Taking Christianity to China: Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850-1950
442
Taking Christianity to China: Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850-1950
442eBook
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Overview
Beginning early in the 19th century, the American missionary movement made slow headway in China. Alabamians became part of that small beachhead. After 1900 both the money and personnel rapidly expanded, peaking in the early 1920s. By the 1930s many American denominations became confused and divided over the appropriateness of the missionary endeavor. Secular American intellectuals began to criticize missionaries as meddling do-gooders trying to impose American Evangelicalism on a proud, ancient culture.
By examining the lives of 47 Alabama missionaries who served in China between 1850 and 1950, Flynt and Berkley reach a different conclusion. Although Alabama missionaries initially fit the negative description of Americans trying to superimpose their own values and beliefs on "heathen," they quickly learned to respect Chinese civilization. The result was a new synthesis, neither entirely southern nor entirely Chinese. Although previous works focus on the failure of Christianity to change China, this book focuses on the degree to which their service in China changed Alabama missionaries. And the change was profound.
In their consideration of 47 missionaries from a single state--their call to missions, preparation for service in China, living, working, contacts back home, cultural clashes, political views, internal conflicts, and gender relations--the authors suggest that the efforts by Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries from Alabama were not the failure judged by many historians. In fact, the seeds sown in the hundred years before the Communist revolution in 1950 seem to be reaping a rich harvest in the declining years of the 20th century, when the number of Chinese Christians is estimated by some to be as high as one hundred million.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817391560 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 442 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Wayne Flynt is a distinguished university professor emeritus at Auburn University and the author or coauthor of twelve books, including Alabama in the Twentieth Century; Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie; Dixie's Forgotten People: The South's Poor Whites; and a memoir, Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives.
Gerald W. Berkley is an assistant director for International Support Services at Virginia Tech.
Read an Excerpt
Taking Christianity to China
Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850-1950
By Wayne Flynt, Gerald W. Berkley
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1997 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8900-0
CHAPTER 1
The light of science and revelation
The Mission
British missionary Robert Morrison, dispatched to China in 1807 by the London Missionary Society, defined his goal directly: "the light of science and revelation will ... peacefully and gradually shed their lustre on the Eastern limit of Asia and the islands of the rising sun." Just so simply did he explain for himself and succeeding generations of Christians the imperative beckoning them to Asia.
At the core of Morrison's vision was the truth revealed in Christ. His gospel proclaimed a merciful and loving God who, through the person of his son, Jesus Christ, sought to save all people at all times and in all places. This gospel contained revolutionary power to change both individuals and society. Once converted, disciples assumed the sacred duty of converting others. The task might take them to the ends of the earth or to their neighbors next door, but each Christian bore the grave responsibility of responding faithfully to God's call wherever it might lead.
This theology did not exist in a vacuum. It occurred in the context of two rich though quite different cultures, one rooted in Hebrew, Greek, and Christian thought, the other anchored in rich oriental values. One of those cultures was vigorously expansive during the nineteenth century. The other was defensive. The United States confidently boasted of its vigorous democracy. China's government was declining into the final and decadent stages of a long dynastic cycle. The United States was rapidly accumulating wealth with which to finance its economic, military, and cultural adventures abroad. China experienced grinding and pervasive poverty. American society championed rugged individualism and democratic values. Chinese society was organized around the family and retained hierarchical and authoritarian institutions. Americans pioneered new and exciting technologies, especially in transportation and medicine, that hastened the efficient movement of people over long distances and revolutionized health care. Chinese enthroned tradition, resisted technology, and paid a frightful price in deadly epidemics and stultifying inertia.
New theological currents coursing through Western thought also influenced missions. The rise of evangelicalism in the eighteenth century and the spread of millennial expectations in the nineteenth spawned reform movements both in Britain and in the United States. The belief in Christ's imminent return and the end of time lent great urgency to the work of conversion. Revivals swept the United States at the beginning, middle, and end of the nineteenth century, energizing the church, winning millions of converts, and attracting enormous riches. Lay movements mobilized masses of Christians, both men and women, as they had seldom been inspired before in Christian history.
If China and the United States were unlike in many ways, they were remarkably similar in one critical regard. From ancient times Chinese had regarded themselves as the most civilized of peoples and their land as the "Middle Kingdom." Other races and nations had to be tolerated patiently, tutored in the ways of civilization, and encouraged to adopt Chinese ways. To assume that such an advanced civilization would deign to borrow from barbarians or to covet their lands, technology, social organization, or religion was ludicrous and incomprehensible to the Chinese.
Americans, having just cast off imperial dominion and established a republic founded on democratic values, believed that they were a chosen race, a special people ordained by God for some great purpose. Their references to themselves and their nation as a "New Zion," a "holy city set on a hill," a "New Jerusalem" squared with their own expansive notions of divine destiny but made them disgustingly self-righteous to others. Although they did not refer to the United States as the "Middle Kingdom," that is nonetheless the way they understood their nation's destiny. Freed from the petty despotism of autocratic monarchs and corrupt priests, they envisioned their land as a new chance for humanity. And events in Europe and Latin America lent credence to their vision by spawning democratic revolutions inspired by the U.S. example.
