The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  In Australia it was even worse. In all but the rarest cases, the missionaries gave up on Australia’s native population and joined sides with the colonial imperialists. Those who tried to ‘save’ them were swept aside by the conscious and unconscious decision that the Aboriginals were doomed and deserved nothing. There was little attempt to preserve their languages or their culture.

  For almost a century and a half innumerable children were ripped away from their natural parents and forced through a mission education which fitted them for little more than deracinated depression and varieties of near slavery. Even here, though, it would be unjust to blame the Church solely. The mission school education was sincerely and correctly thought to be an improvement on the education in the new state that the children could expect elsewhere. They had been abandoned to the marginal remains of their shrinking homelands. The priorities and the firepower of the white British Protestant immigrants chose to ignore the Sermon on the Mount.

  Good work was done with those who had been exiled to Australia for ‘crimes’, many of which nowadays we would regard as pardonable or trivial. Courageous men of the Churches went into those dangerous early antipodean settlements much as their colleagues braved the dark satanic mill towns of England, and an alternative to the desperation of exiled imprisonment was offered and sometimes taken up.

  In time white-dominated New Zealand and white-dominated Australia laid fair claim to be part of a Christian – an Anglican-nonconformist Roman Catholic – global fraternity, and the Pacific Islands were and are also alongside. In that time much of the indigenous culture has been erased.

  The African experience was different in crucial ways and, in my view, hardly surprisingly, it mirrors the African-American experience which came out of slavery. In short, the Africans took Christianity and moulded it to fit their own religions just as the African-Americans took nonconformist Christianity and made it theirs.

  In Africa, the Christian missionaries met other strong faiths – Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, and the greatest of these was Islam. It seemed, according to MacCulloch, that ‘in the early 19th century, the most plausible picture of the future was that black Africa would have become overwhelmingly Muslim, and Muslim growth there remained spectacular throughout the century.’ However, the Christian mission in that same century made even more spectacular progress. The British missionaries took breathtaking risks in their pursuit of converts.

  There were key features in Christianity which meshed with many of the African belief patterns. These patterns were not the messages which were being preached by those who brought their Bible learning into Africa, but they were deep in Christianity and they became the binding that fed the rapid growth of an African evangelical Christianity. Today in some African countries, it is as vibrant and confident as any in the world.

  The King James Bible is a book of signs and wonders, miracles and coded messages revealing to the spiritually aware and to the initiate that this is how God shows his face. Africans were used to looking for such signs and interpreting such wonders and messages. The Bible spoke of spirits – commonly present in African religions – and explained in mysterious terms but in terms demanding to be believed, how the world came about. It described in detail the descent of the family of man. The genealogies were a perfect fit with African familial traditions.

  Polygamy was a stumbling point for the Christian missionaries but not for the Africans who knew their Old Testament and admired the marital customs of the great patriarchs. Certain enlightened missionaries admitted that the Africans’ argument from the Bible was sound. John William Colenso, a Cornishman who became the first Bishop of Natal, argued that the Zulus made a good biblical case for polygamy. He wrote about this in 1862 in a pamphlet addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was condemned as a troublemaker.

  It was a subject which did not go away. In 1917, sixty-five Yoruba ministers were expelled from the Nigerian Methodist Church for polygamy. They went off and founded their own Church: the United African Methodists. Later there was a growing feminist voice which criticised and condemned polygamy. In countries where women were often the most dedicated and gifted Christians, theirs became an increasingly influential argument.

  Meanwhile the Churches went about their wider agenda by funding schools – in South Africa the Xhosa word for ‘Christians’ was ‘schools’. And the Bible itself was not only the location of the Word of God, it became a sacred object which to touch was to be calmed or healed.

  India, by contrast, was a failure for the Protestant missions. There were those, most prominently Bishop Samuel Horsley, who was a supporter of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospels, who did not think it was part of God’s plan that Britain should seek to change the religion of another country. In the Caribbean he had supported the mission because he had seen no religion.

  The East India Company, so powerful that its own army was bigger than the British Army, agreed with Bishop Horsley. They were most reluctantly forced to support the missionary movement in 1813 after a campaign led by William Wilberforce. Proselytisers saw this massive subcontinent as an unparalleled opportunity to bring millions of souls to God. But Hinduism and Islam were deeply entrenched and Taoism and Buddhism had a strong hold: these deep faiths were not to be overturned easily. It proved that they were not to be overturned at all, despite some small gains for the Protestant mission. And the East India Company’s insistence on favouring Christianity instead of maintaining a traditional neutrality was one cause of the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857, the most serious mutiny against any European colonial power in the whole of the nineteenth century. The company was to rue the day it abandoned its successful policy of leaving indigenous religions alone.

  After that rebellion, Queen Victoria ended the ascendancy of the East India Company and ordered the new government to ‘abstain from any interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects’. The lesson had been hard learned. The zeal of Wilberforce and others had unexpected consequences of an undeniably negative nature.

