Europe's Missionary Peripheries

Christian mission discursively performs religious peripheralization, establishing subjects who undertake mission and objects targeted by it. Since the term's use to describe spreading Christianity coincided with Europe's emergent early-modern self-conception, “Christian Europe” became a self-designated center for mission, with other people and places as religiously defined mission peripheries. Mission history, however, demonstrates the instability of such peripheralization, in three ways. First, mission itself sought to undo the missionary periphery by forging new Christian individuals and communities. Second, missionaries undertook different tactics vis-à-vis such peripheries. Three Catholic mission bodies who evangelized eastern Africa suggest diverse engagements with missionary peripheries. Third, and most importantly, those at missionary peripheries responded with their own irreducible historical agency. The chapter will conclude by exploring implications for Europe's Christian identity in light of missionary peripheralization, especially the inevitable contingencies of historical practices inherent in Christian mission and the agency of the evangelized.