Ancestral Feeling: Postcolonial Thoughts on Western Christian Heritage

By Renie Chow Choy

The language of heritage permeates Scripture, encouraging Christians to approach church history like a family history. But the notion of ancestry also constrains the world’s Catholics and Protestants to trace their confessional descent from Europe, rendering them perpetual latecomers in the historical chain.

"Ancestral Feeling" systematically diagnoses the postcolonial problems generated by an ancestral outlook. But, applying critical theories in cultural studies to the study of church history, the book experiments with ways that the Western Christian inheritance can awaken the memory of one’s own ancestors.

Writing a personal reflection on her family’s history in British-ruled Hong Kong, Renie Chow Choy engages autobiographically with England’s ecclesiastical art, architecture, music, and literature, in order to affirm her attachment to a heritage normally associated with English national identity. For global and immigrant Christians brought into a relationship with English Christianity by colonialism but are bypassed by its history, this book makes a bold declaration: England’s Christian heritage is also our story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780334060925

Renie Chow Choy

Renie Chow Choy is Lecturer in Church History at St Mellitus College. She has published on various aspects of early medieval Christianity, and is the author of Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford University Press). She is currently working on inclusive memory in the interpretation of England’s historic churches.

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Ancestral Feeling

Ancestral Feeling

Postcolonial Thoughts on Western Christian Heritage

Renie Chow Choy

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© Renie Choy 2021

Published in 2021 by SCM Press

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Cover photos: Cloister, Gloucester Cathedral; Portrait photographs of author’s grandparents (© Renie Chow Choy)

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ISBN 978-0-33406-090-1

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. ‘Religious Ancestry’: Christian Historiography and English Imperialism

2. ‘Religious Ancestry’: The Postcolonial Critique of Christian Historiography

3. The Ancestor Effect

4. Ancestral Hardship and the Western Christian Canon

5. Ancestral Nostalgia and Ecclesiastical Heritage Sites

6. Ancestral Migration and Christian Cultural Capital

Conclusion

Afterword

For my parents

Hail to the State of England! And conjoin

With this a salutation as devout,

Made to the spiritual fabric of her Church; …

And O, ye swelling hills and spacious plains!

Besprent from shore to shore with steeple-towers,

And spires whose ‘silent finger points to heaven;’

Nor wanting, at wide intervals, the bulk

Of ancient minster lifted above the cloud

Of the dense air, which town or city breeds

To intercept the sun’s glad beams – may ne’er

That true succession fail of English hearts,

Who, with ancestral feeling, can perceive

What in those holy structures ye possess

Of ornamental interest, and the charm

Of pious sentiment diffused afar,

And human charity, and social love.

William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book Sixth

… ‘feeling ancestral,’ or the complex search for self-placement in history – a history intimately tied to the human consequences of globalization.

Jeffrey Santa Ana, Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion

Preface

Most of us can probably recall a moment when we felt duped. For me one such moment transpired during a trip to France to conduct research for my doctoral dissertation. I had been studying early medieval monasticism in relation to the ninth-century emperor Charlemagne, to whom thanks are largely owed for standardizing many things we associate with Western Christianity, from the Vulgate to plainchant, from clerical discipline to canon law. Having lately realized the importance of Charlemagne to manifold dimensions of my own faith and devotional practice, and with his letters about true piety and the formation of faith reverberating in my mind, I attended Mass in Paris and visited the city’s many ecclesiastical attractions with an interest in this figure that was not only scholarly but enormously personal. I was not prepared for his arresting presence in the Panthéon, once an ancient church dedicated to St Geneviève but claimed by eighteenth-century revolutionaries as a secular monument to the cult of France’s national heroes. Here, a few minutes into my visit, in the south transept, a massive mural of Charlemagne’s coronation by the nineteenth-century artist Henri-Léopold Lévy subdued me. Charlemagne stands at the centre astride a flight of steps robed in red, Pope Leo III holding up his golden crown as mighty bishops look on, flanked by monks, young boys, trumpeters, soldiers with swords triumphantly raised, countless townsfolk bearing banners – and presiding over this spectacular event from a white cloud is no less than St Peter himself holding the keys of heaven, surrounded by winged angels with trumpets and harps. As involuntary as it was sudden, an absurd scene played out in my mind to reflect my stance, dwarfed by this mammoth work of art: me, standing timidly in front of Charlemagne, offering my grateful thanks for the missal and Daily Office in my rucksack; he, espying my black hair and the shape of my eyes, interrupts his own coronation, turns to address me and says, ‘But Little China Girl [because of course Charlemagne can quote David Bowie], you are not one of us!’ In that moment, in this ‘temple of the nation’ where I met not Charlemagne my forerunner in Christian faith but Charlemagne the Father of Europe and the King of France, a troubling new thought arose that he and I had nothing to do with one another. It was not that I had never realized Charlemagne was ‘European’ or that I was Chinese. But, cowering beneath this painting which magnified the difference between him and me, what I suffered was the sudden pain of shame, like Moses realizing that though raised as a prince, he was really a slave. It was my James Baldwin moment:

