Histories of legal and of religious change are rarely meshed together.Footnote 1 Human rights are something of an exception; their religious as well as legal aspects have received a good deal of attention from historians.Footnote 2 John Nurser has shown how influential religion was in the formulation of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.Footnote 3 More recent studies have focused on rights and freedoms accorded (or not accorded) religious minorities, and on Christian missions engaged in proselytization, an activity long controversial and now also stimulating debate about the extent to which human rights can indeed be considered “universal.”Footnote 4 Discourse on human rights has altered a great deal since the 1940s. Then, in the context of totalitarianism, global war, and the Holocaust, representatives of many world religions saw in human rights a kind of “world faith to fill a spiritual void.”Footnote 5 Some were also influenced by ideas about post-war “world order.”Footnote 6 From what Samuel Moyn has described as “an anarchic cacophony” of debate emerged agreement on human rights negotiated in part by lawyers and in part by religious organizations, the most influential of which were American and Protestant.Footnote 7 As the United States exerted increasing influence on world affairs during the 1940s, so American Protestantism influenced both U.S. foreign policy and international human rights discourse.Footnote 8 It did so as part of an ecumenical movement committed to religious freedom and human rights.Footnote 9 Many others, neither Protestant nor Christian, shared that commitment. Even so, emphasis on Americans and on international ecumenism obscures important elements in mid-twentieth century human rights discourse, notably the extent to which British imperialism influenced the thoughts and actions of Protestant missionaries and ecumenists.
The British Empire figured prominently in American (and American Protestant) discussion of human rights. With some exceptions, the empire provided a “fair field” for all missionaries and from this arrangement Americans and other western nationals benefitted. By the late 1930s, however, Americans were increasingly critical of British imperialism.Footnote 10 This attitude influenced American Protestant support for universal human rights. What was the attitude of Protestant missionaries from Britain at that time? On matters of empire, their views, as might be expected, reflected the pluralistic range of British Protestant culture.Footnote 11 For all that, they were influenced also by the situation in a particular country, or a particular part of the British Empire. One issue with which missionaries of many different nationalities were preoccupied before, during, and after 1948 shaped ideas about rights. That issue was religious liberty.
Two decades before the Universal Declaration, missionaries described religious liberty in terms of a “human right.”Footnote 12 But what did missionaries mean by “religious liberty,” an issue with an already long and controversial history in Britain, Europe and the United States?Footnote 13 Missionary expansion in non-western regions overseas raised yet further complications, in terms of freedom to proselytize and freedom of conversion to Christianity. Such freedoms were at the heart of missionary interpretations of religious liberty. To those and other ends missionaries negotiated with western secular authority, including national, imperial and colonial. They might request government support for treaty rights and for guarantees of religious toleration: according to James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston missionaries professed in these respects “a manifest obligation to call upon the state in humanity's name.”Footnote 14 That obligation might prove both onerous and exacting. One might turn for examples to many parts of Britain's empire in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.Footnote 15 The case of Egypt was especially complicated.
Invaded and occupied by Britain in 1882, a province of the Ottoman Empire until 1914 and nominally independent from 1922, Egypt remained a vital part of Britain's “informal” empire in the Middle East until the 1950s.Footnote 16 It was also an important site of missionary activity. No less than their British counterparts, Heather J. Sharkey has noted, American missionaries valued imperial oversight of Egypt.Footnote 17 Irrespective of denomination or nationality, however, all missionaries were drawn to some extent into local controversy regarding education, conversion and apostasy—and religious liberty.Footnote 18 This fed in turn into controversy in other world regions of interest to missionaries. From the 1920s onward, denominational and ecumenical networks communicated information about religious liberty to Britain and the United States, ultimately informing discussion on universal human rights. Religious liberty in Egypt also had an imperial aspect. Missionaries believed that British influence over Ottoman and, subsequently, “independent” Egypt was vital to the protection of foreign Christians and indigenous Christian converts. In the nineteenth century Britain used its influence to protect Jews in the Ottoman Empire, a policy that, according to Abigail Green, may have constituted nothing less than an “imperialism of human rights.”Footnote 19 Influenced by their country's legal history, British officials and policymakers continued into the era of decolonization and universal human rights to regard imperial and colonial rule rather than international declarations and conventions as the means by which indigenous peoples and religious minorities might best be protected.Footnote 20 Notwithstanding their ambivalence about aspects of such rule (such as its support of white settlers in Africa), British missionaries typically accorded with that view until the late 1950s. Then, faced with increasing evidence of imperial misdemeanour and resort to violence, their attitude to empire became more questioning and more critical.Footnote 21
This article examines the interrelationship of mission, British imperialism, Anglo-American Protestant ecumenism, and human rights discourse in and about Egypt during the period 1919–1956. Egypt was the focus for discussion and disagreement among Protestants about the rights of missionaries as also of indigenous peoples. Among the most prominent individuals involved was a remarkable yet little known Anglican layman who for more than three decades (1920–1951) served with the Church Missionary Society (CMS) at Cairo: Stanley Andrew Morrison. Subsequent to his time in Egypt, Morrison worked for the relief of refugees in Gaza displaced by the 1948 war between Arab states and Israel. He then undertook a project for “rehabilitation” of Mau Mau suspects in mid-1950s Kenya. In the later part of his career he acquired a reputation in ecumenical circles for skill in planning, organizing, and administering aid and development initiatives under Christian auspices. He already was well known by then for expertise in religious liberty. His interest in the matter formed an important and arguably predominant part of his commitment to mission. Notwithstanding his long service, Morrison's career in Egypt was overshadowed by those of more notable colleagues, missionary-scholars such as William Temple Gairdner and Constance Padwick. Morrison made no similarly distinguished contribution to theology, translation, or Muslim-Christian relations. He was rather an inveterate and indefatigable missionary and ecumenical champion of religious liberty, an endeavor in which he must be regarded as ultimately unsuccessful. Morrison's activism (for he was nothing if not active, over a long period of time) nevertheless reveals much about the complexity of Christian mission in an Islamic country during an age of empire, ecumenism, nationalism, and emerging ideas about human rights.
