21/1 Book

International Journal of Frontier Missions 21:1 Spring 2004•23

ecently, I began reading a book so interesting that I stayed up until

2:30 a.m. ﬁ nishing it. If you ever want a detailed account of how

the nineteenth-century English Evangelicals ended the British slave

trade; abolished sati and infant sacriﬁ ce in India; banned child labor and other

such abuses in England; started the world’s ﬁ rst ‘animal rights’ group (The

RSPCA, which banned the torture of animals for sport); rehabilitated prosti-

tutes; reformed the Parliament; brought education and relief to the destitutes

of England; brought about prison and lunatic asylum reforms, etc., then the

book to read is “The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the

Victorians,” by Ian C. Bradley (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co, 1976).

Bradley tries to take the stance of an impartial historian. However, it becomes

clear after a few chapters that the subjects of his study are steadily gaining

his admiration and empathy. In every chapter he critiques the excesses of the

movement: their petty legalisms, repressive behavior codes (“The Cult of

Conduct”), intellectual philistinism, and so forth. And yet, his approach is

fair and he always balances the negatives with their many positive contribu-

tions. For the most part, the positives win out. A famous historian quoted in

the book sums up the mixture: “Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased

to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and

bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite,

tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical” (p. 106).

The book, however, ends on a tragic note. Many of the Evangelicals lost their

children and grandchildren to agnosticism or atheism. All throughout its

pages, we see glimpses of English Evangelicalism’s serious weakness: anti-

intellectualism. It comes out in the many accounts of their petty legalism and

sometimes even pharisaic separatism; and how they terrorized their children

with stories of juvenile Sabbath-breakers, who actually had a little fun on

a Sunday and then died and went to Hell for it; and how they forbade their

members to read “secular” novels and discouraged them from patronizing

“secular” art and music (Mozart and Beethoven were ﬂ at out!). Their intellec-

tual weakness becomes more pronounced in their view of “practical” religion.

by Jonathan W. Rice

Two Awesome Problems

The Tragic Failure of Britain’s Evangelical Awakening

* Author’s Original Title:

“The Tragic Failure of English

Evangelicalism Repeated by the

Indian Church Today”

Jonathan W. Rice, a researcher

with South Asian Resources, was a

missionary in India for seven years.

Currently he is assisting Vishal

Mangalwadi with a book and TV

project called “The Book that Shaped

a Millennium,” as well as writing his

own book on pollution and ecology in

India—a Hindu-Christian encounter.

Jonathan is also assisting SAR

in launching a Christian literary

movement in India, “Reforming the

Soul of India.”

International Journal of Frontier Missions

The Tragic Failure of Britain’s Evangelical Awakening

of their upbringings, but they also

appreciated the many good aspects.

The main issue was with the world

of ideas: No longer were they pro-

tected, sheltered children, reading the

propaganda of Hannah More. They

were now thinking adults in the real

world, reading the assaults of atheists,

agnostics, and occultists. Their parents

and their church had not provided

answers to such attacks on their faith.

Nor had they trained their children in

the critical examination of the Biblical

worldview vs. other world views, which

would have provided them with the

tools to ﬁ nd answers for themselves.

The result was a severe “conversion”

crisis, but this time a conversion away

from faith to atheism or agnosticism.

Many of them agonized deeply over

their loss of faith. It was as though

they had been robbed. They loved

Jesus and wished with all their hearts

that they could still believe in Him,

but the evidence which confronted

them tore their belief away. Many of

them held onto as much of their godly

past as possible. They tried to salvage

the strong sense of morality, duty, hard

work and self-control, but without

the God who had given it to them in

the ﬁ rst place. One of them summed

it up this way in 1873: “Let us dream

no dreams and tell no lies, but go our

way, wherever it may lead, with our

eyes open and our heads raised” (p.

200). There is bravery and integrity in

this statement, together with a horrible

sense of the tragic. It is the practical

creed of a man who had once known

and loved God, but had lost Him,

and was facing his short life alone and

abandoned in a now empty universe.

True Christianity, they believed, did

not entail entering the marketplace of

ideas. They did not think it worthwhile

to intelligently engage the skeptics,

German Biblical critics, agnostics and

atheistic philosophers of their day.