[T]he moment you were born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone, every face is white, and since you have not seen a mirror, you suppose that you are too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians – when you were rooting for Gary Cooper – that the Indians were you!¹

No doubt my experience that day was particularly exaggerated given the place Charlemagne enjoys in the Western political imagination as the unifier of Western Europe. But this dawning about how my race separates me from the great majority of seminal figures and events in the history of my faith has since repeatedly coloured my life in England, the place I have affectionately called home for over a decade and of which I am now a citizen, and the country which has captivated me since my childhood in British-ruled Hong Kong. Perhaps because I was raised with the sounds and words of English Christianity and studied it formally at university, I continue to remain unprepared for the intrusive moments when assumed affinity gives way instead to alienation. For example, St Alban is a saint whose intercessions I ask every Sunday attending Mass at my church dedicated to him; in my naivety, I didn’t realize that a religious pilgrimage on the saint’s feast day would occur in the context of a festival to celebrate his city’s Romano-British heritage, featuring a public display of a Roman legion’s infantry, training and artillery by a re-enactment society. Nor does it matter that I have spent a decade studying medieval Christianity: a visit to a historic church in Leicester’s town centre elicits the friendly but no less jarring question, based entirely on my appearance and before I’ve even uttered a single word in my Canadian accent: ‘Are you holidaying here?’ In central London as I join a guided tour around John Wesley’s house, I hear a visitor comment that the furnishings remind him very much of his grandfather’s home; I am suddenly flooded with envy towards those who can have such familiar connections to the domestic environment of famous figures, places that can only ever for me represent ‘do not touch’ museum pieces. Across the street in Bunhill Cemetery, John Bunyan’s grave triggers childhood memories of afternoons engrossed in my illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress, but commemorative speeches given at his grave hailing him the ‘master craftsman of the English speech’ and praising his ‘essentially English’ style remind me that I, unlike the English, access Bunyan via my acquired ‘additional language’.²

I don’t believe these experiences represent racist incidents: the UK is a wonderful place for my children and me and we have been largely, though by no means absolutely, spared from overt race-related hatred. Nevertheless, I am unremittingly reminded of England’s cultural dominance and historic precedence. That encounters with England’s Christian heritage present moments of belonging for some, and alienation for others, highlights one problematic consequence of a particular phenomenon: Christians approach the history of Christianity not just academically but with deep personal and emotional investment. And while one can generally study the history of, say, glassmaking with no great crisis of identity, the same cannot be said for ethnic minority Catholic and Protestant Christians’ relationship with Europe, the continent that has shaped so much of their religious thought, spirituality and practices. A Sri Lankan Catholic must understand Rome; a Trinidadian Anglican must understand England. But, although it must surely be true that much would be lost by not doing so, an Italian Catholic doesn’t necessarily have to understand sixteenth-century Sri Lankan Catholics and an English Anglican doesn’t necessarily need to understand nineteenth-century Trinidadian Anglicans. Owing to the history of empire, Western Christianity has an explanatory power which Christianities of the ‘Global South’ do not, its history essential for explaining much about Catholic and Protestant dogma, polity and spirituality. The unsettling fact is that, despite my Chinese heritage, ignoring the history of China altogether would not leave any fatal gaps in my knowledge about such topics.

This is not a book I ever set out to write. As a historian of medieval Christianity, my specialism is European by nature and I would have been quite content carrying on writing books about Benedictine monks and Latin liturgy in Western Christendom. I would hope that most people understand why many ethnic minorities see racialization as the cause of the situations they face, but for my part I have not wanted to perpetuate the stereotype that ethnic minority historians can only ever write about race. Furthermore, I am no expert on critical race theory or postcolonial theory. Nor am I a theologian with expertise on non-Western ecclesiology, liberation theologies, black theologies and so on. But, restless with internal conflict, I write as a historian who feels guilt about my Europhile interests; insecurity because my white British students can often speak with greater personal knowledge about the things I try to teach than I can; indignation because the assertion I so commonly hear – that Christianity was revolutionary because ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’ – seems ignorant and uninformed about historical realities.

