CHAPTER 42

The Social Impact of Christian Missions

Robert D. Woodberry

Robert D. Woodberry is an associate research professor at Baylor University and the director of the Project on Religion and Economic Change. He researches the longterm causes of democracy and economic development in countries outside Europe, paying particular attention to the role of missionaries and other religious groups.

Many people have strong negative reactions to Christian missions. Sometimes these negative views spring from an idealized view of life before missionaries arrived. Other aversions to Christian mission stem from perceptions that missionaries cooperated with colonial exploitation and destroyed indigenous cultures. People often generalize from novels, movies, and selective anecdotes, but until recently, few people rigorously tested these negative perceptions of missionaries.

Christians should be honest about any harm that missionaries have caused, as well as the sin, racism, and pride that missionaries have sometimes expressed. Sin is universal, and repentance is appropriate. But we should not blame missionaries for what they did not do, nor judge them by impossible standards. We should seek to learn from past missionary attitudes, actions, and strategies, and to evaluate the overall effect of missions on the people they worked among. Statistical evidence can help us to understand and evaluate what effect missions have had. The statistical evidence suggests that conditions improved where Protestant missionaries had more influence.

Have Missionaries Helped or Hurt?

To evaluate the social impact of missions, my research team and I compiled historical data on Protestant and Catholic missionary activity and carefully reviewed historical research about missions. We identified historical patterns and compared conditions in places where missionaries were widespread, with conditions in places where missionaries were rare or did not go. If missionaries primarily hurt the cultures where they went, we would expect conditions to be worse where missionaries had more influence. But we find exactly the opposite. Areas with greater exposure to Christian missions (particularly Protestant missions) are consistently better off on virtually all measures of human flourishing.

When I first tried to publish research about the positive impact of mission, the resistance among scholars was extraordinary. I had to provide much more evidence than normal. But the evidence was strong enough that my findings were eventually published in the best journal in political science (and elsewhere) and the research won eight academic excellence awards in sociology, political science, and economics. Soon others began researching the social impact of missions, and the vast majority found similar results. Their research is also published in some of the most prestigious academic journals. Most of these scholars are not Christians, and many are professors at elite universities like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Beijing University, and MIT. If the evidence was weak, clearly biased, or easily refuted, these types of scholars would not be publishing it in top academic journals.

In this chapter, I mostly discuss both historical and statistical evidence, dealing with the social impact of missions.

Missionaries Advanced Mass Education, Printing, and Health

Lay people can fully participate in most religions without being able to read. This is not true for Protestants. Protestant missionaries wanted people to read the Bible in their own language. Thus, wherever they went, they quickly developed written forms of oral languages, created fonts, imported printing technology, and printed Bibles, tracts, and textbooks. In the process, they created the written form of most languages, often introduced the first printing presses, and usually printed the first newspapers and textbooks. They also sponsored mass literacy and were especially important in educating women, non-elites, and slaves.

Colonial governments, settlers, and businesspeople were generally leery of mass education. They preferred dealing with a small, educated elite that they could control. They thought most non-Europeans should only be educated in practical skills like carpentry. For example, in Southeast Asia French colonizers shut indigenous schools, barred Protestant education, and blocked Southeast Asians from going abroad to study. French policy at the time was to only educate as many Southeast Asians as the colonial government could hire. Similarly, prior to missionary lobbying, the British did not invest in mass education either. In areas where the British successfully kept missionaries out—such as northern Nigeria, British Somaliland, the Gulf States, and the Maldives—the British educated almost no one.

Protestant mission education provoked other religious groups to provide mass education as well. When Catholics competed with Protestants, Catholics educated broadly and often had great schools. However, prior to Vatican II (1962–65) or where they were isolated from Protestant competition, they primarily educated priests and the elite. Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists had similar practices of only educating the elite.

Early missionary efforts to educate the masses created economic benefits and this increased local interest in more education. Missionaries also wrote and translated books, built schools, and trained teachers, which made future education expansion easier. Decades later, postcolonial governments often nationalized the mission schools to create their own government-sponsored education system. Creating a high-quality education system is expensive and time-consuming. Thus, in countries where missionaries started education systems earlier and more broadly, postcolonial governments ended up with better education systems. To this day, regions that had more Protestant missionaries in the past have higher literacy rates now.

Similarly, Protestant missions stimulated mass printing around the world. Printing was not invented in Europe nor by Protestants. Many East and Central Asian societies were printing religious texts hundreds of years before European printing began. But most printing in these settings was in archaic “religious” languages, which most people could not speak or read. Muslim, Hindu, and some Buddhist societies throughout Asia and North Africa knew how to print books and used block printing for other purposes, but they did not print books for about a thousand years after first being exposed to them. Exposure to European printing did not initially change this reluctance. This attitude did not change until Protestant missionaries began printing tens of thousands of Bibles and tracts in local languages.

