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- [00:00]
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- [03:11]
Alec Ryrie
Why did Protestant missionaries travel the globe across the course of centuries only to convert remarkably few people? Alec Ryrie, author of new book the World's Reformation, tells Eleanor Evans about the neglected global history of early Protestant missions. How preachers traveled across Asia, Africa and the Americas centuries earlier than many assume, and why so many of their ambitious efforts ended in confusion, contradiction and failure.
- [03:41]
Eleanor Evans
We're looking today at the global Christian religious community in terms of it being the biggest the world has ever seen. It covers huge diversity and astonishing scale. Alec, your new book looks at a more forgotten part of this spread. And before we go into this particular puzzle that you came across, I wonder if you can situate us a bit in the wider history of Christian missionary expansion and efforts.
- [04:03]
Alec Ryrie
Sure. So Christianity has been a missionary religion since its very beginning. This is a West Asian religion which spreads out from that base, then through the Roman Empire, but also beyond it from very early on. And that spread right across the Eurasian land mass is a phenomenon of antiquity and of the medieval period. But then by the end of the medieval era, by the 15th century, Christianity is predominantly a European religion. And the particular variant of it that's going to dominate the modern history, Latin Christianity, Catholic Christianity as it is at that point, is very much confined to to Central and Western Europe. And then with the global maritime opening, Columbus, Vasco da Gama, all of that, the unlocking of the puzzle of the world's oceans by European mariners, which leads to the connecting up of the globe in a way that's unprecedented from the 1490s onwards leads to a wave of Christian globalization as well, which of course also goes hand in hand with the age of European empires. But it's not simply an imperial story. Throughout the history of mission and empire, the two have an uneasy and sometimes collaborative, sometimes conflictual relationship. One of the most obvious signs that that story is a complicated one is that the real surge in global Christianity that we've seen in the past half century has followed the collapse of the European empires rather than being driven by it. So there was a widespread expectation when the European empires fell apart in the post second World War era that that would lead to a collapse of the Christian communities that had been built up. That did happen in some places, but it's by no means the dominant story. And the story as we've traditionally told it over those 500 years is one which is led by Catholic missionaries in the wake of the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, later the French as well, building up tremendously successful Catholic communities in some parts of the world. South Central America most obviously, and a more mixed, tangled, but really interesting story in parts of Africa and Asia as well. And then the Protestant powers become involved in the same process as the normal narrative has it, from about the 1790s onwards, in the wake of the French and the American revolutions, and as the British Empire, especially the second British Empire, the British Empire post American Revolution becomes such a globe spanning phenomenon. And all of that is true, but it does leave an obvious gap in the story, which is that Protestantism first emerges, as is well known, with the 16th century Reformation and is a tremendously energetic, aggressive, vibrant missionary religion within Europe is fighting wars of religion. It becomes the dominant faith at points as much as 40% of the continent and has enormous energy behind it. And yet, as the story is normally told, that energy dissipates as soon as you sail out of a European port to go further overseas. And so that standard Protestant missionary story is seen as starting from the very end of the 18th century. And so I set out to ask the question, why didn't it happen? Why wasn't there a global Protestant missionary movement in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries? So that was the book I was supposed to be writing, and it didn't really happen that way.
- [08:06]
Eleanor Evans
Right, so this is the central question that led you to write your book, the World's How Protestantism Became a Global Religion. You're considering this long standing consensus. It's a big question, it's a big book. But can you give us a sense of what you found, what you've been exploring, of the resource that was poured into some of these attempts where efforts might have been concentrated? What did you find?
