ABSTRACT
British Christianity was introduced in a context of imperial power, which set in process movements which raised issues of religious truth and social identity, it became involved with various cultural encounters and the role of the missionaries became ambiguous and threatening. Christian missionaries struggled in their distinctive ways with this dialectic of 'identity' and 'difference' which bore some similarities to the strategies of the administrators. The complex of views that broadly tied together such missionary societies is often labelled as 'Evangelicalism'. However, it is important to start with a closer examination of precisely what these attitudes were, and to contextualise them in the Darwinian-liberal optimism of the Victorian age, to analyse the degrees of affinity that the missionaries had with the colonising mission of the British empire. Missionaries often believed that divine providence had entrusted India to Britain, and hoped that the secular body of the British administration.
