Yale Divinity School Library Photo
The photo from the W.K. Norton album of the Pilgrims Mission, Benares caption reads: “A Hindu trying to earn salvation. The large jar is filled with water and it falls on his head drop by drop.”
Never cut the fingernails of your left hand. Bury your head in the ground. Or your body, up to the neck, to feed the ants.
Let a huge jug of water, drop by drop, fall on your head.
These portrayals of physical contortions and pain to gain religious merit among late 19th- and early 20th-century Hindus in India are among the images in a fascinating little exhibition, “Missionary Portrayals of World Religions,” that recently opened in the rotunda of the Yale Divinity School Library.
The show, which takes some prospecting to find, is at the back of the Divinity School triangle at 409 Prospect St. It runs through October.
I journeyed up there during the International Festival of Arts and Ideas to see how international images and ideas of other religions and cultures came to us a hundred years or so ago.
The exhibition’s point is that among the early conveyors of religious beliefs — for better and for worse — were eager American and British missionaries with a wide range of motives, said the school’s Special Collections Librarian Martha Smalley.
She’s organized the show from Yale’s extensive collections in conjunction with the 25th meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity, a group of about 70 scholars convening later this week.
In three modest display cases, comprised largely of books, pamphlets, and missionaries’ postcards and photographs, the exhibition shows the range of messages sent home over more than a century of missionaries’ encountering, often without much prior knowledge or preparation, other major world religions.
“Some were gung-ho to show other religions in a bad light,” Smalley said as she stood over a series of photographs of Hindus taken by W.K. Norton of the evangelically-oriented Baptist Pilgrims Mission. “By showing the degradation of the ‘heathens’ they could get support.”
She characterized some of the photographs of Norton as having almost “a voyeuristic character to have an emotional impact: how becoming a Christian can free them from performing these self-torturing activities.”
“Witch doctor’s” gourd.
The only artifacts in the show are a gourd, a necklace with a leopard’s tooth (pictured), and a headband used during mourning. The last item belonged to American Methodist medical missionaries Charles and Joy Sheffy, who served in the Belgian Congo between 1922 and 1946.
“Missionaries often brought artifacts from the mission field to churches that they visited while in the U.S. to illustrate the way of life of the peoples they were trying to reach with the gospel,” Smalley said.
Those visits to home churches were also to raise money for the ongoing work. The props were effective. But the more exploitative photographs were what Smalley called just “one end of the spectrum” of the range of the work.
Scholarly and documentary-minded missionaries’ “anecdotal narratives and more scientific studies were important sources of information (or misinformation) about non-Christian religions during this era,” wrote Smalley in an email after touring a reporter through the exhibition.
She pointed out one missionary, Claude Pickens, who appeared to be fascinated by the Muslim culture he encountered in Western China in the 1930s.
A sample of his photographs (pictured), which have an anthropological objectivity, are in the second display case.
To the missionaries, “that there were other fully formed religions was a new idea,” Smalley said. “They wouldn’t have had much background on Buddhism. They saw their role as educators to the British and American public.”
Missionary work still goes on, but much has changed in the last century, said Smalley (pictured). For one thing, participants in the mainstream denominations’ missionary movements are not called missionaries anymore, but co-workers.
That’s because by and large they go out not to convert and create new churches, but to help out at established ones. More evangelical groups do go out to convert what these documents called the “heathens,” but mainline Protestant denominations are no longer so engaged, Smalley said.
“There was no self-awareness, no p.c. at this point, or respect for other people’s beliefs,” she said of what comes across in many of the documents.
“‘Heathen!’ Some will find it embarrassing. But that was the era. It’s changed,” she said.