The rapid territorial expansion and economic growth of the United States convinced its citizens that both divine Providence and secular enlightenment favored its mission in the world. Thus the natural reaction to so favored status was the desire to share the fruits of democracy, technology, and Christianity with less favored peoples; or, as Robert Morrison put it so well, to shed the lustre of science and revelation on the eastern limits of Asia.
Obviously, when a group of influential people moved to China believing that the true interests of the Chinese people could best be served by forsaking their traditional religion and reorganizing their culture around Western values, disharmony resulted. All missionaries, whether Catholic or Protestant, fundamentalist or liberal, agreed on the ultimate goal of replacing Chinese religions with Christianity, even if they crafted different strategies to achieve this objective. The goal of Christianizing China produced conflict with governing officials and traditional elites, especially in the cities.
The missionaries' task would have been simpler had they come by themselves. Unfortunately, they did not. They came in the vanguard of a colonist migration to China that brought merchants, diplomats, soldiers, and sailors. Although all were Westerners, their impact on China varied widely. Diplomats and their military cohorts, together with businessmen, viewed themselves as short-term residents. This fact made them reluctant to learn the difficult language, which in turn limited their access to Chinese residents. They were unlikely to know much about Chinese history, culture, or customs. Nor did they venture beyond the treaty ports along the coast. In all these ways, missionaries increasingly diverged from their colleagues.
This divergence came in gradual stages. During the early decades of their effort missionaries frequently turned to their governmental cohorts for protection and support. Pioneer missionary Robert Morrison served as translator for the British East India Company and often accompanied British diplomats to Peking as interpreter. Many American missionaries served similar quasi-economic and political roles. This might be a natural response to Chinese violence and provocation, but it portrayed British and American missionaries as pawns of Western political and economic colonialism. As generations passed, missionaries grew more independent and critical of the West's governmental presence and policy.
This change over time is a critical component in the missionary experience. Missionary attitudes were not static. As change occurred they adapted both strategies and methodologies to new circumstances.
Although no simple periodization exactly fits the Protestant missionary experience in China, three broad epochs help define it. The first began with Morrison's arrival and lasted until greatly expanded efforts began about 1880. This initial period was characterized by slow growth of the missionary force and of its converts. Attention centered on evangelism, although rudimentary educational and medical work began as well. Building the missionary infrastructure was critical: these pioneers gradually established patterns of residency (the missionary compound), translated the Bible into Chinese, pioneered work in lexicography, and created organizational structures. Only three of the forty-seven Alabama missionaries discussed in this work served most of their careers during these years, although one of these, Martha Foster Crawford, became a central figure on both sides of the Pacific.
The second period began with a greatly expanded lay movement and the accelerating influence of millennial theology in the 1880s and exploded after the turn of the century. Fueled by enormous growth in wealth of the United States as well as endorsement by its most prestigious statesmen, the missionary effort in China took on aspects of a national crusade.
At the same time, both strategy and tactics subtly changed. Although individual conversions remained the keystone of mission work, the influence of social Christianity found its way to China. Educational, scientific, medical, and other social ministries attracted a larger share of the missionary force and funding. Chinese officials changed from a position of open hostility to Christianity before 1900 to one of growing acceptance and support, albeit for oftentimes self-serving and pragmatic reasons. Coincidentally, the success of the mission enterprise as judged by numbers of converts matched the growth of new missionaries and ministries. Twenty-three Alabama missionaries ministered in China primarily during these four decades.
The decades after 1920 saw the slow but steady decline of Protestant missions. The rapid growth of Chinese nationalism resulted in increased criticism of Christian missionaries, who were often indistinguishable from other kinds of Western imperialists. Three cycles of civil war interrupted by a decade-long Japanese invasion disrupted China internally. Debates between fundamentalists and modernists crippled mission support back home, and combatants often exported their intramural disagreements to mission fields. Women, who had become more assertive of their own sexual rights and more frequently wed into companionate marriages, were less inclined to undertake single and isolated careers as missionaries. Secularists and religious liberals increasingly proclaimed that all religions contained elements of truth, Taoism and Buddhism no less than Christianity. Embarrassed by the intellectual presumptuousness of a religion that proclaimed exclusive loyalty and millennial urgency, mainstream American denominations began to back away from missions. Furthermore, the expanding wealth of three decades ended in the most severe depression in American history. By the time the Great Depression ended and funds were again flowing into mission coffers, Japanese aggression had cut lines of communication and blocked access to China's interior. Civil war between Nationalists and Communists followed the Japanese war, ending the century-long Protestant mission effort by 1950. Although this final period provided the most introspective missionary critique of U.S. policy, the most sympathetic analysis of Chinese culture, and the most radical effort to reform economic and social conditions, it also experienced disruptive battles with mission agencies over the role of Chinese Christian leadership in churches and schools. Twenty-one Alabama missionaries labored during these tumultuous times.
