This is a brilliant example of proper social sciences research. Those Victorian missionaries them done good.

Woodberry’s historical and statistical work has finally captured glowing attention. A summation of his 14 years of research—published in 2012 in the American Political Science Review, the discipline’s top journal—has won four major awards, including the prestigious Luebbert Article Award for best article in comparative politics. Its startling title: “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.”

“[Woodberry] presents a grand and quite ambitious theory of how ‘conversionary Protestants’ contributed to building democratic societies,” says Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history at Baylor University. “Try as I might to pick holes in it, the theory holds up. [It has] major implications for the global study of Christianity.”

“Why did some countries become democratic, while others went the route of theocracy or dictatorship?” asks Daniel Philpott, who teaches political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. “For [Woodberry] to show through devastatingly thorough analysis that conversionary Protestants are crucial to what makes the country democratic today [is] remarkable in many ways. Not only is it another factor—it turns out to be the most important factor. It can’t be anything but startling for scholars of democracy.”

Independence from state control made a big difference. “One of the main stereotypes about missions is that they were closely connected to colonialism,” says Woodberry. “But Protestant missionaries not funded by the state were regularly very critical of colonialism.”

For example, Mackenzie’s campaign for Khama III was part of his 30-year effort to protect African land from white settlers. Mackenzie was not atypical. In China, missionaries worked to end the opium trade; in India, they fought to curtail abuses by landlords; in the West Indies and other colonies, they played key roles in building the abolition movement. Back home, their allies passed legislation that returned land to the native Xhosa people of South Africa and also protected tribes in New Zealand and Australia from being wiped out by settlers.

“I feel confident saying none of those movements would have happened without nonstate missionaries mobilizing them,” says Woodberry. “Missionaries had a power base among ordinary people. They [were] the ones that transformed these movements into mass movements.”

He notes that most missionaries didn’t set out to be political activists. Locals associated Christianity with their colonial abusers, so in order to be effective at evangelizing, missionaries distanced themselves from the colonists. They campaigned against abuses for personal, practical reasons as well as humanitarian ones.

Now, I went and looked at the paper. And the first table is illuminating.

We have three models.

In the first column we have the standard models, ignoring the missionary effort. You can see That being a colony of a place with religious freedom, not Dutch, not Muslim, not without European settlers and being an island correlate with the society being democratic.

But look at column two: when you add in missionary effort. All these factors become insignificant. And when you add in (model three) Catholic missionary effort, nothing much changes.

The missionaries influenced the colonies future more than who the colonial power was.

_______

We should not be that suprised by this. We are called to be salt and light. We are called to illuminate what is wrong, support what is right, and do good. As part of the Calvinist exercise, the “conversory missionaries” (read state sponsored, Evangelical, often fundamentalist, frequently reformed) you need all believers to know what they believe, you set up education systems, you grow a local theological college, you build schools and hospitals and use them to train locals. This is done because (a) it’s worthwhile and good (b) there is a need for such — the death rates in these countries was horrendous, and simple hygiene, plumbing and nutrition make a huge difference — and (c) it glorifies the God which we serve.

To a Christian, democracy is a side-effect. To someone who likes statistics, this paper takes one to a “happy place”. And the fact it is published, peer reviewed, and accepted is makes it useful in the ongoing project of refuting the lies of Islamists on the right and atheistic progressives on the left.