There’s nothing like a European Union flunky complaining about colonialism to trigger off a hernia. There’s also nothing like the grand panjandrum of Britain’s colonial church lecturing us on the evils of Empire to activate my haemorrhoids. So, step forward, Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury.
I’m the mongrel child of two colonialisms—Portuguese and British. I can face Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge and recite the name of every Governor General who ruled India. I can beard ‘Queen of Mean’ Anne Robinson in a Weakest Link den and spit out the date on which British troops gunned down a thousand Indians at Jallianwala Bagh. Blame my history teachers! They drilled this data into my hippocampus all through my school years in Bombay.
So when Justin Welby fulminates against the British Empire like an over-enthusiastic extra on the film sets of Attenborough’s Gandhi, I should be praising him, not pillorying him with juicy jibes. Instead, I am a crying, talking, sleeping, walking, living refutation of Welby’s grievance gibberish. Why, oh why, am I not churning my colonial victimhood into a cottage industry and selling imperial resentment and colonial guilt souvenirs to lefty tourists shopping on Outrage Street?
Because, whether Welby likes it or not, it was the colonial power of Portugal that brought me the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ. And, astonishingly, this is what the Archbishop is slamming in his recent lecture on evangelism that he dishes out like tangled spaghetti.
When preaching the gospel to people of other faiths, His ‘Umbleness Archbishop Uriah Heep stresses “the need to be conscious of our colonial history and how it has impacted other faiths in Britain today.” Yup. If you’re British, you need to flagellate your pallid, freckled bottom and moon it before Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs so they can see you shedding your white privilege and confessing your colonial guilt before you tell them God loves them and Jesus died for their sins.
“How are British Christians heard when we talk of the claims of Christ by diaspora communities who have experienced abuse and exploitation by an empire that has seemed to hold the Christian story at the heart of its project?” asks Welby.
Justin Welby’s grasp of colonial history and the post-colonial Diasporas in Britain is as prodigious as Jamie Oliver’s knowledge of string theory in quantum gravity. Where historians and angels fear to tread, Justin Welby, Sultan of the Superficial, dares to rush in like the Gadarene swine on steroids.
When Welby speaks of “diaspora communities” the church is seeking to evangelise, he is alluding primarily to Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs originating from British India (which encompassed Pakistan and Bangladesh). Welby’s claim that the British exploited and abused these religions while holding “the Christian story at the heart of its project” is not only as phoney as a three-pound banknote, but is dangerous nonsense.
Why? Because far from promoting Christianity in India, ‘the jewel in the crown’ of its Empire, the “ever cautious and pragmatic” British East India Company “studiously avoided tampering with religious institutions.” On the contrary, its “policies of ‘non-interference’ and ‘religious neutrality’ aimed to demonstrate to all in India that their Raj was neither ‘Christian’ nor in favour of missionaries,” writes Professor Robert Frykenberg in Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present. “The Indian Empire was, fundamentally if not formally, a Hindu Raj,” observes Norman Etherington in Missions and Empire.
Indians know how British administrators paid for the upkeep of Hindu temples using British taxpayers’ money. Thousands of pounds were poured into sponsoring the great Jagannath festival at Puri (from which we get the word ‘juggernaut’). “Authorities in India remained extremely nervous about anything that ‘Hindu’ supporters might see as threatening their hallowed institutions and stood ready to summarily expel any missionary, or discipline, and even dismiss, any overly zealous officer whose tactless actions provoked social unrest,” writes Frykenberg.
William Carey, known as the ‘father of modern missions,’ was forbidden from entering British Bengal and only allowed into Calcutta as Professor of Oriental Languages at Fort William College, even though the Baptist missionary was seeking voluntarily to go to India to preach the gospel. British missionaries entering British India faced stiff resistance and were summarily reprimanded or even deported if they disparaged Hindu or Muslim practices as ‘devilish’ or ‘heathen.’
Only after considerable pressure from William Wilberforce, Charles Grant, and the Clapham Sect did the British Parliament reluctantly agree to send ‘missionary chaplains’ to India—and these had to limit themselves to serving British staff in India. Only in 1813 did Parliament partially lift the ban on missionaries entering India.
Guess what happened, Justin? Missionaries landed and established modern English schools, thereby laying the foundation of the well-organised modern educational system in India, which for the first time in three millennia was open not just to high-caste Brahmins, but also to the most lowly untouchable.
Welby patronisingly treats the colonised as mere subjects. Historians, however, recognise colonised Indians as actors, collaborators and even subversives. Ironically, Christian missions gave rise to Indian nationalism and the fight for Indian independence as the efforts of missionaries “brought counter-currents of religious renewal, social reform, and the eventual rise of nationalisms,” observes Etherington.
Cambridge historian Brian Stanley agrees: “Christian missions have often been seen as the religious arm of Western imperialism. What is rarely appreciated is the role they played in bringing about an end to the Western colonial empires after the Second World War,” he writes in Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire.
Welby also ignores completely the role of indigenous evangelists who did far more than missionaries to spread Christianity belying the image of Christianity as the ‘white man’s religion.’ After all, the ancient Syriac churches had existed in India as early as apostolic times and had been entirely indigenous for centuries.
Indian historian James Elisha Taneti explores how women as “informal agents and professional preachers” led their families and communities in conversion movements towards Christianity. Some of these women led and served their communities as schoolteachers, nurses, and Bible women. In his monograph Caste, Gender, and Christianity in Colonial India: Telegu Women in Mission, Taneti explains how the British administration opened up education and employment to the marginalised segments of Indian society, “inadvertently provided them space to renegotiate their social standing.”
