Michael Fry: Lack of progress defines century of missionaries

But it interests me as a historian because it will take place on the centenary of the first World Missionary Conference in 1910, also held in Edinburgh. East again meets West in the Assembly Hall on the Mound, and it will be instructive to compare what difference the passage of a century has made.

The honour of holding the global conference in 1910 was paid to Edinburgh because of the tremendous contribution Scots had made to the missionary movement. David Livingstone was just one among hundreds who had gone out to exotic climes to teach, to cure and to convert, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.

From Scotland's point of view, that was at least as vital a contribution as any other we have made to the formation of today's globalised world, where certain elements of human civilisation (not always the best) are common to everybody. The role in that evolution played by Scots missionaries has proved no less important than the role of Scots traders or Scots soldiers. Remember that Nelson Mandela is the product of a Presbyterian education at Fort Hare in the eastern Cape.

At their best the missions made for a uniquely close and fruitful interchange between West and East, or North and South – in other words between the Christian and his converts. It was necessarily an interchange more intimate and personal than a commercial exchange, let alone an operation of conquering and ruling.

A missionary doing his job well had to penetrate the minds of the natives, in a way no trader or soldier ever did or needed to, and he could come to understand alien cultures far better. Yet missions have fallen out of fashion, and the topic is today all but ignored by Scottish historians along with everybody else.

There were 1,200 delegates to the conference in 1910, compared to the 300 this year, sitting in the same Assembly Hall. They were Protestants only, but they hailed from all five continents. They looked back with satisfaction on a century of organised Protestant missions, and in general on a Christian encounter with the world dating from earlier still.

The Americas were by now converted, to Catholicism in South America and usually to Protestantism in North America. By contrast, Islam remained from Morocco to Indonesia more or less impervious to the rival revealed religion. The missionary fields still full of promise lay in sub-Saharan Africa, in India and in China.

Africa was the most perilous but in other ways the easiest field. No political or religious authority existed strong enough to exclude missions. There were still huge differences in moral attitudes, of course. When one preacher took as his text "Thou shalt not steal," his congregation burst out laughing. They were pastoral people who stole other tribes' cattle whenever they could, as other tribes stole theirs. It was good business and good fun. But such attitudes could be worked on.

India presented a much tougher proposition because moral attitudes were bound up with social structure. For example, the humiliations of the Untouchables were sanctioned by Hinduism. To oppress them represented in one sense a commendable act by anybody of a higher caste. If a missionary told Hindus not to behave in such a way because it was condemned by Christianity, then he might in effect be urging them to break their caste – and few were prepared to do this. The number of Indian converts remained pitiful in comparison to the effort put into converting them.

China was tougher still, because it hardly seemed to have a religion. Unlike in India there were no serious gods, let alone anything resembling a church or ministry, just temples where old men burned incense. The Chinese seemed uninterested in an afterlife: their concern was to enjoy this life. At best they followed the advice of wise or jolly yet obviously human figures such as Confucius or Buddha. They did not expect these worthies to punish them with hellfire – so why swap them for Jehovah, who would?

Many of the missionaries who gathered in Edinburgh in 1910 had personal experience of all this. So, full of Christian hope as they were, they saw even greater challenges ahead than those which Livingstone's generation had met.

One thing the challenges boiled down to was whether Christianity should remain a western religion, with its missions seeking to change native society on western lines, or whether it should adapt itself to native society. For example, what about polygamy? Should it be condemned and forbidden? Or was it possible to accept that a man with four wives could make as good a Christian as anybody else? If not, after all, he might choose to become a Muslim.

In the century since 1910, missions have tried both the old and the new approach. At the airport of Apia on Western Samoa I once got into conversation with a group of earnest young American missionaries dressed in dark suits and ties, just as if in Ohio: the temperature in the non-airconditioned lounge was over 100F. Yet in Malawi, for example, the Scots missionaries went native, resisted white rule from Rhodesia and guided the country towards independence. True, they then handed it over to Dr Hastings Banda, hardly the finest product of a Presbyterian education – but the road to Hell is often paved with good intentions.

It has to be concluded overall that in 2010 the great missionary enterprise is hardly further forward than in 1910. Africa may be largely Christian, or nominally so, but remains backward, even barbarous. India and China are no more Christian now than before. Rather it is Europe that has turned pagan again, in that most people live without any religion at all, and view with distaste the excesses of their evangelical American cousins.

Meanwhile, the most recent example of Christian policy in action comes from George W Bush and Tony Blair. Who among the non-Christian powers, say in India or China, wants to invade us or drop huge bombs on us from 30,000ft? For the peace of the world, as for personal peace of mind, it is better to stay pagan.