I. The Church Missionary Society, Cairo
Late nineteenth-century imperial expansion together with millennial expectation invigorated long-standing missionary interest in Egypt.Footnote 22 Dormant missions were revived and new ones formed. Founded as an evangelical voluntary society in 1799, the CMS previously had undertaken work in Egypt during the 1820s, but this had lapsed.Footnote 23 In the aftermath of Britain's invasion and occupation Cairo appeared to Evangelical Anglicans and to many others as a base from which the Muslim world might be subject to ever greater Christian influence. The primary aim of the CMS was mission to Muslims and to the indigenous Christians of Egypt, the Copts. Its work proceeded alongside that of the Anglican Church in Egypt, which mainly served British expatriates.Footnote 24 Under the stewardship of Temple Gairdner, the Cairo mission acquired considerable renown.
At age twenty-six, Stanley Morrison arrived in Cairo in 1920. He had been born at Walton, Merseyside, to Irish parents. His father was a customs official. Studious and industrious, he had won a non-collegiate scholarship to Oxford. There he studied Greats, and also participated in the work of the Children's Special Service Mission.Footnote 25 After graduation, he worked as a school teacher before offering himself for service with the CMS in 1919. At Gairdner's direction Morrison focused initially on youth work. He set up reading and literature-study groups, and organized games, gymnastics, and other activities.Footnote 26 Gairdner greatly valued Morrison and according to Padwick may have seen him as a successor to his esteemed and much missed friend and colleague Douglas Thornton, who had died in 1907.Footnote 27 Already proficient in ancient Greek and Latin, Morrison quickly mastered Egyptian Arabic. This equipped him for dialogue with Cairenes, which Gairdner deemed a necessity of mission outreach.
A further requirement of mission work was awareness of Egypt's fraught and fluid political situation from 1919. In response to nationalist demands Britain declared Egypt independent in February 1922 while reserving judgement on certain contentious “reserved points” relating to British imperial communications and security, to the capitulations (privileges for Westerners in Egypt negotiated with Ottoman Sultans), and to the protection of minorities. This last point was of special interest to missionaries. In the immediate aftermath of World War I British and American missionary representatives had lobbied their governments with the aim of safeguarding Christian interests in the provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire.Footnote 28 Subsequently the League of Nations incorporated guarantees of religious freedom into its mandatory arrangements. In 1921 the International Missionary Council (IMC) was founded in part to facilitate cooperation among missions but also to maintain good relations between missions, governments, and the League.Footnote 29 These interdenominational initiatives were replicated in Egypt. In May 1921 Gairdner, together with the American Reformed Church missionary Samuel Zwemer and others, formed a nominally representative group: the Egypt Inter-Mission Council (EIC).Footnote 30 Morrison joined Gairdner as a CMS representative on the council, an important early aim of which was to press for religious safeguards to be included in any treaty agreement between Britain and the Egyptian authorities.Footnote 31
Within two years of Morrison's arrival in Cairo the pattern of his vocation in Egypt had largely been set: commitment to mission and also, through a Missions and Government committee of the EIC, to furthering the cause of religious liberty. From 1922 his interest in these complementary matters began to find expression in writings on mission, Islam, and religious freedom. Two journals, The Moslem World and the International Review of Missions, would publicize his views and bring them to wider attention. What were those views? Theologically committed to mission, Morrison regarded the CMS as integral to the future of Christianity in Egypt (“until this land becomes Christ's”).Footnote 32 He appears during the 1920s to have been alert and sensitive to Muslim perceptions of missions and the church. He noted the strength of Egyptian nationalist sentiment, and the profound effect upon Muslims' opinion of Turkey's abolition of the caliphate in 1924. He discerned among young Muslim men a variety of attitudes toward Christianity, antagonistic yet also questioning. For mission to make progress in such circumstances, Morrison suggested, it would need to be “aggressive” but also “intelligent” and “tactful.”Footnote 33 Too often Christianity prompted thoughts of “militant crusaders, unpatriotic Christian minorities, an imperialistic and aggressive Christendom, race-proud English rulers, and a Europe given over to pleasure and material success” in Muslims' minds.Footnote 34 The aim of mission, he wrote in 1930, must include the breaking down of such prejudice and the presentation of Christ's word “in a simple and practical way.”Footnote 35 And the CMS endeavored to broaden its approach to Muslims at this time in order to better reach, through education and youth work, the poor of Cairo.
