Revisiting Lamin Sanneh’s “Western Guilt Complex” from a Grassroots Perspective

The Western guilt complex and its implications

A first-rate scholar who was conversant in diverse intellectual contexts, Sanneh was particularly keen on addressing the scarlet letter of “colonialism” stamped on the Western church—a theme that Sanneh addressed in an article titled “Christian Missions and the Western Guilt Complex” in the Christian Century (1987). The article remains a fascinating, provocative, and timely piece of critical reflection inspired not only by academic insight but also by his personal spiritual journey, which revealed Western Christianity’s enduring guilt over its colonialist past.

Colonialism’s legacy upon Western Christianity established the Western guilt complex as a fundamental idiom of Western ecclesiastical identity, especially in the context of the church’s relationship with the “other.” Missionary work and religious encounters with non-Christian peoples and regions were subsequently almost necessarily articulated apologetically.

Despite the several decades now since its publication, Sanneh’s call for a sober evaluation of missions remains ever more pertinent as the specter of colonialism continues to cast a shadow over Western Christianity. As Sanneh and others have pointed out, the weight of the sins of colonialism produced internally contradictory intellectual formations in the history of missions and missional activities.

As a result, Western Christianity, from the mid-twentieth century, has had difficulty defending its positions in missionary movements and leadership. Faced with backlash and hostility, Western Christianity, in its retreat from missions, turned inward in isolationist defensiveness, driven by fear of the appearance of religious imperialism. The implications of Western Christianity’s retreat are many, but none are more crippling to the vitality of Western Christianity than the severing of missions from the theological underpinnings of Christian praxis necessary to understand and engage the other.

Missions examines Christianity’s relationship with the world and society and points Christians beyond their own context toward others in a movement of redemption and reclamation in Christ. The imperative to extend beyond one’s borders could not be more urgent, as the “next Christendom” is taking shape as a dynamic worldwide religion. Missions represents the wide outward connection with a whole constellation of Christian communities.

In the era of “next Christendom,” Western Christianity, Sanneh wrote, “is now in the twilight of its Western phase and at the beginning of its formative non-Western impact.” ¹ In light of the shift, grassroot perspectives add to our understanding of the human engagement with the divine by acknowledging that the process of Christian experience is a dynamic one that tests and unsettles the boundaries of the preexisting religious and cultural norms and challenges social frameworks in the process. The religious experience of individuals is hardly linear; it can be spontaneous and multidirectional as it is informed by many strands of sociocultural predispositions and pressures.

Sanneh’s Western-free conversion

Lamin Sanneh grew up in Gambia, a Muslim-majority country in West Africa that is surrounded by Senegal. He attended a government-run Islamic boarding school and had no exposure to Christianity growing up. Over time, however, Sanneh became transfixed with Jesus. Sanneh’s turn toward Jesus as Christ was unexpected and totally unguided by Westerners. Sanneh wrote, “There was no church in town when I was growing up; I had never seen a Bible in my life; I had never heard anyone teach or preach about Christianity; there was no mention of Christianity in the books we read at school. There was not a single missionary in my town that I knew of.” ²

In other words, Sanneh’s conversion to Christianity took place without anyone telling him about Jesus—but that is not completely true. Growing up, Sanneh heard about Jesus from the Qur’an, Islamic teachings, and imams, all of which presented him as a revered prophet. From the perspective of Western missiological models, Sanneh’s conversion should not have happened, for missionaries, churches, Bibles, Christian books, and any other exposure to Christianity were absent in his conversion.

Conversion as locally rooted

The seemingly random events that led to Sanneh’s conversion point to the creative and manifold nature of conversions. In Understanding Korean Christianity, I discuss the unpredictable ways Christianity interacts with local cultures as characteristics unique to a culture trigger unintended and unforeseeable reactions. ³ The Christianizing process is neither linear nor unidirectional; rather, it reflects the constantly evolving religious consciousness in the cultural composition that interacts and reacts with the introduction of new religious ideas. I refer to the engagement between Christianity and culture as a “breaking and turning over earth”; the contact “produces a dynamic interaction with local religion(s), cultural self-understanding, and socio-political consciousness.” ⁴

