The Eloquence of Silence: What We Have Omitted to Say About Baptist Missions in an Age of Empire
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: By selecting examples of what was not said in nineteenth-century and more recent treatments of the history of the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), this article identifies silences that reveal the assumptions, blind spots, and prejudices of the day. Examples include the exclusion of missionary women and indigenous evangelists from statistics of the Society’s labour force, and the tendency to marginalise or ignore the role of non-Western agents, both Christian and non-Christian, in instructing missionaries in language learning, translation, and technical skills. The second part of the article discusses the Baptist Union’s Apology for Slavery and the Slave Trade (2007) from the perspective of what it did not say and in the light of the fragmentary evidence for Baptist involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery. The article concludes by citing William Knibb’s question in 1834 asking whether the Jamaican missionaries were right to observe the silence on slavery imposed by the BMS Committee.
Source: Baptist Quarterly
Author: Brian Stanley
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7172495584