The Transformation of the World (192 page)

Adventurous migration across cultural boundaries was not uncommon. An amazing life such as that of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, though far from usual, was still a possibility. Early in the nineteenth century, Anglicans
launched a mission among the Jews in the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian parts of Poland—a “transnational” project in itself. One of the converted Jews was Samuel Schereschewsky, who had received a rabbinical education in Lithuania and been strongly influenced by the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah). The young man then studied theology in Breslau (Wrocław) and made his way to the United States, where Baptists only then actually baptized him. After a further seminary program in theology, he put himself forward for missionary service in China with the Episcopalian Church. Having arrived in Shanghai in 1859, he spent the years from 1862 to 1874 in Beijing, and was consecrated the first Anglican bishop of Shanghai in 1877. Schereschewsky became one of the great Sinologists of his age. The first Chinese translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, still in use today, comes largely from his pen. He always kept a great distance from imperial politics and did not share the proselytizing ardor of his prophet-like contemporary J. Hudson Taylor, who in 1865 had founded the China Inland Mission. There was space for very different characters under the broad roof of the mission.
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The Christian Mission: A Balance Sheet

It is hardly possible to establish an overall balance sheet of the Christian mission. Conversion statistics should always be treated with suspicion. The utopian goal of drawing whole peoples into the global flock of Christians was achieved in only exceptional cases. Nor was conversion necessarily definitive. When the British relaxed the requirements of the law in Ceylon after 1796, many indigenous Protestants reverted to Buddhism or Hinduism.
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Missionary success often occurred where links with the colonial state were especially weak; there is good evidence of this in India.
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Marginal and underprivileged groups, as well as many women, were especially likely to let themselves be approached. Yet, after several centuries of zealous missionary work, only 2 percent of Indians had been converted to Christianity. In China, the mismatch between huge investment and modest results is perhaps even more striking. The greatest breakthroughs were in West and Southern Africa. The indigenous churches that sprang up there—at the same time as among the Maoris in New Zealand—often had missionary backing, but they soon developed a communal and theological life of their own. Undoubtedly missions made a decisive contribution to the globalization of Christianity, and the churches existing today are by no means dependent on mother institutions in Europe. Global Anglicanism, for example, is a product of imperial expansion, but it has long since left behind its past in empire.
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Things look slightly different when we turn to the objects of missionary zeal. Asian governments and a fortiori local authorities feared little more than the arrival of a Christian mission. Its workers did not think like the diplomats or soldiers with whom they were used to dealing; theirs was not the familiar transcultural logic of power politics but a program for the overthrow of existing relations. Missionaries often appeared to be creatures from a different planet,
challenging the authority of local rulers and (especially if they knew an imperial gunboat was available) setting themselves up as local counterpowers. Even if they did not explicitly intend it, missionaries always called the existing social hierarchy into question. They freed slaves, gathered marginal elements of the local society around themselves, raised the position of women, and—as the archmissionary, Saint Boniface, had done eleven hundred years earlier—undermined the prestige of priests, medicine men, or shamans. Missionaries were guests who invited themselves, not wise men called in like the Buddhist monks of early Tang China. Although they might be given a hospitable welcome at first, they soon broke with convention by staying on and trying to change the rules of the social game.

One thinks of missionaries as operating mainly under colonial or “stateless” conditions—in Africa or the South Seas, for example. But quite well established states such as the Ottoman Empire also felt the challenge of this new breed of holy warrior, who let no opportunity slip to project the image of someone representing a “higher civilization.” Such ideological militancy, especially among American Protestants, reached its high point around the turn of the century, when 15,000 men and women from various US churches and missionary societies were active in foreign lands. The Ottoman state found itself in a comparatively favorable situation, since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 had acknowledged its right to oppose the conversion of Muslims to another religion; China had no longer had such an option since 1860. Nevertheless, some circumspection was to be recommended. Since missionaries controlled their own media and had good contacts in the Western press, they were capable of doing serious harm to the empire's image abroad. Catholics were reasonably familiar as envoys of the pope in Rome, who counted as a kind of colleague of the sultan in his religious capacity as caliph. But American Protestants, in particular, caused great confusion with their brisk self-assurance, appearing not only as religious rivals but as apostles of earthly objectives similar to those of the late Ottoman state: they, too, promoted the emergence of an educated middle class.
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Missionaries differed in their effect from representatives of international capitalism, who in the space of a few years could revamp whole countries and integrate them into the international division of labor. Missionaries worked under particular local conditions, building a church here or a schoolhouse there, and in the process reshaping the space in which others lived. They intervened directly in the course of people's lives, not in a roundabout way through abstract powers such as the world market or the colonial state. Local individuals acquired new opportunities and might even receive an education in the metropolis; others gained a new purpose in life by trying to repel the missionary invasion. The effects of missionary work therefore went beyond the circles of proselytes and sympathizers. Local societies did not automatically become more modern through exposure to missionary activities, since missionaries—above all, the “faith missions” geared around a fundamentalist reading of the Bible—brought in their baggage a West that was not
the one of liberalism, reforms, and technological mastery of nature. In any event, local societies faced an unprecedented challenge to their traditional certitudes.

