The great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) were sometimes described on this very Board as the true Axis of Evil, to quote President Dubya. However I'm rather partial to cathedral choirs (no girl choristers please!) and Evensong, so I don't regard religion as intrinsically evil. Missionaries are, however, another thing altogether. A recent book, reviewed in the latest Spectator, paints a typical picture of their depredations:
"The East India Company had refused to allow British missionaries in their territories on the pragmatic grounds that Indians were easier to govern and do business with if they were allowed ‘the undisturbed enjoyment of their respective opinions and usages’. Under pressure from the Evangelical movement, however, the British government made it a condition of renewing the Company’s charter in 1813 that missionaries should be granted access to the subcontinent. It is shocking to find William Wilberforce (who helped abolish slavery in Britain) asserting that, after slavery, ‘the foulest blot on the moral character’ of Britain was that it allowed its Indian (by which he meant Hindu) subjects to remain ‘under the grossest, the darkest and most degrading system of idolatrous superstition that almost ever existed upon earth’; but this attitude was widespread among those who saw it as their religious duty to wean benighted ‘natives’ from their ‘disgusting and bestial rites’. Although the number of actual conversions to Christianity was laughably small, missionaries did much to alienate the indigenous population from its rulers and to foment grotesque notions of racial superiority that became a genuine blot on later British-Indian relations."
I hadn't realised heretofore the contribution of the missionaries to the Indian Mutiny, for example. And then there's a final paragraphy of the review, with its tantalising invitation to read the book: "Covering almost every aspect of the British in India — from pets to pederasty, ... "
Disclaimer: for those who think I read The Spectator for its articles let me plead the Playboy defence - I buy it for Robin Oakley's weekly column on the turf
Reply With Quote
