Conversely, it is with missionaries that Marxists were often ... competition between Marxism and missions in a particular country or region; to missionary's views.
Social Sciences and Missions, No.22, 2009, pp.127–130
Marxism and Missions / Missions et Marxisme We know very little about Marxism and missions (or missions and Marxism). While a reasonable amount of research has been conducted on Christianity and Marxism, missions and missionaries have been left out. This is surprising since missionaries were usually the men and women on the ground dealing directly with Marxist forces and ideas as well as the individuals probably most concerned with the Marxist praxis. Conversely, it is with missionaries that Marxists were often faced, equally if not more often than with than Popes, bishops, parish priests or pastors. The question arises thereafter as to whether what has been said about the relationship between Christianity and Marxism stands for missions and Marxism specifically. Part of the question is about missionaries being distinct from an institutional church; part of the question is also about the empirical reality confirming, informing or refining our general understanding of the issue. The idea of this special issue on Marxism and Mission is not to study the relation between Marxism and Missions in an abstract way – theoretically or theologically. Following SSM’s tradition, our aim is rather to gather case studies of an organisation, an individual or a place. The question of Marxism and missions seems to us particularly important because missionary institutions and individuals, and Communist parties and thinkers, were each other’s main enemy (and competitor) during most of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Yet, as we said, little has been written systematically on the subject. How did Marxists think of missionaries and how did their thinking evolve over time? Equally how did Marxists relate to missionaries on the ground and how did this relate to the Marxist theory? Similarly, how did missionaries see Marxism and Marxists, how did their views change over time, and how did they relate to “Communists” on the ground? In the call for papers, we asked authors for articles looking at the relationship between Marxism and Missions in all its aspects, namely: at home and abroad, Marxism as a theory and praxis, and missions as missiology and concrete religious practices. We stated: “Articles may relate to the competition between Marxism and missions in a particular country or region; to missionary’s views of Marxism; their attitude in the face of the growth of Communist parties or their take-over of power; the views or policies which missionaries might have developed in interaction with Marxism. Or an analysis of how Marxism understood Christian missions and how it deployed policies in relation to them; how Communists collaborated, competed or fought with missionaries. Or an investigation of the connections, commonalities and differences between Marxism and Christianity – and Modernity”. In line with the call for papers, the first article of this special issue looks at the case of evangelical Christianity and the Revolution in Ethiopia in the 1970s. Written by Donald Donham, the text is a study of the arrival of the Socialist revolution in a specific locale, Maale, and its articulation with anti-modernist evangelicalism in that place. The paradox the author proposes to unpack is that the most fervent supporters of Socialism in Maale were former evangelical believers and catechists. Better, all Communists in Maale turned out in fact to have been evangelicals! Donham clears this paradox thanks to a meticulous historical reconstruction of the development of both religion and politics. He thereby shows how unintended connections developed between Marxism and missionary Christianity in Maale and how men and women could thereafter make the switch from one to the other without much effort when the Revolution arrived. Key to solving the paradox is the historical fact that Marxism and evangelicalism constructed a convergent sense of progressive time
and that both offered people an entrance into modernity. In the next article, Susan M. Rigdon looks at communism and foreign missions in China in the twentieth century. She discusses important commonalities between those missionaries in China who were influenced by the Social Gospel, and the increasingly influential communist party of China. Rigdon’s article provides background knowledge on the Social Gospel movement, offering helpful context not just for the missionaries featured in her article, but also for the Social Gospel-inspired work of Max Yergan, which is featured in the article by David Anthony, below. Both Social Gospel Christians and communists in China emphasized the value of revitalizing rural communities, and strived to achieve something like utopia on earth. Rigdon’s article explores several programs of the National Christian Council of China devoted to rural development that were launched in the 1930s – the same time that the Chinese Communist Party survived Nationalist Party efforts to crush it and went on to win the loyalty of growing segments of rural Chinese society. In the end, communists and Christians were at odds because Christian missions were inextricably associated with their sending countries, the imperialist western powers. The CCP if nothing else was staunchly antiimperial, rendering the similarities they enjoyed with Social Gospel Christian groups regarding rural development and an emphasis on communality insufficient to bridge the differences. The third article, by Malik Tahar Chaouch, looks at Liberation Theology, the most developed and well-known case of convergence between Christianity and Marxism. Based on an extensive analysis of the development of this theology in Latin America, the author revisits the history and growth of Liberation Theology (LT) to show the important role which missions and missionary networks played in its “success”. Malik Tahar Chaouch shows that LT, rather than springing from below or being manipulated from above, appeared at the junction of local dynamics and transnational networks (many of which were mission-affiliated). The paradox here is that many theologians and priests “converted” to LT, yet they retained their preoccupation with Catholicism and remained within the institution. Many thereafter remained ambivalent (at times defiant) in relation to Marxism, something which had social and religious consequences. Among other things, a tension began to appear in the late 1970s between a secularised LT tendency and members who were tempted by a return to their religious and community LT roots. In his article, David H. Anthony III writes about African American Max Yergan, who served as a missionary to South Africa under the auspices of the YMCA during the 1920s and 1930s. Yergan was committed to “racial uplift” for Africans, and, influenced by the Social Gospel movement, he proved a wide-ranging and world-bridging activist in South Africa during a fourteen-year stay that began in 1922. He moved easily among the educated elite African Christians as well as white missionaries and white South African officials of the YMCA’s affiliate organization, the Student Christian Association. He also had an eye for social justice. Anthony shows how Yergan’s itinerancy took him not only to institutions of higher learning for Africans and remote mission stations, but also to the gold mines and other sites of labor unrest. Yergan sharply observed the appeal of Marxism in South Africa, exercised through a growing labor union movement and the emergence of the South African Communist Party in the 1920s. Anthony’s paper details Yergan’s increasing awareness of and eventual engagement with Marxism. Working from a significant base of archival work conducted over many years, Anthony gives us a vivid picture of how Marxism and mission mingled in the life-path of a single individual – showing Yergan’s transition from a PanAfrican evangelical to a Marxist view. Our last text is about the opposition between Marxism and missions in Poland. The article looks at the attitude of Communist authorities in Poland after the Second World War in relation to missions and missionaries. Poland was a major mission sending country before 1945, yet the coming to power of Communists after the Second World War led to an end in missionary activities. Jaroslaw
Rozanski documents this collapse of missionary activities in Poland and proceeds to show how, unsurprisingly, Communist Polish authorities tried fairly rapidly to find a compromise with the church in Poland, an outcome of which was the re-start of the sending of missionaries abroad. After 1965 missionary activities regained momentum and they grew ever more as Communism lost impetus. A turning point was the nomination of the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1979 and the birth of the Solidarnosc movement. Missionary activities re-gained full momentum in the 1980s, but this was not without a new burden – from the past. Jaroslaw Rozanski argues indeed that the consequence of the Communist period on the missionary model was that the latter was based on authority, relied on the clergy (rather than the laity), and was reluctant to incorporate the developments resulting from Vatican II. Eric Morier-Genoud and Wendy Urban-Mead Editors
