The British Zion: Congregationalism, Politics, and Empire, 1790-1850

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In this carefully researched study of nineteenth-century British Christianity, Michael Rutz explains the role of white colonial missionaries in advancing civil equality and religious freedom. The author is chiefly concerned with demonstrating his thesis that white missionaries transcended the imperial effects of British expansionism in Africa to advance progressive, humanitarian reform in Britain and throughout southern Africa. In this way, the volume aims to complicate a historiographical trajectory that has routinely highlighted the linkage between Christian missions and imperialism.The context of this interpretive history is the rise of England's Dissenting church movement, which operated outside of and under repression by the established Church of England. Over several decades, the political activism of British Dissenters informed the ideological orientation of the London Missionary Society (LMS), which was established in 1795. As Rutz explains in chapters 1 and 2, the LMS was the chief institution that administered missions to Africa, and its largely Congregationalist constituency found deep resonance with Dissenters' promotion of religious toleration and their efforts to disentangle the state from the parish. Evangelical revivalism itself spawned the LMS's emergence and became fertile soil for the growth of British missionary zeal. For pragmatic reasons, the author shows, Dissenters cultivated an explicitly politicized religious life since they were at odds with state rulers. The author shows how in this context Dissenters produced an evangelical political culture powered by itinerants that engendered adherence to tolerance and religious freedom among Congregationalist missionaries. In this environment, the Dissenting church movement became linked to the foreign missionary movement. And as a result, British society began to embrace humanitarian principles and to mainstream the toleration of repressed church movements.The evangelical Christian progression from religious liberty to abolitionism is the central concern of chapters 3 and 4. Here Rutz charts the role of Congregationalist missionaries who, by the 1830s, had successfully pressed the LMS to take a substantive stand against slavery. This development was in parallel to the ascent of abolitionism in Britain. Among the most articulate promoters of the anti-slavery movement throughout the Atlantic world were Christian evangelicals, and it is clear that the British metropole was no exception to this pattern. Rutz plies a persuasive hand in his demonstration of the important ties between religious advocacy and humanitarianism in this sphere.Next, the author devotes extensive attention to the continually shifting political climate of religious activism in Britain under the frame of church-state relations. Of key importance in the metropole were tensions over state funding for missions. For example, Rutz explains that Dissenting Christians opposed the use of any tax revenues to fund religious enterprises, and they lobbied the LMS to this end. By the latter period of the book's purview, managing emancipated African slaves had become a major issue of its own, and readers are shown how various forces were at work to challenge missionary priorities concerning the fruition of abolitionist motives. So, for instance, the question of whether and how to educate freed Africans became a major public policy issue.The final chapters (including a brief epilogue) turn attention back to southern Africa to interpret the impact of decaying support for missions and a declining evangelical ethos in synthesis with changing racial attitudes. Indigenous nations increasingly opposed the encroachment of white settler colonialism and went to war to defend themselves against the ever expanding system of colonial administrative that obliterated their own economic systems and the social structures essential to black sovereignty. …