  The belief that there was one God only who reigned to rule all the world and that this God had to be made known to the world that had lived in darkness without His light, was gone. The royal decree of King James in 1611 had declared the Bible to be the Word of the sole God and he had declared himself to rule by Divine Right. That was extinguished. Christianity from now on was but one religion among many and Protestantism was but one branch of Christianity.

  This did not stop the missions. It did not for many years strip individuals of their conviction that the Word of the Christian God had to be spread abroad and the way of the path of Jesus Christ was the only road to sinlessness and salvation. It did, though, mark a turning point. In India, Christianity, admittedly with few representatives but nevertheless with the might of 250 years of the Protestant Advance behind it, had come up against Hinduism and Islam in their implacable might: and retreated.

  In China there was a momentous episode of Christian fanaticism which sparked a war called ‘the most destructive civil war in world history’ – worse in casualties and damage than the American Civil War and almost as devastating as the First World War. This was led by Hong Xiuquan, who had been encouraged to read Christian books by an American missionary. Hong, who had suffered several nervous breakdowns, received many visions from ‘God’. The mix of his new philosophy and the breadth of his appeal included a wish to return to the Ming Dynasty, a promise to end corruption and a vow to bring about social equality. He brought about massacres.

  The missions of the Protestants, which followed earlier missions of the Jesuits in China, made converts and held on to them after the collapse of the Hong Xiaquan phenomenon. But as in Japan and Korea, the twentieth-century tornados of ideological change swept away all but a valiant few.

  The most stunning success for the Protestant mission was in the United States of America. In 1815, active Church membership was around a quarter of the population, which then stood at 8.5 million.
A century later it was about 50 per cent of a population which had reached 100 million. MacCulloch writes: ‘that growth reflected the dynamism, freedom, high literacy rates and opportunity available in this society, and the Christian religion seemed to owe its success to a competitive and innovative spirit as much as did American commerce and industry.’ More subdivisions in the Protestant Church seemed to spring up by the year. The idea of a mission became part of a wider American vocabulary. The overall mission was to do God’s work in America, though knowing what would bring Godly benefits was not always certain. The evangelicals, for example, fuelled the temperance movement or mission which led America to prohibition which led to widespread organised crime. This, perhaps, is a classic example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

  The Mormons – the Latter Day Saints – were another mission and despite the ridicule and persecution, the Mormons persisted and persist. Their polygamous ways trouble the authorities. These same authorities also find another group, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, troublesome. They refuse to bear arms or acknowledge the state. They are on an endless world mission. The Jehovah’s Witnesses still knock politely on doors throughout the English-speaking world.

  The determination of these Bible societies was to spread the Word of God and one sure method, they believed, was by printing and distributing as many Bibles as possible. Bible societies began in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain and America. The most ambitious of the British societies was the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), established in London in 1804. This benefited from the energy, wealth and connections of Wilberforce and by 1811 there were offices in Cairo and the beginnings of a network across Europe. In the middle of the nineteenth century the society undertook to provide translations of the King James Bible in all the languages of the British Empire. A hundred years later, the BFBS had over 7,500 auxiliaries. In 1901, the law that the Bible could only be printed in the King James Version was lifted but it was the King James Version which was still dominant well into the twentieth century. New English versions have been criticised as adulterations, shadows, even betrayals of the original.

  The American Bible Society was formed in 1816 and at their first meeting in New York, the representatives of thirty-five Bible societies agreed to work for the distribution of ‘the Holy Scripture without note or comment’. In the twentieth century, more than 125 new Bible societies emerged – in Australia, but also in Cambodia, Hong Kong, Austria and Chile. By 1904, the American Bible Society had supplied nearly 181 million copies of the Scriptures and spent about £14 million on translations and their distribution. During the Second World War, the society circulated an estimated 45 million copies of Scripture. No book in history has matched the general distribution achieved by the King James Bible. The command to the Apostles to broadcast the Gospels was accomplished around the globe. In 1946, the United Bible Societies were founded, an alliance of 135 national Bible societies working in more than 200 countries. The King James Version now spoke to the world in many tongues, including an English which would have been foreign to King James.

  These missionaries, mostly from the nonconformist Churches, preponderantly Methodists and Baptists, provide heroic stories in the history of faith. Henry Nott, for example, a bricklayer, joined the mission ship Duffwhich, as I have mentioned, sailed to Tahiti in 1797. It left the thirty missionaries on the island and went back to England for new supplies which were not to arrive for five years. During that time several of Nott’s fellow missionaries deserted, died, were murdered or went insane.

