Converting a Savage Mind: Abstract Faith and Literal Savage - Page 2

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Feb 25, 2002

The hierarchy that Rev. Philip inadvertently articulated was rooted in the same theory that led Blyden, Taylor, and others to embrace Islam as a lesser form of Christianity and a more appropriate tool to civilize Africa.

Even within Christian circles, there were arguments about the nature of Christian theology and its application to "savages." By sending out missionaries to "civilize" the "natives," were they putting the cart before the horse? As early as 1796, just before the start of the nineteenth century and the great thrust to convert and civilize Africa, Dr. George Hamilton created a stir at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by stating that spreading the gospel "among barbarous and heathen nations...reverses, the order of nature. Men must be polished and refined in their manners before they can be properly enlightened in religious truths....Indeed, it should seem hardly less absurd to make revelations precede civilizations in the order of time, than to pretend to unfold to a child the Principia of Newton, ere he is made at all acquainted with the letters of the alphabet" (L.E. Elliott-Binns, Religion in the Victorian Era (London: Lutterworth Press, 1936), 378).

This statement certainly concurred with the elitist view of Christianity. The more intellectual an individual, the more capable he/she was to comprehend and embrace Protestantism. For centuries, English Protestantism had developed a complex theology regarding issues from predestination to the apocalypse to transubstantiation. Missionaries could not practically apply these theories to modern African life; nor did they have the language to explain them. Yet Christians felt they were essential concepts to their faith. Instead of recognizing that it had taken centuries for them to develop and refine their theories, many condemned the Africans for not immediately comprehending them. They had a static view of culture and civilization. As a fixed entity, it never changed. If the Africans did not have the capacity to comprehend the complex theology of Protestantism upon introduction, the British assumed they never would. Reade claimed not to judge them, but he suggested that Africans were not ready to grasp the doctrines of the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, or Hell. Instead, because they were musically and linguistically oriented, he decided that their "bodies ought to be trained before their minds" and that churches along the coast should be turned into "workshops" (Reade, 445).

This segment of society like Reade who suggested missions were useless often argued that the Africans could not comprehend Christianity because of their mental deficiencies. Reade attributed this perceived inferiority to racial characteristics. He argued that African children could learn as well as white children "up to a certain age" but after that certain age, "they forget all that they have been taught, and become as stupid and as sensual as their fathers were before them" (Reade, 445).

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