- [08:27]
Alec Ryrie
So the main thing that I found is that there is an awful lot more in the way of serious missionary activity. And by missionary I should say, I mean conscious attempts to try to convert previously non Christian peoples to Christianity, to Protestant Christianity. There's far more of this going on all over the world than I think has been recognized. And a lot of this has been seen by specialist scholars of particular areas. The number of times I came across specialist scholarship saying, well, we all know that there's no global Protestant mission, but look, here's an exception and there comes a point when you meet too many exceptions and you think, hang on a second, something's going on here. And I think there are interesting reasons why that story has been missed. It's very archivally dispersed. There's something about the Protestant self image at the time and the sense that they always have of running to catch up with what the Catholics have done. There's no mistaking that. The just sheer chronology and the scale of the empires that the Spanish and the Portuguese have tells you that this is a story where the Catholics are in the lead and the Protestants are always feeling themselves to be on the back foot. But it's also clear that the other reason why it's not had the attention that I think it deserves is that these missionary efforts are often usually pretty unsuccessful in terms of actually winning converts. Not completely. There are some remarkable things happening in some places of the world. And I do spend some of the book telling these stories. But in some ways the central theme of the book is why it was that despite what I think I've shown is a pretty impressive amount of energy, effort, money, prayer, the level of investment that's being put into these projects, the return on them is pretty poor. And I think actually that's what makes the subject more interesting, because it shows that rather than this being a heroic story of missionary success of the kind that was going to be told in the 19th century, this is a story that helps us to understand the deep preconceptions that Protestants in this period brought to this task. How they understood themselves, how they understood the world around them, and how difficult it is for them when those prejudices come into head on collision with the reality of people around the world who are just unfathomably alien to them. And the depth of the human difference that they're encountering as they, as that, as they're staring across these cultural chasms is one that I think we often find really difficult to understand in our, in our globalized age. And so things that they think are obvious truths that feel to them utterly self evident, both religious and cultural, absolutely stumble in the face of these, these sorts of problems. And so part of what I'm telling in this, in this book is a story of how those mistakes are slowly, painfully learned from, and how by the 18th century, not a majority by any means, but a critical mass of these Protestants are starting to think, hang on a second. If we're going to understand the world in this way and bring to it the good news that we urgently believe we have to, we're also going to have to understand ourselves and our own culture and differentiate ourselves from it in a different way.
- [12:16]
Eleanor Evans
I think we're going to pull on some of those threads that get us a little bit closer to that understanding as we talk. Before that, can you give us a really quick sense of where these missionaries were going? What sort of scale are we looking at?
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Alec Ryrie
So the short answer is almost everywhere. I mean there's a map at the beginning of the book which gives you a sense of the geographical scale. I mean to give you a very quick tour. So I mean there is an important story around the fringes of Europe itself in northern Scandinavia and elsewhere. There's Moravian missionaries in Greenland in the 18th century. There's a lot going on in North America, a whole range of different groups trying to reach different Native American peoples as well as of course the very substantial missions to enslaved peoples in North America, in the Caribbean and in some cases elsewhere. There's some significant efforts taking place at points in South America ranging from fiascos like the short lived but seriously intended in missionary terms Scottish colony in Darien in Panama, it's an utter fiasco but really interesting story through to the Dutch colony in Brazil which is held there for 30 odd years. And there's a very serious, intentional and quite successful missionary effort taking place there. You've got a number of efforts in places around the African coast. Much of that is linked to the slave tends to be less successful for that reason. Then you've got the Dutch presence in the Indian Ocean and beyond. So the Dutch hold a large part of Sri Lanka territories throughout what's now Indonesia. There's an extraordinary story of the Dutch presence on the island that we now call Taiwan across the middle of the 17th century, which has a short lived but while it last very successful mission there and some attempts, although it's much more difficult to reach into the Asian mainland as well as closer to home efforts to reach into the Ottoman Empire. That's enormously difficult, but a lot of efforts put into it and one or two individuals who are getting further than that. There's a remarkable German Lutheran who winds up as a confidant of the Emperor of Abyssinia, modern Ethiopia for a number of years. So those are some of the highlights. But it is a properly globe spanning story which is one of the things that made it quite difficult to put together.
- [14:44]
Eleanor Evans
Yes, you've given us a real sense there that it is far from an insubstantial effort and story. And I should just mention that in Alec's recent article for History Extra magazine you do examine that particular episode on the island of what is today Taiwan, what you call the story of early and Protestant missions in a nutshell. So I'll leave our listeners to go there for a bit more on that foreign
- [15:06]
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- [16:31]
Eleanor Evans
I wonder, Alec, if we can go back to some of these forgotten early Protestant missionaries and you can bring us closer to that sense of understanding what does success look like for them and what attitudes are they perhaps bringing that we should understand?
