and narratives that worked at a tangent to the missionary encounter.
