Abstract
In November 1880 Protestant settler children and their teachers gathered in the southern New Zealand city of Dunedin to celebrate the centenary of the British Sunday school movement. The first event was a ‘mass meeting of children’ that incorporated hymns from Bateman’s Hymn Book ‘sung with very great spirit by the children’, Bible readings and a series of addresses.2 One speaker lamented that many children thought that being a Christian meant they had to become a ‘parson’ or ‘very old men and women’. That was a mistake; to be true disciples of Christ, they ‘must get to be like Christ was when he was at their age’. He then observed that:
It would not be a very desirable thing that the clergymen on the platform should go away playing leapfrog all down Princess street [sic], but he would not think it at all a wrong thing for the boys to do it, but would think they had enjoyed the meeting and were in really good spirits. He wished boys and girls to understand that they had not to give up play, but to be like Christ when He was a child. They were not asked to be Christ’s men and women, but Christ’s boys and girls, and they had Christ’s example as a boy, and would have His help.3
This chapter was initially presented as an exploratory paper for a panel on childhood and religion at the ‘Childhood, Youth and Emotions in History’ Conference, November–December 2012, hosted by the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. I gratefully thank the conference organizers for the opportunity to air some of these ideas and to then re-craft the paper for this chapter. In turn, I am also grateful to the editor and various readers who have constructively helped to refine the chapter even further.
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Notes
Rev. J. Upton Read, ‘Childhood and Christ’s Children’, Supplement to the N.Z. Christian Record (3 December 1880), 2.
Later in his life, the influential Horace Bushnell held a high view of children and their natural susceptibility to religious formation; see Margaret Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Marcia J. Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 350–364, here 359.
Geoffrey Troughton, ‘Religious Education and the Rise of Psychological Childhood in New Zealand’, History of Education Review 33 (2) (2004), 30–44.
See e.g. Christine Weir, ‘“Deeply Interested in These Children Whom You Have Not Seen”: The Protestant Sunday School View of the Pacific, 1900–1940’, Journal of Pacific History 48 (1) (2013), 43–62;
Helen May, Baljit Kaur and Larry Prochner, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 101;
Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996), 78–80;
Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford University Press, 1999).
Robert T. Handy, A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 281–282.
Geoffrey Troughton, ‘Religion, Churches and Childhood in New Zealand, c.1900–1940’, New Zealand Journal of History 40(1) (2006), 39–56, here 39, 40.
David Stuart Keen, ‘“Feeding the Lambs”: The Influence of Sunday Schools in the Socialization of Children in Otago and Southland, 1848–1901’ (PhD thesis, University of Otago, 1999);
John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1988), 58–59;
Neil Semple, ‘“The Nurture and Admonition of the Lord”: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Methodism’s Response to “Childhood”’, Histoire Sociale: Social History 14 (27) (1981), 157–175.
See e.g. Grace Bateman, ‘Signs and Graces: Remembering Religion in Childhood in Southern Dunedin, 1920–1950’ (PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2014).
Helen May, ‘Mapping Some Landscapes of Colonial-Global Childhood: ece@2000.europe.antipodes’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 9 (2) (2001), 5–20.
John McKean, The Church in a Special Colony: A History of the Presbyterian Synod of Otago & Southland, 1866–1991 (Dunedin: Synod of Otago and Southland, Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, 1994), 38–40.
For differences between missionary and settler Christianity in New Zealand, see Allan K. Davidson, ‘The Interaction of Missionary and Colonial Christianity in Nineteenth Century New Zealand’, Studies in World Christianity 2 (2) (1996), 145–166.
See e.g. John Stenhouse, ‘Christianity, Gender, and the Working Class in Southern Dunedin, 1880–1940’, Journal of Religious History 30 (1) (2006), 18–44.
See e.g. Matthew Sigler, ‘“Our Hearts Reply”: Charles Wesley’s Lyrical Technique as a Prescription for Rooted Emotion’, Liturgy 28 (2) (2013), 39–47;
Ardjan Logmans and Herman Paul, ‘Hercules at the Crossroads: Confirmation as a Rite of Passage in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands Reformed Church’, Church History and Religious Culture 93 (3) (2013), 385–408;
Lynn Bridgers, ‘Emotion, Experience and Enthusiasm: The Growing Divide in U.S. Religion’, Modern Believing 50(4) (2009), 6–24;
Timothy J. Nelson, ‘Sacrifice of Praise: Emotion and Collective Participation in an African-American Worship Service’, Sociology of Religion 57 (4) (1996), 379–396.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context: Journal of the History and Philosophy of the Emotions 1 (1) (2010), 11–12.
