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Religion: The Brown Man’s Burden

2 minute read
TIME

In foreign missions, white men have become the brown man’s burden. This was the note sounded repeatedly last week at the annual assembly of the National Council of Churches’ Division of Foreign Missions, meeting at Buck Hill Falls, Pa.

On the five-day gathering’s opening day, the Rev. Winburn T. Thomas of Pasadena, Calif., a field representative in Indonesia for U.S. mission boards, laid it on the line for the 300-odd delegates. In Asia, he said, “colonialism is a bigger issue then Communism—and white is the color of colonialism.” Almost 99% of U.S. Protestant missionaries now serving overseas, said Dr. Thomas, are white men and women. “I asked the church leaders of mid-Java if they would prefer Negro or white workers, and their decision was unanimously against our present practice of sending almost exclusively white missionaries.”

Dynamic young M.M. (for Madathil-parampil Mammen) Thomas, an Indian youth leader now studying at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary, warned his fellow Christians against linking Christianity in Asia with Western civilization.

“Christianity must transcent Western civilization,” he said, as well as the “evil of denominationalism that discredits Christianity in Asian eyes.”

And Christian support of conservative or reactionary elements, he added in an interview, is not the way to cope with Communist competition: “The Christian opposition to Communism should express itself as a Christian concern for the social revolution.:” Anthropologist Absolom Vikakazi of Natal, South Africa, currently teaching at the Kennedy School of Missions in Hartford, Conn., pointed to the growing movement in South Africa toward what are called separatist churches. These (there were about 800 at the last count in 1948) have broken away from the white-dominated mission churches, to set up their own, sometimes reverting to the practice of polygamy.

The origin of the movement, said Vilakazi, is partly a rejection of what has been called “the apostasy of the missionary churches” from the early simplicity of Christianity and of the first missionaries. But it is even more a manifestation of the hunger of the colored man to be free of white domination and stand on his own—”the creed of ‘Africa for the Africans’ as expressed in church terms.”

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