To be sure this emphasis was in part due to the fruitlessness of direct evangelism among Muslims. Progress among the Copts had also been unsatisfactory: Coptic attitudes to missions ranged from indifference to ambivalence to hostility.Footnote 36 In 1906 the CMS, with the Anglican see in Egypt and Sudan, had resolved upon a policy of “friendly cooperation” rather than of conversion, in the interests of securing a viable Egyptian Anglican (Episcopal) Church.Footnote 37 The altered policy toward the Copts eventually was validated in 1923, in a formal statement authored by Gairdner.Footnote 38
Copts' relationships with missions, Muslims, and the Egyptian authorities interested Morrison.Footnote 39 But Islam interested him more.Footnote 40 He became for a time an examiner in Arabic at the American University in Cairo (AUC). He assumed ever greater mission responsibilities, and these increased further after Gairdner's untimely death in May 1928. CMS made him secretary of the mission the following year. Morrison can be described fairly as “driven.” He took on a huge workload, commensurate with his enormous responsibilities (as he perceived them) as chief representative of Anglican mission in Egypt. Ecumenically minded, Morrison felt little inclination to work closely with Anglican bishops or dioceses. This was in part for reasons of temperament: delegation was anathema to him. It was also due to CMS mistrust of episcopal authority, born of the Society's origins as a voluntary association. Within the Cairo mission Morrison became the object of awe, due to his organizing abilities and prodigious appetite for work. He and Margaret Girling, who also worked with CMS Cairo, married in London in 1930. So ubiquitous became Morrison's initialled signature on correspondence that those initials (S.A.M.) led to him becoming known less as “Stanley” than as “Sam,” indefatigable mission secretary and advocate of religious liberty. By 1928 he had begun to look beyond Egypt, to explore the situation in other Muslim countries.
II. Ecumenism and “Religious Liberty”
In March 1928, in Jerusalem, the IMC hosted a two-week meeting attended by 250 representatives of Christian organizations from more than fifty countries.Footnote 41 Morrison was among the delegates from Egypt. The event provided him with an unprecedented opportunity to meet many others interested in mission, the church, and Islam. The agenda was huge, and the published report would encompass eight volumes. A predominant concern at the time, and one noted since by historians, was the distinctiveness of the Christian message: how might this be enhanced given the challenge posed by contact with other faiths and, in the West, by secularization?Footnote 42 There were other concerns also, among them the challenge of nationalism in the form of political movements in Egypt, India, and China. This, together with changing relations between missions and governments, had implications for religious liberty and for what the Jerusalem meeting described as “protection of missionaries.” Freedom to proselytize should not be imperilled according to the IMC, asserting that mission was “a spiritual and moral and not a political enterprise.” It should therefore be carried on under the auspices of “two great human rights alone, the right of religious freedom for all men, and the maintenance by each nation of law and order for all within its bounds.”Footnote 43 Such was the interest in religious liberty and “protection of missionaries” aroused in Jerusalem that many delegates deemed the topics worthy of further study.
A notable participant at the Jerusalem meeting was Harvard University professor of philosophy William Ernest Hocking. He would soon edit the Layman's Report on Foreign Mission of 1932, which offered a controversial critique of overseas mission from the United States.Footnote 44 Hocking was extremely interested in religious freedom. At Jerusalem, he and Morrison established a rapport and friendship. Hocking was in the region also to research a book that would be published in 1932, as The Spirit of World Politics. In this work, he scrutinized the tensions between imperialism and self-determination, notably in the former Ottoman territories of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. “The stupidities of the West, born of its lingering willingness to exploit,” Hocking thought, were “creating an irreconcilable Islam” in Africa and Asia.Footnote 45 Desirous of information on the situation in Egypt, he corresponded with Morrison, who was back at Cairo.
Happy to oblige Hocking, Morrison did not wish solely to furnish him with news. He perceived Hocking as a potential ally in the cause of religious freedom in Egypt, and wrote to him accordingly in March 1930.Footnote 46 The political situation was as ever uncertain, too often bedevilled, Morrison would report to CMS headquarters, by “Moslem orthodoxy and conservatism.”Footnote 47 But there were some reasons for optimism: treaty talks were about to commence in London between the governments of Egypt and of the United Kingdom. These would discuss, among other things, the “reserved points” of 1922 and Morrison hoped that formal protection for missionaries might finally ensue. To help secure this objective he requested the assistance not merely of Hocking but also of IMC London secretary and veteran of India William Paton, to whom religious liberty was a matter of abiding interest.Footnote 48 Paton responded with alacrity to Morrison's request, and persuaded Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang to host an informal meeting at his official residence, Lambeth Palace, for members of the Egyptian government delegation including Prime Minister Nahas Pasha and foreign minister Ghali Wassif. There, Paton pressed Nahas Pasha on the issue of religious minorities, but to no avail.Footnote 49 The treaty talks also ended inconclusively.
