Science, Technology, and the Gospel
It's 1890, and Protestant Missionaries Are Publishing Science in China. Why?
This noble invention is to be the means of extending civilization, republicanism, and Christianity over the earth. It must and will be extended to nations half-civilized, and thence to those now savage and barbarous. Our government will be the grand center of this mighty influence.... The beneficial and harmonious operation of our institutions will be seen, and similar ones adopted. Christianity must speedily follow them, and we shall behold the grand spectacle of a whole world, civilized, republican, and Christian....Wars will cease from the earth. Men “shall beat their swords into plough shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.”... Then shall come to pass the millennium.1
What was this marvelous new thing? Why, the “magnetic telegraph”! Or so it seemed to a writer in the Ladies Repository of 1850.
Now, imagine yourself as a Presbyterian missionary evangelist in the 1870s, itinerating through the towns and villages of Shandong Province. As night approaches, you secure yourself a spot in an village inn, along with an assortment of other travelers, wheelbarrows, carts, and donkeys. As a Westerner, your arrival is conspicuous, and the usual crowd of idle children and men gathers to observe your strange ways and accoutrements. Privacy is not a thing. But you are used to this. And as polite inquiries are being made about your “honorable country” and your “honorable business,” the crowd parts for a man of dignified bearing. After cordial greetings, then come his questions.
But not about your religion. He is curious to learn about science and the civilization of the West. Can you perhaps provide him with books on science, or even instruct him in scientific subjects. You do your best to honor his interests. But this is not your calling, your answers can barely scratch the surface. But you keep encountering inquirers like this, in nearly every town. And you wonder what you might do to respond to this groundswell of curiosity.
This was the testimony of two missionaries at an 1877 Protestant missionary conference in Shanghai. One of them was Calvin Wilson Mateer, a veteran Presbyterian missionary and founder of Tengchow College (now Shandong University). Another missionary at the conference affirmed the same experience. Others surely nodded in agreement.
These missionaries were responding to a paper read by William A. P. Martin, a former American Presbyterian missionary and now an educator in Peking, employed by the government. Martin’s paper explored the extent to which missionaries “should endeavour to contribute to the creation of a new secular literature in China.” This was now the field of his own professional activity, and its pursuit had been a contributing factor in his leaving the Presbyterian mission. Before he sailed for China in 1849, he had expressed his view in his seminary graduation oration on “The Uses of the Physical Sciences as an Equipment of the Missionary.”
But sometimes science just quacks! An ad appearing in The China Medical Missionary Journal (May 10, 1890).
I have mentioned in an earlier piece that this topic has been lingering on my mind. And not least because in the 1950s my own grandfather, James R. Graham III, threw his considerable energy into starting a college of science and engineering in Taiwan. For years I’ve wondered what factors might have contributed to that initiative. Was this something rolling out of his missionary experience in China during the 1920s and 30s? Was there a call for such an institution from Nationalist Chinese who had fled the mainland to Taiwan? In any case, my curiosity was piqued. And it set me up to take notice of scientific interests among missionaries in an earlier era. When I kept bumping into nineteenth-century China missionaries promoting science, it seemed odd, and even extraordinary. But then it started to make sense. And then it became even more interesting.
China had long been an insular cultural unit, walled off in time and space. As Frederick Wakeman put it, “the greatest land power in East Asia had been politically and ritually sealed into its own hermetic sphere of activity…. The longer her isolation continued, the more jarring the shock when the cultural enclosures of this last great, independent historical unit were shattered.”2
And so in the late nineteenth century we find missionaries, who across the vast reaches of China’s plains and mountains, were moving about through villages and towns, their ears close to the ground. And they were finding themselves fielding inquiries from those who were curious about this new world crashing through the gates of the Middle Kingdom. Technology (telegraph, steam engines, electricity, industrial and military innovations) and science (broadly defined), which had grown in Western soil and over a long process, was now thrust upon China in an upending tsunami from the West. The old bulwarks against unwanted change were engulfed and rendered useless. And at the intellectual level, Confucian scholars were reexamining and recalibrating their tradition so as to—Perhaps!—utilize Western means to attain Confucian ends.
