Mission, Race, and Empire
The Episcopal Church in Global Context
By Jennifer C. Snow
Oxford 368 pages, $39.95
Amid the growing recognition that Christian churches must reckon with the legacy of colonialism, this compelling volume by Jennifer C. Snow of Church Divinity School of the Pacific chronicles a new history of the Episcopal Church through the threefold lens of colonial/imperial expansion, racial ideology, and mission theology. This triad belongs together, and the Episcopal Church is an especially pertinent field of inquiry for such investigation.
As Snow’s introduction explains, modern conceptions of race are a legacy of the colonial enterprise, which they served to legitimate. Similarly, missionary effort and colonial expansion often ran in tandem, not least, though also not exclusively, as Anglicanism accompanied British imperialism’s spread. The Episcopal Church resulted from first colonialism and then from colonial revolt, before participating in the same colonial/imperial impulse that the United States was birthed in and then perpetuated.
Snow’s history unfolds over three main sections covering roughly discrete time periods and their respective understandings of mission. “Christianizing the Colony” (1600-1800) begins with Roanoke and Jamestown and runs to the post-revolutionary context. “Church Planting, Civilizing, and Christianizing” (1800-1920) is bookended by the Second Great Awakening and the annexation of Hawai’i and the Philippines. And “Missio Dei” (1920-2019) runs from the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 to the Anglican Communion’s current travails over the place of LGBT people in the church.
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As Snow notes, her decision to tell this history through the disciplinary lenses of mission and empire places at the center figures who have tended to be marginal in the Episcopal Church’s self-conception. As a result, the picture that emerges, particularly over the first two sections, is not flattering, and, tellingly, diverges fairly widely from the story that Episcopalians (at least white liberal Episcopalians) would prefer to tell about ourselves.
This is a story of cultural imposition and erasure, as early understandings of mission failed to reckon with any distinction between the gospel and British (or, later, Anglo-American) culture, and so invited would-be converts to assimilate themselves not to the way of the cross, but to a white culture no less contingent than their own. It is a story of imbibing and reinforcing racist ideologies — against the Americas’ indigenous populations, against its enslaved (or, later emancipated) African-descended populations, against its Asian inhabitants, none of whom measured up against the arbitrary standard of a white culture that was treated as synonymous both with culture and with Christianity. Taken in tandem, these factors lead to an Episcopal Church positioning itself as an agent of Manifest Destiny, and incapable (read: unwilling) to upset the status quo, leaving oppressed populations to suffer, lest their succor damage the unity of the church or wider social order.
With this last observation, we are brought squarely before what has been called America’s original sin, slavery, and the role Anglicans/Episcopalians played in constructing and maintaining the “peculiar institution.” Snow tells this story ably, if damningly, thoroughly documenting a history wherein even those who opposed slavery were urged to remain silent and avoid getting “political.” Emblematic here is Bishop John Henry Hopkins, in whose view “it was acceptable to find slavery personally distasteful and to hope that it would someday be abolished, it was not acceptable to say that it was morally sinful, to insist on its abolition, or to critique or punish those who owned slaves.” As C. Kilmer Myer will later write, “There are many ways of not rocking the boat and no doubt Anglicanism has discovered them all.” Chief among them may be the General Convention of 1862’s pastoral letter about the Civil War, which made no mention of slavery, and the 1865 General Convention’s decision to simply proceed as if there had been no war at all.
The picture is not uniformly negative, of course. Though Snow has little sympathy for Bishop William Kip, whose anti-Asian racism is vividly depicted, and who is characterized as fundamentally unsuited for his task as a missionary bishop, her portraits of such figures as William Augustus Muhlenberg and Jackson Kemper are nuanced and generally positive, reckoning with the ambiguities of any figures whose historical and cultural horizons differ from our own. Similarly, she details efforts toward greater representation for BIPOC populations within the presbyterate and episcopate, even if these efforts were often stymied, mealy-mouthed, or half-hearted.
The book’s major turning point is the transition to a missio Dei conception of mission, one that sees God as the primary agent in mission and the world, rather than the church as the primary locus of God’s missional concern. With this shift, the Episcopal Church begins to reckon with its complicity in historical injustices, including Japanese internment during the Second World War, and begins to speak with a more prophetic voice, including greater involvement in the Civil Rights movement.
Snow attributes women’s ordination and LGBT affirmation to this shift as well. Here it’s unclear that she has built the case as convincingly as she might have, because this attribution moves beyond the historian’s reportage and into theological construction. For all my sympathies, and for all the parallels I recognized between the historical cases and some of the dynamics we now face (I found them striking as I read, even before Snow made the connection explicit in her conclusion), I still do not see an unambiguous line of causation. As a history, the book outlines a cogent, well-documented case. When it ventures into theology, it is less persuasive. It may be correct in its judgments, but the argumentative loop is not closed.
As Snow traces the emergence of a baptismal ecclesiology within the Episcopal Church and how it informed arguments in favor of women’s ordination, we are reminded of the rallying cry, “ordain women or stop baptizing them.” There are excellent reasons to ordain women, but arguments of this sort are specious. As I render that judgment, though, I am aware that sometimes it is the luxury of hindsight that allows one to insist that there are better theological reasons for something than those that were offered by the trailblazers, who perhaps were doing the best they could to follow the Holy Spirit’s call in an as-yet unknown territory. Most theological judgments only wind up making sense in hindsight.
Snow has done us a great service here, and all Episcopalians, whatever their political persuasion or assessment of the developments underway in our church, would do well to sit with the story she tells, for it is all of our story. Those inclined to view ours as a progressive, justice-oriented church would benefit from recognizing that our record has been far from pristine and that this orientation is rather new indeed and not to be taken for granted. Those troubled by the more recent leftward turns ought to consider how strongly the historical dynamics parallel those at play in our day. And all of us need to consider the role of our agency in the making of the church. The Episcopal Church has been many things. It’s up to us, cooperating and/or resisting the grace of God, to forge what it shall be.