Instead, they claimed, God had called

them to a purely practical faith: to send

forth missionaries, to help the poor and

downtrodden, to better peoples’ man-

ners. These were the things pleasing

to God; not intellectual debate or true

apologetics. In fact, a popular belief of

theirs was that one could only prove

the existence of God by looking deep

within one’s own conscience (pietism at

its worst!). When, by the mid-1800s,

much of Evangelicalism became inﬂ u-

enced by the rise of proto-fundamen-

talist groups, any fading hope of a ‘life

of the mind’ was dashed to pieces.

Which brings us to the tragic last

chapter of Bradley’s book, the story

of the new generation: the children

and grandchildren of these nine-

teenth-century Evangelicals. While

some of them kept the faith, “an

alarmingly high number deserted the

Evangelical fold” (p. 194). Some still

remained Christians. For example,

three of William Wilberforce’s sons

became Roman Catholics and the

fourth became a non-Evangelical

Anglican. Thomas Macauley also

forsook Evangelicalism, though he

still considered himself Christian. The

real tragedy is not in these cases, but

in the many others who abandoned

the Christian faith altogether. Bradley

notes that, “Samuel Butler, George

Eliot [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans],

Leslie and James Fitzjames Stephen,

and Francis Newman renounced

Christianity altogether and became

atheists” (p. 194). There are many

others whom Bradley doesn’t mention.

For example, what about Margaret

Noble several years later, the Wesleyan

pastor’s daughter, who as a child “loved

Jesus very much” and wanted to be

a missionary when she grew up? As

an adult, she came under the spell of

Swami Vivekananda, converted to

Hinduism, changed her name to Sister

Nivedita, and wrote praises to “Kali the

Mother.” The list could go on and on.

Many of those who fell away ﬁ t into

a similar pattern. On one hand, they

resented the repressive narrowness

The story of the great author George

Eliot (the pen-name of Mary Ann

Evans) was very upsetting. I had

grown up reading her stories but had

never known the story of her life. She

was raised an Evangelical and loved

God with all her heart (but, unfortu-

nately, she had not been taught how

to love Him with her mind). Her hero

was William Wilberforce, and when

she was 19 she wrote, “Oh that I might

be made as useful in my lowly and

obscure station as he [Wilberforce]

was in the exalted one assigned to him”

(p. 199). In another letter, she said that

she would be happy if the only music

she ever heard again in her life were

worship music. However, all was not

well. Bradley notes that “Three years

later she rejected Christianity in a con-

version which was almost as cataclys-

mic as those which had brought others

to vital religion” (p. 199).

What was it that shattered Evan’s

faith? She read two books of

Biblical criticism, Charles Hennell’s

“Inquiry Concerning the Origin of

Christianity,” and Strauss’ “Life of

Jesus.” Utterly disillusioned, she aban-

doned her faith and spent the rest of

her days alone in the universe, without

God. She tried her utmost to live a

moral and selﬂ ess life without divine

assistance, but failed miserably. In the

1850s, when she had become a suc-

cessful author, she met George Lewes,

a philosopher and scientist. Lewes

was a married man, but they “fell in

love.” Since he had no legal grounds

for divorce, he simply abandoned his

wife and moved in with Evans. They

lived together as though married until

Lewes’ death in 1878, trying to pre-

tend that Lewes’ real wife didn’t really

exist. What a wonderful beginning

and yet such a horrible shipwreck for

Mary Ann Evan’s life.

What sickened me the most was the

fact that Evans lost her faith through

reading the works of Hennell and

Strauss! At this point in history, those

men are no longer taken seriously.

Their works have been completely

refuted. No careful, thinking person

today could ever lose faith by read-

ing Strauss! In our time, some people

lose their faith over the Jesus Seminar,

but the western Church has come a

long way in scholarship. Right off

They loved Jesus and

wished with all their hearts

that they could still believe

in Him, but evidence

which confronted them tore

their belief away.

21:1 Spring 2004

Jonathan W. Rice

the top of my head I can think of at

least three books, two by Protestants

and one by a Catholic, which solidly

refute the theories of the Jesus Seminar

(and there are many more). Why

didn’t the nineteenth-century English

Evangelicals produce solid responses

to Strauss and others? Why were they

so lazy in this area when they were so

diligent in every other aspect of life?

Why did a whole generation have to be

robbed of their faith in Christ? Why

did a sweet young girl like Mary Ann

Evans have to get deceived, fall away,

and then live a life alienated from God

as the mistress of another woman’s

husband? True, Evans and all the

others were adults, accountable to God

for their actions and beliefs. But from

a Biblical perspective, they were also

sheep whose shepherds had failed to

protect them from savage wolves.

