From the Empire of Christ to the Third World: Religion and the Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century
In the early twentieth century the people of Britain were engaged with the non‐western world primarily through missionary societies, which reached their peak influence in the 1920s. Far from being an intrepid hero like David Livingstone, the typical missionary was a woman employed in a Christian school, hospital, or clinic, hoping to promote a diffuse Christian influence in a non‐Christian land. In the twentieth century Christian activists founded non‐ecclesiastical NGO's such as Save the Children, Oxfam, and Voluntary Service Overseas. Despite the liberal Protestant religious convictions of their founders, these NGO's fostered a class of Third World development experts for whom professionalism dictated a complete separation from religious ideals.
Keywords: missionaries, NGO's, Oxfam, development, Third World, voluntarism, professionals, religion, Liberal, Protestantism
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .