The Pietist Schoolman

After a multi-week hiatus, I’ve finally got a chance to return to our series blogging through Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (InterVarsity Press). If you’re just joining the conversation, you can find the beginning of the series here.

We’re moving from Africa to India, which will be the source of three of the “witnesses” in Noll and Nystrom’s “clouds.” We’ll summarize those chapters next week, but today, I want first to offer some context, for India is a very different part of the Christian world than sub-Saharan Africa, and in some ways an unlikely choice for a book seeking to explain the “momentous changes that have reconstructed the shape of Christianity in the world….” (p. 9).

First, when European missions began, India already had some small but ancient churches claiming origins in a legendary 1st century AD mission by the Apostle Thomas. Second, European Christian missions in India were almost entirely a Roman Catholic enterprise for almost three centuries, until William Carey initiated what Protestants would think of as “The Great Century” of missions.

But third, if measured simply in terms of how much Christianity spread throughout Indian society in the wake of this “Great Century,” then we have to agree with church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch that “in the long term India was to prove the biggest failure of European missionary enterprise” (Christianity, p. 892). Later in his tome, MacCulloch even likens that “failure” to the Holocaust, both having “provided a useful spur to humility for Christians” (p. 948). Which might lead one to wonder why Noll and Nystrom would dedicate three of their seventeen chapters to Christians from India…

Indeed, to this day, India has a proportionately tiny Christian population. According to the World Christian Database (as its numbers are made publicly available by the Association of Religion Data Archives), not quite 5% of Indians are Christian; it’s less than 4% for the whole region, which includes predominantly Muslim countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. By contrast, the two regions of Africa in which most of the book’s first stories are set, southern and eastern Africa, are 82% and 64% Christian, respectively.

Even within Asia, we’re in the least Christian region possible. About half of Clouds of Witnesses draws from the East Asian countries of Korea and China (9% Christian, though Chinese Christian numbers are notoriously difficult to estimate), but the book completely ignores Southeast Asia, which is the most Christian region in the continent (almost 22%). That last number is admittedly higher because the Philippines (89%) and Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor, 84%) are included (and Noll and Nystrom are in search of Protestant witnesses, relatively scarce in two countries long dominated by Catholicism). But still, most countries in SE Asia are proportionately more Christian than India, including Singapore (16%), Brunei (14%), Indonesia (12%), Malaysia (9%), Burma (8%), and Vietnam (8%), and none is represented in the book we’re working through.

And, of course, it’s important to note that Noll and Nystrom don’t include any stories from Latin America, which is home to hundreds of millions of Christians, including growing numbers of the Protestants (mostly evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic) on whom the authors choose to focus.

So we ought to take another look at just how they decided which countries’ or regions’ stories to tell. First, they “selected individuals who we thought were significant, who struck us as personally interesting and about whom we could find accessible materials in English.” That last qualifier is probably the most important in explaining the lack of attention to Southeast Asia, which (apart from Singapore and Malaysia) is unlikely to be covered by many English-language primary or secondary sources about Protestantism. Noll and Nystrom also “had hoped to include several figures from Central and South America, but in the end we concluded that most Latin American biographies included too much Catholic-Protestant conflict for a book focused on the world’s newer Christian regions” (p. 14).

Not to say that India is left by default, but as a region widely studied by historians, with plentiful records in English, and not as prone to Catholic-Protestant conflict as others (not that I’m sure such is a very good reason to exclude stories, though it’s not surprising from a writing pair that previously studied Catholic-Protestant cooperation), it does seem to fit the project.

And, of course, even 5% of a billion-plus national population leaves us over 50 million Christians in India, no small number (larger than the total population for most of the countries I’ve mentioned). And certain regions in India (e.g., Kerala), plus its island neighbor of Sri Lanka (proportionately twice as Christian, but not touched on by the authors), have sizable Christian minorities. So finding three “personally interesting” Indian Christian stories should be no problem.

But the fact that the Indian Christian population is dwarfed by Hindus and Muslims (and comprises approximately the same size as those practicing traditional, animistic religions) suggests that Christianity has faced numerous challenges on the Subcontinent, and I hope that our authors don’t gloss over them. For example, MacCulloch points to several causes of the missionary “failure” in India:

By the end of the [nineteenth] century more perceptive missionaries were realizing that Christian missionary work had not achieved the critical mass necessary to success in India. Like Catholics before them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestants found that the Indian caste system was a formidable barrier to promoting a religion whose rhetoric emphasized the breakdown of barriers among all those who followed Christ. British-run schools continued to flourish, but they did not deliver many converts or enough native Christian leadership to stimulate mass conversion. Indians took what they wanted from European education; Christian schools enjoyed a great success, but it was of a different order from that in similar Evangelical schools founded by the Church Missionary Societies in Egypt…. There the intake has also been from an elite, but an elite already Christian. In India, few pupils were from Christian families, and few decided that they would take on a new faith, even while they benefited from Western culture. In fact the challenge to faith and intellect posed by the Christian onslaught had prompted Hindus to self-examination and eventually to self-confidence and pride in their heritage. They were aware and proud of a growing interest in their culture in the Christian West, ironically as a result of their excellent education in Christian colleges. (p. 894)

In addition, MacCulloch notes that the British government refused to support evangelism when it took over the colonial project from the East India Company in 1858. That year the personally devout Queen Victoria famously proclaimed that the new government was to “abstain from any interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects” (fitting, as MacCulloch points out, with a larger trend towards ending religious discrimination in officially Anglican Britain itself).

The caste system, the limitations of education, Hindu confidence and pride, lack of cooperation between imperialists and missionaries… Several of these factors will indeed show up in Noll and Nystrom’s stories of three Indian Christians, which we’ll share next week.

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