Moreover, because Protestant missionaries wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible in their own language, missionaries radically transformed how printing was done in East and Central Asia, and transformed the language used in printing and education. Earlier Asian printing and education was primarily limited to classical or archaic, unspoken languages. Protestant missionaries, however, printed and educated in vernacular languages closer to how ordinary people spoke. They popularized writing systems that were easier for ordinary people to learn. In the process, they printed the first East and Central Asian newspapers and birthed the modern East Asian printing industry.

Missionaries were also central to the spread of Western medicine, established medical schools for local people, and helped organize voluntary social reform organizations. Missionaries also introduced new crops, new technical skills, and new ideas about politics and the economy. These missionary innovations fostered longterm economic development, dispersion of power, and other social transformation.¹

Missionaries Mobilized Colonial Reform

Missionaries are often accused of a close association with colonial states. Sometimes this was true; some colonial states controlled missionary appointments and finances. Most of these states were Catholic, although some were Protestant (such as the Dutch). However, when missionaries were independent from both direct state control and European settler control, they often pressed for reform of the practices of colonial powers.

Most missionaries were not strongly anti-colonial. They were willing to live with moderate forms of colonialism and were not primarily concerned with politics. However, colonial abuses angered local people against the West—which many associated with Christianity—and thus made missionaries’ work more difficult.² Missionary writings are full of complaints about how colonial abuses undermined their best efforts. Thus, missionaries had (1) incentives to fight colonial abuses, (2) personnel throughout the world directly exposed to abuses, (3) a base of supporters in many colonizing countries, and (4) a massive network of religious media to mobilize the faithful against policies that hampered mission interests and hurt people they had grown to love. Thus, missionaries were central to campaigns against slavery, forced labor, and the opium trade. Missionaries also encouraged the rise of foreign aid programs, the creation of international relief organizations, protecting indigenous land rights, and many other reforms.³

Missionaries Resisted Supposedly “Scientific” Views about Race

One of the most consistent critiques against missionaries is their ethnocentrism. Missionaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were products of their era (as are we). Between 1800 and World War I, both Christians and secularists generally assumed the superiority of Western civilization. Historic missionary literature often emphasized problems with other cultures and religions in ways that many modern readers find distasteful. Yet this should be viewed in comparison to the so-called “scientific” racism that flourished in academia and among European settlers at this time. The main missionary critiques of other people were cultural and religious, not racial. William Carey argued that Britons had been “barbarians” before the coming of Christianity and that the gospel could transform other cultures just as it had done so in England.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries were more often criticized for thinking too highly of indigenous peoples. For example, James Hunt—who coined the word “anthropology,” founded the first anthropological society, and edited the first two anthro-pological journals—argued that dark-skinned peoples were different species, mentally inferior to Whites, and could not be “civilized” through education. He argued that anthropologists had to fight missionaries to establish their discipline. In the 1866 volume of the Anthropological Review, he wrote:

In this endeavor to commend Anthropology to more general acceptance, we must not hide from ourselves that two great schools are, on principle, decidedly opposed to our pretensions. [They] agree in discarding and even denouncing the truths of Anthropology They do so because these truths are directly opposed to their cardinal principle of absolute and original equality among mankind. The parties to which we refer are the orthodox, and more especially the evangelical body, in religion, and the ultraliberal and democratic party in politics.

In critiquing the historic ethnocentric attitudes of missionaries, it would be more helpful to compare them to others of their time, rather than to the standards of today. To do otherwise is its own kind of ethnocentrism. As the Harvard historian William Hutchinson writes, “If deficient from a modern point of view in sensitivity to foreign cultures, [nineteenth and early twentieth century] missionaries were measurably superior in that regard to most contemporaries at home or abroad.”⁴

What Is the Overall Effect of Missions?

One might wonder if I merely selected examples that fit my own preferences. Others could surely select anecdotes that make missionaries look worse. How do we rightly evaluate the average effect of missions? One way to do so is with statistics.

Statistically, societies where Protestant missionaries arrived earlier and were more prevalent ended up better off on every indicator of human thriving I have studied. We evaluate human flourishing in at least ten areas: literacy, educational enrollment, infant mortality, life expectancy, voluntary association membership, book publishing, newspaper circulation, corruption, political democracy, and economic development.⁵ The impact of Catholic missions turned out to be weaker and varied from location to location—although it improved during the twentieth century. These results are consistent, both between countries and between different regions of the same country (such as India, China, Nigeria, and Ghana).⁶

If the main effect of missions had been destructive, we would see the opposite.

For example, my studies show that for each additional Protestant missionary a country had in 1923 (per 10,000 population), average life expectancy was 1.3 years longer in 2000 (even after accounting for other factors that influence life expectancy). We find a similar pattern at the subnational level in India.

However, demonstrating that missionaries caused increased life expectancy (or any other outcome) is more difficult than showing an association. For example, perhaps missionaries disproportionately went to healthy places (because they wanted their family to survive), or perhaps they survived longer in healthy places. If so, already healthy places would end up with more missionaries, creating a positive association between missionaries and health even if missionaries did not improve local health.