To Hocking such lobbying was unwise, and a “religious liberty” clause in any Anglo-Egyptian treaty of doubtful value. Either might confirm Egyptians' perception of missions as aligned more closely with a foreign power than with the indigenous church.Footnote 50 Hocking advocated an approach different from that of Morrison. At Jerusalem he had argued that Christians “must speak the language, and use the conceptions of other religions, in order to be understood.”Footnote 51 Christians, he believed, would also need to reappraise their own faith, in the light of its perception by non-Christians: what Hocking described as the “new situation in the world of thought to-day” demanded no less. By what right, he enquired in The Spirit of World Politics, “do we apply our standards of civilization to cultures other than our own?”Footnote 52 He was nevertheless conscious of the difficulty that nationalism might cause overseas mission. In 1931 he argued that missionary freedom as well as religious freedom more widely should become the subject of international agreement.Footnote 53 This, he believed, might be achieved through the League of Nations, or, given the League's shortcomings (which Hocking believed included being wasteful, bureaucratic and timid), through some other transnational agency not yet brought into being.Footnote 54 Hocking, with other American Protestants such as AUC president Charles Watson, was at this time giving a lead in “rethinking missions” in the contexts of imperialism and of Christian relations with other faiths.Footnote 55
Morrison doubted Hocking's assertion to him that treaty clauses would prove inimical to mission and church interests. To his mind, influential Egyptians (such as diplomats) would willingly commit their country to religious liberty in such terms: by so doing they would demonstrate Egypt's maturity, as a society and a nation.Footnote 56 Morrison appears to have viewed religious liberty as an entitlement owed Christians (whether native- or foreign-born) by Muslim Egypt. This view insufficiently took account of anti-Western and anti-missionary sentiment stimulated by the Egyptian press and the Muslim Brotherhood, which formed in 1928.Footnote 57 On behalf of the EIC Morrison worked assiduously to cultivate contacts within the British high commission, in order to keep the authorities there apprised of missionary concerns.Footnote 58 He participated in deputations to Egyptian government officials and the prime minister.Footnote 59 He continually kept Paton, in London, informed of developments.Footnote 60
British officials in Cairo felt obliged to grant missionaries an audience, though they were uneasy about their tendency to provoke Muslim opinion.Footnote 61 Morrison continued to press for Britain to support religious liberty. The renewal in 1936 of Anglo-Egyptian treaty negotiations represented an opportunity too good to miss. Again enlisting Paton and Archbishop Lang in London, he orchestrated an ecclesiastical epistolary siege of the high commission in Cairo.Footnote 62 This brought no reward. In August 1936 an Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was finally agreed upon, and subsequently ratified, at Montreux, Switzerland, in May 1937. Britain would retain a military presence at Suez. The treaty contained provision for abolition of the capitulations and (after an interim period, to end in October 1949) special legal status for aliens. It did not commit Egypt to formal guarantees of religious freedom. Paton remonstrated with the Foreign Office, insisting that it should support a possible IMC petition to the League, that once Egypt becomes a member state in 1937 it should assert its commitment to religious equality.Footnote 63 Wary of antagonizing Egypt, the Foreign Office would do no more than suggest to its counterpart in Cairo that it reaffirm commitments made in the Egyptian constitution of 1923.Footnote 64 The authorities in Cairo ignored the suggestion.
Morrison's initiatives had been complemented by those of Charles Watson, with whom he worked on the Missions and Government committee of the EIC. Through personal contacts in Egypt and the United States Watson also sought to maintain official awareness of missionary concerns about religious liberty.Footnote 65 For all that, it mattered greatly to missionaries that Egypt should accede to membership in the League of Nations. There she might be subjected not merely to “peer pressure” but also to lobbying by the IMC. Morrison had previously hoped (in vain) that religious minorities in Iraq would benefit from its accession to the League, in 1932.Footnote 66 In the event, Egypt's membership did not bring the public commitment to religious liberty that missionaries had sought and expected. Paton continued to lobby the Foreign Office. In Cairo, Morrison stepped up his efforts in an attempt to gain British support for reform. He managed only to exasperate and annoy the ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, who suspected that Morrison's motive was not religious freedom for Christians but rather proselytization.Footnote 67
III. From “Religious Liberty” to “Human Rights” and a Universal Declaration
Although religious liberty preoccupied many Protestant missionaries during the 1930s, the decade also saw intense debate about the present nature and future direction of mission. This influenced the IMC meeting at Tambaram, India, in December 1938. Inevitably the agenda at Tambaram included religious liberty, which was increasingly threatened by totalitarianism in Europe and beyond. That threat also influenced the agenda of the ecumenical Oxford conference on “Church Community and State” in 1937. The conference asserted that “an essential element in a better international order is freedom of religion.”Footnote 68 Ecumenical networks and influence ensured that from being a matter of intense concern to missionaries, religious liberty during the 1940s would become part of a much larger cause—that of human rights, the significance of which would come to be regarded as at least ostensibly “universal” by decade's end.
Developments in the United States were of crucial importance. During the late 1930s, guided by theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, American Protestant churches moved steadily, if uneasily and with some misgivings, toward an unprecedentedly assertive stance on international affairs.Footnote 69 In December 1940 the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America (FCC) agreed to subject the international situation to sustained critical examination, through a Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace (CJDP) under the chairmanship of John Foster Dulles.Footnote 70 Well resourced and with links to representatives of other Christian and non-Christian groups and to influential elites in government and in business, the commission would stimulate debate on racism in the United States, imperialism, post-war “world order”—and religious liberty.Footnote 71
In January 1942, the FCC, together with the Foreign Missions Conference of North America (FMC), set up a Joint Committee on Religious Liberty. Under the initial chairmanship of John Mackay, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, its focus would become wide ranging, to encompass developments in the USSR, China, and Latin America as well as in the Middle East. It relied upon the protracted study of religious liberty that had ensued in the aftermath of “Jerusalem 1928.” New York IMC secretary Abbe Warnshuis had co-ordinated this process, which involved meetings in New York and the gathering of large amounts of information and opinion about religious liberty from around the world.Footnote 72 Missionaries contributed as also did lawyers and academic experts in law and other subjects. Much of the information related to the Middle East, and some was made publicly available in published form.Footnote 73 Morrison was among the contributors to this information gathering, which enhanced his status in the ecumenical movement as a local expert on religious liberty and Muslim-Christian relations (his survey of “Muslim Lands” formed part of the Tambaram meeting's published proceedings).Footnote 74 He did not, however, make a significant philosophical or theological contribution to debate about religious liberty during the 1930s, as did Hocking and Watson. But his intense interest in the topic and his dealings with Hocking, Watson, and others was not without effect, for between 1940 and 1942 Morrison formulated ideas about religious freedom interesting both in their own right and also for the responses they would evoke from others. Having failed to make headway with British officialdom in Cairo and London, his thoughts increasingly turned to the possibilities of international rather than imperial protection of missionaries and religious minorities.