- [16:45]
Alec Ryrie
So in many ways what success looked like for them? It's, you know, the answer is kind of simple and obvious. They wanted to convert people. They wanted to have a godly Protestant community and of the kind that they would recognize in North America or in East Asia. For the Dutch, you know the number of different places where they're trying to do this, they have a model, they've seen it done in Europe and they are trying to roll that out. So I mean, if you look for example at the island of Sri Lanka, which is under Dutch rule from the 1650s onwards until the end of the 18th century, and the Dutch regard this in much the same way as if they'd taken over a Catholic province in Europe. They're going to have mass schooling which people are going to be required to send their children to on pains of a fine so that they'll be, be raised with some basic knowledge of Christianity. There will be essentially an established Protestant church which people are required to conform to. And the assumption is that over generations that will properly take root. It turns out to be much more difficult than they imagined, partly because of the cultural depth and also because setting up a structure like that at scale is enormously difficult just in terms of staffing it. And so although they can provide school teachers, the quality of instruction at these schools, let's say, seems to have been bumpy. So there's that kind of simple approach. We're going to try to replicate the Christian societies we've understood. And you can see different kinds of Protestants doing it in different ways. So the Puritans in, in New England are trying to go for something that's much more intense and involved rather than the more kind of structural whole of society thing that the Dutch and indeed some Anglican missionaries elsewhere are doing. But there are other temptations and possibilities lurking there as well. So one of the images that they often use to describe this process, and I spend a little bit of time in the book talking about the language that they use to talk about it. There's, I mean, I use the word missionary because people know what it means. They're often wary about that. The term that they most regularly use is propagation or plantation of Christianity. So these are agricultural metaphors. And if you're going to plant the Protestant gospel in a new land, well, you can do it by taming the existing wild vegetation and turning that into a nice ordered garden. But sometimes it's easier to do it just by ripping up the existing vegetation and transplanting in more familiar crops. And so there's an unease about is it about converting people or is it about converting territory? And you see that tension between a kind of immigration based transplantationist approach to the Christianization, especially of colonies in America. And in some ways it's even more extreme in the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. The tension between that and the wish to try to civilize, to convert these people. Especially because civilization and Christianization are understood to be intimately linked to each other. And of course by civilizing people they mean encouraging them to adopt what they see as the self evident merits of, of a European lifestyle. There are people within this world who are questioning that, who are saying no either. It's simply not necessary to try to persuade these people to adopt a European culture. Or more commonly they will say, well, of course we want them to do that. But actually Christianization should come first. But that sort of approach, which can threaten or destabilize the colonial project and so introduce a degree of threat because it still allows some power to the people under the culture whom you're engaging with. It's so much easier to just assume that the way to make these people Christians is to turn them into Christians like us and these children. And that there's a lot of language of we are the senior civilization. These innocent people will be raised to appreciate the benefits, bits of what we have to offer them. And this is one of the reasons why the more I looked into this, the more I became convinced that one of the crucial lenses for understanding the entire story as it unfolds all over the planet is the Atlantic slave trade. Not just because enslaved Africans are the non Christians whom Protestants encounter more often than any others, you know, Native Americans or whoever are out there, but the people they've enslaved are in their houses, on their estates, they meet them every day. But also because that encounter, as it seems to me, provides a template through which they are interpreting a lot of the rest of the encounters that they have with people in very different circumstances. So it has a series of knock ons beyond the significance of those encounters in themselves.
- [22:18]
Eleanor Evans
This evident conviction that this religion brings all of those benefits that you've just outlined in terms of, quote, unquote, civilizational improvement or what have you. How does this butt up or come up against that reality of the evil of the slave trade as it was understood and, you know, how might we look at it and understand it better?
