Charles Freer Andrews is a name slipping from the contemporary Church's memory of significant twentieth-century Anglicans. He is still most easily remembered as Gandhi's closest Christian friend. Yet Andrews is a historical figure well worthy of study apart from Gandhi, as his significance is by no means subsumed within the reputation of the moral leader of Indian independence. In church history, Andrews has been recognized as a notable missionary thinker who developed influential ideas regarding Christian interchange with Eastern religions.Footnote 1 Less acknowledged is that Andrews was among the first to inhabit a mould of global Anglican social concern better recognized in later twentieth-century figures such as Trevor Huddleston in South Africa and Bishop Ronald O. Hall in Hong Kong.
This mould is known to have been derived from patterns of social thought, theology and campaigning originating in Victorian England and the urban conditions confronted by those Anglican thinkers commonly labelled Christian Socialists. In the post-1945 period, Huddleston and Hall took to their colonial (and post-colonial) contexts this theological inheritance from Frederick Denison Maurice, Brooke Foss Westcott, Charles Gore and others, and drew attention to how the Anglican social tradition was at work in non-Western settings.Footnote 2 After them came that more recent instance of the global Anglican social conscience, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.Footnote 3 Yet a generation or two before this, the early twentieth-century colonial career of C. F. Andrews had already demonstrated that this same Anglican social tradition had a global frame of reference. Andrews's career embodies the evolution from urban Christian Socialism to global social Anglicanism. The views of empire held by earlier and contemporary Christian Socialists in England did not actually guarantee this evolution. Rather, it was Andrews's personal experience of empire, as he witnessed colonialism in context, which led him to adapt and apply forms of Christian Socialist critique and campaigning across a more extensive imperial horizon.
Reputations: Andrews and India
Andrews was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1871 and died in Calcutta in 1940. From 1904, when he first set foot in India, to 1914, Andrews was a member of an Anglican religious order in Delhi, the Cambridge Brotherhood, and a missionary employed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), teaching at St Stephen's College, Delhi.Footnote 4 According to Andrews's most recent biographer, Daniel O'Connor, it was this first decade in India that essentially forged his future career.Footnote 5 During this time, Andrews came to reject the colonial mindset of regulated distance and detachment between European colonizers and the colonized. Instead, through close friendships with Indian Christians, then Indian Muslims and Hindus, Andrews developed views radically at odds with contemporary imperial culture.
Andrews's views included a strident rejection of the racist assumptions he recognized to be integral to Britain's empire system, and commitments both to what would now be called ‘contextual theology’ and to indigenous church leadership.Footnote 6 Andrews further advocated interreligious dialogue: his first two books written in India, missionary studies entitled North India (1908) and The Renaissance in India (1912), stressed the importance of inter-racial friendships for missionaries.Footnote 7 Andrews was not alone in such radicalism: other European missionaries demonstrated a similar resistance to the emergent racism of the late Victorian empire, while the Oxford philologist F. Max Müller had notably proposed greater dialogue with Hindus and Muslims as an approach to Christian mission in India back in the 1870s.Footnote 8 More distinctive among Anglicans though, was Andrews's Christian sympathy for Indian nationalism.Footnote 9 In time, he became convinced that the Indian independence movement was generating a ‘new religious impulse’ with great potential for a future synthesis of Hinduism and Christianity in the subcontinent.Footnote 10
Andrews met Mohandas K. Gandhi after ten years’ involvement in the Indian context. They were introduced in 1914 in South Africa, where Andrews had travelled at the behest of his friends in the Indian National Congress to research the conditions faced by south Asian workers and traders in the racially divided colonies, principally Natal.Footnote 11 Here Gandhi had been practising as a barrister since 1893, and had become a leading activist for Indian civil rights.Footnote 12 He campaigned particularly against mistreatment of Indian indentured labourers – migrants taken from Indian villages and shipped between British colonies, serving abusive contracts in some of the worst working conditions.Footnote 13
Andrews had followed the Indian press coverage of Gandhi's campaign of non-violence and non-cooperation, and even wrote on his voyage before they met: ‘I have a great happiness and blessing in store for me – to see Mohandas Gandhi . . . . My journey will be a pilgrimage to touch his feet’.Footnote 14 On arrival, Andrews did indeed touch Gandhi's feet on the dockside, a gesture which aroused apoplexy in the South African press. Their friendship was then forged as the pair toured indentured labour estates, then negotiated with the interior minister (later prime minister) General Jan Smuts.Footnote 15 Their collaboration has long been credited with securing the Indian Relief Act, which provided for the phased end of the indenture system in South Africa and the lifting of a punitive tax on South Asians.Footnote 16
