Phillip Jensen offers a some observations about Samuel Marsden, New South Wales’ second colonial Christian chaplain.
To say that Marsden has been a controversial figure in historical evaluation is an understatement. His additional role in the judiciary saw him given the title of the ‘Flogging Parson’. For a time, history recorded something of a disparity between Marsden’s influence in New South Wales with that of his legacy in New Zealand, which was portrayed far more positively.
Jensen observes that “Marsden may have been brutal, but in the day in which he lived and compared to the people he was seeking to serve, his brutality is hardly the most striking feature.”
These words are not meant to lessen the seriousness of Marsden’s excesses, but to try and contextualise them, both in their time, but also in contemporary historiography, evidenced by a New Zealand tour guide that condemns Marsden for “ruining the Maori culture even for demanding that they “abandon cannibalism and slavery”!.”
In particular he contrasts the condemnation that Marsden has received with the contemporary idea of those who claim “that there are no moral certainties or absolutes, and nobody should impose their ideas upon anybody else; even by persuasion and prayer. We now are being taught that no culture is superior to another and the only immorality is to spread your culture to others. People should have been left in their own culture, whatever it was, without the arrogant intervention of Europeans.”
Jensen points out that such a defence against cultural imperialism includes practices include slavery, cannibalism, polygamy, prostitution and suttee.
Yet Marsden’s efforts are objectively condemned, while the cessation of these other degraded activities in different cultures, largely due to the missionary activities of Christians like Marsden is mourned.
Read Jensen’s full article, ‘The Brutal Missionary’.
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