A NEW COMMUNION: UNDERSTANDING EPISCOPAL IDENTITY IN THE MISSIONARY FUROR OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES
The Social Gospel-era missionary Ray Phillips, pictured with his wife, Dora, and their eldest three children - John, James, and Ruth. Photo from The Missionary Herald.
In the chancel of Philadelphia’s African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, the first black Episcopal Church, a gong sounded, and then Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori began a service of repentance with these words:
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ, we are gathered here to express our most profound regret that the Episcopal Church lent the institution of slavery its support and justificiation based on scripture, and after slavery was formally abolished, continued for at least a century to support de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination. We gather to repent, to apologize for our complicity in and the injury done by the institution of slavery and its aftermath and to amend our lives, to commit ourselves to opposing the sin of racism in personal and public life, and to create communities of liberation and justice.
Therefore, I invite you to join me in recalling the lamentable events that scar our past, and the wounds that continue in the present. Let us seek God’s forgiveness that we may be transformed more fully into the Body of Christ witnessing to God’s abundant love. (1)
Thus began the Litany of Offense and Apology written by the poet and essayist J. Chester Johnson. Freshly commissioned, it was one of the culminating acts of the 2008 “Day of Repentance” for the Episcopal Church’s role in slavery that was called for by resolution A123 from General Convention in 2006. The events of this October day had been in the works for a long time, coming out of the Executive Council’s National Concerns Committee and a previous service, in 1997, where then-Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning apologized for the church’s treatment of indigenous Americans.
We find ourselves, in my experience, relatively comfortable with talking about combating racism and its legacy in the United States, but we do not find ourselves fully living into the vision of “Becoming Beloved Community,” which is set in a context that “moves beyond the United States and beyond black and white, to consider racism in many nations, among many races, ethnicities, and cultures.” (2) We are specifically called to move in foreign contexts as well (this church still is technically the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society), yet there is a lack of work on this front. At the 79th General Convention in 2018, none of the 11 resolutions to the Committee on Racial Justice and Reconciliation focused on our previous and current foreign entanglements. And yet, we must begin to come to terms with this portion of the past and to start, we must learn our history and understand where we have been. Bishop Ian Douglas’s 1990 book Fling out the Banner! offers a phenomenal overview to our history, especially his chapter on “American Supremacy” in the mid-20th century. However, to best explain my point, I believe we’re better served going back a few decades more.
My own personal research focuses on the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which can perhaps best be defined by the Presbyterian Book of Order. It stated that “The great ends of the church are the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of the truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.” (3) This liberal mixture of social work and evangelism, described by Douglas as the “activism that sought to bring the best of the democratic Christian civilization of the United States to the ‘unenlightened’ nations of the world,” found a strong base of support in the Episcopal Church, where its merging “with Anglican establishmentarian (4) tradition gave birth to a national church idea in the Episcopal Church … [that] sought to build up national churches that would minister to the social and spiritual needs of the local people while maintaining communion in a universal (catholic) church.” (5)
An ore crusher at a gold mine in Johannesburg. Photo from The Missionary Herald.
What did this look like on the ground? Perhaps the most memorable example comes from the tales of Ray Phillips, the Congregationalist missionary whom I have studied for the last few years. Phillips graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1917, and, alongside his wife and son, moved to South Africa a few months later to serve as an assistant to Dr. Frederick Bridgman. He would not live in the US full-time again until 1958. Phillips, after getting acclimated, created a number of ways for the African population to experience the real and abundant life of God, a philosophical and theological ideal based off of the works of Richard Clarke Cabot, a medical doctor and philosopher who, in his book What Men Live By “proscribed” his reader “an indefinite amount” of real life - “work, play, love, and worship.” (6)
Phillips found himself specifically attracted to working with those in the mining compounds, seeking to harness their energies into what we might now call “good clean fun.” “If we can give these young fellows clean amusements and athletics, places to enjoy themselves, with music occupying a prominent place,” he wrote, “we shall be aiding mightily the evangelistic work of the church, and help to send back to the tribal homes of these men, when they return, heralds of the ‘abundant life’ of Christ.” (7)
Arguably, the most successful way of imparting these “clean amusements” came through the creation of a mine cinema circuit, where Phillips would send censored versions of American films to various mines around the country, where they would use it as a form of social control in the evenings. During the 1922 Rand Rebellion, a strike of the white miners, Phillips was called into the mines often because of the fear that the idleness of the African workers would lead to a revolt. When extremist white strikers attacked African workers at the New Primrose mine compound, hoping to start a riot, Phillips was immediately called in to quell any attempt at revolution. He wrote:
The lights went out and the picture flashed on. Sure enough, there was SiDakwa [meaning “little drunken man,” the isiZulu nickname for Charlie Chaplin]! For a moment only the silence continued, then uproar! Listeners far outside the compound trembled. Were the natives coming out? It was an attack, but an attack by the film comedian on the outraged feelings of the New Primrose workers. Soon all the 4000 were shouting themselves sick with laughter as they watched Charlie, Larry Semon, Buster Keaton, and others do their funny stuff. Never was there such a treat; so many laughs. At the end of two hours the compound was limp and weak from shouting, the vengeful spirit had long since vanished, and the great crowd bade us good night in the usual joyous way - many still laughing. There was no murder that night at the New Primrose. (8)
There was no murder that night. No riot, no retaliation, no revolution. Just quiet and complete control. This control has been named the “colonization of consciousness” by anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff, who posit that “Whether it be in the name of a ‘benign,’ civilizing imperialism or in cynical pursuit of their labor power, the final objective of generations of colonizers has been to colonize their consciousness with the axioms and aesthetics of an alien culture.” (9) For a church that sang “red and yellow, black and white, [all] are precious in His sight” and that knew at the end of days that God would be worshiped by people “from tribes and peoples and languages,” (10) we have again and again lost our way and missed the mark.
