In recent years, historians of European imperialism have become increasingly attentive to the complex role that mission Christianity played within the larger colonial project. But if scholars of the “new imperial history” have been eager to incorporate missionary efforts into broader narratives about the creation and contestation of imperial power, historians have been largely silent about the relationships among mission churches, decolonization, and the emergence of postimperial identities. This collection of essays—which grew out of a special conference devoted to this topic in 2000—seeks to rectify this void by exploring how, in the age of colonial nationalism, mission Christianity may have shaped contests over existing political and social authority as well as new conceptions of collective identity. Using a variety of methodological approaches and a rich array of case studies, the authors all grapple with the question of whether mission Christianity was compatible with or indeed at all relevant to movements for colonial independence. More specifically, they historicize the struggle of churches and individuals to reconcile messages of universalism with white and nonwhite nationalism, spiritual equality before God with the inequalities of public life, the indigenization of churches with the creation of new political regimes, and colonial legacies with the search for cultural authenticity in religious expression.

Brian Stanley's observation that these competing paradigms were “more often to be found in ambiguous and subtle combination than in simple binary opposition” (6) is aptly born out by the essays, which are organized into three sections. Part 1 explores how European missionaries and settlers began to perceive the growing tensions among Christian, ethnic, and national identities that became so visible by midcentury. Adrian Hastings examines the shifting debate within Catholic as well as Protestant circles, highlighting the problems that non-Western nationalism posed to those who increasingly embraced a vision of Christian universalism. At the other extreme, such calls for “supranationality,” ecumenism, and local self-determination presented formidable challenges to churches with strong nationalist traditions. Hartmut Lehmann discusses, for example, how Germans in the interwar period pinned hopes for spiritual and national regeneration on the ability of missions to promote the Christian and ethnic solidarity of the Volk—an enterprise intimately bound up with protecting the German diaspora from assimilationist forces abroad. Evangelization was also employed as a defensive measure by Afrikaner communities in pre-1948 South Africa, but Richard Elphick questions whether a segregationist stance was a foregone conclusion within the Dutch Reformed Church (normally understood to be the theological wing of apartheid). Andrew Porter highlights another intriguing case of Christian siege mentality in the “defensive isolationism” (99) of British Anglo-Catholic missiology in central Africa, where attempts to restrain the tide of modernity by fostering an indigenous church based on rural African ideals were ultimately undermined by stubborn ecclesiastical authoritarianism.

While part 2 continues to examine the interplay between Christian and nationalist ideologies, the perspective shifts as the authors turn to indigenous Christians and their worldviews. Judith Brown, for instance, discusses the anxieties that arose in India's Christian community with the emergence of a nationalist political culture that increasingly equated “Indianness” with high-caste Hinduism. In a similar vein, Ka-che Yip explores the growth of Chinese nationalism and state building in the republican period, revealing how public opinion cast missions as obstacles to the development of a strong nation-state that would ensure material progress and loyal citizens through the centralized control of social policy. Under these circumstances, Chinese Christians were placed in an extremely difficult situation, and Daniel Bays uses the fascinating life of Chen Chongguie to illuminate the evolving context in which indigenous Christians thought about the future of their own church and its relationship to society. If mission Christianity became increasingly extraneous to nationalist politics in Asia, Derek Peterson shows how Gikuyu Christians in early- and mid-twentieth-century Kenya deployed Bible translation as a means of contesting traditional structures of knowledge and authority as well as addressing the social and economic displacement rendered by colonial rule.

Part 3 contains a series of detailed case studies that explore how Christians responded to particular crises in the period surrounding African decolonization. John Stuart begins by documenting the wide spectrum of political attitudes that different British mission communities adopted in the face of rising independence movements. Stuart, in fact, anticipates a key theme echoed throughout the collection—namely, that the varieties of Christian persuasion and local context were as important as metropolitan affiliations in determining responses to the “winds of change.” Caroline Howell revises our understanding of Anglican involvement in the controversy surrounding the deposition of the Kabaka of Buganda, revealing that the church adopted a far more ambivalent stand than previously assumed, caught as it was between a colonial state that increasingly sidelined its authority and a Buganda constituency that expected more efficient advocacy on their behalf. If mainstream religious groups were often diffident about assuming an active role in the politics of decolonization, Philip Boobbyer shows that the Moral Rearmament campaign confidently sought to shape the terms of many nationalist debates in north, central, and east Africa, promoting reconciliation and advancing evangelical Christianity as an ideological alternative to Soviet communism. The transformative impact of Christian solidarity is explored at the individual level by Deborah Gaitskell in her analysis of the local circumstances and female relationships that changed the political outlook of Hannah Stanton as she moved from South Africa to Uganda in the 1960s. At a much broader level, Ogbu U. Kalu uses a Gramscian framework to consider how indigenous Christian initiative in West Africa—coming from both the mainline “center” and the independent, charismatic “periphery”—effectively undermined the “passive revolution” that metropolitan and African church authorities attempted to achieve through concessionary reforms.

Overall, what may strike readers most about these historical attempts to ground meaning in a shifting political and cultural landscape is the repeated emphasis on the ambiguity and anxiety that colored missionary responses to decolonization. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, most church leaders and missionaries who faced the end of empire did not establish themselves as meaningful cultural brokers. Instead, they largely shied away from taking a prominent role in negotiating the transition to independent rule, often identifying more closely with retreating colonial states than they did with the very indigenous churches they had fostered. If this was indeed the case, perhaps this collection of essays is of greater value to historians of Christianity than to historians of decolonization: for if missionaries and church leaders failed to actively shape the retreat of empire, nationalist politics clearly complicated the theological and cultural dimensions of European and indigenous Christian identity. Moreover, if these essays underscore how orthodox responses to decolonization were often shortsighted and conservative, they also illustrate the resilience and progressive nature of independent charismatic churches as well as dynamic elements within mainline missions. All of this indicates the need for a nuanced approach to the multiplicity of Christianities such as this book provides. Clearly, a postcolonial world has not produced a post-Christian world. The continuing shift in the global orientation of Christianity from a Western to non-Western axis and from the northern to southern hemisphere necessitates the kind of interrogation of the connections between national and religious identity that the authors of these essays have begun.