I (and others) have tried to account for alternative explanations. Perhaps we missed something or measured it poorly. That is something we can never prove. Still, we can measure robustness: how bad would our model have to be for the association between missions and health (or some other area of human thriving) to disappear. The answer is: our research model would have to be terrible—which it is not.

For those who still doubt the positive impact of missions, we can switch approaches. Each approach has different unprovable assumptions, but these assumptions differ. If we find consistent results, it strongly suggests that missionaries caused the outcome. For example, the British colonial administration tried to bar missionaries from Muslim areas in colonies such as Ghana and Nigeria. In these countries, the British drew a border that missionaries were not supposed to cross. If we measure conditions in the same ethnic communities on either side of that border (which no longer exists), people just south of the line, where missionaries were allowed, have more education and more wealth than those just north of it.⁷

Similarly, if we link individuals across multiple censuses in sub-Saharan Africa; families that became Christian generally grew in education and wealth, but not families that remained Muslim or their indigenous religions. The exception is Muslims and traditionalists who lived near a mission station.⁸ Finally, in some areas in which we can measure education and economic development before Protestant missionaries arrived, both education and economic development grew faster in areas that got Protestant missionaries than those that did not. Together, these studies provide strong evidence that missionaries enhanced education and economic development.

Since my early work, many social scientists from different religious, political, and ethnic backgrounds have studied the social impact of missions, focusing on different areas of the world and using many varying techniques to identify causation. However, virtually all this research comes to similar conclusions. The association between missions and multiple forms of well-being is large, extremely robust, and probably causal. In fact, a recent review article about causality highlights Christian missions as one of the most consistent predictors of longterm development in economics—consistent both across regions and between studies.⁹

Thus, regardless of how one assesses the influence of colonialism, imperialism, and multinational corporations on the Global South, affected countries would be worse off if Christian missionaries had not been present and engaged. Current missionaries are less important to education, health care, and printing because governments and businesses have copied them. Still, mission aid programs are more efficient than government programs; the combination of aid and evangelism seems to multiply the effectiveness of aid; and conversion and religious instruction seem to have economic benefits of their own.

RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement

Notes

1. See e.g., Robert D. Woodberry’s The Shadow of Empire: Christian Missions, Colonial Policy and Democracy in Post-Colonial Societies (PhD diss., UNC-Chapel Hill, 2004); “Reclaiming the M-Word: The Consequences of Missions for Nonwestern Societies,” The Review of Faith and International Affairs 4, no. 1 (2006): 3–12; “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (2012): 244–74; and “Aid that Works: Missionaries, Economic Development and the ‘Reversal of Fortunes’” (comparative politics workshop, University of Chicago, 2014).

2. William R. Hutchinson, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1.

3. For more on how missionaries influenced colonial reforms and foreign policy, see Woodberry, Shadow of Empire; Woodberry, “Reclaiming the M-Word”; Woodberry, “Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy”; Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1998); and Geoffrey A. Oddie, Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms 1850–1900 (Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1978). For more on immediate abolitionism, see Turner, Slaves and Missionaries; and Woodberry, “Reclaiming the M-Word”; on land reform in India, see Oddie, Social Protest in India; on fighting forced labor, see Woodberry, Shadow of Empire; and Grant, Civilised Savagery.

4. Conversely, others suggest that missions are associated with greater religious tensions (because of polemic criticism of other religions and marginalized groups disproportionately converting) and that missions is associated with a greater prevalence of AIDS (because women get more education, delay marriage, and then are more sexually active outside marriage then Muslims).

5. For example, in India, literacy is highest in Kerala, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Goa—regions that have almost nothing in common except the prevalence of Christians and historic missionary activity. The people of Nagaland and Mizoram were huntergatherers with no written language prior to missionary contact.

6. Dozie Okoye and Roland Pongou, “Missions, Fertility Transition, and the Reversal of Fortunes: Evidence from Border Discontinuities in the Emirates of Nigeria,” Journal of Economic Growth (forthcoming); and Woodberry, Shadow of Empire, 50.

7. Alberto Alesina, Sebastian Hohmann, Stelios Michalopoulos, and Elias Papaioannou, “Intergenerational Mobility in Africa,” Econometrica 89, no. 1 (2021): 1–35; and Alberto Alesina, Sebastian Hohmann, Stelios Michalopoulos, and Elias Papaioannou, “Religion and Educational Mobility in Africa,” Nature 618 (2023): 1–10.

8. Anna Callis, Thad Dunning, and Guadalupe Tuñón, “Causal Inference and Knowledge Accumulation in Historical Political Economy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy, ed. J. Jenkins and J. Rubin (Oxford University Press, 2022).

9. Woodberry, “Aid that Works”; and Gharad Bryan, James J. Choi, and Dean Karlan, “Randomizing Religion: The Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 1 (2021): 293–380.