Maligning the missionaries
by Niall Gooch, Artillery Row:
Should the Church of England regret the promotion of Christianity?
In his fascinating 2015 book God Or Nothing, Cardinal Robert Sarah speaks warmly of a group of French missionary priests who established their headquarters near his home village of Ourous, in the remote north-west of Guinea: “I will always admire these men, who had left France, their families, and their ties to bring the love of God to the ends of the earth.” Sarah’s parents were ordinary subsistence farmers, converts to Catholicism from their traditional animism. Their son has enjoyed a highly distinguished career in the Catholic Church. He was appointed an Archbishop at the age of just 34 and is a bona fide intellectual and polyglot.
When the Holy Ghost Fathers arrived in the Ourous district in 1912, Guinea was under French control, and would remain so until 1958, well into Cardinal Sarah’s lifetime. As in many parts of the world, the spread of Christianity in West Africa was closely linked to European colonial endeavours.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to take a simplistic view of the interplay between proselytization and imperial expansion. It was not simply a matter of priests and missionaries marching arm in arm with invading armies. In the early days of British rule in India, the East India Company — the dominant power there until 1858 — strongly opposed Christian missionaries operating in their territory, on the grounds that it was potentially destabilising and would stir up discontent. This prohibition had weakened significantly by the 1820s and 1830s, but wariness of evangelists among British authorities in the subcontinent remained. Even in the later nineteenth century, after the rule of the EIC had been replaced by direct Crown government, official British policy was to work with and carefully manage the religious diversity of India, rather than to supplant it with Christianity.
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