Democratized American Missionaries and Black Christian Movements in Late 19th-Century South Africa
If this is true, historians need to take a closer look at the role that religion played in anti-colonial movements. Obviously, the dynamics at work were neither simple nor straight-forward. Given, however, the wide range of missionary activity and diversity of peoples they engaged, certain combinations of missionaries and new movements of world Christianity might shed additional light on these issues.
This paper examines the relationship between democratized American evangelical missionaries and black Christians in late nineteenth-century South Africa. Democratized evangelical missionaries focused overwhelmingly on spurring revivals rather than addressing political or social concerns, which may seem to make them a poor link in the chain of anti-colonial activity. However, in their revivalism, democratized American evangelicals promoted an audience-centered authority, refused to defer to the authority of elites, embedded their religious movements in popular culture, and accepted the spiritual experiences of ordinary people at face value. They also demonstrated a propensity for breaking free from established denominational structures to form new institutions. Those characteristics could be found in some missionaries who traveled to South Africa. Black Christian evangelists in South Africa often cooperated with missionaries and adapted these dynamics to their own communities. Over time, however, some of these black Christians also turned these democratized dynamics against missionaries and established religious institutions in South Africa, creating movements, institutions and patterns of behavior that challenged racially-based hierarchies.