The Theological Origins of Anti-imperialist Thought

This presentation will explore the transformation of European Protestant ecumenical thought about imperialism and racism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, leading ecumenical figures and organizations in Germany, Britain, Holland, and Switzerland were ardent imperialists, who believed that the missionary project was premised on European supremacy over other races, especially in Asia and Africa. Yet during the 1930s and 1940s, a dramatic shift occurred, as many members of this movement began to develop comprehensive anti-imperialist and anti-racist theories. By the 1960s, these ideas became a new consensus in the ecumenical movement, and challenging colonial thought and politics became one of the its core political goals.

This paper argues that the origins of this transformation lay not only in the postwar era’s colonial upheavals, but also in theological debates in interwar Europe. It focuses on several representative thinkers, such as Joseph Oldham and Hendrik Kremer, who were among the first to separate the international religious mission from imperialism. Both Oldham and Kemer developed their ideas under the influence of Karl Barth’s new “theology of crisis,” which became enormously popular among Protestants in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing from Barth’s ideas about the relationship between man and God, they claimed that Europeans could not claim superiority over other races, and that in order to bring about the evangelization of the world, Europeans should develop a more egalitarian vision of Africans and Asians. By tracing the evolution of these ideas, this paper will uncover important intellectual and religious sources of European decolonization.