In April 1940 Morrison wrote to Paton about IMC strategy for the post-war world. Paton needed no urging; he was already thinking not merely about post-war mission but also about Christianity and world government, along lines advocated by the British polemicist Lionel Curtis.Footnote 75 Morrison had recently read H. G. Wells, who argued for “the rights of man” and for a “declaration of rights,” the principles of which, legally codified and agreed, might become “the fundamental law for mankind throughout the whole world.”Footnote 76 Yet rather than with mankind as a whole it was instead primarily with missionaries and Christian minorities that Morrison was concerned, as he explained to Paton. The IMC, Morrison suggested, might espouse for their protection a “Charter of Freedom” to which “many countries” might be willing to pledge commitment.Footnote 77 Morrison did not detail how such an objective might be realized but Paton was sufficiently intrigued to forward his ideas to Warnshuis in New York, where they seemed then to languish. Morrison chafed at the ensuing inaction; but while it is difficult to be certain it is also possible that his suggestions influenced the circumstances in which the Joint Committee was brought into being. In May 1942, he submitted for the committee's consideration a memorandum, on “Religious Freedom and Status of Minorities.” In this he argued that safeguards for religious liberty must not await the ending of war. “Guarantees of an international character,” he wrote, “will be necessary for the proper protection of minorities.” He mooted a “Declaration of Human Rights” and the setting up of a new world organization to take the place of the League of Nations. This should have as one of its constituent parts an “International Religions Bureau” (on the lines of the International Labour Organization) which, backed by some “permanent juridical machinery,” would arbitrate matters of religious dispute.Footnote 78
Morrison's ideas drew mainly on his experiences in Egypt and also on current thinking by Paton, Wells, and others. His use of terms such as “Charter of Freedom” and “Declaration of Human Rights” might seem to have chimed well with ecumenical sentiment of the time. But in its deliberations the Joint Committee sought to distinguish between “religious liberty” and the “missionary freedom” so valued by Morrison.Footnote 79 For advice on Muslim countries, it relied, for the most part, not upon Morrison but upon someone else known to him: FMC representative to the committee John S. Badeau, former missionary in Iraq and lately professor at AUC (where he would succeed Watson as president in 1945). To Badeau, Morrison's proposals were too redolent of the League's mandate system of “international supervision,” and were thus certain to be rejected by Muslims.Footnote 80 Asked by the committee for a fuller statement on the proposals, Badeau composed a devastating critique. He queried how human rights based upon religious freedom alone (as Morrison suggested) could prove acceptable to non-Christians, or Roman Catholics. Might Islamic states be expected to commit to a “Charter of Freedom” as a means and measure of international acceptance? Such an assumption was hugely problematic. Muslims, according to Badeau, would view “with intense suspicion any attempt on the part of the Great Powers to regulate the religious rights of minority groups . . . Moslem states would view such [a] program, not as a disinterested attempt to guarantee basic religious rights, but as the very basis of missionary scheming.” Badeau argued further that protection of rights should have a basis much broader than religion alone. Only by being prepared to “look through Arab glasses” could the West “help prepare the Near East to take the liberty it ought to have.”Footnote 81
Badeau's argument found favor in the Joint Committee. It was indicative of much American thinking about liberties and rights and also about the Middle East. There was increasing suspicion and mistrust of British imperial intentions.Footnote 82 Americans believed that with their assistance, countries in the Middle East could attain new levels of economic and political development (including political independence), in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter of 1941, and also as a bulwark against communism.Footnote 83 The government of the United States was at this time turning to missionaries and other Americans knowledgeable about the Middle East (of who Badeau was one) to inform its policy making about the region.Footnote 84 Nor was Americans' sense of obligation to the post-war world confined to Protestants. Catholic priest and activist John LaFarge asserted in 1943 that the United States should come forth as “the definitive asserter of religious validity, religious freedom, and religious relevancy to the new social order in the reconstruction of the world.”Footnote 85 Such sentiment dovetailed with American skepticism of British intentions and British imperialism.Footnote 86 Disenchantment with imperialism fed into debate on religious liberty. Dulles was certainly interested in “missionary freedom,” but he was more interested in Britain's unwillingness to relinquish its colonies.Footnote 87 A visit to England in 1942 to discuss the work of the CJDP with religious and political leaders confirmed Dulles's suspicions: the British were unwilling to “pocket their pride” and accept international arbitration of colonial problems.Footnote 88
The Joint Committee concluded that Morrison's unduly “Protestant” and “individualistic” (as it especially seemed to Badeau) interpretation of religious liberty would hinder cooperation with non-Protestant and non-Christian groups—including Catholics, Muslims, and Jews. Having considered a range of proposals the committee determined that its objectives would have a less overtly religious focus. The best means of securing religious liberty, it decided, would be through an international charter of human rights, within which protection could be accorded to religion and conscience. American Protestants turned decisively to work for such a charter. President Roosevelt took an interest. In March 1943, the Dulles Commission published its very influential Six Pillars of Peace. Later that year the Joint Committee decided to appoint an executive officer, O. Frederick Nolde. In March 1944, after consulting with the State Department, it published a statement on religious liberty. Nolde went on to facilitate agreement between religious and secular groups on an acceptably broad interpretation of religious liberty. This became an important part of an internationally agreed definition of human rights.