This book concerns an impossible dilemma: on one hand, the colonizing assumptions behind the notion of ‘Christian heritage’; on the other, the fact that millions around the world feel affinity for this same ‘Christian heritage’. Inevitably, the arguments I present will invite critique that they do not sufficiently challenge the status quo: in the view of an external reviewer, they are too ‘emollient’. For I am hardly proposing the downfall of the traditional historical enterprise. Admittedly, throughout this book I display a rather defeatist view regarding the inevitable centrality of Western Christian heritage: its literature, sacred art, music, architecture explain too much of the religion of millions across the globe. Thus, I focus on the ‘ancestral feeling’ that keeps ethnic minority Christians tied for ever to Europe – and I do not propose its suppression. I argue that notions of ancestral bond cannot be circumvented, because the language of family, generations, forefathers, progenitors, inheritance and heritage permeate nearly every page of Scripture from the Old Testament to the New, and Christians have never been able to think about faith as something other than ‘received’ and ‘passed on’. But recognizing the manner in which the theological and historical enterprise has been held captive by imperializing assumptions, much of it expressed through the paternalistic language of ‘lineage’, how can I still tolerate my own elective affinity with Western Christian heritage? Is it possible, having encountered the national Charlemagne of the Panthéon, to esteem him still as a spiritual forefather?

This book is about the legacies of colonialism, and scholars have coined different terms to capture what is at stake. The most widely used term, ‘postcolonialism’, is also the one that is the most misunderstood. Most people seem to adopt ‘postcolonial’ for its mere temporal connotations, as in ‘after colonialism’. So the assumption is that, with the world having been largely decolonized, we now live in the ‘postcolonial era’. There are two things to be said about this. First is that the question of whether and when empire has ended is still the subject of much heated debate. As outlined by Sathnam Sanghera in his Empireland:

Some posit it was the massacre in Punjab in 1919 when the British lost the moral argument, some say it was the 1930s when Gandhi gained traction against the British, some argue it was 1947 when the British formally withdrew from India, some pinpoint it to the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese in July 1997, some gesture towards the Suez crisis of 1956, some insist it continues to exist in the remaining British Overseas Territories we still possess, which in 2020 consisted of Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Antarctic Territory, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat. the Pitcairn Islands, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, St Helena, Ascension and Tristan de Cunha and the Turks and Caicos Islands.³

But, second, in its more precise, technical and potent usage, the term ‘postcolonial’ denotes an active reading posture that exposes ‘the whole colonial syndrome’ that has seeped into our language, thought and assumptions, often without our even noticing.⁴ As a term that became established in critical literary theory in the 1980s following Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, it is not synonymous with ‘anti-colonial’: rather, its task is more intellectual, seeking to expose the effects of colonialism on ways of thinking, being, feeling for both colonized and colonizer.⁵ In Sugirtharajah’s words, a postcolonial reading focuses on exposing and critiquing ‘the universalist, totalizing forms of European interpretation that were passed on to us’, and must be a ‘discursive resistance’ not only to imperial ideologies and attitudes but also ‘to their continual reincarnations’ in fields of study as diverse as the historical, economic, scientific and theological.⁶ For the aims of this book, I employ the term ‘postcolonial’ in this second sense.

Then there are a host of terms to describe the people who experience the tensions caused by imperial prejudice and oppression. In this book I adopt the house style of the British government’s website (Gov.uk) and the Office for National Statistics, which recommend the use of the term ‘ethnic minorities’ to refer to all ethnic groups in the UK except the White British group.⁷ But the term ‘ethnic minorities’ lacks the power that other terms have to expose dichotomies of power, such as ‘colonized’ and ‘colonizers’. Some terms emphasize the sites on which these dynamics of power are played out: we are the ‘Global South’, the ‘subaltern’ (‘below’ and ‘other’, to indicate subordination and an inferior rank). Other terms focus on the effects caused by those in power acting upon those without power: we are the ‘racialized’, ‘ethnicized’, ‘marginalized’, ‘minoritized’. Still other terms focus on the consequences of emigration and disruptions to identities, families and sense of belonging caused by these imbalances of power: we are ‘hybrid’, ‘diasporic’, ‘migratory’, ‘bordered’.