Bateman, ‘Signs and Graces’; Charlotte Greenhalgh, ‘The Church as a Site of Romance in Interwar New Zealand’, in Geoffrey Troughton and Hugh Morrison (eds), The Spirit of the Past: Essays on Christianity in New Zealand History (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2011), 126–141;
Florence S.H. Young, Pearls from the Pacific (London: Marshall Brothers, 1925).
The one recent exception is Jane Haggis and Margaret Allen, ‘Imperial Emotions: Affective Communities of Mission in British Protestant Women’s Missionary Publications c1880–1920’, Journal of Social History 41 (3) (2008), 691–716.
See e.g. Maud Anne Bracke, ‘Building a “Counter-community of Emotions”: Feminist Encounters and Socio-cultural Difference in 1970s Turin’, Modern Italy 17 (2) (2012), 223–236;
David Hendy, ‘Biography and the Emotions as a Missing “Narrative” in Media History: A Case Study of Lance Sieveking and the Early BBC’, Media History 18 (3/4) (2012), 361–378;
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods’;
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review 107(3) (2002), 821–845, here 835;
Jan Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49 (2) (2010), 237–265.
See further Ian Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford University Press, 2001), 66–67;
Hilary M. Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801–1908 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35–37;
Stuart M. Lange, A Rising Tide: Evangelical Christianity in New Zealand 1930–1965 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013), 16–21.
Catherine A. Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Marcia J. Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2001), 313–320;
Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, ‘Representations of Children in the Sermons of Philip Doddridge’, in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and Childhood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 379–389.
Peter J. Lineham, No Ordinary Union: Centenary History of Scripture Union in New Zealand (Wellington: Scripture Union in New Zealand, 1980), 5–20.
Rev. R. Waddell, ‘The Sabbath-School and Missions’, New Zealand Missionary Record (February 1884), 44–49, here 45.
Rutherford Waddell, The Dynamic of Service (Dunedin: A.H. Reed, 1928), 16.
Peter N. Stearns, ‘Defining Happy Childhoods: Assessing a Recent Change’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3(2) (2010), 165–186, here 172. In the American context Stearns links this change to: the influence of professionals on definitions of childhood; declining birth rates and thus smaller families; wider emphases on cheerfulness in American adult culture; the impact of consumerism and industrialization; and the impact of compulsory schooling.
For similarities in the British context, see Stephanie Olsen, Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880–1914 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 8.
Editorial Committee, St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church: A Brief Survey of the First Sixty Years and an Illustrated History of the Years 1923–1963 (Dunedin: Editorial Committee, 1963), 9.
A.R.C., ‘Keep up the Standard’, St Andrew’s Bible School News (April 1917), 1.
G.F.I., ‘School Ideals’, St Andrew’s Bible School News (March 1917), 1.
Allan Davidson, ‘New Zealand Churches and Death in the First World War’, in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War (Auckland: Exisle Publishers, 2007), 447–466.
Geoffrey Troughton, ‘Richard Booth and Gospel Temperance Revivalism’, in Geoffrey Troughton and Hugh Morrison (eds), The Spirit of the Past: Essays on Christianity in New Zealand History (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2011), 112–125;
Mark H. Senter, When God Shows Up: A History of Protestant Youth Ministry in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010);
Henry Bush and Walter J. E. Kerrison (eds), First Fifty Years: The Story of Christian Endeavour under the Southern Cross (Sydney: National Christian Endeavour Union of Australia and New Zealand, 1938).
Amos R. Wells, The Missionary Manual: A Handbook of Methods for Missionary Work in Young People’s Societies (Boston: United Society of Christian Endeavor, 1899), 10.
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Morrison, H. (2015). Settler Childhood, Protestant Christianity and Emotions in Colonial New Zealand, 1880s–1920s. In: Olsen, S. (eds) Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484840_5
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