- [22:38]
Alec Ryrie
Now, this is a story I became very involved in because I found it one of the most compelling that I was dealing with because most Protestants during this period are intensely concerned about the evils of Atlantic slavery. But they don't worry about it and think about it in the way that. That we might. The idea that slavery in itself is inherently evil and is something which Christians ought to oppose is something that starts to emerge only at the very end of my period. And indeed, I think one of the reasons why there is a real change in tempo around the end of the 18th century is intimately tied up with the emergence of slave trade abolitionism at the same period before that. You do have a handful of folks, Quakers and others, who are regarding slavery itself as inherently wrong. But the much more common view from, from Protestants who are thinking about this, you know, ministers, theologians, who are worried about the issue, and they are, they're intensely worried about it, is that there is such a thing as Christian Slavery. And this isn't it. That this. The way that this particular form of slavery is being done is wrong. It needs to become more paternalistic, more familial, that you should be able to treat your slaves as a kind of extended spiritual family. This is from their reading of the Bible. Abraham, you know, the ancient patriarch kept slaves whom he circumcised. He raises them in his religion. They are part of his household. That's the model that they want to replicate. The trouble is, regardless of what you think about the applicability of that model in the ancient world, and there are obviously some pretty serious problems about that, too, it can't even begin to work in the context of plantation slavery. The sheer scale, the industrial nature, the level of slaughter that is attached to this, and equally the level of commercialization. One of the most serious obstacles to the repeated attempt to try to Christianize the structure of slavery, to create something Christian that could be made to work within Atlantic slavery, is the impossibility within that subject of recognizing families formed by enslaved people because slaveholders want to be able to break up families for sale. And if you can't do that for some, you know, some laws put in place to prevent that, that absolutely undercuts the notion that enslaved people are simple property to be treated in much the same way as agricultural animals. So you have a century and more of Christian thinking about this, which is trying to imagine a slavery that has probably never existed, that certainly could not exist within that period, but which they desperately want to, because it's going to avoid an open confrontation with the structures of power. Not because they regard the slave system as admirable. They really don't. They're very clear about that. But because it is an enormous fact, a vast system, which I mean the idea of abolishing it. From the perspective of the late 17th, early 18th century, it seems unreal. There are repeated attempts to found colonial economies that are going to function without slavery. And they all fail. Because, as people repeatedly point out, there is no way to make a sugar plantation or any of these other agricultural projects pay for themselves unless they are depending on slave labor. I think about it as the way that we talk about oil nowadays, in that lots of people would like to run an economy without oil. There's been lots of attempts to do it. Lots of people have talked about it. Nobody's ever yet managed to make it work. It has something of that quality to it. But then over the course of the 18th century, it becomes clearer to more and more people that trying to form a Viable Christianity within the slave system is not just difficult, but is a contradiction in terms. One of the people I use a lot as a witness for this is a man named Philip Kwaku, who was the first African to be ordained in the Church of England. I mean, remarkable man in many ways. He spends 50 years after his ordination as a missionary working for the Church of England Society for the propagation of the Gospel at the British slaving station at Cape coast in what's now Ghana, close to his own home. He himself had never been enslaved, and he has a remarkably unsuccessful career as a missionary. In some ways, I. My sense of him as a character is he's probably not really cut out for it, but although he is deeply committed to it, but he becomes increasingly clear as the years go on that the contradiction of trying to spread the Protestant gospel from a slave trading station is what is making this profoundly impossible. And he becomes very clear that what he calls the horrid slave trade is the most serious block that he is facing in trying to do this work. And not just him, but a number of people, again, a critical mass of people, particularly in Britain and in Britain's American colonies, reach the conviction that unless that trade itself is interrupted, they're not going to be able to pursue the project of Christianization to which they're so committed. And that's one of the things that pitches us into a new world from the 1770s, 1780s onwards.
- [28:49]
Eleanor Evans
Right? So if this contortion, this sort of conciliation changes at the end of the 18th century, there are other factors before that that are also proving blockers to the spread to the success of these missionary efforts. I wonder, you mentioned in your first answer about Catholics, quote, unquote, being in the lead. And I wonder how these missions related in terms of the scale and methods of the Catholic missionary efforts. Did they look to one another? Was there a sense of comparison or even competition there?
- [29:19]
Alec Ryrie
A very strong sense of rivalry. I mean, certainly amongst the Protestants who feel themselves to be playing catch up the whole time. And I mean, one of the regular themes of the rhetoric which I think has actually proved misleading to historians, is there's a lot of bewailing of how little we've done. It's shameful. And all this, which I think we're sometimes inclined to take a little literally when they're usually just trying to reproach their audience and say, you know, come on, put your hands in your pockets about this. But that sense that there are Catholics everywhere and that that's the fundamental challenge they've got to deal with is of course, a direct reflection of the wars of religion that are unfolding in Europe at the time. You know, Protestants everywhere are obsessed with the popish Antichrist and pursuing that competition with Rome. And you see it, you know, in the most unlikely places. So, I mean, I was talking about Sri Lanka earlier. The first Dutch minister in Sri Lanka, having set up the first of these schools, is writing home very proudly to say, you know, these pupils are able to denounce all kinds of popish errors. And you think, well, you know, okay, there had been a Catholic presence on the island. That's not, it's not as if he's imagining this out of nowhere. Even so, there's something a little strange about that. In terms of numerical scale. Very hard to make a, a meaningful comparison, partly because Catholics, for excellent reasons that make sense within Catholic theology, are often pretty free and easy about baptizing people, because baptism is itself an efficacious means of grace if you're a Catholic. Whereas Protestants are usually much more careful about making sure they have a kind of proper, deep conversion. One of the early Protestant missionaries in Massachusetts has this great line about how if we were to adopt the same methods that that Catholics did, we'd be converting people by the thousands. But we've not yet learned the art of putting Christ's stamp onto people as if onto copper metal. You know, saying the Catholics are producing this kind of mass produced rubbish, whereas we're producing this kind of artisanal, handcrafted,
- [31:36]
Eleanor Evans
quality over quantity sort of idea.
