The final chapter of Jeremy Best's book starts with a brief thought experiment. He asks his readers to imagine an event in Berlin: At an international conference following the 1910 World Conference of Missions in Edinburgh proud German theologians would present themselves as a vital part of a global movement. They would introduce visitors to the German capital and exhibit the achievements of German missiology and evangelism. This, of course, never happened. In 1920, the remnants of a once large mission movement in Germany displayed staunch nationalism, and international missionary circles kept their distance from former war opponents.
The fictious story illustrates the main argument of Best's book: The missionary movement in Germany provided an alternative version of Germany's emersion into globalization around 1900. Protestant missionaries kept an uneasy distance from the jingoist tone of the Wilhelmine Kaiserreich and the exploitative economic intentions of German colonial rule. They fended off the encroachment of political agents into what they viewed as their very own territory, namely the cultural and religious uplifting of non-European peoples around the world. They saw value in the cultures of peoples in the mission fields and practiced a comparatively sensitive approach to establishing independent local churches in the German colonies. They gave precedence to the religious calling over imperial economic ambitions and power politics. This approach was laid out by the founding fathers of the German mission movement such as Gustav Warneck and upheld by successors like Karl Axenfeld. In Best's opinion, the sharp accusations of racial and national treason against Catholic competitors, of naivety in the face of a Muslim threat against colonial authorities, of backwardness and irrationality against indigenous religious practitioners are less important characteristics of the movement. The First World War presented a contingency which ended the internationalist and universalist outlooks of German missionaries as well as their alternative version of global cultural engagement. These are somewhat contentious assertions in the face of recent scholarship on missionary involvement in colonialism. How does Best build his argument? What is the archive and the frame of reference his argument is based on?
The book is organized in six chapters. The first recounts the emergence and theological framework of the German Protestant mission movement, making good use of Warneck's scholarly journal “Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift.” Warneck was a very influential mission intellectual who formulated the theological basis of German missions without openly compromising the missions’ independent trajectories and spheres of influence within the German colonial discourse. Chapters 2–4 provide in-depth studies of key missionary debates. Chapter 2 outlines the peculiar idea of building Volkskirchen (ethnic churches) and teaching Volkssprachen (ethnic languages), which referred to an idealistic idea of Volk binding together culture, language, and nation. This distinguished German Protestant missionaries from their Western counterparts. The third chapter details discussions about the direction of the colonial education system. Missionaries gave precedence to teaching the gospel in local languages, hoping to ensure “proper” conversion and to insulate converts from European materialism and other alleged vices. More economically-minded colonialists hoped to gain a semi-educated, menial labor force for plantations and farms. The fight for spheres of influence among Catholic and Protestant missions in Southwest and Central Tanzania after 1900 is discussed at length in chapter four. Best sets aside the actual encounters of European and African mission activists on the ground and concentrates on the Protestants’ attempts to fault Catholic missions as agents of Rome who undermined both the German goals in East Africa and White racial superiority.
Chapter 5 shifts the focus to the German Protestant population's support for mission work. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women engaged in mission societies and knitting circles, subscribed to missionary journals, or visited mission festivals and exhibitions. Missiology viewed them not only as a financial and moral resource for the cause but aimed at stabilizing and improving German faith communities via mission work. Best argues convincingly that missionary media presented a global cultural encounter that was peacefully facilitated by the common language of Christianity to the German public. Whether this presented an alternative to the violent impact of secular colonialism remains doubtful to the reviewer. It may just as well have stabilized a colonial state in crisis and assured the trust of the population that all would be well in the Empire as long as the missions were left to do their work. After all, the missions never left any doubt about who would be the dominant part of the global encounter.
The final chapter examines the involvement of German missionaries in the religious internationalism of the turn of the twentieth century. Best unfolds a finely tuned narrative of German theologians’ attempts at adapting to Western missions: from uneasy encounters in the 1870s to the hopeful coming into the fold at the grand Edinburgh conference of 1910 and the implosion of the universalist and internationalist framework of German Protestant mission theology in 1914. Within weeks, Western and German missionaries turned against each other. The German protagonists joined the chorus of national mobilization in 1914 and revanchism after 1918. One wonders whether nationalism and internationalism had ever been alternatives, as Best claims, or whether the missionaries proudly claimed their place as Germans in the global missionary order?
Best's story emerges out of the archives of mission directors, boards, and theologians of the colonial metropole. He explicitly excludes gender or race perspectives as well as the encounters of missionaries in the field with African activists and other members of colonized societies. This decision leads to occasional lopsided interpretations. Best, for instance, asserts that missionaries were traumatized by the Maji Maji War without even mentioning East Africans’ trauma resulting from an extremely destructive strategy of the colonial army which, by the way, was wholeheartedly welcomed by missionaries. The decision also renders missions a project of European men of the metropole who developed a notion of internationalism which centered around North American and Western European cultural and religious superiority, to be delivered to non-Europeans in the fashion of a benign paternalism. Therein, these missionaries were to a degree distinct from other men of the colonial metropole.
Jeremy Best presents a lively picture of the intellectual world of the leading German missionary activists. He details their inner and outer battles about coming to terms with the emerging and solidifying German colonial empire as well as its breakdown after 1914. Best's goal to differentiate our understanding of the international Protestant missionary cosmos is also fulfilled. The interactions of German mission leaders with international missionary Protestantism, the differences in outlooks on how this internationalism should be organized, and the convergence of ideas, even the building of international (i.e., Western) missionary community are examined in a fruitful manner.