Morrison was stunned by Badeau's criticism, and he sought in vain to counter it. He had consulted with the ecumenical Near Eastern Christian Council. He had received advice—and approbation—from the legal adviser at the British Embassy in Cairo.Footnote 89 His suggestions, he argued, had been “democratic” as well as Christian. The response of Badeau and the committee he described as “self-contradictory” and “unsatisfactory.”Footnote 90 Morrison's account of these events to Paton contained an element of pique, in its assertion that Christians in Egypt would of necessity have to take religious liberty—it would not be offered them.Footnote 91 His campaigning on their behalf appeared to have brought little or no reward. The attitude of the committee toward Morrison was emollient, however. Keen to draw on his expertise, it requested, through the IMC, that he review parts of Miner Searle Bates's manuscript for Religious Liberty: An Enquiry.Footnote 92 Published in 1945 on behalf of the committee, this 600-page study of the world situation represented, as had Six Pillars of Peace, a statement of American and ecumenical Protestant intent: very much less widely read it was more informative than influential.
The book provided yet further evidence of American Protestant ambition—and resources. This contrasted with the situation in Britain. Visiting England in 1942 both Dulles and his travelling companion Walter Van Kirk of the FCC had expressed disappointment at the inability of the churches there to promote the importance of religious liberty. They noted the efforts of Paton, of Archbishop William Temple, and of the ecumenical Commission of the Churches for International Friendship and Social Responsibility, which had published a pamphlet on “The Christian Church and World Order.”Footnote 93 But they made insufficient allowance for the strain under which British religious leaders continually labored (by 1944 both Paton and Temple were dead). Only in March 1945 did British church and missionary societies combine to set up a committee on religious liberty, under the leadership of political scientist Ernest Barker and CMS general secretary Max Warren. This committee would liaise with its counterpart in the United States and also contribute suggestions to the commission set up in New York in 1947 under the chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt to devise the Universal Declaration.Footnote 94 It also invited advice and representations from missionaries. In December 1945, Warren involved Morrison (who was on furlough) in discussions with U.K. government officials on religious freedom in the Middle East. These accomplished little beyond acknowledgement by missionaries and civil servants alike that the issue remained problematic.Footnote 95 Warren was no more able to influence the British authorities in London than Morrison in Cairo. But rather than discouraging Morrison, lack of success spurred him to yet further lobbying not only of Egyptian government ministers but also of Britain's ambassador to Egypt and of the Egyptian embassy in London.Footnote 96 He also corresponded with Nolde, requesting ecumenical support for the cause of mission schools in dispute with the Egyptian authorities.Footnote 97
Morrison's commitment to the cause of religious liberty reached a new level of intensity in the aftermath of World War II, a development attributable in part to his worries about Islamic Egyptian and Arab nationalism. On a visit to North America in 1947, he met with the New York-based Joint Committee on Religious Liberty. Though they might claim to be democratic, Middle Eastern governments, according to Morrison, were more typically “centralized, bureaucratic and authoritarian.” So identified with imperialism were foreign missions that their relations with national churches had become difficult in the extreme.Footnote 98 All this, he subsequently averred in April 1948, was attributable to “totalitarian Islamic nationalism.”Footnote 99 He continued to hope that the special legal status of foreigners in Egypt might be renegotiated prior to the expiration of the interim period in October 1949, agreed upon twelve years earlier at Montreux. Morrison worked unsuccessfully with the EIC to that end.Footnote 100 He also submitted information to London, which the Archbishop of York used in a May 1948 House of Lords debate on human rights and religious liberty.Footnote 101
By that time Nolde, with the assistance of many others, embarked on the final protracted stage of agreeing upon a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United Nations was the preeminent forum for discussion of human rights. Transnational agencies worked to feed information, advice, and influence into the UN. Ecumenical Protestantism did so through a Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, formed in 1946 and run jointly by Nolde and the Anglican layman Kenneth Grubb. At its inaugural meeting in August 1948, the World Council of Churches (WCC) affirmed its support for human rights. On December 10, the UN ratified the Universal Declaration. Egypt was one of the signatory states.
The UN provided a forum for debate about many things other than human rights; it soon became a focus for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist activism. Egypt was to the fore in this regard. In July 1946, Egypt's prime minister, Nokrashy Pasha, alleging contravention of the terms of the 1936 treaty and of the UN Charter, requested that the Security Council compel Britain to evacuate its troops from Egypt (and Sudan).Footnote 102 Though unsuccessful, this action demonstrated, in a new way, the strength of Egyptians' feeling about Britain's continued military presence in the vicinity of the Suez Canal. Indirectly, but inevitably, the dispute colored relations between Christian missions and the Egyptian authorities. Morrison continued to be at the forefront of mission representations to government, notably on educational matters. He also continued to petition external ecumenical agencies for assistance in the cause of religious freedom.Footnote 103 But from 1948 the activities of the CMS in Egypt became subject to further strictures that had nothing to do with Egyptian or British imperial politics. In that year the Society began a worldwide process of “realignment” in the interests of economic efficiency and in the context of an uncertain future for overseas mission.Footnote 104 Subsequent years would be characterized by financial wrangling between mission secretaries (including Morrison) and CMS headquarters in London.Footnote 105 The uncertainty was exacerbated by the steadily worsening political situation in the Middle East. In 1948, Britain gave up its mandatory responsibility for Palestine; the year would end with Egypt and other Arab states at war with the new state of Israel.