- [31:37]
Alec Ryrie
Exactly. And you think if you're having to make that kind of argument, then, you know, you're already on the back foot. So in terms of sheer scale of effort, the Catholics establish and maintain that lead, if you want to think about it in those terms. But there's certainly a Catholic awareness of this rivalry. So you have Catholics in many parts of the world, when they become aware that Protestant books are being introduced, they're going to a lot of trouble to try to buy them up and destroy them to stop them getting out any more widely than they can. There's very direct rivalry between Protestants and Catholic missionaries in North America. The the Protestants backed by the British, Catholics backed by the French. One of the most obvious distinctions is that Protestants in many places are much readier to ordain and authorize ministers who've come from convert backgrounds. I mentioned Philip Kwaku, but there are a number of others, in particular the Dutch in Sri Lanka. And also there's an extraordinary joint German, Danish, British missionary effort in South India, Tamil Nadu, from the early 18th century onwards. And these are communities which employ lots of indigenous people as schoolmasters, as deacons in those sorts of roles, and in some cases not a trivial number of cases, as fully ordained ministers. And some of them, like Philip Kwaku, are straining to be. He's working to be more English than the English and to show how absolutely loyal he is to the church that's, that's accepted him. Others are much more willing to stand up for themselves and their own kinsfolk. And I spend some time in the book talking about one of the most remarkable of these, a Mohegan, a Native American named Santa Mockham, who becomes a very forceful advocate for his own people's rights in the years before, during and after the American Revolution, while also being a minister of the Presbyterian Church.
- [33:48]
Eleanor Evans
So your book clearly demonstrates this breadth, this persistence of this missionary culture that has been forgotten. And you gave an answer earlier on that a lot of that is to do with the various failures. In an article you've written for History Extra magazine you mentioned that one other factor of why it may have been a failure is a sense of over optimistic idealism. The sense that this religion, the benefits of this religion were self explanatory and didn't need any extra effort. Perhaps in some cases. I want to ask particular about the Welshman William Jones and his idea of how they might achieve success.
- [34:25]
Alec Ryrie
Yes, there is this, I mean almost charming naivety. It's charming until you look again and then it's got a kind of dark swirl in it. They have this intense naivety about the self evident truth and attractiveness of their, of their religion. They can see that it's true. Surely it's, it's, it's going to be obvious. And they say something very similar about the quality of their own lifestyle, you know, completely normal for people in North America, for European settlers in North America to think, you know, all we have to do is provide our indigenous neighbors with an example of how much better our lifestyle is, how much more prosperous we are with kind of modern agriculture and so forth, and they will realize that they don't want to live like naked savages running in the wood and will instead come to embrace this self evident superiority of our way of life and the religion that goes with it. And this can lead to an often genuine bafflement that is it doesn't seem to be working. We've shown them what more could they possibly want than seeing how well this works. And this plays out in a number of different ways in different settings. I mean, you mentioned William Jones who has this. I mean, well, is it charming? It tells you something about their preconceptions. He has a suggestion for how India ought to be converted, which is that a book ought to be produced with a condensed version of the Christian Bible in it. So he wants some of the Old Testament prophecies and then enough documentation to demonstrate that they're authentic and then selections from the New Testament, both giving an account of Jesus, life, ministry, death, resurrection, while also demonstrating the prophecies in them of fulfilled, the acts of the apostles, other bits and pieces. So this kind of basic primer in Christianity. And he says all that you should do is have this book translated into various Indian languages, printed and dispersed and just let it seep out as soon as people encounter it. That will do more than anything else can. The self evident attractiveness of this doctrine will, will persuade people. And I mean even in that, I would say he's moved on from some of the earlier approaches which say we just need to go and live there. But it's becoming clearer and clearer by the 18th century that actually one of the major obstacles to converting people to Christianity is when they meet actual Christians who don't tend to behave in a morally exemplary way, especially in a colonial setting. And so one of the things that's I think striking about Jones's suggestion is that we don't want to contaminate their view of Christianity by having them meet actual Christians. Much better to put the ideal out there. And I mean, it's not that he's completely wrong. When one looks at the wider history of Christian