Forgotten Missions 

The World’s Reformation:
How Protestantism Became a Global Religion
by alec ryrie
yale university, 576 pages, $45

The World’s Reformation is a splendid achievement. Extensively researched, Alec Ryrie’s book covers an extraordinary global scope, and it is hard to imagine any scholar, however learned, who would not learn much from it. It is an indispensable contribution to the study of the emergence of world Christianity. It is also, though this is not the author’s primary purpose, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the ideological and religious underpinnings of European empires.

The book’s full importance is apparent only when we situate its argument in the context of conventional narratives of modern Christian history. Beyond question, the Reformation era began an immense global spread of Christianity, but according to standard interpretations, that process was sharply divided into two distinct phases. The first, from perhaps 1520 through 1760, was overwhelmingly Catholic in its emphasis; according to the stereotype, only from the later eighteenth century did Protestants play a significant role. That transition came with the rise of the British Empire and of Protestant missionary celebrities such as William Carey in India. But Ryrie shows that Protestants were active much earlier, and on a global scale, even if the long-term effects of their activity fell far short of their expectations.

Our usual accounts of missionary activity in the early modern era focus heavily, often almost exclusively, on the Catholic achievements. Of course, in a heroic age of mission symbolized by such names as Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci, there was much to inspire awe. Catholic religious orders spanned the globe, winning mass conversions in the Americas and making inroads into China, Japan, South East Asia, and Central Africa. They exploited the opportunities engendered by such sprawling and long-lived imperial regimes as the Spanish, Portuguese, and (later) French. To remark this is not to minimize or excuse the horrors to which those missionaries contributed—conquest, imperial brutality, and enslavement—but incontestably, they transformed the older worlds they encountered.

Catholic clergy, especially the Jesuits, made astonishing contributions to the cultural life of the societies they encountered, particularly their languages. This was true in such diverse societies as Vietnam, Bolivia, and Tamil South India. On an international and even intercontinental scale, Catholic clergy became key diplomats and translators. If we are seeking a date to symbolize the true beginning of globalization, and of global Christianity, we might choose the moment in the 1570s when the Catholic diocese of Manila was created as a suffragan see of Mexico City. For three centuries, the vital imperial trade route from Manila to Acapulco was also the primary axis of Catholic missions.

It is easy to tell this story in a way that all but excludes Protestants, whether nations or churches. According to the stereotype, early modern Protestantism remained ensconced in its European bastions: As Ryrie remarks, Protestants appeared “strangely late to the missionary party.” Catholic apologists delighted in noting the contrast in how each side enacted the divine commandment to spread the gospel. Protestants, they observed, were confined to a diet of herring, while Catholics enjoyed their tropical pineapple. On this account, the phrase “global Protestantism” would have seemed an oxymoron, almost a cruel joke.

Even in the standard narrative, there were conspicuous exceptions. Early English settlers in North America notionally justified their activities in terms of evangelism of native peoples, which produced the famous efforts of John Eliot. The English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) dates from 1701. Protestant missionary activities in India began with German ventures in 1706. But such work seemed very marginal beside Catholic achievements—inevitably given the imbalance in imperial power on which foreign missions depended.

Not until quite recent times have scholars, at least in the English-speaking world, paid full attention to the role of other significant Protestant endeavors. This fuller accounting has chiefly meant acknowledging the Dutch empire, which achieved global status by the start of the seventeenth century, with bases ranging from New Amsterdam and Suriname to Jakarta and the Cape of Good Hope. Conventionally, historians portrayed the Dutch as focused on imperial aggrandizement and commercial profit to the exclusion of religion. But evidence shows that this was not the case, and that the Dutch churches spread their influence far afield. So argued Charles H. Parker in his revelatory Global Calvinism: Conversion and Commerce in the Dutch Empire, 1600–1800 (2022). Without drawing on any vast trove of new sources, Parker did a superb job of synthesizing, and in so doing he depicted stunning achievements. While not abandoning their herrings, the Dutch, too, came to relish their pineapples.

Parker’s precedent means that Ryrie’s work is not absolutely groundbreaking, but throughout his lengthy account he does a great deal of myth-busting. He makes some shrewd observations about just how those myths arose, not least in terms of the archival resources available to researchers. The fact that Catholic religious orders are documentary pack rats, with archives concentrated in a few strategic centers, makes it easy to trace their efforts worldwide, unlike with the more diffuse Protestant missions. But Ryrie is also frank about the lack of impact made by much of the work he is so painstakingly commemorating. As he notes, “most early Protestant missionary projects secured dismally few conversions, despite the money, effort and prayer invested.” Very few produced flourishing churches anxious to preserve every documentary scrap left behind by their European missionary founders.

