Ronald Storrs (From University of Cambridge Digital Library, Pembroke College Archives)
Sir Ronald Henry Amherst Storrs (1881 – 1955) was a British administrator who served the British Empire in Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus, and Northern Rhodesia. In Egypt, he worked at the Finance Ministry of the Egyptian Government in 1904, and in 1909 he became Oriental Secretary to the British Agency, a position he held until 1917, when he moved to Jerusalem to become its Military Governor.
Storrs was a devout Anglican, and he came from a family closely connected with the Anglican Church: his father was John Storrs, the Dean of Rochester (1845 – 1928). One of his brothers was the Rt. Rev. Christopher Evelyn Storrs (1896 – 1978), an Anglican bishop, while one of sisters, Monica Melanie Storrs (1888 – 1967), became a missionary in the Peace River area of Canada.
In the Middle East, he came in touch with Eastern Christians of all sorts, some Arabs, some Syrians, some Armenians and some Copts. And he had a profound respect for them and their Churches. For sure, he was an admirer of the Copts. Now, while Catholic missionaries were the first to “convert” the Eastern Christians, Protestant Churches of all sorts, from England, Scotland, U.S. Germany, Austria, etc., descended on the Middle East in first half of the nineteenth century. While some planned to undertake their missionary work within Muslim communities, they were quick to despair, and replace the Muslims by the Copts, the Armenians and the Syrian and Palestinian Christians as their field of work, not wanting to realise that these Eastern Christians were Christian before them. And the effect was devastating: divisions, conflicts and weakening of the national churches, which the Muslims were not slow to exploit. As Storrs describes it, what happens to those “converts”, those who become “Brutestánt”, is a denationalisation: a process by which one pulls himself out of his natural ground and estranges himself. One becomes ashamed of his roots, and is proud no more of his national church, of his people’s history, culture, literature and language. He is no more one of the nation. From that position, it is not much longer before one sees the down falling of his ancestors’ Church a desired purpose.
Ronald Storrs describes this effect in his Orientations (also published as The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs):
Nearly thirty years of the Near and Middle East have inclined me to the opinion of those who would assist the Eastern Churches to grow stronger within by education and training, rather than weaken them by enticing their members into other denominations. Nothing seemed to denationalize an Arab, a Copt or an Armenian like becoming a Protestant, or “Brutestánt” as he more often pronounced himself. I could never see that his almost unctuous respectability, his open contempt for the venerable institution which he or his father had abandoned, were at all superior to incense and ikons. If he wished you Happy Easter as you left the service, it was with a gentlemanly Nordic restraint, as if sympathizing with a bereavement; whereas his cousin of the old faith shouted aloud “Pikhristos anesti” “Christ is risen”, and in some places fired his gun against the wall of the Church.[1]
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[1] The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs by Sir Ronald Storrs (G. P. Punam’s Sons, New York, 1937), p. 434.