missions, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, you can see, well, okay, not exactly that, but there are times in which the message has slipped out of missionary control and run ahead of itself and been taken on board and indigenised by peoples all over the world, sometimes in an enormously constructive way, as has happened in large parts of Africa. Although you could tell the story of the Taiping repellent in China, perhaps the bloodiest war of the whole of the 19th century, as a consequence of that kind of self starting missionary dispersion. But I think that sense of the naivety that you see at work, that kind of blithe faith that really they don't need to do anything because the self evident power of the message will be enough. I came to see that as a kind of key feature for understanding the period for two reasons. Both because it helps to explain how reticent they often are to take more kind of aggressive Missionary strategies. There's an awful lot of let's just print books and disperse them with very little sense of, okay, we're going to invest enormous amounts of money sometimes into these printing projects with no real plan for how we're going to get them into the hands of people who might want to read them. So in some ways I think it helps to explain the relative lack of success of these projects, that kind of naivety. But I mentioned the dark swirl of it as well, because the other effect is when it doesn't work. And of course it usually doesn't work. Who are you going to blame? Well, you can say, well, it's our fault, because the moral example we're setting is it doesn't live up to it. But it's so much more satisfying to be able to say, well, it's their fault. We showed them. What more could we have done? Clearly God doesn't want these people to be converted. Clearly they're too bestial. They need to be forcibly civilized first. Maybe the Christian gospel isn't really for them. And so while in some ways this approach has a kind of gentleness and respect to it, that you're giving people their own agency. And Protestants will often talk about how much better this is than the kind of enforced missionary work that you see amongst the Spanish. Very fond of contrasting themselves to the Spanish brutality. In fact, it can turn almost as vicious at the end because it's still within a context of colonial power. And as much as many of them may wish to disentangle themselves from it, that's easier said than done.
- [40:39]
Eleanor Evans
Yes, there's definitely an insidiousness there. This idea that you other the people that you're maybe also trying to bring into a fold and all the darkness of that. You've taken us through quite a few of the factors today of why many of these efforts failed. You've already said that that's caused much more of it to be forgotten. But I guess the point of your book and your work is that these did happen and that these do exist and have a lot to tell us. Much more is in the book and much more is in your article for History Extra magazine as well. But Alec, is there any other further thoughts you'd like to end on here as we point people towards those onward reading?
- [41:17]
Alec Ryrie
Well, maybe just one thing to. To add to that, which is that, yes, this stuff deserves to be remembered because it happened. I think that there's a global story here that we've not noticed and that is significant in its own right. But I also have come to be convinced that it's got important consequences for more recent times and for our own times as well. When we look back at these people, the fundamental mistake that they seem to be making repeatedly, over and over again, in a kind of how could you be so stupid? Way from, from our perspective, is that they do not understand the depth of the cultural chasms over which they're looking. Their simple conviction of the. The rightness of their own culture and civilization and religion. And I mean, not just unwillingness, almost inability to take seriously the fact that they might have to acquire some distance from themselves and learn something from other people. That's an enormously difficult leap for them to make. It's a leap that we, in our multicultural, cosmopolitan age, have become very used to doing. Although maybe we're not quite as good at it as we sometimes flatter ourselves as thinking that we are. But. But insofar as we have learned anything about how to do that, how to put ourselves into wider perspectives, to see ourselves as others might see us, it's because we learned the only way anybody ever really learns anything, which is through trial and error. And the story that I'm telling in this book is, I think, a large part of how we have slowly, painfully come to acquire that sense of the wider world. So although I am at times maybe fairly brutal about some of these folks when they deserve it, my overall approach is to try to treat them with a degree of sympathy. I don't think that any of us would necessarily have done much better in their circumstances. They made these mistakes so that we don't have to. And I think that's one reason why it's worth certainly learning about them and maybe even occasionally learning from them. That was Alec Ryrie speaking to Eleanor Evans. Alec is professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and the author of the World's Reformation.
- [44:10]
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