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Gloves and hymn books
William Jacob on the civilising zeal of Anglican missionaries
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| Anglicanism and the British Empire c.1700-1850 Rowan Strong
Oxford University Press £55 (978-0-19-921804-2) Church Times Bookshop £49.50 ANGLICAN overseas missionary work is usually thought to have originated in the Evangelical Revival. Dr Strong shows that it began a century earlier, in the late 17th- and early-18th-century resurgence of Anglicanism, when the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) was established in 1703. He draws on sermons preached by leading bishops and clergy at the SPG’s annual services, and on extracts from missionaries’ reports presented to annual general meetings, from 1701 to the 1840s, as evidence from “the centre”, in London, and “the periphery”, in the colonies, for a “public Anglican discourse of the British Empire”. He shows how Anglican understandings of empire were grounded in the long-standing understanding of Christianity as the ground of social order and morality — the state having a duty to uphold the Church, at home, and in the colonies. He traces the working out of this in the British colonies in North America, Bengal, Australia, and New Zealand. Strong shows that there was a concern to evangelise native Americans and African slaves, as well as to minister to colonists; and he illustrates the tension between “civilising” and “Christianising”, and the failure of missionaries to take seriously the cultures of native Americans, Hindus, Aborigines, and Maoris, regarded as “dwellers in darkness”. Distinguished preachers and missionaries throughout the period saw Britain as having a providential duty to save indigenous inhabitants from the popery of Spain and France (their colonial competitors), and to civilise and convert them. From the early 1830s, however, after the formal inclusion of Nonconformists and Roman Catholics in the British state, governments were politically wary of financially supporting Anglican establishments in colonies. This resulted in a new overseas Anglican identity, built on bishops and self-determination in local Churches. The focus on annual sermons and annual reports is valuable in this book, but the context of the intellectual world of the preachers and missionaries is missing. Presumably, living in an entirely Christian country, and knowing about non-Christians only from the Bible, preachers and missionaries had only Old Testament views about whoring after other gods to draw on for their attitude to the cultures and religious practices of Hindus, and the rest. Beliefs about providence, millenarian expectations, and divine judgement drove many missionary initiatives. A sharper focus, in a broader context, would have made this a more informative and useful book. The Ven. William Jacob is the Archdeacon of Charing Cross. To order this book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price") |