Which of these above names for ‘people of colour’ can possibly capture the unique set of emotional, psychological and intellectual tensions that I wish to explore in this book? As it happens, the practice of naming – literally, the conferral of given names – are a rather helpful way of illustrating the problem I tackle in this book. I have always felt that the profusion of unique ‘English’ baby names emerging from the one tiny island of Hong Kong could itself sustain a lengthy monograph. As was the case in British colonies around the globe, missionaries and teachers in missionary schools typically gave children and young people their Christian names: Samuel, Philip, Paul, Jacob, Thomas, Mary, Elizabeth, Priscilla, and so on. But apart from the missionary influence, Westernization generally also inspired rather more eccentric naming: Rimsky, Marsilius, Winky, Pinky. Native English-speakers will react with mockery or bewilderment and the abundance of such names in East Asia – especially when set alongside the monosyllabic Chinese surnames – offers a source of perennial amusement and ridicule for expats. Such a response fails to appreciate that quirky ‘faux-English’ names are symptomatic of a debasing postcolonial predicament. Decades of colonial education have conditioned Hong Kongers to connect English names with learning and prestige. A name like ‘Chow Shun-Man’ (my Chinese name transliterated) doesn’t exactly exude the same level of educational attainment, cultural sophistication and status that English names like Augusta, Victoria, Louis and Arthur do. But Hong Kongers are also aware that we were not accorded the same rights as the English, as exemplified in the ‘British National (Overseas) nationality status’, a ‘nationality’ which (until January 2021, precipitated by the dramatic unravelling of stability in Hong Kong) did not actually grant Hong Kong people the right to even reside in the UK. As with English nationality, so with names. Many self-conscious Hong Kongers deliberately invent names that evoke Englishness but are not a straightforward copy, to emanate Western sophistication while acknowledging the reality of difference. A quick trick to make a male first name sound English without being a total copycat is to add ‘son’ to any syllable:⁸ I know of an Addson, Kingson, Garson and Greenson. I also know of a Winchester, York, Aragon, Fancy, Pansy and Rainbow – not to mention the name conferred on me by my parents inside Hong Kong’s Queen Mary Hospital, which I am told on a regular basis reminds British people of the UK’s best-selling heartburn and indigestion tablet. Names are usually the first revelation of one’s identity. If I have managed to convey how a simple name can reflect such complex questions of identity in the bearer, brought about by an English inheritance without the concomitant privileges of ethnicity or nationality, then I hope we can begin to get a sense of the topic I wish to broach in this book.

A note on Chinese terms

Chinese characters today exist in traditional and simplified forms, the former still in use in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and many historic overseas Chinese communities outside Asia, and the latter associated with the reforms of the government of the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong in the 1950s and 1960s. In this book I use the traditional form.

For transliteration of Chinese terms, I have followed the Yale romanization of Cantonese as standardized in Gerard Kok and Parker Po-fei Huang’s textbook Speak Cantonese (1958) and still widely used today.

I have retained the most commonly recognized transliterations for key events and names of people and places (e.g. Shang Dynasty, Zhou Dynasty, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Confucius). Where a term is of distinctly personal interest to me, I have rendered it in the Cantonese of my mother tongue (e.g. ‘Chow’ in place of Zhou).

Notes

1 James Baldwin, speaking for the proposition ‘The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro’, Cambridge Union, England, 17 February 1965. Printed in Raoul Peck (ed.), 2017, I Am Not Your Negro: A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck, New York: Vintage International, p. 23.

2 Isabel Hofmeyr, 2002, ‘How Bunyan Became English: Missionaries, Translation, and the Discipline of English Literature’, Journal of British Studies 41(1), pp. 84–119 at 110.

3 Sathnam Sanghera, 2021, Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain, London: Viking, pp. 33–4.

4 ‘… a process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome’: Peter Hulme, 1995, ‘Including America’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 26 (1), pp. 117–23 at 120, emphasis in original.

5 The clearest and most accessible text in my opinion for outlining the intellectual influences, preoccupations and obligations of postcolonial studies is Leela Gandhi, 1998, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.

6 R. S. Sugirtharajah, 1998, Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism: Contesting the Interpretations, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, around pp. 17–18.

7 www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/writing-about-ethnicity#ethnic-minorities-and-ethnic-groups (accessed 27.08.2021); https://style.ons.gov.uk/house-style/race-and-ethnicity/ (accessed 27.08.2021).

8 Joyce Man, ‘Hong Kong Loves Weird English Names’, The Atlantic, 1 October 2012.

Introduction

While I preoccupy myself with ‘decentring Europe’ from the Introduction to Church History course I lead, my friend in the USA is moving in the opposite direction: she is organizing a ten-day ‘Christian heritage tour’ to England for members of her Chinese American church. Prior to the shutdown of the travel and tourism industry caused by Covid, inbound religious tourism to the UK was experiencing an unprecedented boom; when the industry begins its recovery, my friend will still have many tour operators to choose from. She could choose from one of several tours to the UK operated by