Evangelical missionary preaching and the legal protection to make religious choices under the British Raj not only “muddied the cultural norm” but the “exposure to modernity resulted in dissent within the dominant and heightened the aspirations of the disenfranchised for reforms. Taking advantage of the cultural unrest and educational opportunities, the subjugated groups pursued their struggles against the status quo and made inroads not seen before.”
Welby’s anti-colonial screed a la Edward Said and the Empire-bashing brigade does not arise from his passion for evangelism. It arises from “the conviction that Western culture is constitutively defined by a virtually uninterrupted series of crimes visited upon other groups: blacks, women, homosexuals, natives of the Third World,” as Indian-American author Dinesh D’Souza stresses, and that Western Christianity is complicit in this colonial conspiracy.
Eerily, by arresting street preachers and clamping down on Christianity through its draconian policies, today’s British government is repeating what the colonial administration did in India—preventing Christian mission—this time in Britain! And Justin Welby is colluding in this anti-Christian enterprise by hanging the millstone of colonial guilt around the necks of today’s Christian missionaries.
I wonder if any other ABoC in living memory has been as inept, and with such a tendency for not putting his brain in gear before speaking as Brother Justin?
Mind you, what’s the alternative? Helen Ann Hartley or Nurse Sarah? Maybe it’s better he doesn’t go!
As an Englishman who had no say in the circumstances of my conception and birth, I am nevertheless grateful to have been born into a country which thanks to the influence of Christianity was a good place to be born, and which I still see as worth defending.
(It is indeed worth noting that despite our much maligned colonial history, folk from all over the world seem to want to come and live here amongst us ‘evil colonialists’. A paradox indeed…)
Like many native English citizens I had a father, uncles and forbears who at some point in their lives were conscripted or volunteered to fight ‘for king and country.’ Sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly.
I recognise that we British got things wrong. We exploited territories overseas, we were involved in slavery, we were ruthless in putting down opposition etc.
We exported our class system and snobbery around the Empire, and our aversion to clear and decisive thinking sometimes resulted in awful bumbling and the glorification of events which other nations would regard as serious defeats..
But I’m not going to beat myself up about it. I’m not going to allow myself to be made to feel guilty by those who might use that guilt to their own advantage. I refuse to forget that other nations, other Empires have treated their conquests with cruelty and ruthlessness, and that for example modern China continues to show great ruthlessness within and without its borders.
To continually cringe and crawl and beg forgiveness for our past sins is a peculiar form of British public school masochism, in which we were beaten on the bottom for ‘our misdemeanours’ and learned to rather enjoy it. “Spank me again Matron!”
We should acknowledge our failings but refuse to be imprisoned by them. .
I agree completely. Welby won’t apologise for his real faults, like his defamation of Bishop George Bell, but he wants us to apologise for the British Empire!
Pride. One of the most prominent sins, and one often the hardest to repent for. Any cleric who does not have the humility to admit when they are wrong, needs to take a long hard look at themselves and ask if they are in the right vocation.
In my own opinion Homer, I’m not sure what gospel he even follows any more.
How I long and pray for the Lord to raise up a real man of God. In the meantime, I must just continue to preach the word as best I can.
Amen, Fr K! And the Lord be with you as you preach His Word in season and out of season. Your words about Welby remind me of the proverb: ‘wise in his own eyes.’
Very true. I honestly think he doesn’t realise how many of his own clergy are now actively seeking a way out and alternative denominations. I read the posts and comments of all his ilk; all prattling on about politics and PC issues. Where are they when it comes to risking not being popular by standing up for the gospel and God’s holy ordinances? Nowhere to be found.
It certainly is not the same church I was ordained into. They all seem to study business management these days at theological college and walk out with all the associated phrases and buzz words, yet with hardly any biblical knowledge, or understanding of the church fathers or the roots of our faith.
The CofE needs in my opinion to take a long hard look at itself and determine if it is fit for purpose anymore.
The sad thing is they don’t seem to realise that at some point that it’s all going to come crashing down round their ears if they continue this cult of nice trajectory.
I personally know a number of people who have converted to Islam because they see a people prepared to stand up for their values and their faith without apology, whilst this nicely nicely soft christianity in this country just seems to apologise for its own existence.
Bishop Gavin Ashenden is right in my view when he says we will be back to being a church in the catacombs.
Perhaps the Benedict option really is the way forward in the UK.
“The CofE needs in my opinion to take a long hard look at itself and determine if it is fit for purpose anymore.
The sad thing is they don’t seem to realise that at some point that it’s all going to come crashing down round their ears if they continue this cult of nice trajectory.”
Only those who have some sense of the reality of a holy God who through Christ Jesus brought us salvation, might do that. Those who only seek a platform to shout from, or a stage on which to ‘strut their stuff’ probably wouldn’t.
As to converting to Islam… Our God has given us the freedom to reflect and to choose. Allah requires unquestioning obedience..
I quite agree. If people don’t hear the truth preached though they will run after what appears to be truth. Let’s pray that those who do have the opportunity to make a difference realise that. Until then it’s up to the rest of us to continue running the race
Heavens, another old friend! I had no idea you posted here Clive, I not long ago discovered it for myself as a subscriber to Anglicans Unscripted. Thank you for your kind wishes. I am still able to function despite the COPD (my wife looks after me very well!)
I do occasionally have a look at the other blog, and please if you can discreetly do so, send my best wishes.
I now know the little quaker grapefruit’s secret identity, bless his heart!
“My health isn’t the best at the moment, but I’m not going to publicise what I have.”
That’s either slightly embarrassing or very serious, so God bless your gentle soul Clive. I will remember you in my prayers..
That was one of your favourite doctrinal positions as I recall..