In November 1906, at the Australian Church Congress in Melbourne, Bishop George Frodsham appealed for missionaries to the Australian Aborigines: “The Aborigines are disappearing . . . Missionary work . . . may be only smoothing the pillow of a dying race, but I think if the Lord Jesus came to Australia he would be moved with great compassion for these poor outcasts.”1 As gracious as these words were, Bishop Frodsham’s speech assumed that the Aborigines were a weak, underdeveloped race who could not survive competition with the fitter, more developed whites. His mindset was sadly infected with racist views of the Aborigines common in Australia at the turn of the century.

Under the influence of Darwinian theories of evolution, most early twentieth-century Australians regarded Aborigines as primitive and underdeveloped. The Australian Encyclopedia of 1907 described them as “ape-like.”2 Anthropologist Baldwin Spencer wrote a series of advisory recommendations to aid the Commonwealth Government in forming policy regarding the Aborigines. In 1913 he described them as “[m]entally about the level of a child . . .”3 Actions supported words. Because they were regarded as sub-human, Aborigines were sometimes hunted down for sport and shot like animals.4 At a government level, the 1904 Aborigines Act gave the government legal guardianship of Aboriginal children until the age of 16. In 1909 they were excluded from public schools and confined to Aboriginal schools, which often lacked trained teachers. Later, in the 1930s, the “full-blood” Aborigines were isolated on reserves, because they were regarded as “incapable of being civilized,” whilst mixed-race “half-castes” were “civilized” and assimilated into Western culture.

In the midst of such race hatred, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was marked by compassion for the Aborigines. They sought to educate them and train them in manual labor and farming. They also condemned white maltreatment and exploitation of native Australians. Above all, CMS missionaries longed to care for Aboriginal spiritual needs by telling them of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Tragically, however, CMS accepted the social Darwinism of Baldwin Spencer’s reports. The first three CMS missionaries were told that it would try their patience “to the uttermost” to minister to “these overgrown children.”5 CMS publications frequently spoke of Aborigines as underdeveloped, untouched by evolution, and inferior to white Europeans.

The CMS did much good for Aboriginal Australians, and not all their missionaries accepted the racist stereotypes of their day. Nevertheless, the early days of CMS were marked by racism, which, although milder than that of secular Australians, was still appalling. As a result, even today, Christian witness among Aborigines is hampered by charges of cultural imperialism.6 CMS harmed the gospel because they drank uncritically from the polluted wells of social Darwinism, rather than accepting the Bible’s teaching that all people are equally God’s image bearers. Such behavior warns Christians to subject their thinking to Scripture and to beware the contaminating influence of secular worldviews that lead away from the truth.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Quoted in John Harris, We Wish We’d Done More: Ninety Years of CMS and Aboriginal Issues in North Australia, rev. ed. (Adelaide: Openbook Publishers, 1998), 93.
 
2  Stewart Gill, “Conquerors or Saviours? The Aboriginals and the United Aboriginal Mission,” Kategoria 7 (1997): 9-26, at 11.
 
3  Gill, 11.
 
4  In 1908, the North Australian newspaper wrote, “As to the shooting of the blacks, we uphold it defiantly” (Quoted in Harris, 92).
 
5  Harris, 98.
 
6  E.g. Anne Pattel-Gray, Through Aboriginal Eyes: The Cry from the Wilderness (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1991); see also the views canvassed in Hilary M. Carey, Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of Religions (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 57.
 

article adopted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located one and a half miles east Rt. 222.