During the remaining decades of their lives, Andrews and Gandhi maintained a deep personal bond through letters, visits and further travel, including to England in the 1930s, when Andrews was a key mediator in negotiations between Gandhi and the British government. The dynamic between them has dominated scholarly attention, as Andrews was one of Gandhi's few critical friends, unafraid to disagree with him, even arguing for Indian independence well before Gandhi was convinced himself.Footnote 17 In addition, Gandhi's lifelong interest in Christianity – or, more precisely, in Jesus and the New Testament – was shaped by their friendship. Gandhi could not dismiss Andrews's Christian practice and belief so contemptuously as that of most other Western Christians.Footnote 18 In recognition of their closeness and Andrews's wider fame as a Christian, for Indians ‘C. F. A.’ came to stand for ‘Christ's Faithful Apostle’.Footnote 19
Andrews was thirty-three years old when he arrived in India in 1904, a little under halfway through his life. The second half of Andrews's life has attracted by far the most interest from historians and biographers, and yet his Christian thought and experience were marked by greater continuity between his years before and after India – and Gandhi – than such notice implies. Concerns and principles traceable in Andrews's career as a Christian Socialist in 1890s England may be linked to his thought and achievements later. Even so, when this thought and activity is, in turn, set beside the varying perceptions of empire among Andrews's contemporary Anglican Christian Socialists, a significant difference can be discerned. Better known Christian Socialists of the time tended merely to lift their Christian moral horizon from urban England to celebrate or critique empire. Andrews, by contrast, applied campaigning principles and a theological perspective inherited from England to actual colonial contexts and conditions. As a result, this article makes a case for understanding Charles Freer Andrews as a pioneer who broke one mould of nineteenth-century Christian Socialism yet recast himself in a related form, that of a twentieth-century global social Anglican, whose personal experience of empire shaped him as a witness and campaigner ‘on the ground’. It is this distinctive pattern which recognizably fits the careers of later twentieth-century Anglicans such as Ronald Hall, Trevor Huddleston and Desmond Tutu.
The Making of a Christian Socialist
Space precludes all but a summary of Andrews's early biography. He was not born an Anglican, but grew up in the Catholic Apostolic Church, the millennialist body founded in the 1830s after Edward Irving's prophetic interpretations and his followers’ claims to charismatic experiences.Footnote 20 Andrews's father was a minister in the church, first in Newcastle upon Tyne, then in Birmingham, so that Charles's upbringing involved immersion in the group's distinctive blend of elaborate high church liturgy with (as Andrews later described it) a ‘strange, emotional atmosphere of prophesying and speaking with tongues and ecstasy in the Spirit’.Footnote 21 Both church and home reinforced a fairly reactionary brand of political conservatism, so that Andrews was raised to believe that ‘Queen Victoria represented . . . God's anointed sovereign . . . and the vast British Empire in India was . . . the most glorious achievement of the Anglo-Saxon race’.Footnote 22 A day scholar at King Edward VI School, Birmingham, Andrews was given little opportunity to escape this context until university, when he secured a scholarship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
In the months before his arrival in Cambridge in 1890, the teenage Andrews experienced an intense religious conversion, whereupon, he later wrote, ‘my articulate life as a Christian began . . . Christ's presence became a daily experience . . . God in Christ had come to me in the night’.Footnote 23 Initially, Andrews responded to this inner conviction of God's love and forgiveness through more frequent attendance at his father's church; though he also found himself compelled to notice, as if for the first time, ‘a slum quarter’ next to the church. This was a place, Andrews wrote, ‘where drunkenness and vice were forced upon the poor by their poverty itself, creating a vicious cycle’.Footnote 24 Andrews's spiritual autobiography continued: ‘Never before had I even dreamt of visiting these homes or seeing these poor people. But now they were very dear to me for Christ's sake’. He recalled befriending several inhabitants of the slum, and ‘would go from house to house . . . seeking to help them wherever occasions arose’.Footnote 25
Commencing his studies in Cambridge in 1890, Andrews's piety was gradually drawn in an Anglican direction by the twin influences of his best friend, Basil Westcott, the youngest son of Brooke Foss Westcott, recently made bishop of Durham, and his tutor, the Revd Charles Prior, who happened also to be Bishop Westcott's son-in-law.Footnote 26 During the course of degrees in Classics and then Theology, Andrews broke with his millennialist past, and was confirmed in the Church of England, embracing the Anglo-Catholic devotion and social concern closely associated with Westcott and other contributors to the recent volume Lux Mundi.Footnote 27