  Nott was the only survivor and spent the five years’ wait learning the Tahitian language. He would eventually translate the King James Bible into Tahitian. He attempted to befriend the fearsome King Pomare II but in those five years while waiting for the Duff to return from England he made not a single convert. He returned to England only twice in forty-seven years. This island and others like it were far from the sun-kissed innocence romantically relayed from the inaccurately reported experiences of Fletcher Christian (so desperately romantic in fact that it lured him into murder and mutiny). One group of Tahitians killed their children as soon as they were born: King Pomare’s chief wife belonged to that sect. There were constant wars after which the houses of the defeated were burned, prisoners butchered, their bodies pounded to pulp with large stones, then dried out, holed in the middle and worn like a poncho. Children were sacrificed to idols: Nott estimated that in his thirty-year reign, Pomare sacrificed 2,000 victims to his idols.

  Henry Nott’s line of defence and attack was to quote from the Bible, especially and, he records, repeatedly from the Gospel according to St John, chapter 3 verse 16: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ It had been the favourite line of Martin Luther, who is said to have repeated it three times in his death throes.

  Nott’s house was destroyed; his possessions stolen; his printing type melted down for bullets. By 1810, alone and beggared, Nott described himself as ‘troubled . . . persecuted . . . cast down . . . but not in despair’. He held to his faith that one day Christ would triumph in those islands.

  It is not so easy to dismiss such resolution and such faith. Perhaps it was all a delusion. Perhaps Nott and the many other missionaries like him were in a trance of fanaticism, mesmerised by a promise which devoured their reason. Or perhaps through their religion they dug more deeply into their inner resources than most do and found there a source of conviction which carried its own knowledge. Perhaps they believed because they knew something hidden from most of us.

  After eighteen years, Nott’s persistence was rewarded: or he might say his call to faith was answered. Pomare had a chapel built; 31 natives agreed to renounce idolatry and the number sped up to 800. King Pomare won a great battle and after his victory he destroyed all the heathen idols and altars he could find. Schools were established and a huge church was built at Papara – 712 feet long, 54 feet wide, containing three pulpits, 260 feet apart, so that three sermons could be preached simultaneously. In 1819, King Pomare was baptised, watched by more than 5,000 of his subjects. Henry Nott, the bricklayer from Bromsgrove, had, as he would see it by the grace of God, helped Tahiti to see the true light and become an active Christian community and put aside its murderous heathen ways.

  William Carey, a cobbler, went to India as a Baptist missionary at the age of thirty-three and stayed there for forty-one years. He never returned to England. He was part of what was admitted to be an unsuccessful mission but it was not for want of trying on his part. He had schools built, and travelled thousands of miles across the subcontinent preaching the Word. By the time of his death in 1834, Carey had helped to set up more than thirty different missionary stations in different parts of India. His greatest achievement was to translate the Scriptures into Bengali, which set off a spate of translations into fifteen other languages – Sanskrit, Hindustani, Person, Maratha, Guajarati, Oriya . . . The small but tenacious congregations of Christians in India today still honour him.

  There is Alexander Mackay, a Scot, an engineer missionary who arrived in Zanzibar in 1876. It took him two years to achieve his first goal and get into Uganda. He spent fourteen years there without once returning to Scotland. Mackay built 230 miles of road, and translated Matthew’s Gospel. He died of a virulent tropical disease having seen his bishop murdered, his pupils burned and his converts and friends strangled or clubbed to death. ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord’ was the injunction that inspired him and so he did.

  Uganda’s Christian community had grown out of the example of Mackay who, it was reported, when surrounded by mayhem and threats of death, ‘met it with calm blue eyes that never winked’. Another missionary wrote of him: ‘it is worth going a long journey to see one man of this kind, working day after day without a syllable of complaint or a moan and to hear him lead his little flock in singing and prayer to show forth God’s kindness in the mornin
g and his faithfulness every night.’ Perhaps his example eventually led to the consecration of John Sentamu as Archbishop of York in 2005.

  There were many like him: Samuel Marsden in Australia; Mary Slessor, a Scot, in Africa; another Scot, James Chalmers, in the Cook Islands for ten years and New Guinea for twenty-four, until he was murdered by cannibal tribesmen; and yet another Scot, James Gilmour, who went to Mongolia and died there at the age of forty-seven after twenty-one years of service. J. Hudson Taylor, an English missionary to China, founded the China Inland Mission, which at his death included 205 mission stations, 800 missionaries and 125,000 Chinese Christians.

  In 1885, there were the ‘Cambridge Seven’ – seven young graduates from Cambridge. They had a wide influence in inspiring student volunteer movements and their remarkable successes in China were published in The Evangelisation of the World, which was distributed to every YMCA and YWCA throughout Britain and the United States.

  The records of these people, mostly working alone in initially alien and hostile cultures with languages hard for Europeans to grasp, must inspire respect at the very least, even from the most case-hardened agnostics and atheists. Unless they are thought to be utterly misguided, their undoubted energies misdirected, their intrusions into foreign cultures undesirable. In which case what they did is to be written off and even damned.