If the road to hell is paved, as the saying goes, with “good intentions,” the intentions of Phillips and those of his ilk, including Episcopalians, must make up a good bit of that road. In a 1919 article for The Missionary Herald, the periodical of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Phillips wrote that the church’s task was to “give these young fellows clean amusements and athletics [and] places to enjoy themselves,” to prevent “unscrupulous men to make capital out of the natural craving of these young fellows for amusement and athletics, their love for music and social intercourse.” (11) Beyond the inherent “moral wrongness,” as it were, of the “colonization of consciousness,” we have forgotten, in our missionary and evangelistic zeal, the words of Christ himself.
Appointing the seventy to share the Gospel, Jesus instructed them that “whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe it off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.’” (12) Apostles and preachers are called to have restraint, to accept the listener’s “no” as well as their “yes.” We are called to be mindful, to not nag, but to gently welcome and encourage. Our Presiding Bishop reminds us that “if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” The Episcopal understanding in the early 20th century, that we were called to “bestow the goodness of American society and the richness of Anglican tradition to the ends of the earth,” (13) is a slap in the face to our understanding of God.
How, then, do we come to terms with the actions of our church, especially when we realize now, in 2020, that what they did was wrong, but that a century ago, we thought we were doing the right thing? How shall we repent? We must begin, I think, with serious study. There is no Traces of the Trade (14) for this issue, which is, I recognize, decidedly less zeitgeist-friendly than our past with slavery. Bishop Douglas’s book is the only one on the topic I could find and it is, while well-written, out of date in regards to current scholarship and changes in the Episcopal Church since its publishing, such as the massive growth of Episcopal Relief and Development. We will need academics and amateurs, laity and clergy, former missionaries and people who have never left the country to gather and consider our past. Additionally, there are more dimensions that we need to flesh out as well - how are we teaching seminarians about missionary history? How do we discuss missionary history and the importance of doing mission work in this day and age in our adult formation sessions, confirmation classes, and in the pulpit? What are the biases, prejudices, and assumptions that we have around our mission work?
Only when we have a clear picture of the situation can we afford to move ahead - to apologize, as we have done before, but also to make some form of reparations. A number of our fellow provinces in the Anglican Communion have us to thank for their existence in whole or in part, including the Nippon Sei Ko Kai (Japan), the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil, and the Episcopal Church in the Philippines. How might we not only support their work as churches, but support the growth of their own unique identity as provinces, rather than have them remain the products of a colonial system or to have more established provinces like ourselves hijack their work for our own personal use?
As I was writing and meditating on the themes of repentance and reparation, the obvious thing that stuck out to me was the use of the prefix “re-,” which means to bring something back to its original state. It is my hope and prayer that the God who makes all things new will make us a new Communion - one free of colonialism and one that, like the early church faced with the addition of the Gentiles, finds a way to become true to itself, its culture, and the words of our Lord.
“A Litany of Offenses and Apology,” October 2008. J. Chester Johnson Papers, Series II. Queens College, City University of New York (New York, N.Y.) Department of Special Collections and Archives. https://jchesterjohnson.com/images/uploads/LitanyinPoetry_DayofRepentance2.pdf
The Episcopal Church, Becoming Beloved Community, https://episcopalchurch.org/files/becoming_beloved_community_summary_0.pdf.
Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Part II, Book of order (New York: Offices of the General Assembly, 1981), 13, https://bit.ly/2CjvPkM.
The tradition that advocated for TEC to become a state church in the USA, like how the Church of England exists in England.
Ian T. Douglas, Fling out the Banner!: The National Church Ideal and the Foreign Mission of the Episcopal Church (New York: The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1996), 13.
Richard C. Cabot, What Men Live By: Work, Play Love, Worship (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), xiv.
Ray E. Phillips, “Ten Days in Johannesburg,” The Missionary Herald, January 1919, 17-18, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89065732208.
Ray E. Phillips, The Bantu are Coming: Phases of South Africa’s Race Problem (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1930), 147-150.
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4.
Rev. 7:9, NRSV.
Phillips, “Ten Days,” 17-18.
Lk. 10:10-11, NRSV.
Douglas, Fling out, 74.
Traces of the Trade is the 2008 documentary by Katrina Browne (an Episcopalian) that focuses on how her ancestors, the DeWolf family (also Episcopalians), made their money through the slave trade.