Encouraged by Prior, Andrews spent extended periods at the Pembroke College mission and settlement house in Walworth, South London.Footnote 28 Here he reported discovering ‘a joy which often carried me through the difficulties and doubts of college days. Life was simpler there; the suffering of the poor called out sympathy in return. Christ was near: I was consciously taking part in his service’.Footnote 29
By 1895, Andrews had resolved to be ordained ‘for college mission work among the poor’, but first made use of Westcott family connections to become a lay worker in Durham diocese, living close to the Sunderland shipyards.Footnote 30 Andrews worked for St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth, once one half of the Venerable Bede's twin monastery at Jarrow and Monkwearmouth. In the area surrounding St Peter's, Andrews remembered, ‘poverty and stark hunger were widespread . . . [and] little children were ill cared for and undernourished’.Footnote 31 Witnessing such ‘cruel suffering’, confirmed him as ‘an out-and-out opponent of the capitalist system’.Footnote 32 Nonetheless, he wrote movingly of the transformation he witnessed when impoverished individuals were shown the love of Christ.Footnote 33 Ordained deacon in 1896, and priest the following year, Andrews returned to lead the Pembroke settlement in South London until 1899.
On the eve of moving to Sunderland, the twenty-three-year-old Andrews wrote a prize-winning essay, The Relation of Christianity to the Conflict between Capital and Labour. Published in 1896, the work has been passed over by most biographers, considered immature and of little consequence for his later career.Footnote 34 In it, he acknowledged his already extensive reading in ‘the writings of F. D. Maurice’ as well as those of Bishop Westcott.Footnote 35 Much of Andrews's argument is certainly derivative. However, three key principles are worth registering, for their resonances in his later life.
The first principle, derived from both Maurice and Westcott, is the assertion that the incarnation, particularly as presented in the Gospel of John, revealed the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity.Footnote 36 For Andrews, this theological principle should shape the Church's approach to capital and labour through an insistence on brotherhood as the foundation of society.Footnote 37 ‘Human labour cannot be treated as a dead thing in the same way as cotton or coal’, he observed; the relation between workers and employers cannot be ruled by profits but by ‘mutual good-will and self-sacrifice’, the realization of brotherhood.Footnote 38
Second, Andrews maintained that the Church needed to recognize and minister to a vast body of unskilled labour, ‘the poorest of the poor’, living precarious lives with ‘bodies and minds stunted’, a situation familiar to him from the ‘coster-mongers and casual dock labourers’ surrounding the Pembroke London mission.Footnote 39 He stated boldly: ‘Christ is pleading here for the strong to help the weak. A Church which fails to go right down into the midst of the very poorest to bring help and succour is self-condemned’.Footnote 40
Finally, for Andrews the Church was called to be a ‘“Prophet” of the State’, her voice ‘crying in the streets of the great city’, sending forth Christ's followers ‘to be a practical contrast to social abuses’, and so march towards a ‘moral victory’.Footnote 41 In doing so, the Church must be confident, he insisted, of a stronger ‘motive power’ than ‘love of gain’. ‘This stronger love, overcoming the love of gain and self’, he identified as ‘the constraining love of Christ, and its power is not theoretical, but has been practically proved stronger in every age’.Footnote 42
[T]hose, who have realised that constraining love, have been the most active . . . the most energetic . . . . . . . [I]n the starving, the sick, the captive, the outcast of humanity, they see Christ pleading with them . . . . They know that devotion can be stronger than greed . . . . Again and again a stronger motive than self-interest has won the day, and the future will lend still ampler scope.Footnote 43
In such words, Andrews articulated the Christian Socialist conviction that the exertion of moral influence and example, based on practical knowledge and the higher principle of love, would ultimately right the social ‘wrongs’ and ‘abuses’ of the age.
Andrews and Westcott
On advice from the Westcott family, Andrews left the Walworth settlement in 1899 to return to Cambridge, becoming vice-principal of the Clergy Training School (now Westcott House), and soon after a fellow of Pembroke.Footnote 44 His move to India in 1904 also involved the Westcotts. Basil, Andrews's closest friend, had joined the Cambridge Brotherhood and taught at St Stephen's College, Delhi, before dying of cholera in 1900.Footnote 45 Andrews eventually decided he must ‘take his place’.Footnote 46 This personal emotional pull was supplemented by the influence of Bishop Westcott himself, whose distinctive views on Christian mission in India Andrews learned at first hand.
