Lift Up Your Hearts!

We've subscribed to Christianity Today magazine for more years than I can remember.  The publication has been through many changes over the years, and I can't say as I've been happy with many of them, particularly its following of the deplorable trend of featuring images, pull-quotes, and short snippets instead of solid text.  If it wasn't designed by someone with ADHD, I'm guessing that's the audience they're reaching for.

On the other hand, CT is far from the worst offender in this, and besides, it makes for perfect bathroom reading.  There's no need to linger after the job is done just to finish a chapter.

Despite my complaints about the format, they do have some excellent articles not found elsewhere, and this year's January-February issue was a home run.  I'll mention three article of particular note.  Whether non-subscribers will be able to follow the links or not I don't now; they have a good deal of content available for free on their website, but what is and what isn't seems random to me.

The Surprising Discovery About Those Colonialist, Proselytizing Missionaries.  Sociologist Robert Woodberry's work was inspired by a mandatory lecture he attended while in graduate school:

The lecture was by Kenneth A. Bollen, a UNC–Chapel Hill professor and one of the leading experts on measuring and tracking the spread of global democracy. Bollen remarked that he kept finding a significant statistical link between democracy and Protestantism. Someone needed to study the reason for the link, he said.

Woodberry was hooked.  Warned by his professor that finding something positive about missionaries in the colonial era might scuttle his academic career, Woodberry was meticulous in his work and extraordinarily skeptical in his statistical analysis.  The correlation wouldn't go away: 

Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in nongovernmental associations.

"Missionary" is a broad term, and it's important to note that the correlation only applies to what the author calls "conversionary Protestants" who operated independently of the colonial powers.

Protestant clergy financed by the state, as well as Catholic missionaries prior to the 1960s, had no comparable effect in the areas where they worked.  Independence from state control made a big difference. "One of the main stereotypes about missions is that they were closely connected to colonialism," says Woodberry. "But Protestant missionaries not funded by the state were regularly very critical of colonialism."

"Why did some countries become democratic, while others went the route of theocracy or dictatorship?" asks Daniel Philpott, who teaches political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. "For [Woodberry] to show through devastatingly thorough analysis that conversionary Protestants are crucial to what makes the country democratic today [is] remarkable in many ways. Not only is it another factor—it turns out to be the most important factor. It can't be anything but startling for scholars of democracy."

The missionaries didn't set out to fight social injustice, but they knew it when they saw it, and knew they had to do something about it.  Nor did it hurt their cause to have Christianity associated with someone helpful, rather than just the abusive rulers.  For example:

John Mackenzie, without whose efforts eventually gave birth to the nation of Botswana:

When white settlers in South Africa threatened to take over the natives' land, Mackenzie helped his friend and political ally Khama III travel to Britain. There, Mackenzie and his colleagues held petition drives, translated for Khama and two other chiefs at political rallies, and even arranged a meeting with Queen Victoria. Ultimately their efforts convinced Britain to enact a land protection agreement.

The difference between French and Belgian Congo:

Congo's colonial-era exploitation was well known: Colonists in both French and Belgian Congo had forced villagers to extract rubber from the jungle. As punishment for not complying, they burned down villages, castrated men, and cut off children's limbs. In French Congo, the atrocities passed without comment or protest, aside from one report in a Marxist newspaper in France. But in Belgian Congo, the abuses aroused the largest international protest movement since the abolition of slavery.

Why the difference? ... Protestant missionaries, it turned out, were allowed only in the Belgian Congo. Among those missionaries were two British Baptists named John and Alice Harris who took photographs of the atrocities—including a now-famous picture of a father gazing at his daughter's remains—and then smuggled the photographs out of the country. With evidence in hand, they traveled through the United States and Britain to stir up public pressure and, along with other missionaries, helped raise an outcry against the abuses.

Because it was important to the missionaries that all people be able to read the Bible, literacy and education came sooner to countries where they lived.

"They focused on teaching people to read," says Dana Robert, director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University. "That sounds really basic, but if you look worldwide at poverty, literacy is the main thing that helps you rise out of poverty. Unless you have broad-based literacy, you can't have democratic movements."

Why, Woodberry wondered, did the University of Togo library contain far fewer books than he himself owned, while across the border the University of Ghana was vastly superior?

The reason was clear: During the colonial era, British missionaries in Ghana had established a whole system of schools and printing presses. But France, the colonial power in Togo, severely restricted missionaries. The French authorities took interest in educating only a small intellectual elite. More than 100 years later, education was still limited in Togo. In Ghana, it was flourishing.

Pull out a map, says Woodberry, point to any place where "conversionary Protestants" were active in the past, and you'll typically find more printed books and more schools per capita. You'll find, too, that in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, most of the early nationalists who led their countries to independence graduated from Protestant mission schools.

You can read Woodberry's scholarly paper, "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy," online in the American Political Science Review.  I'm sure it's worthwhile, though I've only read the first few pages myself at this point, and eventually it gets pretty technical.  Here's the abstract:

This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.

(I've decided to split this post into at least two parts, this one having taking more words than I expected. Not that that should surprise anyone, least of all me.)