The organic means by which individuals convert to Christianity without the aid of human “fertilizers,” as has happened in Korean church history and in Sanneh’s own conversion, should absolve Western Christians of any colonial guilt. Sanneh was in disbelief, however, when he encountered the embarrassment the news of his conversion to Christianity brought his Western friends. Writing about the Western guilt complex, Hwa Yung writes, “I am not aware of any society or culture in history that has self-critically developed a guilt complex as deep and extensive as that of the present western world over its past mistakes.” ⁵ In what should have been a response of exultation, Christians responded to Sanneh’s conversion with discomfort. The church’s “hesitant attitude about religious conversion,” Sanneh wrote, “surprised, frustrated, dismayed, saddened, and confused me.” ⁶

Sanneh sensed the contradictory impulses that the Western guilt complex produced, even as he explained that his conversion occurred without Western intervention. This guilt complex created a monolithic interpretation of missionary activity as a by-product of Western cultural imperialism. In response, Sanneh and others corrected many misunderstandings of the colonial experience. For example, Sanneh argued that the end of Western colonialism in Africa inhibited the growth of Islam, while, at the same time, it led to the growth of Christianity. ⁷ For Hwa Yung, former Methodist bishop of Malaysia, the Western guilt complex demonstrated Western Christianity’s sensitivity to the colonial plight of those who endured Western colonialism. Yung writes, “What has been almost completely overlooked is that the very fact of the western guilt complex may well be one of the supreme evidences for the enduring validity of the gospel in the post-Christian western world!” ⁸

Many have endeavored to balance one-sided perceptions of missionary work by noting many of their outstanding contributions. One of the missionaries’ highest achievements was their commitment to bringing the gospel into the vernacular languages of peoples around the world. Missionaries and mission boards invested enormous amounts of resources and personnel to research, translate, publish, and teach vernacular languages. In all, the worldwide translation movement has involved over 1,800 languages. The impact of this singular missionary effort has had an incalculable impact on global education and development. As Dana Robert notes, “In 1935 missions were running nearly 57,000 schools throughout the world, including more than one hundred colleges. Mission schools promoted literacy in both European languages and vernaculars, and they spread Western ideals of democratic governance, individual rights, and the educability of women and girls.” ⁹

The legacy of colonialism

In “Christian Missions and the Western Guilt Complex,” Sanneh examined not only the stain of colonial shame that stigmatized the Western church but also, more importantly, the subsequent crisis of confidence in missionary and evangelical engagement. Witnessing their retreat from any hint of proselytism, lest they be accused of repeating colonialist infringement and oppression, Sanneh wondered in amazement at Christians’ reactionary and apologetic responses to his conversion. Sanneh was “baffled by the apparent determination of my church superiors to keep religious subjects from all ‘decent’ and ‘cultured’ conversation.” ¹⁰

The legacy of colonialism damaged the reputation of missions to the point that, by the 1970s, the academic field of missions and mission studies faced, according to Dana Robert, an “imminent collapse of legitimacy.” ¹¹ During that time, missionaries were synonymous with cultural imperialists. Robert writes, “Nationalist independence movements named missionaries as complicit in the system of Western occupation, and critique of missions grew exponentially. Because students lost interest in what they considered a colonialist enterprise, mission studies began disappearing from mainline denominational seminaries.” ¹²

A remnant of this era was the scaling-down and discontinuation of professorships and programs of mission studies in religious studies departments and in seminaries. ¹³ The implications, however, went beyond the elimination of academic positions. Western Christianity’s retreat from missions represented a far greater threat to the vitality of Western Christianity than what was understood at the time, since missions articulated the outward ways Western Christianity expressed the mandate of the Christian witness. Without the impetus for cross-cultural and evangelistic exchanges that missions offers to diverse communities around the world, the church can easily become inward-looking, interested only in its own affairs and concerns.

The origin—and diminishing role—of Western missions

Modern missions was developed by a willful cultivation of Christian concern to neighbors and strangers abroad. Andrew Walls noted that William Carey (1761–1834), often called the Father of Modern Missions, understood that “a missionary was essentially a preacher, and that a preacher should normally be a minister.” ¹⁴ Walls added, “But for them the minister was the representative of the established Church in society.” The primary responsibility of the minister was the home church and congregations. However, missions adds a layer of missional and ethical concern that Christians and churches express to those outside their circles, without which hopes of dialogue and exchange with worldwide churches remain illusory.