Looking ahead, after the overthrow of the Qing empire in 1911/12, Western “science” and its technological offspring would increasingly and enthusiastically come to the fore in China. In fact, Science and Democracy were now the paired solutions to a renewal of Chinese society. Chinese intellectuals, many of them Western educated, mounted a criticism of China’s past that mirrored the Western critique of China. There was a rush toward science or, more accurately, “scientism.”3 For it seemed that science provided a new cosmology that might anchor and frame this new world that was emerging. So began a compressed and frantic catch-up to what European thought and culture had achieved over a protracted history of change, symbolized in the Western Enlightenment.4
And so the early decades of the twentieth century saw a revolutionary quest for a new worldview, a Chinese Enlightenment. By the 1920s there arose a virulent attack on religion, and Christianity quite pointedly. Ironically, this was to repudiate the very soil that had nurtured the European Enlightenment.5
All of this brings to mind the “Needham Question,” formulated by Joseph Needham through his tireless investigation and publication of China’s technological discoveries and inventions over the centuries. That is, Why was China, despite its early and sustained record of technological success, overtaken by the meteoric rise of modern science in the West? Why had modern science not developed over the long history of Chinese civilization?6
Interestingly, it was Japan that, from the mid-nineteenth century on, had rapidly gone to school on Western science and technology. Japan, the brilliant student of East Asia, now became tutor to backward China. This was a great reversal of the historical relationship between China and Japan. And unanticipated consequences would eventually unfold.
I’m skipping ahead of our nineteenth-century story. But often enough, historical outcomes shed interesting light on earlier developments. And I think this is the case with missionaries and science in China. In the late nineteenth-century, Western missionaries were debating their role, and taking initiatives, in promoting science in China. And their perceptions of China’s hunger for science were not wrong. But really. Who would have thought that they were sowing the seeds of what would come forth?
I’m still processing this whole development. (And through it all, I keep thinking that someone must have already plowed this field and published their findings!) So consider this an amateur’s notebook on some of the things I’ve been seeing. For convenience, I’m going to ground most of my comments in the published reports from the two late-nineteenth-century Protestant missionary conferences in Shanghai, first in 1877, and then in 1890.
But before we dive into that in our next piece, let me offer a snapshot of the intellectual life of some of these missionaries. A favorite of mine is from the Congregational missionary Emma Smith, wife of Arthur Smith, the author of the widely influential book Chinese Characteristics. Here is Emma Smith in 1890:
Take the case of the most interesting and the dearest Chinese woman you know. She looks at your book-shelves and says timidly, “I suppose these are all about the Bible.” How can you make her understand that this shelf-full is about art, that the next shelf is scientific works, your dear old schoolbooks; the next, travels and biographies, and the one above, your favorite poets? You glance across them, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Whittier, Adelaide Proctor and Mrs. Browning.7
Emma Smith would have been an eager subscriber to (the former) Books & Culture, or to Comment Magazine.
In this case she was addressing missionary women engaged in ministry to Chinese women. While there is a clear air of superiority and cultural pride, she had a point. And that was the great educational and cultural distance between many Western women missionaries and most Chinese women of the nineteenth century, who were overwhelmingly denied educational opportunities. However we might view them, Emma Smith and her colleagues were not the marginal figures of twenty-first century stereotypes. They were often well educated, culturally engaged, and—overtly or implicitly—purveyors of what they regarded as the providential advances and benefits of Western civilization. Science and technology were part of that package.
And the Chinese were watching, learning, adapting, and engaging with this new world emerging on their soil.
“The Magnetic Telegraph,” Ladies’ Repository 10 (1850): 61–62; quoted Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States, Book 5; Oxford University Press, 2007).
Frederick Wakeman Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861 (University of California Press, 1966), 4-5.
D. W. Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900-1950 (Yale University Press, 1965).
Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 6.
For the full scope of this argument, see Peter Harrison, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China (Harper, 2008).
Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890), 255.