Westcott considered India to be for the East what Greece was for the West: the great ‘thinking nation’, the source of its founding philosophy.Footnote 47 Like several contemporaries, Westcott dreamed of Delhi's becoming an Indian ‘Alexandria’, a place where Christianity would be translated into an Asian intellectual framework, ‘for the fuller interpretation of the faith’.Footnote 48 A dimension of this enthusiasm was Westcott's interest in the mysticism of the Fourth Gospel. ‘One of his great hopes’, Andrews recollected from their conversations together, ‘was that Indian thinkers would be able to interpret fully the Gospel of John’.Footnote 49
Andrews's life in India, including the notable evolution in his beliefs there, followed a trajectory set by the formative influence of Westcott. The Gospel of John remained Andrews's anchoring text throughout his time in the East, where, he wrote, ‘this Gospel has its true home in the hearts of men and is best understood’.Footnote 50 The principles of the incarnation and human brotherhood informed his view of almost every initiative he took, from his immersion of himself in the Indian community (not keeping his missionary distance) to his allying himself with the unifying movement of Indian nationalism, itself grounded, as he saw it, in the realization of brotherhood.Footnote 51
Controversially, Andrews's efforts to formulate an indigenous Indian Christian theology, as Westcott had wished, led him to stray beyond the bounds of his mentor's orthodoxy for a significant period. This Andrews acknowledged by resigning from the SPG and the Church of England in 1914, although he resumed presiding and preaching in Anglican churches in the 1930s and found the resignation of his orders had never been formally accepted. Much of his theological reasoning was framed by the intention to ‘widen’ understandings of Christianity, to interact better with Hindu and Buddhist thought. Greek and Latin theology had too ‘narrowly . . . defined and confined the Faith’, Andrews alleged.Footnote 52 The experiential and ethical dimensions of Christianity offered the terms most amenable for India to receive Christianity. ‘To follow Christ’, he insisted, was ‘not the expression of an outward creed, but the learning of an inner life’.Footnote 53
Indenture
Andrews shared this last reflection in a sermon in Lahore Cathedral, upon his return from South Africa in 1914. There, his experience investigating the conditions of indentured labourers had had a profound personal effect, building on the time spent earlier among the English poor. He informed his Lahore hearers: ‘I have found Christ in strange, unlooked-for places, far beyond the boundary of sect or dogma . . . . In South Africa, I found Christ's presence . . . far more intimately . . . in the Indian and Kaffir locations placed outside the cities of the Rand, than in those cities themselves built up of gold with all its fatal curse upon it.’Footnote 54 The white Christian West now worshipped ‘Money and Race’, while ‘the meek and lowly Christ’, he wrote elsewhere, was ‘found and worshipped . . . amid the little groups of Indian passive resisters fresh from prison – Hindus almost all of them’.Footnote 55
In 1915, Andrews resolved to build on achievements in South Africa by working to end indentured labour throughout the British empire. He was shocked by a Blue Book colonial report on conditions among Indian labourers in Fiji, an archipelago of islands with vast sugar plantations.Footnote 56 The statistics for suicides among indentured Indians there suggested the misery was even worse than Natal.Footnote 57 Stirred by a recurring vision of a beaten, cowering Indian labourer, whose face kept changing into the face of Christ, Andrews embarked for Fiji. He travelled via Australia, where he met with the prime minister and with executives of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company.Footnote 58 In Fiji, Andrews lived among the labourers, compiling a report on conditions at first hand. He drew particular attention to the plight of Indian women in labour camps: heavily outnumbered by men, they were routinely fought over, assaulted and abused. ‘[E]ach woman has to serve three males’, he stated plainly; this was a ‘moral evil’ demanding response.Footnote 59
His report sparked outrage in India, largely on account of the dishonour seen to be done to Indian women, and was accepted by the viceroy, Lord Hardinge. An Abolition Act was drawn up, but the Colonial Office delayed implementation to the extent that Andrews returned to Fiji in 1917 to compile yet more evidence in order to make the case for abolition irrefutable. His second report was controversial, yet effective: indentured labour was officially ended in the British empire on 1 January 1920.Footnote 60 This was a seismic reform ‘almost equal to the abolition of slavery’, one biographer has argued, and Andrews achieved it ‘virtually on his own’.Footnote 61
Andrews's efforts on behalf of indentured labour won him the title in India Dinabandhu (‘friend of the poor’) by which he is still known.Footnote 62 This, and his manner of putting himself alongside the labourers, and seeing Christ in their midst, clearly demonstrates a continuity with his life with the poor in England. Strikingly, his campaign also followed the modus operandi of urban Christian Socialists: gathering statistics, gaining audiences with public and private authorities (frequently through Oxbridge and established Church connections), exerting moral pressure, demanding a ‘moral evil’ be ended and claiming the need for a ‘moral victory’.Footnote 63
Christian Socialists and Empire
For all this apparent continuity in method and approach between the imperial and home contexts, C. F. Andrews's views on the British empire itself, as they evolved in India, South Africa, Fiji and elsewhere, departed in varying degrees from those of other Anglican Christian Socialists of his time.