Missional theology and engagement are crucial to discussions as to why and how the church engages the other. World Christianity today is undergoing a massive demographic shift, but for the Western church to participate in the increasingly complex Christian community, missions, with its unique mediating position in World Christianity, must first understand the particular dynamics of the Christian movements now taking place. With the ascendance of Christianity in non-Western countries, Andrew Walls warns that the issues riveting Western Christianity “will be less and less significant for the future of Christianity.” ¹⁵ As the significance of Western Christianity diminishes in World Christianity, the shackles of the Western guilt complex will further impede efforts to engage the worldwide Christian community for fear of repeating past mistakes.

The significance of a grassroots perspective

Grassroot approaches to missions, or focusing on how specific cultures translate the gospel into their particular context, can alleviate colonialist concerns. According to Tom Hastings, Sanneh’s insight into the “infinite translatability” of the gospel once it takes root in the culture “still has not been understood or heeded by much of the Western theological academy.” ¹⁶ By taking seriously the dynamic process of how people encounter and assimilate religion, assumptions about linear projections of individuals’ religious experience are challenged; such an approach should also stimulate debate in an ongoing discussion of the complex interplay of ideas taking place in the grassroots. Perspectives from the grassroots validate the Christian experience of individuals and communities by centering their encounter as the point of reference and recognizing their role as an interactive participant in the unfolding of their faith. In effect, it counters the presumption that people and cultures in the Global South are largely uninvolved or like a blank canvas when encountering Christianity.

The view that peoples in the Global South are devoid of consultative capacity not only continues the colonialist treatment of native peoples as inferiors who need modernizing or Christianizing but also grossly underestimates the existing power structures embedded in the native culture. No culture or civilization is ever static. In actuality, each one over time has been absorbed with the nutrients of ideological formations, cultural predispositions, religious notions, and profound historical precedents—for good or ill. Every religion is full of transformative themes, and unintentional and unexpected combustible interactions can easily ignite within the native soil.

As Andrew Walls reminded us, the Word became flesh at a particular time and space, becoming “a Palestinian Jew in the early first century.” ¹⁷ God meets individuals and communities within cultures and traditions. As people incorporate Christianity into their cultural context, a process of religious hybridization or domestication takes place.

Rejecting simple explanations for encounters with Christianity, we should shift the focus to the effects of both grassroots engagement and the formation of Christian self-understanding, an undertaking that opens new possibilities for Christian representations in non-Christian environments. While the approach of Western academic scholarship privileges missionary personnel, resources, strategies, and Western models, they nonetheless continue the perspective that considers the agencies of propagation as the primary influence in cross-cultural transmission. For example, “what one misses” in the missionary narrative, according to Sanneh, “is a conceptual framework that ties Bible translation into the logistics of indigenization.” ¹⁸

The multidirectional narratives from non-West regions reveal the self-reflection of local cultures as they grapple with Christianity. Local cultures interpret Christianity based on their religions, moral obligations, and cosmologies. More methodological approaches grounded in grassroot experiences will be needed to properly understand Christianity as a globalizing religion. This breadth in turn will increase awareness of the variety of Christian experience and clarify the construction of new religious identities in the wake of interactions with Christianity, which is currently undergoing monumental shifts. ¹⁹ The examination of the unique challenges facing Christian communities in the Global South will inform our understanding of Christian reproduction.

Conclusion

The unabated “self-flagellation about colonialism” ²⁰ within Western Christianity impairs historical judgment and distorts broader themes in the missionary discourse. At the same time, the Western guilt complex must also be seen as a Western phenomenon, not only in the obvious sense that it is a Western reaction to colonialism but also in the larger sense that Western perspectives in general inform our interpretation. The overreliance on Western factors, personnel, and reactions (such as the Western guilt complex) undermines our ability to understand the experiences of diverse communities. This guilt complex, as well as narratives that exclusively rely on Western sources, does not fully account for the participation of those outside Western power structures and authority.

Lamin Sanneh recognized, within the grassroots, the spontaneous forces driving contemporary Christian movements when he wrote, “The current [global Christian] awakening had occurred without the institutions and structures that define Western Christendom . . . monasteries, theological schools, and hierarchical agency.” ²¹ In recognizing the potency of indigenous knowledge systems, we can appreciate that the spiritual self-awareness of peoples provides crucial insight into the dynamism of their conversion experience. In the process, the center of the religious meaning-making process shifts to the recipient population. The interpretation and subsequent incorporation of new religious values and practices do not begin on a blank slate but rather on a complex canvas filled with competing values, religious proclivities, and reservoirs of knowledge.