The book’s conclusion left me with

deep grief in my heart for a genera-

tion now long dead. And I thought

of today’s English, the great-great

grandchildren of the Evangelical

generation. An England where the

Royal Family has degenerated into

tabloid trash, where Mick Jagger has

become a knight, and where instead

of Christian spirituality they follow

everything from Hare Krishna to

Harry Potter. And don’t forget those

wonderful Brits who convert to Islam,

like shoe-bomber Richard Reed.

What a travesty!

When Vishal Mangalwadi joined me

in the ofﬁ ce the next morning, I told

him about my reading experience and

how badly it had bothered me. Vishal

immediately said that the present-

day Indian church is failing in the

exact same manner. He mentioned

as an example the attacks of Hindu

journalist/politician Arun Shourie

against the gospels a few years ago. I

was in Calcutta then and read them

each week as they came out in The

Asian Age newspaper. He had used his

connections to write full paged, syn-

dicated articles attacking the Bible for

several Sundays in a row, culminating

on Easter Sunday. (Apparently, some-

one forgot to tell him that Hindus are

tolerant of all religions!) The amazing

thing about it was he was using old,

outworn, nineteenth-century argu-

ments against Christianity. A few

weeks later, one Christian leader gave

a pathetic, insipid reply in the op-ed

section of the Asian Age, but that was

it. The rest of the Indian church was

publicly quiet.

I mentioned the articles to some col-

leagues at the Bible college where I

taught. Some were unaware of them

and others seemed rather sheepish,

as if the articles might be shaking

their faith as well! One person said

that maybe RZIM (Ravi Zacharias

International Ministries) or some

such group should write a response.

But no one from any of the well-

funded seminaries in India ever said

or wrote a word. Nor did any of the

well-paid church bishops, who in

addition to their salaries get free

housing and transportation. Several

years later, they still remain silent!

And not only that, there is more

to the scandal. In 1989, Sita Ram

Goel wrote his “History of Hindu-

Christian Encounters” (Voice of

India Publishing). Around the same

time, Voice of India also published

“Psychology of Prophetism.” Over

twelve years later, the Indian church

still has NOT responded to these

attacks against Christianity. When

Arun Shourie wrote “Missionaries

in India,” (1994) only one person,

Vishal Mangalwadi, responded with

a book. No one has of yet answered

his newest anti-Christian polemic,

“Harvesting our Souls.”

Why does the Indian church allow

such intellectual attacks to go

unchallenged? Are the bishops and

seminarians afraid that if they write

well-researched answers that some-

body might beat them up or throw

rocks at them? What really is the

problem here? Perhaps the same anti-

intellectual laziness which destroyed

English Evangelicalism. Please do not

underestimate the intelligence of our

Indian young people. Many Christians

all over India have read these attacks,

especially the ones serialized in The

Asian Age. How many of them have

already lost their faith because no one

in the church bothered to give them

an answer? Maybe we should just tell

them to “Trust and obey and go on

your way.” Is that what the church

leaders think? They should not fool

themselves. The young people will go

on their way, out of the Church and

into Hinduism or something else.

The fault, however, does not lie with

the Indian Church alone, but with

the Western missions groups that

pour untold millions of dollars into

India. These groups seem not to have

learned anything at all from the fail-

ures of both English and American

Evangelicalism. For they will invest

millions of dollars to send western

tracts, dig wells, build hospitals,

and give free food to impoverished

Muslims in India. But if someone

requests a few thousand dollars to

help Indian Christian thinkers do

some serious research and writing,

they are ignored.

Each generation of leaders in each

nation will be accountable for the

sheep in their care. They will answer

for it at the Judgment Seat of Christ.

Which reminds me…possibly no other

group in church history was more

aware of the Judgment Seat of Christ

than the nineteenth-century English

Evangelicals. They were, in fact, overly

aware of it, almost to the point of

neurosis. How devastatingly ironic it

is that those same people will have to

give an account at the Judgment Seat

of Christ for losing entire generations,

starting with their own children,

because they were too lazy to challenge

the wolves at the door.

May the Indian church awake before

it ends up in the same defeated place,

guilty of the blood of its own sheep

that it cared not to defend!

ay the Indian church awake before it ends up in

the same defeated place, guilty of the blood of its

own sheep that it cared not to defend