Given these thorny problems, Ryrie has made heroic efforts to recover those Protestant missions, which even in the seventeenth century were diverse in their geographical distribution, “from Lapland to Chile and Barbados to Taiwan.” It would have been tempting to present this story in the form of narrative accounts of particular churches and their fields of harvest. Ryrie’s approach is thematic, which allows him to draw illuminating comparisons among various European societies, with an impressive range of reference.

The book has four parts. In his section on “Principles,” he sketches the broad assumptions, motives, and rationales that believers brought to their projects. Naturally, apocalyptic ideas were prominent here, as was the notion of the Antichrist who threatened the societies that had broken free of the Roman yoke.

A lengthy account of “Templates” then describes the models and precedents that shaped Protestant encounters with non-Christian ideas. They include experiences with Jews and Muslims, and with “barbarians,” a term here applied to the various ethnic and social groups with which dominant Protestant societies were so often in conflict. The “barbarian” section is enlightening, and the cross-national analogies are rewarding. In the British context, barbarians were the Catholic Irish and the Highland Scots, whereas Scandinavians confronted the Sámi peoples of the far north. We should never forget that in the Protestant worldview of the time, the Catholic faith of many Irish and Scots was just as demonic as the pagan survivals of the Sámi, or indeed of the polytheistic faiths of Asia. By way of illustration, the evangelistic societies of the early eighteenth century that were seeking to bring the Protestant vision to the peoples of India, for example, were painfully conscious of how little progress they had made with those marginal peoples on their home territory. English translators produced a usable Bible in Tamil before they performed the same task in Scots Gaelic.

Finally, this section includes Ryrie’s account of missions to slaves, an issue that caused acute difficulty for well-meaning Protestants. Here, at last, would-be evangelists had full access to non-Christians to whom they had the power to bring the gospel, but at the same time they faced the danger that baptizing slaves might stir demands for their liberation. Ryrie’s account of these debates is thoroughly researched and draws effective transnational comparisons.

The book’s third and longest section, “Approaches,” discusses the means by which Protestants hoped to achieve conversions and preserve converts in the faith—in modern academic terminology, to ensure that recruitment was followed by retention. He discusses the rhetorical tactics that were used to persuade subjects, and he stresses the roles of education, literacy, and “civilizing” influences. At a very early stage, advocates were aware that such methods threatened to destroy essential aspects of traditional identity, replacing them not just with a laudable Christian character but with whole new identities in the European style, with all their drawbacks. The question of what was properly and laudably “Christian” as opposed to “English” (or “Dutch”) was never satisfactorily resolved.

In another controversial area, Protestants had an unfortunate tendency to believe that a translated Bible would infallibly conquer a heathen territory once it was introduced, regardless of the circumstances in which that introduction occurred or the means by which the locals encountered it. Their faith in the Scripture often verged on Bibliolatry, a fact that may well suggest some reasons for their lack of impact.

Ryrie’s concluding section concerns “Outcomes,” and it is here especially that he considers the pivotal question of the relationships among missions, empire, and colonization. Throughout the period, the language of “planting” religion shaded into that of “plantation.” Although he disputes the convention that Protestants had little involvement in mission before the late eighteenth century, Ryrie accepts that a qualitative change did occur at that point, and that the upsurge in British Protestant activities was inseparable from the advance of empire.

Reading The World’s Reformation has taught me a great deal, and I will incorporate its lessons whenever I teach about Christian expansion. I would be reluctant to suggest any close parity between Protestant and Catholic aspects of the story (not that Ryrie ever exaggerates the significance of his topic or makes unsustainable claims). The two stories differed in critical ways. If Protestants were indeed highly active in missions, as we now realize that they were, still they never produced anything comparable to the Catholic experience in China or Japan. In those two critical lands above all, the religious orders acquired vast power and prestige, which under different circumstances might have expanded to achieve some kind of national conversion. Nor, because their missionary successes were so limited, did Protestants contend so constantly and agonizingly with questions of religious compromise and interfaith debate. With all due caveats, I would still retain the conventional focus on Catholic missions in the early modern centuries, and I might even speak of the “Age of Francis Xavier.”

But I would not only cite the many Protestant examples and debates that Ryrie brings to our attention; I would also follow his example in exploring just why our narrative is shaped as it is, and how we decide what is or is not worthy of commemoration. Over and above its other virtues, The World’s Reformation is a brilliant case study in the construction of historical memory and of historical amnesia.