Morrison found time that year to attend the WCC inaugural meeting at Amsterdam. He likely felt by then that the scope for freedom of action that the secretaryship of the Cairo mission had long afforded him was becoming constrained. If political and financial reasons were factors, then so too was what he perceived as the intrusiveness of others in matters for which he felt alone responsible. The 1944 decision of British churches and missionary societies to set up in London an ecumenical Near and Middle East Committee to monitor affairs in the region complicated his situation. Morrison would soon lament the profusion of committees. He became ever more disputatious in his dealings with them. Those with whom he corresponded commented on his increasing irascibility. “He has always been difficult,” wrote one in 1947, “and as age creeps on he grows more difficult.”Footnote 106 Morrison was only fifty-three years old and as interested as ever in religious liberty. He continued to petition and write on the subject during the remainder of his time in Egypt, and after. In May 1951 he attended, in Beirut, an IMC- and WCC- sponsored conference on aid to refugees from the Arab-Israeli War. Impressed by his contribution the organizers subsequently requested that Morrison assume responsibility for coordinating church relief efforts. This placed the CMS in a dilemma: there was no ready successor at the Cairo mission. In deciding to second Morrison to the aid project Max Warren concluded that “in the overall strategy of God's kingdom in the Middle East the opportunity of Christian initiative in regard to the refugees must take the precedence.”Footnote 107 With this remarkable admission began a new phase in Morrison's career that would take him to Gaza and thereafter to Kenya, where he worked until his death in 1956, at the age of sixty-two.
IV. The Contentiousness of “Religious Liberty” and Human Rights
In 1954 Morrison wrote that “Religious Liberty as understood in the West does not exist in Islamic countries.”Footnote 108 For more than thirty years he had contributed to missionary and ecumenical discourse on the subject. Eventual agreement among religious representatives as to a “universal” understanding of human rights should not obscure, however, the variety of ways in which religious liberty was understood within the West. Historians have noted the extent to which American Protestant attitudes in the 1940s were informed by their, sometimes “paranoid,” anti-Catholicism.Footnote 109 In Britain that aspect of inter-church relations (or rivalry) played out in different forms. The wartime period was notable for attempts at rapprochement by certain leading Catholics and Protestants, and this too helped to stimulate debate on religious freedom to which missionaries contributed. Responding to Max Warren's request for an opinion, the general secretary of the Anglo-Catholic Universities' Mission to Central Africa (which had a long history of contact with Islam) baldly stated that Christians who proselytized among other cultures must be prepared to accept the consequences of doing so. “Active proselytization by Christians in Moslem countries,” he suggested, “is definitely a form of aggression.” There should be no expectation of entitlement to religious liberty.Footnote 110 That might necessitate too close a relationship with or even some reliance upon secular political authority, something of which many British missionaries were wary. With ecumenical rather than denominational responsibilities William Paton had to combine commitment to mission and indigenous churches with consultation where necessary with governments. It was little wonder, therefore, that missionaries so valued the IMC with its ethos not merely Christian but also “internationalist” rather than nationalist or imperialist.Footnote 111
There were people and things other than ecumenical institutions upon which missionaries relied, especially where religious liberty was concerned. One of the many legal experts who contributed to discussions on the matter was Joseph P. Chamberlain of Columbia University. Paton wrote to him in May 1931 about the main issues confronting missionaries: freedom of indigenous minorities to practice their faith; the right of conversion; and the right of the foreigner to proselytize. The right of foreigners, according to Paton, “is not an immediately obvious part of basic religious freedom, and . . . the grounds on which such freedom is demanded must be very clearly explored and stated.” He went on: “Dr. Watson will tell you how both he and I felt ourselves at a loss sometimes in the Egyptian discussions because of our ignorance of matters which to a practical international lawyer would be commonplace . . . it takes the legally trained man to know what are the real facts needed.”Footnote 112 Yet in the matter of proselytization, Paton would later affirm, it was also necessary to “pass out of the realm of legal right into that of Christian duty . . . The inner dictates of the Christian conscience . . . are never satisfied by the claim for the legal right to win others to Christ . . . It is not so much claiming a legal right from man as obeying a spiritual duty to God.”Footnote 113
Morrison would undoubtedly have agreed. He regarded evangelism as his highest priority, and lamented the pressure of other conflicting duties.Footnote 114 In truth he seems to have revelled in his role as an advocate of religious liberty. He grasped the opportunities it offered, especially for networking. For that activism there may have been a cost to the mission unremarked upon by him but noted by co-religionist Geoffrey Allen, Bishop in Egypt. Asked by CMS headquarters about the implications for the Cairo mission of Morrison's departure to Gaza in late 1951, Allen ventured that it “has suffered from the fact that Morrison is so very much the most vigorous and able person in it; that has tended over a period of years rather to inhibit any leadership or policy that did not run quite along the same lines as his.”Footnote 115 Morrison did things his own way, and this included unwillingness to delegate or (as Allen saw it) to encourage younger colleagues. His formal successor (from October 1952) had to contend with an Egypt undergoing fresh revolutionary change and also with a mission lacking evangelistic zeal, insufficiently committed to indigenous leadership and identified ever more closely with empire.Footnote 116
Morrison made use of networks local, imperial, and international in his pursuit of safeguards for religious liberty. His attitude is typified by an assertion made to fellow-Anglicans in London in 1942: the church must take “a firm stand” on the matter.Footnote 117 By that time the British authorities in Cairo had become weary of his and other missionaries' protestations. Prominent Egyptians were more critical. A British official recorded the opinion of prime minister Ali Maher Pasha in 1936, that “what was going on in Germany at present as regards the Jews was not only far worse than anything that had recently happened in Moslem Egypt but far greater in volume than any religious intolerance which had occurred in Islam during a thousand years.”Footnote 118 The implication was clear. Egypt had nothing to learn from the West about freedom of religion. That is not what Morrison or, indeed, Paton thought. Both men knew how problematic much western influence had been on the Middle East. But that influence had also been to the good, they believed, not in religious terms alone but also in terms of what Paton described as the “liberal tradition.” In the 1930s that tradition was under threat from totalitarianism, which if successful might also infect “the eastern nations.” Paton argued that “to the theory and practise of the totalitarian state the Christian Church must be in unrelenting opposition.”Footnote 119 This too was the purpose of ecumenism, one that would become clearer only from the early 1940s as existing ideas about religious liberty informed and influenced new ideas about human rights.