Within each of these three periods complex political, economic, and cultural issues interacted. Although the first American missionary agency, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, began in Boston in 1810, the first American Protestant missionaries arrived later. During these first decades most China missionaries came from New England and located in the city of Canton in southern China. Not until the 1842 Treaty of Nanking were foreigners allowed to settle elsewhere. At this historic juncture a generation of labor by their little company had netted American missionaries only six Protestant converts. The British acquisition of Hong Kong and the opening of five so-called treaty ports by the Treaty of Nanking (Canton, Shanghai, Foochow, Amoy, and Ningpo) provided new possibilities for Protestant missions. The treaty specifically permitted the erection of churches within these five cities and exempted foreigners from Chinese law.
Additional treaties forced upon China during the 1840s and 1850s opened the country's interior to colonialist penetration. James Hudson Taylor, energized by his belief in Christ's imminent return, established the China Inland Mission in 1866. Concentrating exclusively on evangelism, his interdenominational and millennialistic missions moved beyond the port cities and into China's interior. This movement took missionaries beyond sophisticated cities with their hostile mandarins (the name Westerners gave to Chinese officials) into rural towns and villages where simple and illiterate farmers frequently interpreted Christianity as just another sect of traditional folk religions and welcomed the strange people who proclaimed a message of goodwill.
During these first decades missionaries established five types of activities: preaching, teaching, healing, publishing, and distributing tracts. Chapel preaching became the central form of proclamation. Educational activities consisted primarily of teaching English, the Bible, and other Christian materials. Western merchants supported educational efforts through the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge among the Chinese. The first Western-style hospital, an ophthalmic facility in Canton, admitted patients in 1835. Missionary hospitals and dispensaries provided the only Western medicine available in China during most of the century. Book and tract distribution relied on the same system of colporteurs who hawked such materials for a small fee in the United States. They usually gave away religious tracts or charged a nominal amount for them and for books.
Translation and printing absorbed enormous time and energy during this first epoch of missions. Missionaries completed several translations of the Bible between 1819 and 1823, as well as tracts and a catechism. The American Bible Society issued a simplified vernacular Chinese version in 1871. Between 1833 and 1914 all or portions of the Chinese Bible reached circulation of more than twenty million copies. So valued was this work that several professionally trained printers were appointed to China among the earliest missionaries.
Although conversion was the object of all these activities, missionaries were cautious about converts. They realized that Chinese could and did take advantage of their gullibility. One exceptionally naive missionary, Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff, employed a number of converts as native evangelists and colporteurs operating out of Hong Kong. Despite their inflated reports of souls converted and sermons preached, many of them turned out to be unscrupulous hustlers who never left the island, spent their expense money on opium, and sold the literature supplied by their employer to a printer who promptly resold it to Gutzlaff. This scandal became public just as missionaries Tarleton Perry (T. P.) and Martha Foster Crawford arrived in Hong Kong in 1852 from Alabama, and it profoundly influenced their notions of the proper relationship between missionaries and their Chinese converts.
As a consequence of such incidents, missionaries usually designated a lengthy period of discipleship training for "inquirers." During this probationary period applicants studied tracts and Bible passages and demonstrated conversion by forsaking idolatry, gambling, opium smoking, concubinage, and other practices viewed by missionaries as sins.
As this first stage of the missionary enterprise in China came to an end, Christianity had achieved a beachhead along the coast and in scattered inland locations, but little more than that. In 1857 American missionaries in China numbered 88; by 1870, they had increased only to some 200. The total of Protestant missionaries from all countries in 1870 was only about 400, and total converts numbered about 5,000.
The last two decades of the nineteenth century were momentous ones in the United States. As the nation emerged from a serious depression during the 1870s, the economy boomed. The era was marked by confidence and optimism as well as an innocence that assumed American civilization to be the purest and noblest. Religious revivals swept the nation and lay movements thrived. The Student Volunteer Movement began in 1886 to recruit missionaries, and its first winter of work on campuses netted 2,000 volunteers. Between 1886 and 1936 the movement enrolled 50,000 college students; 13,000 of these served as foreign missionaries, constituting half of all those sent abroad. The movement worked in conjunction with the YMCA/YWCA, which also became active in China. The Laymen's Missionary Movement began twenty years later and united 100,000 men in prayer meetings, conferences, and mission study groups. They brought notions of efficiency and planning as well as financial resources to missions. Women's missionary societies also flourished. By 1915 they enrolled three million women in some forty denominational societies, making the missionary enterprise the largest mass women's movement of the time. Their focus on converting secluded Chinese women emphasized the need for more female missionaries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Taking Christianity to China by Wayne Flynt, Gerald W. Berkley. Copyright © 1997 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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