Civilization, race, and culture: missionary discourses of human difference, their ambiguities and legacies

Three categories of human differentiation—civilization, race, and culture— have been successively prominent in the vocabulary of Christian missions. Using examples drawn from a variety of British Protestant mission contexts, the paper will discuss each of these concepts in turn. ‘Civilization’ will be discussed with primary reference to its most common antonym—‘heathenism’, which became embedded in Anglophone usage through choices in biblical translation, culminating in the King James version of 1611. Although civilization discourse was often permeated by racial attitudes, it was used in both white-on-white and black-on-black contexts, and hence was not intrinsically racist. In the early 20th century the vocabulary of race assumed new dominance in mission thinking, notably at the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910. It was used in contradictory ways, most frequently by ‘progressives’ who employed it to legitimatise plurality in Christian thought and practice, at least with reference to Asia. It then became a bridge for the entrance into 20th-century missiology of anthropological concepts of plural cultures, which were frequently grounded in linguistic studies. Whilst these may appear to represent an improvement on earlier vocabularies of civilization, heathenism, or race, missionary reliance on functionalist concepts of culture has brought its own problems of static essentialism. Many present-day advocates of world missions now reconcile the universalism intrinsic to Christian understandings of humanity with the obvious fact of ethnic difference by erecting hard and problematic boundaries, both between idealized discrete cultures and between the constructed categories of ‘culture’ and ‘religion’.  

Brian Stanley is Professor Emeritus of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh.  

- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.