This is perhaps most evident in relation to Brooke Foss Westcott's opinions on the empire. For Westcott, the British empire was a largely positive opportunity for the English nation and English Church to prepare ‘the brotherhood of Christian nations’.Footnote 64 His perspective was notably that of someone with little if any first-hand experience of the empire outside Britain.Footnote 65 His thinking, most especially on India, was thus informed by his imagination, which drew upon his reading and hearing the accounts of acquaintances and family members. In an essay on ‘Empire’, Westcott wrote plainly of ‘our race-obligations, especially in Africa and India’, to spread the Christian message. He looked approvingly to a time ‘when India will finally be organised in distinct nations under our paramount power’.Footnote 66 In the same essay, he made clear his view of the Church as intimately bound up with empire, to the point of making the idea of empire almost ‘holy’. Through the unceasing ministry of the Church, he wrote, ‘each earthly Empire reaches its end in the largest ordered society of men; and in due time ‘the kingdom’ . . . of the world becomes “the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ”’.Footnote 67
Westcott's acceptance of the fact of empire, and even enthusiasm for its opportunities, has been considered representative of ‘an older generation’ of Christian Socialists.Footnote 68 Certainly, F. D. Maurice's contemporary, J. M. Ludlow, held a similarly benign view of British imperial institutions.Footnote 69 But by the 1880s, a few younger members of the radical Guild of St Matthew were more willing to condemn colonialism, one declaring that its effect was to ‘dram, drug and syphilise’ native populations, particularly in Africa.Footnote 70 In time, ‘Jingoism’ and the Boer War provoked the indignation of Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland, the leading Anglican Christian Socialists after Westcott. Their critiques nevertheless focused largely on imperial sins in South Africa: land-seizures from Boer famers, and – most notoriously – the placing of Boer families in newly invented concentration camps.Footnote 71 According to Peter Jones, Gore, Scott Holland and other Christian Socialists were influenced by John Hobson's theory of imperialism as a tool of capitalism.Footnote 72 War in South Africa, like other colonial exploits, looked suspiciously like the British state serving dubious capitalist concerns: securing mining interests, markets for manufactured goods, and yet more engineering projects to railway the world.
Once again, neither Gore nor Scott Holland, by this stage of their lives at least, had any real exposure to the reality of colonial contexts.Footnote 73 Empire, for them, was still encountered in newspapers, books and letters. It was thus, as for Westcott, imagined. Gore and Scott Holland certainly felt the empire's effects in urban Britain, in London and Birmingham, for instance. However, their moral horizon lifted principally to detect the extended arms of British militarism and capitalism as they reached out from its metropole. Without experiencing colonialism themselves, English Christian Socialists had little consciousness of how their moral critique and moral pressure might be applied there.
Andrews was different. Experiencing empire at first hand, he took concerns and principles common to the Anglican Christian Socialist tradition developed in an urban industrial setting, and applied them in colonial circumstances. Contrary to existing biographies, his extraordinary life and achievements may be seen clearly to be born of both the formative experience of becoming a Christian Socialist in the 1890s and his years in India. His significance in Anglican history, as distinguished from, say, the history of modern India, is therefore his creative realization of the imperial implications of Christian Socialist notions of human brotherhood, finding Christ amidst the poor and protesting moral and social wrongs. In the life of C. F. Andrews, empire reshaped Anglican social thought, giving it global purchase. In subsequent generations, Anglican campaigners against such evils as apartheid in South Africa or slum conditions in rapidly urbanizing Hong Kong likewise protested against moral and social wrongs on the basis of their own personal experience, witness and presence.Footnote 74 Significantly earlier, Andrews had shown how this Anglican social conscience reached not only within the parameters of the Church of England, from London to the north-east of England, but to India and Fiji; or, to put it another way, even to the ends of the earth.