What are we to make, then, of Morrison's description of post-war Arab states as “totalitarian”? His verdict reflected disappointment, perhaps even bitterness at Arab refusal or unwillingness to learn from the West. What hopes he may have held for Egyptian adherence to the Universal Declaration were not fulfilled. He was too hasty to assert that after defeat by Israel in 1948 Egypt had “come to realize that she must align herself with the Western powers.”Footnote 120 More and more Egypt defined herself in Islamic as well as national terms, against western institutions such as missions and churches and against western cultural, religious, political and legal values. In 1956 it became apparent how assertive yet also discriminating Egypt might choose to be: the Suez Crisis saw the Egyptian government expel British (and French) nationals, including missionaries but not U.S. citizens. This decision followed a period of increasing Egyptian government pressure on mission schools to accept Muslim students and provide Islamic as well as Christian instruction. Ultimately, Egypt's government asserted its own definition of religious freedom—and of human rights.Footnote 121
V. Conclusion
The influence of Protestant mission and ecumenism on the Universal Declaration can hardly be gainsaid, though it should be kept in perspective.Footnote 122 Missionaries accorded the declaration great importance. But its universality was from the outset “necessarily precarious,” and became almost immediately subject to challenge from African, Asian, and Arab anti-colonial movements.Footnote 123 Meanwhile, for American Protestant evangelicals, the ecumenical emphasis upon “universal” rather than overtly “Christian” rights and duties was in every sense misguided to say the least.Footnote 124 Nevertheless, its success in marshalling support for human rights demonstrated liberal Protestantism's prominence in the search for a “new world order” during and after World War II.
Liberal Protestantism's ascendancy would continue for a time after 1948. The post-war world retained certain other aspects of an older world order. Notwithstanding American “anti-imperialism” there remained a place for empires, against which non-Europeans increasingly rebelled. Egypt was a sovereign independent state but Britain still retained an imperial military presence there. As long as that stayed in place, the political situation in Egypt would remain, with variations, as it had been since 1919: complicated and contentious. This had always had implications for non-Muslims, whatever their faith. Uncertainty as well as ecumenicity compelled the cooperation of Christians through local forums such as the EIC. Issues relating to religious education, conversion and apostasy could not but prove controversial in an Islamic country seeking to assert a distinctive “national” as well as religious identity. The difficulties experienced by Christians in Egypt after 1919 presented western Protestants with a problem that compelled their attention. Stanley “Sam” Morrison was one of many who contributed to debate on that problem. Ecumenically minded though he was, he did so primarily from a missionary point of view. That was problematic in a country such as Egypt, where indigenous Christians might be the object of discrimination and missionaries might seem agents of imperialism. Morrison knew this, but he did not allow it to deflect him from his task. Others, of whom Paton was one, took a broader view. By 1936, Paton's biographer tells us, he was more concerned with the freedom of the church than with the rights of missionaries. On the “foreign missionary whose nationality is the same as the dominant power,” Paton wrote: “the fact that he is of the same people as the rulers will pre-dispose him to agree with them and see things as they see them; he will therefore have to watch his actions with peculiar care lest he allow his national sympathy to estrange him from the Christians of the land with whom he is working.”Footnote 125
Morrison could have had few illusions on that score: “British action, whatever its motive, is interpreted as imperialistic,” he had written in 1928.Footnote 126 Yet only with difficulty could someone representing a British missionary society in Egypt disassociate themselves from empire. Unequivocally committed to mission and to religious liberty Morrison could hardly avoid its taint. This was evident enough from Egyptian criticism of missions. It was evident also from Badeau's criticism of Morrison's ideas in 1942. The extent to which discourse about religious liberty as also about human rights became “universalized” during the 1940s should not obscure the extent of difference among Protestants as also between Christians and those of other faiths, including Muslims. The case of Egypt helps show that such difference may be ascribed to things other than denomination and doctrine. Given the British imperial presence in Egypt, Morrison may have been disadvantaged in terms of local perceptions and attitudes by his nationality as much as by his religion to an extent greater than, say, an American missionary. Against that, until the year of his final departure from Cairo, he continued to assert the closeness (as he perceived it) of his links with British officials.Footnote 127
Such links did not prove helpful to Morrison and his cause. That he should have valued them could not have been anything other than problematic for the mission, however strong his commitment to ecumenism within and beyond Egypt. That some of the most pointed questions about those links came from people such as Hocking and Badeau is notable indeed. Morrison brought great singularity of purpose to bear on the demands of his missionary task. This informed his views on religious liberty and also gave them a certain singularity in their privileging of Christian missionary as well as Christian minority interests rather than of “universal” rights, as understood by the 1940s. The interpretation of religious liberty that contributed to the prevailing definition of those rights owed a great deal to American Protestantism. Its influence within the ecumenical movement was decisive. So also was its access to and influence within other legal and political networks, especially in the United States. And as American Protestantism and ecumenism exerted its influence so was it influenced, in turn, on issues such as post-war “world order” and British imperialism.