In some countries, the main historical contribution of Christian missions was to assist in the appropriation of Western sciences, including medicine. This was especially true of the work of Protestant missionaries in China from midcentury on. Only a small percentage of their translations were of texts with a Christian content; most related to science, technology, and practical issues facing society. Beginning in the 1920s, the sciences in China reached a level where they were independent of the initial missionary impetus. The Protestant mission played a similar role in Latin America (above all Brazil) and Korea, where it got under way only in the 1880s. One reason why the (mainly US) mission was more successful in Korea than in China, and a fortiori Japan, was that it offered a moderately oppositional alternative to official Confucianism and the dead weight of Chinese cultural hegemony without suffering from the burden of complicity with imperialism (Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910). The fact that the mission in Korea used both English and Korean (a language scorned by the old elite), thereby offering cultural space for the articulation of a rising tide of nationalism, was another of its attractions. A tortuous process stretching from 1884 to the present day has made South Korea's Christian third of the population one of the highest proportions anywhere in Asia.

4 Reform and Renewal

Charisma and State Building

Even more than the eighteenth century, the nineteenth was an age of reforms and new departures in religion. Many of these, though not all, can be explained with the cliché of “the challenge of modernity.” Many, though not all, were responses to the global hegemony of Europeans. Much as basic themes of Pietism—here understood in a broad sense going beyond Germany—took on new shape in the various evangelical movements of the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century in the Islamic world had been an age in which movements of renewal, also seeking authentic roots of piety, appeared outside the established clerical hierarchies.
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These outbreaks of fervor originated less in the centers of Islamic learning than in peripheries such as Southeast Asia, Central Asia, or the Arabian desert (which in the eighteenth century was an Ottoman frontier territory but also the oldest Muslim region). The best known of these movements is Wahhabism, so called after the fiery preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–91), who condemned nearly all existing variants of Islam as heretical and demanded a radical purification. The fury of the Wahhabis was so great that between 1803 and 1813 they caused serious damage even to some of the holy sites in Mecca and Medina, arousing revulsion in large parts of the Muslim world.

The significance of this movement lies not so much in its (modest) theological originality as a “grim and narrow theory of unbelief,” and it should not be seen as representative of eighteenth-century reformist Islamic thought.
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It is mainly interesting for its temporarily successful state building. The founder joined forces with a local ruler, giving rise to a militant state based on Islamic renewal. In 1818 Muhammad Ali, the pasha of Egypt, conquered the first Wahhabi desert state with the approval of the Ottoman sultan and put an end to the experiment. But in 1902 the Wahhabi ruling house of Saud began a period of renewed ascent, which directly preceded the step-by-step formation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the early twenties. In 1925 the holiest places of Islam again came under Wahhabi control.
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Unlike later forms of militant Islam in India, North and East Africa, or the Caucasus, original Wahhabism cannot be seen as a movement of resistance to the West (which did not have the slightest influence in Arabia in the late eighteenth century). The road from a heterodox breakaway to a newly founded state was an exception rather than the rule. In the nineteenth-century Islamic world, religious energy often streamed precisely out of the tension between state structures—whether colonial as in India, Indonesia, and Algeria, or indigenous as in Iran and the Ottoman Empire—and vibrant, less institutionally hardened orders and brotherhoods.
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Other examples of attempts to build a state on religious charisma were the Taiping movement in China and Mormonism in the United States. First appearing on the scene in 1850, the Taiping under their prophet Hong Xiuquan were a social revolutionary movement that constructed a complex worldview out of Protestant missionary propaganda and the traditions of Chinese sects.
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Their state-building efforts finally came to naught, but the Mormons had greater political success. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as they also call it, was founded in 1830 by an American prophet, Joseph Smith, who, like Hong Xiuquan seven years later, experienced visions as a young man and interpreted them in the sense of a prophetic mission. After Smith was murdered by a hostile mob in 1844, his successor Brigham Young led an adventurous exodus in 1847–48 to the uninhabited Great Salt Lake region, taking several thousand followers with him. Other converts joined them, some from Britain and Scandinavia, and by 1860 some 40,000 Mormons were living in the state of Utah. The Latter-day Saints were not permitted to establish a theocratic republic where the people deferred to their inspired leaders.
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Utah was founded as a territory under the direct control of the US presidency, and from 1857 to 1861 (as it happened, the high point of the Qing government's war against the Taiping) the Mormon zone was actually under military occupation. If the Taiping doctrine may be understood as an indigenized Christianity, evidently remote from biblical sources, Mormonism was also a version of Christian doctrine adapted to local circumstances, complete with a holy book of its own from its founder.
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Its characterization as “Christian” is still disputed today. To many people living at the time of its founding, its adoption of polygamous practices made it as
alien as an American Islam. But Mormonism answers the question of why the Bible is silent about America. With its bold speculations about westward migration in the age of the Old Testament, it includes the American landscape in the biblical plan of salvation and is thus the most American of all the religions in the United States.

Prophetic movements, some believing a messianic end of time to be imminent, also appeared in other parts of the world. The Mahdi movement in Sudan (1881–98) had such a character, as did the Spirit Dance movement among American Indians in the northern Midwest (1889–90), the movement of Sayyid Ali Muhammad Shirazi (aka “the Bab”) that appeared in Iran in 1844, or the movement that inspired the Maji-Maji uprising against colonialism in German East Africa between 1905 and 1907. Resistance to imperial invasions or a tightening of colonial rule was very often led by prophetic figures and accompanied with millenarian expectations.
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All these movements promised radical change: their goal was not adaptation to the modern world but its downfall and a return to conditions they thought of as self-determined. Messianism was not a necessary requirement of radical politics. Compact religious communities of any kind could, out of religious motives, respond to outside pressure with active resistance. In parts of Southeast Asia, therefore, well-organized Buddhist monks—for whom messianism was an alien phenomenon—mounted effective opposition to the colonial powers.
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