The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam Read Online Free PDF Page B

his thirty-seven-year-old Irish wife, Lucy Kumm (née Guinness), built a handfulof grass huts—a station for their new organization, Sudan United Mission. This was the first of fifty they hoped to build across the continent, along the border where Muslim North Africa ended and the Land of the Blacks began. They intended to stop Islam from spreading south among “the border pagans” 1 —the non-Muslims living along this fault line. By baptizing them as Christians, the Kumms wouldbuild a human bulwark against Islam’s “winning” Africa.
    “The
raison d’être
of this mission is to attempt to counteract the Mohammedan advance in Central Africa by winning the pagan tribes to the Christian religion,” Kumm wrote his supporters in America and London. Not knowing Kumm’s true aim, the Emir of Wase’s great-grandfather even helped the missionary clear the land. The Kumms modeled theirmission on that of David Livingstone, the Scottish Congregationalist missionary and explorer who had bushwhacked across Africa. He fought armed battles against Muslim slave raiders until, infected with malaria and crippled by chronic dysentery, he died in Zambia, in 1873. Livingstone’s heart was buried under a mvula tree. His corpse—embalmed, wrapped in calico, canvas, and bark—was shipped to Englandand buried at Westminster Abbey, where his tombstone is inscribed: “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization.”
    Both Livingstone and the Kumms belonged to a burgeoning global religious movement—one that intended to reach the whole world withthe Gospel. It was rooted in evangelical Christianity, a broad-based movement that had begun in the sermons of early eighteenth-century British and Americanpreachers who called for a return to an egalitarian form of faith uncorrupted by the secular forces of the day. The movement was based on several core tenets that generally hold true today. First, preachers challenged their congregations to have a direct encounter with Jesus Christ through scripture—not through the church and its rites. Each person had to decide to dedicate his or her life to Christ—and,in that decision, to be reborn, or “born again.” Second, they averred that the words of scripture were infallible, a term that implies different things for different people. For some, it means that the Bible is literal, word-for-word truth; for others, that the words of the New Testament are more generally inspired by God. Third, many saw it as their duty to reach new believers, a projectknown as the Great Commission and rooted in Jesus’s parting command to his disciples: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). The evangelical movement, while strong in Britain, was especially popular in North America, and by the 1820s, most American Protestants were calling themselves evangelicals.Today, one in four American adults is an evangelical Christian, and for many, the basic tenets established in the nineteenth century have not changed. 2
    During the nineteenth century, the advances of the industrial revolution—especially the steamship and telegraph—and the American Civil War, made possible a theological revolution. The tenets of the evangelical movement spread throughout the world.Many American evangelicals, especially Yankees, had hoped that the Civil War would usher in a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in the United States. Instead, the brash new wealth of the Gilded Age turned Americans toward the Gospel of Wealth as preached by Andrew Carnegie. Frustrated and disillusioned at home, evangelicals turned their attention to reaching the rest of the world with their messageof salvation through Jesus Christ.
    Some evangelicals believed that it was possible to accelerate Jesus’s return by reaching every single person on earth with this message from the Gospel According to Matthew: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all